The Waffle at 50
Walter Gordon, left, chair of the 1955-1957 Royal Commission on Canada’s Economic Prospects, and Cy Gonick, founding publisher of Canadian Dimension, and one of the leading figures of the Waffle…
Mel Watkins
Canadian Political Economy on Staple Thesis
In an impressive overview of the state of Canadian Political Economy, a new book Change and Continuity ed. by Mark P. Thomas et.al. includes two important articles on the continuing…
Populism in the Time of Neoliberalism
The way of the world in recent and present time is the preach and the practice of neoliberalism, of pushing markets to their extremes. The Turkish writer and political analyst…
Help please!
Can anyone out there help me? Just saw a headline on CNN saying that, in spite of Brexit chaos, unemployment was at an historic low. Likewise in US where in…
Technology and Democracy (continued)
Post the Second World War, the US became dominant in the world economy and a shift from coal to oil was deliberately taken by the state to weaken the power…
The Stamp of Oil
The opening sentence of the 2011 book, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil by the historian Timothy Mitchell, reads “Fossil fuels helped create both the possibility of…
Wilbur Schramm and Noam Chomsky Meet Harold Innis
That’s the actual title of a recent book (2015) by Robert E. Babe, who has a doctorate in economics and is professor of Information and Media Studies at the University…
The Anthropocene and the New World
In recent decades all but the wilfully ignorant have had to face two facts: that climate change is taking place and that it is the result of what we humans…
Possessive Individualism
That’s what the political theorist C.B. Macpherson (1911-1987) saw emerging historically with the rise of capitalism. Frank Cunningham in his just published intellectual biography of Macpherson, The Political Thought of…
Abraham Rotstein and the Radical Decade from the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies
Remarks at a posthumous book launch of his Myth, Mind and Religion at Massey College, University of Toronto, October 2018 For more than 50 years, going back to the days…
Is there life after NAFTA?
Like all sensible folk I was myself opposed to the NAFTA at the outset, convinced that it did more for the corporations than for the rest of us. I’m still…
The New Language of Resource Exploitation: From Staples Dependency to Extraction Empire
“Staples dependency” we know from Innis onwards. It can mean reliant upon, dependent on, the export of staples, and permits of a staple theory of linkages as economic theory. It…
Rotstein’s Monumental Epitaph
The late Abraham/Abe Rotstein (1929-2015) was an economist of a leftist persuasion, literally a Left Liberal. He left behind an almost completed manuscript which he had been working on for…
Was Innis Wrong?
The question is taken from the title of an article by Nancy Olewiler of Simon Fraser University in the Canadian Journal of Economics (November 2017), which, as it happens, was…
The Contemporary Relevance of Karl Polanyi
The political economist Karl Polanyi, author of the 1944 volume The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, is arguably better known today than during his lifetime.…
A Tale of Two Books
Just published is Volume I of an exhaustive – occasionally exhausting – biography of Paul Samuelson. It’s titled Founder of Modern Economics: Paul A Samuelson Vol I: Becoming Samuelson, 1915-1948…
Toward a Better World
That is the well chosen title of a marvelous new book by Gerry Helleiner, sub-titled Memoirs of a Life in International and Development Economics. Helleiner, from his home base at…
Trump in the Time of Trumpism
“Trailer of Globalization” by Piotr Mamnaimie We live in an “age of anger”, to borrow the title of a recent book by Pankaj Mishra – an India-born public intellectual well…
A Critical Take on Staples
Almost a century ago W.A. Mackintosh and Harold Innis created the staple approach to Canadian studies which came to be the core of “Canadian political economy.” Post World War II…