‘He entirely neglects the much weakened power of labour in the run up to the crisis…the growth of household debt and the housing bubble postponed a crisis which was inherent in the neo liberal model which has dominated for the past thirty years.

Maybe I am wrong but he systemically misses this point. Also, it is the precariousness of work and that lost household demand in which the totality of the housing crisis should be nailed up to the gates.

A society of massive inequality loses its middle, and without a middle, we change- from an egg shape to an hourglass shape and then bursts into a pile of sand that most populate the bottom and form the new massive base of a pyramid. And that is precisely where we are heading under the austerity regime.

How do we get back our egg- and potentially given the austerity vs stimulus debate- we are in a chicken versus the egg argument.

The solution lay in your point on the environmentally targeted stimulus combined with a massive program on developing an innovation infrastructure to foster the change culture.

Long run- focused.

Krugman’s limitations start with his supply side Keynesian formation. To be fair, on his blog at the NYT he has mentioned declining unionisation as part of the problem. But he has remained nearly silent on the fraud that was and remains at the TDC of the financial crisis.

If he were to take on the trade deficit and the whipsawing of the global labour supply curve he would have to come out against free trade and or capital mobility. Which is a much larger fight theoretically and practically. So I think he is making a stand where he feels most comfortable and respectable. As most of us do.

Within departments, their tends to be an over-reliance on contract instructors/adjuncts to fill the gaps; these positions have low pay, few benefits and poor job security. Conversely, there’s very little use of Lecturer I/II positions or Research Professor posts, which specialize teaching or research, respectively. Personally, I think hiring many more LI/LII positions would fix a lot of problems, much like hiring Nurse Practitioners has helped in health care. Research Professors are a special case, useful when someone has say, industry experience but little experience in the academy. There are also Academic Professionals at some schools, which is similar to this and designed to meet a specialized admin or tech need.

On the TT side, universities have to acknowledge the value of supervision, which they do only superficially now. In theory, everyone should have a few grad students, but in practice some professors have many (and get them through quickly) while others have none at all. There should be some form of course release for research based on supervising x number of students. This would go a long way to leveling out the playing field.

As a rule, splitting research and teaching as a blanket policy is a pretty terrible idea. The two should feed into each other in a way that benefits both students and professors. The fetishization of research hurts both parties.

I guess what I’m saying here is that we’ve become so caught up in thinking in terms of tenure track/non-tenure track, research/teaching, full time/adjunct that we forget there more nuanced ways of running a department or a university. We seem to have fallen into a combination of either/or thinking, superficial status games, and the prioritization of faculty wants over student needs. The problems facing the academy are fixable, but only if we accept that there isn’t a “magic bullet” or cookie-cutter solution. Good institutions are cultivated — not born, made or legislated into existence.

These low interest rates you, & others cheered for have produced Canadians borrowing at very low rate for housing, which they can afford now, but will not when rates reset. Canadian simply with assets are borrowing vast sums of cash to be used on consumption. Houses used as ATMs is not good for the economy, or all Canadians.

The longer Candian borrow at low rates for housing, total real estate debt will go up, and eventually the mortgage payments too, will increase, draining disosable income. Adjust for inflaition because housing prices are out of whack with Canadian incomes.

I cannot justify economically 20-40 year olds borrowing 300k for a house, with student debt to boot, probably some credit card debt, that due to rising prices without matching wages, and likly increasing morgagte payments will lead to anything but unemployment when he has no disposable income to spend.

The top1% are concentrating more wealth comparable with other times in history, increasing prices without correspondng growth in wages at the bottom, have enriched them even further. Any inflation without matching wages is irresponsible, wrong, and should be fought with every inch of the soul.

There is currently no regulation in place or was enforced to stop this. Progressive wishing to unwind thiss mess caused by low rate of interest will require new or existing law that is unhindered, then have strictly enforced, and then see if it works for Canadian of all colors, or you could use the crude but effective interest rate policy as Paul Vockler the last defender of Glass Steagall Act, who hiked the rate to 20%.

I was never an adovocate for these low borrowing costs, that in my opinion have created a huge burden that should have never existed, we wasted resources, time, energy to become builders of houses we wont need in comparison to products, services, we need daily given what collasped in the US.

“The inflationism of the currency systems of Europe has proceeded to extraordinary lengths. The various belligerent Governments, unable, or too timid or too short-sighted to secure from loans or taxes the resources they required, have printed notes for the balance.”

“This excerpt from The Economic Consequences of the Peace, written just at the end of World War I, makes clear how fully he understood inflation’s potential to destroy the fabric of society.”

Please Progressives dont be “too short-sighted” in printing money, balance your book, either from taxes, loans. Dont print money.

And we all know that this structure of influence is a direct consequnce of the policies of Mr Mulcair and the NDP.

To use the press in this country as fish wrap would be an insult to dead fish.

In fact they are making things far worse…

But it also blames the unemployed for being jobless…

Distracting from the fact that Harper economics is making great depression level unemployment worse and worse

Unfortunately, they have been able to use the profits to do just that–get us to not just allow them to exploit the tar sands, but let them keep all the rents, ignore all the externalities, allow foreign ownership indiscriminately, rake off extra subsidies. Frankly, Canadians should own the oil companies in Canada publicly like all the non-patsy countries. The only reason we’re not at least charging large royalties and making sure the exploitation of the stuff doesn’t harm the rest of the economy and the environment too bad is concentrated money-based influence-peddling. And the Conservatives go beyond being influenced, they’re practically a political vehicle built and owned by the Alberta oil patch for the specific purpose of harnessing the whole rest of Canada as little more than an enabler for windfall resource rents to be handed to private, mostly foreign, interests.

If the world acknowledges the future impacts of AGW and the economic impacts of future scarcity driving the price of energy up to unaffordable levels, does no one think states will take steps to mitigate the economic and environmental impacts?

Harper’s hubris consists of making a low quality, hard to refine, expensive to extract commodity, the centre of Canada’s economic activity at exactly the same time all other nations are seeking to reduce energy consumption, or identify substitutes.

To put this in another way, Canada seeks to maximize its participation in a market facing long term decline. It is like going focusing on the production of buggy whips and horse harness at the dawn of the age of the automobile. This is bad economic policy and this policy is driven by Harper, not Mulcair.

Oil prices continue to edge down. Tar sands production costs close to $80 per bbl, the current market price is around $92 and tar sands oil sells at a $6 discount to WTI. If the world economy continues to slow there will be continued downward pressure on oil prices and the high cost producers i.e. Alberta, will face margin contraction.

If the global downturn continues for any extended duration, Alberta will be in for a world of hurt.

So I agree with you 100%, I have been very self-involved in the Canadian scene, as that is where the political levers are, and right now, getting the manufacturing and high value adding workers and industries to recognize the economic negative externalities of oil exploitation at insanely accelerated rates also line up well with the within those green movement goals.

I think Jeff Rubin made a good point last night on Fang and O’feary last night, the whole point of oil, how far can price go before oil is no longer affordable. There are plenty of oil reserves, but the question comes down to economic costs to extract them. I wish we had a stronger environmental awareness that factored in co2 costs as that would definitely push tar sand production into a zone where affordability would mean the tar sands would not be feasible. It is all about extraction costs and right now we only include use a commodicifation process that reifies oil costs in a manner that exlcudes CO2, and hence why Harper is the anti-christ of planet earth!

Everyone depends on the atmosphere and the climate. Alberta doesn’t have the right to disrupt those things for all of humanity, both now and for many future generations.

It’s a depressing sign of how economically obsessed and self-involved we are that we care more about whether the oil sands are hurting manufacturing in Ontario than about how they are killing people in Bangladesh and Sudan.

They say the study says something that refutes Mulcair and then states the study agrees with him, but only mildly? WTF!

Who is the editor these days of the G&M? He must be having a grand old time with these headlines.

I still for the life of me do not understand how making a case for how the dutch disease has raised the dollar is regionally tearing up the country. Manufacturing and knowledge workers go right across this country. Has anyone lately bothered to look at how many workers we are comparing?

I also have a problem with the study. They are stating how much employment was lost, yet they fail to look at how much potential employment from new investment could have been added. For example, they state that the dutch disease has not hurt the auto sector, that is quite a stretch. I recall just a few months back the Canadian Exec in charge of GM Canada stating that the high dollar has cost Canada investment. That is a serious fault of the study. We know that the dollar has affected many long term investment decisions, and the longer the dollar remains above PPP, the less incentive for corporate HQs, mostly foreign based, and lower investment and less jobs will be created. By excluding that feature from the study introduces a huge amount of bias into the methods by the IRPP, lets be at least a bit realistic here.

Amazing how one small rise in manufacturing data can incite media gurus to nail Mulcair to the cross making such outlandish statements that. “see we had a small gain in manufacturing- Mulcair is trying to destroy the country”

Can you imagine the frenzy these “unbiased” reporters will be in by the time we get close to elections?

Come on you crazy fool media guys stop it already would you! Lets report like we are adults here.

If anybody is trying to tear up the country it is HArper, did anybody in the press report on how Harper’s EI policy will effect seasonal workers, and we all know that given the makeup of specific industries like fishing and construction, seasonality is intrinsic.

Did anybody in the press consider that instead of trying to build a capacity to extract every last drop of tar from those sands in a mater of 10 years, might actually be a bad idea, and given the real effects on the dollar has actually killed off more jobs than it has created?? Did anybody say that potentially tar sand development was actually regionally based! Nope not one mention of that. You phracking reporters call that balanced? I think not.

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/exports+kill+jobs/6628677/story.html

Oil exports kill jobs

Re: “B.C. premier blasts NDP’s stance on resource sector; Mulcair can’t have it both ways: Clark,” the Journal, May 13.

Between 2002 and 2011, the Canadian dollar’s average exchange rate skyrocketed to 101 American cents from 64 cents. The loonie gained value largely because of a greater foreign appetite for Canadian assets, profitable due to the high price of oil and a boost from corporate tax cuts.

Canada is unique among major oil-exporting countries in having virtually no limits on foreign ownership of the non-renewable resource.

Today, manufacturing represents just 10 per cent of all employment in Canada, down from a peak of 16 per cent in 2000. Economic analyses from universities, banks and international organizations indicate that non-competitiveness as a result of higher exchange rates, dubbed “Dutch disease,” caused much of the sharp decline in Canadian manufacturing jobs over the past decade. From 2004-08, more than one in seven of those jobs, nearly 322,000, disappeared.

B.C. Premier Christy Clark and Prime Minister Stephen Harper purport to be good economic managers, but their rash promotion of unsustainable raw exports has greatly damaged our economy at the expense of workers across Canada.

Larry Kazdan , Vancouver, B.C.
© Copyright (c) The Edmonton Journal

I guess that is where debate in our policy circles are going- right into Tea party mode- you do not need facts. I recall recently in an email exchange with Doug Henwood, of LBO fame, who was in Calgary to debate a certain right wing economist, ( I will not mention names) and I said to Doug, something like, wow that dude is pretty right wing,how did you make out. He replied that, it was not that bad, as the guy actually had a couple of numbers and facts to support his argument. He said that was a big change from the tea party types he had been debating in the US, that just make stuff up as they go.

So it seems as though Harper is closing in on mission critical, dumb down the policy debates in Canada.

I mean yesterday’s claim that ‘all jobs are the same, from Flaherty was quite insulting for many workers. Just a nasty bunch that crew, I do think the tories have begun to take the veil off and show themselves as the Tea Party north that we all feared they would, once the got that prize of a majority. These have been some of the most upside down days I have ever witnessed in Canadian policy circles. Just a real lack of legitimacy yet filled with the brute force of the velvet policy gloves.

I would like to say that the EI changes announced recently are some of the most regionally divisive policy set backs I have seen in a while. Again Harper picks on those that are being victimized by the recessionary winds. Economic bullying for sure!

Truly this is all about accumulation and distributional issues.

We need to occupy austerity.

I hope the labour movement can somehow power itself to ride this wave of this tide to the new shores of struggle.

Holy phrack! If this is “streamling” or gutting of the EI program, (by stealth and backhanded dictating) is not a massive economic hit to eastern Canada I am not sure what is.

Its not bad enough that the phracking system is broke and works for less than 40% in need, they are about to destroy the only economic tie that a massive amount of workers in seasonal industries are already penalized for. Lets not forget something, for example, many of the fishery programs and quota systems that were put in place were economically made somewhat sell-able, because we had an EI system that actually could accommodate businesses that could not provide full year work to their workforce and provided these workers with a semblance of economic stability.

This is also a slap in the face to Ontario and Quebec, as they are the heartland of the economic meltdown created by the dutch disease where thousands of families were imperiled by jobloss in the manufacturing/knowledge based industries. So they want talk regionalism, I think this is where the debate actually begins.

Why are people saying it is divisive and evil for Canadians to question pursuing oil and resource extraction as an economic strategy. Especially at the torrid pace of resource development mainly the tarsands and the result of it raising our dollar to a point that it kills off the rest of the economy, is known as the dutch disease and its destructive effects are well documented. Recent evidence is coming out that manufacturing in Canada contains an increasingly large proportion of the knowledge workers in our country building innovative things does take brains! The knowledge economy is our key to an innovative future, yet we sit here and let an out of control Harper wave the flag over the resource extraction industry controlled by foreign interests destroy our future capacity to have a higher standard of living? How is that even remotely considered dividing the country? Which is how the tories want us to perceive it.

Sorry for the late reply…

I meant “nowhere to be found” on Twitter, not newspapers.

That’s where a lot of politically engaged folks are. These are the nerds & activists who are most likely to vote & influence the intentions of those in their immediate circles.

They can’t articulate strong economic positions on their own. So they rely on the declarations, charts, & fancy numbers only economists like yourself can generate. Folks latch onto those kinds of tweets like it’s currency.

The problem last election was that only worthless Mintz & Gordon bills were in circulation. It was like Zimbabwe, progressives really had no choice in the matter.

By having all you progressive economists on Twitter, the broader progressive community has easy access to positions/info when hot-button economic issues arise. They don’t have to wait for countless slanted editorials & wire reports before getting the straight goods.

Thanks for the effort,
Dan Tan

Despite being absent from Canada and from Twitter, I had an op-ed in The Toronto Star and got into The Globe and Mail a couple of times during the last federal election campaign.

PLG, I think the constitutional way to achieve your goal is through the federal corporate tax. Since royalties are deductible from taxable profits, lower royalties mean higher corporate tax payments.

But with a federal rate of just 15%, this dynamic is pretty weak. A higher corporate tax rate would increase the incentive for provincial governments to raise royalties to take advantage of deductibility.

Last Thursday’s At Issue Panel (http://www.cbc.ca/video/#/Shows/The_National/At_Issue/1275869467/ID=2233337064) spent its entire 14 minutes talking about Mulcair’s comments, the subtext being that he isn’t really fit to lead the nation given the divisive nature of his comments. Of course, not a word was said about the master of national division, Stephen Harper.

This was followed by a truly distasteful tantrum by Rex Murphy, (http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2012/05/11/thomas-mulcair-dutch-disease-oilsands_n_1511042.html?ref=canada) who furthered the theme of the divisiveness of this ‘national leader’, a term he used three times with heavy sarcasm in reference to Mulcair.

Clearly, the CBC chooses to ignore the sad history of appeasement efforts.

The last time I checked a majority of oil assets in Canada were owned by foreign interests.

This would be a comedy if it were not so deadly serious to the future economic well being of all Canadians. Like many countries, we need to have our dollar be reflective of our PPP and not some notion of what oil is trading at.

It is precisely this argument that Mulcair will knock off Harper in the next election.

Funny really, as Harper keeps painting himself into the tar sand corner. That truly is the regional tendency that proves to be Canada’s freedom from Harper’s tyrannical rule.

There is another perspective that needs to be incorporated in the Petro-Critique and that perspective involves housing costs.

See the recent Diane Francis column on foreign speculators acting to drive up condo prices in Vancouver and Toronto:

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/05/04/taxpayers-also-victims-of-hot-money-behind-canadas-condo-bubbles/
Quote
The condo bubbles in Toronto and Vancouver are caused by foreign speculation and are making housing unaffordable and creating financial risk for the country in terms of government-insured mortgages.
End Quote

We live in a world in which many central banks are debasing their currency or promoting a ZIRP environment. This makes it difficult to preserve capital, much less earn a return on capital.

Since Canada has a currency tied to commodity exports, it is viewed as a “safe” currency and investment dollars flow in. Some portion of these foreign funds are directed toward Canadian real estate investment which drives up the price of housing and places it out of reach of residents.

The second aspect of this problem arrives in the future when the “hot money” decides Canada is no longer a safe haven and the money begins to flow out as quickly as it arrived. I think we may all be surprised by how quickly that may happen and the carnage that it will create.

Europe is re-entering recession and Europe is China’s largest trading partner. The Chinese economy will cool due the Euro area slow down and Chinese commodity demand will decrease. This will have a negative impact on world commodity prices. The price of oil has already dropped to $95 from $105 at the start of May, a 10% drop in two weeks, and will likely continue to drop as the world economy continues to slow.

Making predictions is difficult, especially predictions about the future, but watch the screams coming from anyone “whose livelihoods depend on the oilsands” as the slowdown deepens and tar sands producers begin to delay or defer projects. Watch what happens as declining tar sands demand blows a very big hole in Flaherty’s revenue projections. Watch what happens when the Canadian economy can no longer re-balance as all the manufacturing jobs in the east (such as CAT) have long disappeared. Watch as Harper and friends blame their gross miss-management of the economy on Mr. Dion.

Give the guy a some space. His children have to go to college too, don’t they?

It is not that CAD that is going up, but USD is going down the drain. Stupid is it too much to understand? Why loonie has to race downwards?

Are you on Twitter?
I put your name in and could not find you. If you’re not, please do get on. For good or ill, that’s where the press are.

I won’t go into it here, but I tracked this stuff during the last election…and you progressive economists were nowhere to be found. Anytime some important economic discussion came up, Mintz & Gordon were the only loudmouths reaching out to economically illiterate press.

Give the Twitterverse factoids & one-liners on a constant basis. Progressives need more than links to long reports & press releases.

Best,
Dan Tan