The Progressive Economics Forum

Much of the outrage about file sharing (aka “piracy”) has come from movie studios and record companies, but not much at all from TV networks. Of course, they do put out their product for free, albeit bundled with advertising. Lots of people record these shows and watch them at their convenience, often skipping the adversiting. [...]

I was at a forum on labour shortages in Canada yesterday, organized by the Canadian Association of Sector Councils. (These consist of industry plus some labour representatives who undertake labour force planning activities, sometimes including sponsorship and promotion of training.) There was an interesting clash of economic and employer perspectives on the labour shortages issue. [...]

  A big conference on this topic – and key Conservative promise – gets underway in Toronto today. Here’s a CLC commentary, from Executive Vice-President Barb Byers.. “  The Federal government has been busy introducing Canadians to the idea of “Patient Wait-Times Guarantees”. If patients are unable to receive treatment in a timely manner, Conservatives [...]

Below is Steve Jobs’ article, playing on some of the same themes as Barlow. But without the grand conclusion that Barlow espouses: musicians can control live performances, and make good money doing it. “Pirated” distribution can create an audience willing to play $40 (ranging up to $200) to see a live show. We already see [...]

Arun Dubois’ posts on copyright and intellectual property have me digging back a decade to my days as a bureaucrat at Industry Canada in the Information and Communications Technology branch. I remember reading this essay by John Perry Barlow, published in Wired back in 1996 or so, and finding it really compelling. Reading it again [...]

Canada, with the notable exception of Quebec, continues to lag when it comes to early childhood education. The research says that the most important brain development happens between birth and age six, so why do we wait until age six before we have kids in school full-time (most kindergarten programs are “half-day”, generally three hours [...]

Former Conservative Garth Turner’s decision to join the Liberal caucus is one of several recent news items that highlight the extensive similarity between these two parties on economic policy. 1.) In response to the Conservative proposal to require that all interest savings from debt repayment be devoted to tax cuts, the former Liberal Finance Minister [...]

This is good news and good timing. With Steve Jobs on side, maybe the folks at Heritage/Industry will reconsider their quaint attachment to rigid intellectual property rights measures when they set about drafting amendments to the copyright act. Dare to dream…

In case you missed it, last year UCLA’s Ed Leamer did an excellent critique of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. He plays cat and mouse with Friedman’s use of the term “flat”, offering up a review of economic theory and empirical evidence related to the theme, while making some pretty funny jokes at Friedman’s [...]

I find myself shaking my head when I read that Exxon-Mobil just announced an all-time record profit of US$39.5 billion for 2006. And then, after the release of the IPCC report on Friday, the Exxon-Mobil-funded think tanks come out denying climate change (it should be noted that Exxon-Mobil’s contributions to these groups would appear to [...]

After posting a 1959 video interview of Ayn Rand, Mark Thoma rants about the common problems of “free markets”: Markets Are Not Magic … To listen to some commentators is to believe that markets are the solution to all of our problems. Health care not working? Bring in the private sector. Need to rebuild a [...]

As we have been hearing about the legacies of the great minds of economics, a name that has not cropped up much lately is Marx. The first article below suggests that Marx’s ideas live with us in the global economy, and growing inequality has awoken the old guy’s spirit. With it we are seeing a [...]

Dean Baker makes the case below. I think this is a good way of internalizing the external costs of driving, including CO2 emissions and other nasty stuff. And in the case of BC and a few other provinces, it would be easy to implement via public auto insurance monopolies. In and of itself, however, I [...]

The recent flurry of stories about Canada’s copyright laxity (see below) suggests that the “rights holder” community is softening up the Canadian public for a strong dose of copyright medicine. Want to see first-run movies at your local theatre just like everyone else in North America? Better support some tough new copyright (and criminal code) [...]

Overall, the UK coverage of IPCC 4 has had an urgency beyond what we are seeing in the Canadian papers (who are, to be fair, much better than they used to be on this mother of all issues). From the front page of The Independent, a paper not known for its alarmism: UN delivers definitive [...]

  Posted below – An attack on expected linkage between trade and labour standards by the new US Congress by Bhagwati et al in the Financial Post, and a response by Global Unions. Fast-track renewal could lead to tougher demands on the poor By Jagdish Bhagwati, Alan Deardorff, Koichi Hamada, Parvin Krishna and Arvind Panagariya [...]

There’s a lot of dis-information in today’s Globe, especially from Jeffrey Simpson,  re the supposed impossibility of Canada achieving our Kyoto commitments.  In fact, the Kyoto protocol clearly allows us to make up for any shortfall in domestic emission reductions through the Clean Development Mechanism.  As Matthew Bramley from the Pembina Institute told the Commons [...]

The December, 2006 OECD Economic Outlook (full text unavailable on line) points to sudden tax revenue windfalls in most member countries due to large capital gains and the fact that “the process of income and wealth distributions becoming more skewed has picked up pace lately …. and may be interacting with progressive tax systems to [...]

The Guardian has an edgier take on the story posted earlier today. Check out the reference in last paragraph regarding a certain Canadian think tank. Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study Friday February 2, 2007 The Guardian Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the [...]

A colleague emailed me a submission to the Supreme Court of Canada seeking to have them interpret whether the investor-to-state dispute settlement regime of NAFTA (in Chapter 11) is in violation of the Charter of Rights. We will know in a few months time whether the highest court in the land will hear this appeal [...]

Last Fall, in my capacity as a member of the Vancouver City Planning Commission, I helped organize a conference on affordable housing from a longer-term urban planning perspective. The final report is now available here. It features a summary of what happened at the conference, written by yours truly, but also contains lots of great [...]

Yesterday, the BC office of the CCPA released our annual alternative provincial budget, which we call the BC Solutions Budget. It is hard to keep these things fresh when the government does not listen year after year. Mostly, we harp on the fact that the budget estimates have become so conservative that they are off [...]

Thanks to DeSmogBlog for posting a leaked copy of a new Fraser Institute report denying climate change.Their release follows; click the link to get to the desmog page which has links to more info and the actual leaked report. I think it is worth reiterating that the Fraser, like its US counterparts, has been very [...]