A guest blog from Marc Lavoie and Mario Seccareccia, Department of Economics, University of Ottawa In a speech delivered on October 4th to the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce (see: http://www.bankofcanada.ca/2012/10/speeches/a-measure-of-work/), the senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, Tiff Macklen, has offered some self-congratulatory remarks, by arguing that the
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Things Are Good: Track the Small Things for Big Happiness
Teresa Amabile is a professor at Harvard Business School who has researched diary keeping and has made a very nifty realization: even keeping a few thoughts a day can amount to huge differences in happiness. I use I Done This to track my days, perhaps you’d like to too after
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Canada Already Has A 1¢ Carbon Tax
Last year this Conservative government collected $424,418,000 in taxes to pay for carbon emissions. That same year Canadians used 38,208,346,000 litres of gasoline. Doing the quick math, Canadians paid 1.1¢ or $0.011 for every litre of gas they consumed in 2011. Now Canadians weren’t taxed at the pump, though it
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Kady points out that despite the Cons’ best efforts to stonewall, the Robocon investigation in Guelph looks to have locked in on the source of their fraudulent robocalls. And while it’s indeed somewhat concerning that Elections Canada hasn’t reached anywhere near the same
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Labour Losing to Capital
The just-released OECD Employment Outlook – full text not available on line – has an interesting chapter on the sharp decline of labour’s share of national income in virtually all OECD countries over the past 30 years, and especially the last twenty years. The median labour share in the OECD
Continue readingThe Scott Ross: Canadians Should Envy Greeks
Canadians aren’t too envious of Greeks, Italians, and Egyptians right now, but maybe they should be. Though Canada has a relatively better economy and a stable political system, the other countries in the world facing crises have something Canada seems to be lacking, a resolve to make things better. Facing
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Canada’s Self-Imposed Crisis in Post-Secondary Education
On June 7, I gave a keynote address to the Alberta Union of Provincial Employees Education Sector Conference. My PowerPoint presentation (with full references) can be found at this link. Points I raised in the address include the following: -Canada’s economy has been growing quite steadily over the past three
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Sunday Morning Links
Assorted content to end your weekend. – For much of the relatively recent past, one of the areas of relative consensus in economic theory is that productivity increases would find their way to workers. But Paul Krugman shows that hope to be utterly misplaced: Where did the productivity go? The
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: New Generation of Thinkers Link Inequality, Innovation and Prosperity
<em>This guest blog was written by Mike Marin and Anouk Dey. It originally appeared in the Toronto Star on February 24. The authors are part of a team that produced the report Prospering Together (in English http://bit.ly/z4GQx5 and in French http://bit.ly/yabiK2) </em> <em></em>What do the Occupy Movement and Canadian software
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Drummond’s Productivity “Puzzle.”
Don Drummond confesses that he has been wrong to believe that changes in public policies – such as free trade, cuts to corporate taxes, low inflation, the introduction of the GST, balanced budgets and reductions to inter provincial trade barriers (aka the neo liberal agenda) – are the key to
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Economic Climate and Inequality
The December issue of the quarterly Economic Climate for Bargaining publication I produce is now on-line. This issue has a number of pieces on issues of inequality, including: Rising inequality is hurting our economy Labour rights, unions and the 99% Canadian economy bleeding jobs; public sector cuts to intensify Recession
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Bruce Campbell comments on the link between rising inequality and declining democracy, while Rachel Mendleson notes that the erosion of workplace democracy and the labour movement is a key factor in both. – Meanwhile, Erin points out that while decades of corporatist policy
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Keynesian Productivity
Statistics Canada released an interesting study today on the slowdown of productivity growth in Canadian manufacturing. Conservative economists tend to view productivity as a microeconomic issue, reflecting the allocation of scarce resources through the market. The way to maximize productivity is to remove taxes, regulations and other “barriers” to the
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Invisible Hand Has Failed Canadian Innovation
The Globe and Mail is running an interesting series this week on Canada’s miserable performance in business innovation and productivity. Here is the main page. Barrie McKenna’s long piece on Saturday set the stage. The “infographic” that went with the article included some interesting tidbits: Canada provides by far the
Continue readingAccidental Deliberations: Wednesday Morning Links
Miscellaneous material for your mid-week reading. – Jim Stanford points out that when it comes to manufacturing, any talk of an “invisible hand” doing much for productivity is based purely on faith rather than evidence: When it comes to Canada’s lousy record in productivity and innovation, the standard prescription of
Continue readingThe Progressive Economics Forum: Who’s over or under-paid?
We all know that the wages and compensation individuals receive in private competitive markets reflects their productivity, unless pesky unions and government regulations get in the way–because Economics 101 (and Michael Hlinka) have told us so. Corporate CEOs are worth every penny their “independent compensation committees” award in compensation and stock options them because they are “creating value” […]
Continue readingGeoff at Mount Allison: Geoff Campbell: Student, Communications Assistant, Newspaper Web Editor, and Non-Profit Public Relations Coordinator at Mount Allison University
This year I’m going to be fairly busy. In terms of classes:
My Cultural and Political Change class with Dr. Hunt (who
just got back from sabbatical at the London School of Economics) is
really interesting. So far we’ve discussed John Dewey and expe…
The Progressive Economics Forum: Shock and Awful – The Truth Behind CIT Cuts
Cutting corporate income taxes doesn’t create jobs. They may raise wages, but probably not for you and me. And they mean Canadian taxpayers are paying more….to help the Americans pay down their debt Here’s how I know these things to be true: Yesterday SUN TV rolled out its first full day of programming. The prime […]
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