Progressive Proselytizing

The nicab during citizenship debate is missing one major element

2015-10-10T09:35:00.000-07:00

Many of us have been disgusted the way that the election campaign's hottest issue has been whether Muslim women should be allowed to wear the niqab during a citizenship ceremony (note that this is not for identification, they remove it for that in front of a female prior to the ceremony).

The issue is simultaneously unimportant and important. It is unimportant in the sense that of all the numerous impactful issues that face us as a nation, the issue of whether a handful of Muslim women who would like to join the country and wear the nicab during the citizenship ceremony is simply nowhere near the top. It is a minor cultural issue and it sickens me that Harper managed to get a boost in the polls by prioritizing this, particularly in Quebec where it really harmed the NDP. We should be talking about something else.

However, I am going to join in on talking about this issue because while it shouldn't be deciding elections, it is nonetheless important, and because there is a major element to the debate that has been entirely missing. Canada does, and ought to, stand for the basic set of freedoms codified in the Charter and endorsed throughout society. We may not like the nicab. I don't like the nicab, although I will recognize that many who wear it don't fit the kinds of caricatures often portrayed. But that doesn't mean freedom of religion goes away! It doesn't mean that the government - an ostensibly freedom loving conservative government no less - has the right to tell a woman how they should dress, that religious identification is all fine except for this particular few inches of cloth.

While Zunera Ishaq, the woman at the centre of the controversy who recently became a citizen after the court ordered the ceremony proceed with her wearing the veil, doesn't show any signs of this, let me assume, for the sake of argument, the worst caricatures of the opposing narrative. Suppose in a case the nicab is not a symbol of religious devotion, but a symbol of male oppression, forced on women against there will and preventing them from engaging in a pluralistic society. Assume everything bad you can imagine. How, exactly, is this desired ban helping that? Don't we want these woman to be able to leave their homes and engage with society? Don't we want to be welcoming and accepting of these woman as they are so they can feel comfortable to learn about our society, and make their own choices? Perhaps this isn't a slippery slope where the citizenship ceremonies is just the first place such bans occur (Harper has already speculated on bans in public service; Europe is moving steadily in this direction), but is making it so women don't feel able - or aren't allowed, under these assumptions - to leave the house actually helping anyone? Outside of making us feel self righteous (as we violate our core principles of freedom of religion), I don't see the point.

The missing issue:
Versions of the above have been said by many much more eloquently than me. Let me raise a different question: why are we required to swear oaths at all? There are those who want to become citizens but don't feel comfortable with the oath new Canadians are required to say. I am not comfortable with it, although I didn't have to say it as a natural born Canadian. One of my professors is not comfortable with it either, and has led an unsuccessful legal battle to be able to become a citizen without this oath. I think Canada should be a republic, and think it is repulsive that we should swear fealty to a monarch who happens to be the head of a religion.

Much like Zunera Ishaq, Dror Bar-Natan and his fellow litigants have had various court cases and even got a few news stories. However, their story has not animated the public discourse to anywhere near the same level as Zunera Ishaq who has become, arguably, the single biggest issue in the election campaign. In both cases we have a purely symbolic ceremony that can't be done in a particular way because someone wants to become a citizen but has religious or political objections to how exactly that is to be done. For those that agree with me that the nicab should not disqualify one from becoming Canadian, is it not a small leap to agree with me that swearing fealty to an unelected monarch ought also not be a disqualifier?

I have long argued on this blog that Canada should be a republic, that the Monarchy while only symbolic and lacking de facto power nonetheless symbolizes many bad things we should reject and doesn't symbolize the many good things (such as, ironically, freedom of religion) that we might wish to symbolize as a country. This is view is entirely legal for me to type, and indeed would be a gross violation of freedom of expression for there to be any law against me expressing it. Why, then, would we demand and citizenship be conferred only to those willing to swear an oath that fundamentally violates this view? And why on earth would we care what people wore when they said it. Or, ideally, didn't say it.

Mulcair fails Media Relations 101

2015-08-02T19:22:00.000-07:00

Today was election campaign launch day in Canada. Well I suppose that really happened a year or so ago, but today was the official launch, when the official rules kick in, at any rate. All the parties want one main thing out of these launches, to say a few positive things in their opening declaration that gets picked up by the media and gives them a round of free, positive advertising.

Mulcair, however, fumbled badly. He gave his speech, the media was there, but his mistake was that he pissed the media off by not answering any questions. This result in the media mainly writing stories about how he didn't answer questions, and completely ignore what he actually said:

CBC: Tom Mulcair takes heat online for not taking questions at first campaign event
Torstar: NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair takes no questions at campaign launch
Huffpo: Mulcair Takes Zero Questions From Reporters At Campaign Launch

And so forth. What they wanted was glowing articles covering their policy framing, like Trudeau got.

The lesson to be learned here is a simple one: don't piss off the media. None of them want to be out there on the sunday of a long weekend, but they are there because they have to cover your speech. So don't piss them off. Mulcair most likely didn't want to take questions because he wanted to be the person who got to frame the issues, not the media questions. What he got was the "Mulcair doesn't answer questions" frame.

The irony is that Harper is absolutely horrible at media access and has been for a long time. Mulcair is far, far better at this. And denying the media here doesn't represent some affront to democracy the way Harper's continued actions do. But because he pissed the media off, it wasn't presented this way.

Thankfully, it is a long campaign. A ridiculous long campaign designed to help the Conservatives and their larger war chest. Mulcair gets to try again on tuesday.

GMO labeling shows that "states' rights" is just a convenient lie for the GOP

2015-07-31T16:50:00.001-07:00

Imagine that the Democrats wanted to pass a federal law requiring food companies to label their products if they contained genetically modified organisms. What would be the Republican response? Undoubtedly a big piece of their argument would be the appeal to states' rights. That is, the federal government shouldn't be going around impose their will and view on the states, and that it would be horribly wrong for the federla Democrats to impose their view on GMO labelling on the states.

Except, the US House did this exactly backwards. The Republicans (with some Democratic support) have passed a GMO labelling bill that prevents any state from passing any law that labels food as GMO. Where did the states' rights argument suddenly go?

The main reason for this is that Big Agriculture hates these kinds of bills. Much of the US agricultural system is based around a couple of GMO crops. And not just GMO crops, but crops that are heavily subsidized by the US government through various farm subsidies. The subsidies have been around since the 20s, and have created a food system that asymmetrically depends on these crops and does little to help any of the subsidies putative goals. This industry is one of the most firmly entrenched in political culture. For instance, the first state for presidential candidates is Iowa, a heavy agricultural states. Politicians are forced to praise the continuation of this system as a condition of having a chance to become president.

For years, the standard line for Republicans on gay marriage was that it should be left to the states. This was why the Supreme Court was wrong, this is why they couldn't consider it federally, because it would be grossly wrong to impose something nation wide against the sanctity of individual states. For the most part, this is nothing more than an attempt to mask their real desire - to keep gay marriage banned - under a convenient sounding jurisdictional argument. But let us pretend that their view here was sincere. This GMO labelling business shows just how quickly this states' rights nonsense was dispelled. Minutia about how to label food is sufficiently important to make the federal government step in, but ensuring equal legal opportunities regardless of sexual orientation was not.

Hopefully this is the last time we have to pretend their is any shred of sincerity or standards to when the states rights line gets brought up. No standard, that is, except this: we agree with states' rights when the federal situation is something we don't like, and conveniently forget about it when it is something we do. Or more correctly, forget about it when

Finally, I should not that I am not anti-GMO. I think there is great potential in using science to develop crops that are most efficient, healthier, safer, and cheaper. I think some of that potential has already been realized, while recognizing that we need to strictly test and identify any health, environmental or social consequences. As a member of the left, I often find myself railing against others on the left who are far more generically anti-GMO. And I recognize that food labelling is probably going to lend more towards the kind of knee jerk anti-GMO that we have seen with the increased prevalence of gluten labeling (which is absolutely important for those with Celiacs, even if it has sparked an unnecessary food craze in a huge number of others). However, to categorically ban any state from experimenting or moving in this direction is ridiculous, even if it wasn't blatantly consistent with the GOPs self claimed states' rights ideals.

"We're better than news, we're truthful"

2015-06-27T22:06:00.000-07:00

So says Kory Teneycke, the former VP of the new defunct Sun News Network and now Director of Communications for the PMO.

The irony here is simply too much. He is at least half right. Sun News Network was premised on just about anything but the truth. It was highly partisan and served precisely to better right wing interests. Truth was irrelevant, and it was why I so often opposed what they were doing. So he is not wrong to think that when he was in the news, he was not truthful.

I was highly critical of Harper's choice of spokesman, for precisely this reason. Communication Directors are always going to be partisans; it is basically their job description to spin things in favour of Harper. Yet even among possible Communication Directors, Teneycke was a horrible choice, confirming the Harper had no interest in trying to advance a meaningful dialogue, and baseless partisanship would be the name of the game. Being truthful, of course, just isn't relevant.

This quote is the ultimate example of projection. He lied when he was in the news. He lies now. And he the ones he accuses of lying? The rest of the media that actually does the thing he was - and is - supposed to do: tell the truth.

Alberta NDP would have won 26 seats if PC and Wildrose merged

2015-05-06T14:42:00.000-07:00

The question for the federal scene coming out of the historic NDP wave election in Alberta that saw them jump from four seats to 53, a solid majority, is whether anything close to this is reproducible on the federal scene. The major difference between the two is that federally only the Conservatives represent the right wing (shhh dear Liberal bashers) while in Alberta there is the Progressive Conservatives and the Wildrose Party.

One crude estimate is to see what would have happened if the PCs and the Wildrose had indeed joined into a single party. Assuming the votes work out the same way in this new scenario (a big if!), it is easy enough to compute how things would have turned out: the Alberta NDP would have one 26 out of 87 seats against a powerful Conservative majority. (email me if you want the spreadsheet)

This result is fairly stable if you relax the assumption. For instance, suppose the NDP gets a 10% boost (not 10 point) because of, say, people so disgusted by the amalgamation that they vote NDP. That only gives him 28 seats.

Of course, at the federal level, Alberta doesn't give 87 seats. Under the new redistricting (which makes this kind of math very hard this year), Alberta only generates 34 seats. If we assume the result is proportional, that means the NDP gets 10 seats federally. Not bad. Not great, either. In 2011 (when only 28 seats were up for play before the redistricting), the Conservatives swept 27 of 28 seats, with the NDP second in 23 of those 27.

Incidentally, the Liberals might appear to be the big losers here, but they aren't. They are a dead party in Alberta, capturing only 4% of the vote (most Liberal supporters undoubtedly ended up voting NDP so it doesn't necessarily mean people dislike them as much as 4% implies). But the key point here is that normally when the NDP does well it hurts the Liberals and helps the Conservatives. Here the NDP doing well reduces the number of Conservative seats but doesn't change the number of Liberal seats (they get zero either way), so it makes it easier for the Liberals federally.

There are about a million caveats to this very crude analysis. It only works under a tonne of assumptions that are almost impossible to remain true. Either way, there is hope for a modest but not enormous jump for the NDP federally.

Justin Trudeau's tax plan is good policy and great politics

2015-05-04T14:59:00.000-07:00

Going as far back as Justin Trudeau's leadership election, he has consistently kept his major campaign planks close to the vest. Little tidbits, like the policy on marijuana, come out in carefully crafted morsels, but for the most part we are left guessing at what his first federal election campaign platform will be based on the vague rhetorical positioning his team has let out over the last year.

Finally, however, we have some clarity. Trudeau has announced a big series of changes to tax policy. They do a couple things. Firstly, they reverse the two much criticized regressive new tax policies from Harper: income splitting and doubling the TFSA contribution limit. Secondly, he is going to increase taxes on income over $200k from 29% to 33%. All of this new (or at least new relative to Harper's plan) money coming largely from higher up the income ladder gets moved downwards either through a 1.5% tax decrease in the 44k to 89k tax brackets, as well as pumping a lot more money into children benefits, crucially tying these into income as well.

The net effect is to make our government system a few percent more progressive than it was before. On this blog I have long claimed that income inequality is a major problem we face, ultimately deriving from the numerous regressive forces in society that make it easier for the rich to get rich, and keep the poor being poor. Government is, first and foremost, a massive wealth redistribution engine that through a progressive taxation and spending scheme helps offset these recessive forces in society. Despite this, we still face significant inequality. This policy would be a tweak in the right direction.

It isn't just good policy, it is great politics. The majority of the electorate is in that middle class category that is going to benefit (although seniors won't like the TFSA not doubling and don't benefit from the child benefits). Myself, as a PhD student hoping to get a job and have kids in the future, I'm very likely to be smack dab in the demographic that benefits. But even if I wasn't, it is the right thing to do and is undoubtedly going to popular.

The Conservatives, of course, will demagogue the tax increases. Any deficit neutral tax change by definition will have some increases and some decreases. The National Post editorial team has already slammed it as "class envy". We have seen this kind of demagoguery on the idea of making the tax code more progressive before. My guess is that it is a losing political position, that the sense among the public that our society is too unequal is too strong.

The 30,000 foot view

Taking a 30,000 foot view of a political landscape with three dominant parties, the party on the right generally wants to decrease the size of government, the party on the left wants to increase it, and the party in the center wants to leave it somewhere close to where it is. The problem for all centrist parties is that it is hard to advocate compelling changes that people vote for when your big picture position is not to keep things roughly where they are.

That said, over time the political landscape tends to change and what often happens is that all parties move simultaneously over the course of, say, a decade. On lots of social issues, for instance, the left moves quickly, the right moves barely at all, and the center moves slowly. One of the biggest changes, as I've noted before, is that the amount of political space between the Conservatives and the NDP (and indeed in other countries a similar pattern holds) has shrunk considerably which leaves less and less unique space for the Liberals to carry out their own identity.

Given the above dual problems of being positioned in the "keep government spending roughly the same" category with less and less distance between them and the Conservatives or NDP, changing the tax code to be more progressive is the perfect policy. It keeps the basic constraint of a similar amount of government funding, but makes a meaningful improvement by changing the level of progressiveness in the system.

Not everyone is going to love the Liberals for this plan. Many fellow progressive bloggers are going to want more net taxation to pay for various policies they think are good. I often join them. But if we restrict ourselves to keeping net taxation relatively constant, this is a good plan.

Tech on the Side: Skeumorphism and round smartwatches

2015-04-24T00:37:00.000-07:00

It appears as if Samsung's next smartwatch is going to follow the Moto 360 in having a round face. This is an examples of short term thinking and skeumorphism gone horribly wrong.

The concept of skeumorphism in technology refers to using designs that were needed in older technology, but are no longer relevant today. The first several generations of iOS were full of skeumorphism, from faux leather and yellow legal pad style notes to 3D drop shadows and mechanical dials. None of these design elements made anything more functional, but there was a sense in which they were familiar to actual note pads and actual 3D buttons. Arguably it made it easier for people to effortlessly embrace the touch screen centric world we now live in.

In Windows 8, in iOS 7, and in Material Design on Android (and most of the rest of Google's portfolio), skeumorphism has largely been dropped. Everyone is completely familiar with touch screens now, and we hardly need these old visual cues. So modern designs don't pretend to be anything beyond the two dimensions they live in and have clean and often brightly coloured designs far from their pre-mobile predecessors.

Why a round watch?
For mechanical watches, the fact that they are round follows from the geometry of a hand going around in a circle. A rectangular watch is just going to have wasted space in the corners and would be pointless for mechanical watches.

For smartwatches, round faces make little functional sense. Anything that displays text (such as messages, emails, etc) is going to be best displayed on a rectangular display. The only real application that makes sense for a round display is for showing legacy watch faces. But even then, this is only going to be a small portion of use (otherwise why by a smartwatch?), and besides, wasted space on one app is a far smaller problem then not enough space on everything else.

Round smartwatches are thus an almost quintessential examples of skeumorphism. It is using a design that made a lot of sense in the legacy technology being replaced (mechanical watches) in the modern technology (smartwatches) where it is functionally unnecessary.

At least in the iOS examples of skeumorphism there wasn't much of a loss. We didn't need fake binder coils on our notebook, but they didn't hurt much either. There was, at worst, a fairly small percentage of wasted space compared to modern designs. With round smartwatches, the functionality of the smartwatches is worse than rectangular designs, in particular for the displaying of text.

Why then does the Moto 360, the presumed new Samsung, and others use round displays if they are, as I suggest, obviously inferior? My arguments were about functionality. Theirs are likely more about familiarity.

Smartwatches are a largely untested product category and it isn't clear that people will either find them useful enough relative to smartphones to bother, and the degree to which people will find it fashionable or unfashionable to have them. Watches are always on display as part of our wardrobe, so this matters to an even greater degree than smartphones. The hope, presumably, is that by having a device that looks like a watch - something many people wear currently - that it will make people more familiar with the product and more likely to buy it.

Maybe so, but I somewhat doubt it. If early estimates are correct, it would appear Apple has sold more smartwatches in their opening weekend then the entirety of Android (or Samsung's own OS) based watches have in a year. Apple, of course, is a unique entity, and it isn't as if most of those rectangular Android smartwatches have sold much either. However, for long term success, I think trying to get a few more people from the door early with familiar but functionally inferior designs isn't going to be a winning strategy.

This blog is primarily about political and social commentary. But it is also my personal space to blog about, well, whatever else it is that I'm interested in. These posts get labels "______ on the side", such as my Tech on the Side series.

Seniors are not a good reason for doubling TFSA limit

2015-04-07T13:38:00.001-07:00

After years of being promised whenever the federal books got balanced, it looks like the next Harper budget is indeed going to double the contribution for Tax Free Savings Accounts. This policy has long been criticized - including by me - for being a policy that disproportionately provides advantages for the rich. Indeed, the number of people capable of putting aside over $10k in savings per year while working are fairly limited.

Today in parliament, Finance Minister Joe Oliver has hit back against these criticisms, effectively pointing out that there is another big group of people who are already maxing out their contributions: seniors. 71% who max out are over 55 and 46% are seniors.

The reason for this is fairly simply: most seniors live entirely off their savings. It is very likely that a good chunk of these will max our their contributions when it is doubled, too. As they are saving already, whatever savings plan is introduced will undoubtedly be used extensively be them. So fair enough, the point that it isn't just rich people using it is well taken, clearly there is this big group that takes advantage of it.

However, this doesn't fit as neatly in with the objectives of the TFSA in the first place. The main point of a government backed savings program is to encourage savings in the population. The argument is that a population with a higher savings rate is thus going to experience less dramatic recessions (since they can spend their savings during a recession) which will be better for all of us. I'm totally in favour of savings plans in general, just not this one in specific, as I will get in to.

Seniors, however, are not encouraged to save based on increasing these contributions. Seniors are already not working and thus living primarily off savings and can not save more. They will use this policy and benefit from this policy but they won't be contributing to the primarily goal of the policy: increasing net savings in our society. What is happening here is something of a wealth distribution towards seniors. That's okay. I think there are solid reasons to distribute wealth towards seniors who often suffer, but it comes back again to whether this savings method is a good way to do that.

The fundamental problem with a savings incentive system based on tax breaks is that it is inherently regressive (as it undoes a tax code that is inherently progressive taxing higher earning people more). Someone earning very little pays a low tax rate and so doesn't benefit from the same dollar value in savings as someone who is richer. It isn't just that it exacerbates systemic inequality, it also undoes the putative goal of a government saving plan: to encourage savings to dampen recessions. This is because the poorer people are those most sensitive to the pressures of recessions and thus in most need of savings to be able to continue spending through the recession which keeps the economy good for all of us.

Even if we just restrict to seniors, this helps richer seniors who have high investment income more than it helps poorer seniors, those who we might care to distribute wealth to in the first place. If the goal is to help at risk seniors, this is the worst way to do that. So while it certainly doesn't help the main objective of the plan - increasing net savings -it is also a poor way to implement this sort of secondary objective. And everything it does, to seniors and working age people alike, is done in a highly regressive way.

Contrast this with, say, a savings plan that includes direct government contributions in a progressive way (ie government adds x% on first thousand saved, y% on the second thousand saved, etc). Perhaps combined with a separate wealth distribution to seniors if needed, also done in a progressive way. There are many ways to do this that can be debated. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to ever be a substantive debate on the best kind of savings policy in Canada. TFSAs are what we got, and we are about to double down on them, criticisms be damned.

Ontario's brave new cap and trade program

2015-04-02T23:26:00.000-07:00

The Globe and Mail just broke the story on what will likely be the defining component of Kathleen Wynne's legacy: The Ontario Liberals are introducing a big cap and trade plan. Details are sparse as yet, but it looks like they will be joining the Quebec/California regime. This is huge news, especially given Ontario's relative prominence in Canada's economy.

While BC (under the Liberals as well, incidentally) were moving forward with their carbon tax, Ontario Liberals had made big moves on the green energy file. With cap and trade, they are now tackling the greenhouse gas production side of the energy equation.

One of the trickiest problems of global warming is that it falls to tragedy of the commons problems.
Any individual jurisdiction has incentives to not act themselves (and thus not accrue any costs relative to others) and have everyone else take the costs while they just get the relative benefit of less climate change. To succeed we need to move beyond this kind of jurisdictional selfishness, and it takes people coming together and bravely willing to take bold actions, even when most of the provinces, the federal government, and, indeed, much of the planet are dragging their feet. There already was an argument based on the green energy file that Ontario was one of the most aggressive provincial or state level jurisdictions in North America for combating climate change. With the introduction of a cap and trade program, this will solidify that status.

Kathleen Wynne didn't have to do this. It was certainly not some key part of any election plan. At best it is politically risky. I have previously argued how dynamics regarding the Green party made a strong case for the McGuinty era Liberals to push hard on the green file, but I'm not convinced the same dynamics are as strong today after an election where anything to do with tackling climate change was very much on the fringe. But she choose do to this, and now we have policy worth fighting for.

People debate the efficacy of cap-and-trade vs fee-and-dividend (ie carbon taxes) and any other plan we may come up with to tackle global warming. I've done so, for instance, here. Some will undoubtedly be disappointed by this particular plan to help combat global warming. Fair enough. However, given the dynamics of today where we have this pressing global problem and very little global action against it, I am going to take what I can get. Absolutely we should push for not just any solution, but the best solution, but I will do so by also giving full throated support for undoubtedly positive - even if not optimal - political action like this.

The political angle:
During the 2011 Ontario election, I wrote that the election to reelect McGuinty was, and must be, a referendum on the brave green energy plan (using feed-in-tarrifs) the Liberals had previously instituted. I have consistently lamented the NDP for not prioritizing climate change issues while the Liberals have been acting positively.

Now, however, there is hope for political agreement as the NDP has long supported cap and trade (while federal Liberals flirted with carbon taxes, particularly under Dion's "Green Shift" plan). Despite the Liberals having a majority, this a program that needs to be implemented and reinforced over decades to help its goals, and having political agreement is critical. The PCs, of course, will abhor it, and will be the advocates for those businesses who will lose under this proposal, but this can't be helped.

Regular readers will recall that I have never been a partisan between the Liberals and the NDP with a long documented history on this blog of sometimes supporting and criticizing and voting for both parties. The one issue that really forced my hand, in Ontario at least, was the green energy file with the big moves by the Liberals largely rejected by the NDP for (in my view) bad reasons. While the 2014 elections had very weird political framing, in 2011 by far the key issue was green energy for me. It is of great comfort to me that by keeping a party with a history of success on this file in office, we have been rewarded by further success on this file despite the numerous headwinds and little momentum that would seem to have been the case yesterday.

There are a lot of details to be worked out, and I'm sure we will be debating them in the time to come. But for now, at least, I'm happy we are moving in the right direction.

How much should graduate students be paid?

2015-03-29T00:29:00.002-07:00

Being a graduate student is in some sense in the middle of two extremes: being a student primarily benefiting oneself and being a paid worker benefiting society. Before graduate studies, one is an undergraduate where nobody would expect to be paid to be an undergraduate. After graduate studies, one is (hopefully) going to be paid a paid a sum commensurate with the skill the knowledge accrued during graduate studies and be doing work that, by and large, can be said to "benefit society". During graduate studies, however it is somewhere in between. Graduate students are both benefiting themselves by increasing their future potential and also doing teaching and research that is benefiting society. How much, then, ought they be paid?

How graduate studies typically work:

A graduate student typically has two major roles. The smaller of the two roles is what makes up a higher portion of their funding package: teaching work. They are being teaching assistants that run tutorials, mark midterms, hold office hours, and the like. In latter years they are also course instructors which run full courses much like a professor. This is unquestionably real work. If you blind yourself to anything but this specific work, graduate students are typically well compensated for this specific work, over $40 and hour at the University of Toronto. That is very comparable to a moderately high skill hourly wage in the private sector. I have no problem here. The issue is that the number of hours is fairly small, something like 200 hours a year, so about 10% of what "full time" work is.

The larger role is doing research to produce a thesis. This sucks up the vast majority of the time spent in the latter years after courses and comprehensive exams and the like are completed, and for this portion of work graduate students are paid very little, far less than what research work in the private sector might be. Together the compensation for these two components is typically a less than poverty line amount to take home.

Graduate students are usually paid an amount in between these two extremes of undergraduate and full time work, something like the 15k minimum funding package offered by the University of Toronto. It varies from school to school. This is an amount far larger than what undergraduates are paid (nothing, minus tuition), and an amount far smaller than what is typically paid for full time work after one graduates. It doesn't seem immediately wrong to me that this in between place in life gets paid an in between amount of money, the question will be one more of where, precisely, to put the number.

No graduate student becomes a graduate student for the money earned while in graduate studies. One is almost certainly going to be paid far less than if one tried to find a job after completing their undergraduate degree. However, the main motivation for being willing to spend 4-6+ years severely underpaid relative to the undergraduate degree job market is because of a combination of increasing future earnings (a PhD being far more competitive than a BSc) and/or a genuine passion and interest for the subject of one's studies. Part of the calculus that goes into the decision to go to graduate school is the assumption of a (relative) loss now.

Two types of arguments:

As with many questions of policy, there are typically two rather different types of arguments. Firstly, we have what I will call "economic" arguments. These claim some sort of larger economic or perhaps soceioeconomic benefit from the policy. For instance, when talking about TFSAs, one can argue that a society with more middle class savings has smaller recessions which is good. This is at its root an economic argument.

Secondly, there are what I will call "social" arguments, that presents some form of normative benefit like equality or freedom that will benefit from the policy. I support gay marriage not because I think society will be better off economically, but because of these ideals of freedom and equality.

The best policies are often ones where there are strong arguments in favour considered both ways. For instance, during a recession, spending money on employment insurance is one of the best stimulative policies possible (as the money so quickly enters the local economy) so there are strong economic arguments for it but there are also strong social arguments about reducing inequality and suffering.

Returning to graduate funding, I'm going to find that sweeping macroeconomic arguments for increased funding are somewhat lacking, but that there nonetheless remains strong social arguments. The economics first:

In between two extremes:

Let's take this to the salary extremes to see the effect on graduate schools. Firstly, let's act as if graduate studies is comparable to undergraduate studies, as in it is primarily about advancing one's own knowledge and ability to compete in the market later in life. Let's assume we pay zero dollars for graduate studies, and charge tuition to boot. The same motivation mentioned above (that people would earn more in the future with an advanced degree) still applies, but the threshold changes. A half decade of going into debt requires a huge future return on investment that for many people won't be justified. The obvious effect is going to be a substantial decline in the number of people applying to graduate schools, resulting in less of the best BSc graduates ending up going to get graduate degrees. There are strong arguments that a highly educated society has many positive socioeconomic consequences, and so far less competent people wanting to go into graduate schools would be a loss. Of course, there would be the gain that provinces would have to pay less for universities and could thus tax less or spending elsewhere.

There is also something of a tipping point effect. Four years of unpaid undergraduate work is a serious strain on either family finances or building up of student debt for many people. It is doable, just, but hard. A decade of it (undergrad and graduate together) is simply too much to be sustainable for many people, no matter how positive the future return on investment. So this extreme seems like it would have a big cost in the terms of having a high quality, highly educated society with marginal benefits on tax bills.

Now take the other side, that graduate studies are paid similar to private sector jobs. Say, $40k per year, just to pick a number. This is going to make graduate school even more desirable since your get the future earning potential as well as being paid reasonably well immediately. If we hold the number of graduate positions constant (this will already be a substantial burden on governments to finance, increasing the number of positions would be yet more again), what this increased incentive will do is mean that the composition of graduate students will improve. Very bright people who might not have done graduate school will now do it and so we will have, on average, a better cohort of graduate students (and a worse cohort of people who go to the jobs market after BSc). The problem here is that we likely come upon a resistance point. The best and brightest typically (not always, but typically) already go to graduate school, because the incentive structure already is enough for them. And for those that don't - bright people who leave to the job market leaving less bright people to get accepted to graduate school - it isn't clear to me that keeping these people in graduate school is actually that big of an advantage for society. I also want very bright people to found startups in the private sector and the like. So this extreme seems like a big cost on provincial coffers for little socioeconomic gain.

In between the two extremes thus seems like a reasonable place to be. Not $0, not $40k. Can we argue for the difference between $25k and $15k (the UofT minimum now)? Clearly this is going to require more detailed arguments than the more sweeping big pictures arguments thus far. Indeed, from these sort of bigger picture arguments there doesn't seem to be any clear reason why one is better, it really depends on the sensitivity of these smaller changes in price to the incentive structure.

Unaffordable for some:

For me personally, the level of funding is sufficient. While obviously I would like more, the advantages that graduate school provides meant that the benefit relative to working after my undergraduate were not that sensitive to how much I was going to be paid. However, I have various advantages (family support during undergraduate, having savings, cost sharing with my wife, etc) that meant that living on graduate funding was a very doable position. I have a reasonable quality of life despite living in Toronto and extra money at this point would only be saved for future spending.

For many, especially those without my financial advantages, this is not the case. Without financial support such as being able to live at home during their undergraduates, one will often leave with substantial debt and spending a decade running a deficit is simply untenable for many people, particularly those with children. Graduate school funding minimums are substantially below the poverty line, and while this can be often tolerated for amount of time (during ones undergraduate, for instance), it is hard to maintain for so long.

Economically, the consequence of graduate funding being at this level is that it pushes some people out of graduate school and into the general market based on its level of unaffordibility. As such, the calibre of the graduate school cohort declines as otherwise competent people don't enter.

Higher packages probably don't cost society much:

If we tax higher incomes slightly more (as in the incomes graduate students will often make) and pay graduate students a little bit more, what is effectively happening is a forward shift of future money to the present. The income curve with respect to time will be less steep with more money made in the first decade and less in latter ones. Even if we act as if there are precisely no other socioeconomic consequences (this move very likely isn't zero sum), it is probably a preferable switch for most people who will get graduate degrees. It would, of course, be a negative for people who end up earning high incomes but didn't do graduate school, but these are people already privileged by ending up with high incomes and being paid more during the years graduate students are students.

The net economic argument:

Putting all this together on the economic front, I think it is something of a wash. The majority of the cohort is not sensitive to very large increased wages in the sense that increasing pay isn't going to make more of the best students go into graduate studies versus entering the job market after undergraduate as the advantages of graduate school are sufficient to dominate already. That said, there is still nonetheless a portion of the potential cohort where the financial challenges do push them out of the possibility of grad school. Large increases simply are not necessary to increase the quality of the graduate school cohort, but small increases will pull those who simply can't continue at the current levels (due to debt, kids, lack of family support, etc) to stay in. Taxing more on higher wages to pay for higher funding now largely transfer the time distribution of money from two similar cohorts.

What precisely the "slightly higher" level of funding is debatable, and changes substantially depending on the local cost of living. One convenient metric is the poverty line which already takes into account many of the financial challenges facing people. Changing the minimum funding package to being the poverty line will pull up those currently unable to do graduate school based on financial challenges.

The social argument:

Regardless of the above economic considerations, I think there are strong social reasons to consider moving up to poverty line levels of funding. At its core, this is an argument about equality. There is a portion of the potential graduate school cohort who can't go to graduate school due to financial challenges, whether this is the need to help out family, whether it is kids of one's own, whether it is due to past debt (for instance from an unassisted undergraduate). Disproportionately these people are going to come from lower income families.

I've always believed that a key role for for governance in society is to create a broad floor beneath which we can't fall. Graduate school is not like access to healthcare in that it is meritocratic and can't be done by everybody. There are plenty of ways where demographic considerations change one's potential to be able to get accepted for graduate school and nothing in this post is going to address this. But at a minimum, I think we can accept the idea that people should not be unable to attend graduate school based on reasonable financial limitations. There are people in that category. We should change that.

Media bias in covering the University of Toronto TA strike

2015-03-12T17:44:00.000-07:00

At a bare minimum, when the media covers a major conflict between two sides - a union striking, say - it should include the briefest of quotes from people representing both sides of the conflict. This is not exactly a high bar to meet requiring the cheapest and simplest method in journalism: asking the leadership of both sides to provide a quote. We could well wish for higher standard, but this is a bare minimum.

Unfortunately, coverage of the University of Toronto strike by the union representing Teaching Assistants and Course Instructors (of which I am a member), fails this lowest of standards.

Take, for instance, this piece in the Globe and Mail, which covers first York University then University of Toronto. In the latter half, it quote at some length from an open (and rather misleading) letter posted by the University on the University's website. There is no attempt made to go to the Union's website, to quote from open letters on the Union's website, or to quote in any way any representative or supporter of the Union. We get the Universities perspective at some length, with absolutely no mention of the Union's.

The lack of better media:

One of the most systemic biases in the media is that they are so often stenographers for the powerful, repeating their statements and views while ignoring that of the less powerful. There are many factors that reinforce this bias.

Firstly, it is cheap and easy to just publish quotes from spokespeople, to show up at organized press conferences and repeat what was said. Doing research to contextualize issues, back up statistics, trying to source well reasoned quotes from the general public or the disenfranchised and package it all together in an objective and detailed way is far harder. Better, of course, but harder and more expensive.

Secondly, there is a need to preserve access for the future that encourages non-critical coverage. Media that are known to excoriate certain groups end up not being able to get interviews with those people. Conversely, media that typically white wash authority figures will be able to keep getting access to those authority figures.

Thirdly, there is always a need to present information with credibility. For instance, on a scientific issue, actual scientists are needed so that the issue is presented with credibility. Spokespeople for governments and companies and the like have a built in sense of credibility with the public. Humans operate based on appealed to authority more than is often recognized, and using these figures makes conveying that sense of credibility easy for the media. The problem is that on issues where the powerful has a definitive bias (such as the University wanting to make their position in the strike seem very reasonable), such authority figures are not actually very credible commentators on the issue, despite the simplistic appeal that they are by definition "the authority".

There are many more, but collectively these result in a system that tends not to spend the time and effort to provide objective, unbiased, contextualized news, but instead tends far more towards being stenographers for the powerful. The position of governments and companies and the like is widely disseminated no matter how ridiculous those positions are, and countervailing voices get a far smaller microphone. To exacerbate this, given these the pressures the system starts to habitually work this way, employing people that think that way, promoting people that think that way, and extending this type of reporting outwards into far more than is needed by the pressures alone.

How this works in this case:

In this case of the Union/University coverage asymmetry, I don't believe there is anything intentionally malicious going on. It isn't that collectively the media is deliberately trying to distort the coverage so as to sway people to support the university over the union. Instead, it is simpler but no less powerful effects going on.

Very likely, to the writer this was a fairly low priority piece, written under a time crunch. The simple, fast, and (most importantly) cheap way to fill in some context and interest beyond the headline is to do nothing more than go the university's website and quote a couple sentences from the open letter published there. The reporter doesn't need to know anything detailed, doesn't need to call people, doesn't need to go and travel to the university and speak with people, doesn't need to research facts, and so on. It can be quickly whipped up and sent out and on to the next story.

If they had managed to go to the union's website as well, to quote from one of the open letters from key union members just as they quoted a key university member, I could have accepted this. Lazy, context-less, repetition from officials is its own set of problems in the media, but at least it would be equally lazy to both sides and get those couple sentence quotes out for readers to compare. But for this to be taken so far that they don't say anything - not one word - from someone either representing or supporting the union is simply unacceptably bad journalism.

And why not? Why didn't they go to the union's website and quote something from there? While at campus to take photos anyways, how hard is it really to get a quote from any of the protesters? Perhaps it really is nothing more than that less than ten minutes was spent on this story and this is what you get. But I suspect it is representative of the systemic pattern of behavior that just gets exhibited in a situation like this even when it is so trivial to put one quote from the Union in the article.

In this case, students are just intrinsically not the kind of authority the media tends towards. For the general public the view of a generic student is not going to be taken with the same level of credibility as that of the University leadership who have this sort of default assumption of being the more reasonable and more authoritative. Regardless of how valid this assumption might be generally (lots of students say lots of unreasonable things), when it comes to a core conflict between the University and the Union, taking just one of the sides because of these default asymmetries results in a massive bias.

We might wish for a media that rose to a much higher standard. Indeed, this is a big part of why I blog here. But the media is failing to uphold even the lowest of standards.

The US Budget Deal is atrocious for progressives, and the GOP base

2014-12-13T11:35:00.001-08:00

The 2014 US midterm elections were a massive win for the GOP and, rightly or wrongly, gave them a mandate to act on the issues they campaigned upon. However, the big new budget bill is drawing controversy over something few GOP supporters are going to have thought was core to their election mandate: loosening restrictions on investment firms doing derivatives training, and a ten fold increase in allowable campaign donations.

Appealing to the base was never the point, of course. On the derivatives side, it is the pay off to Wall Street, and all the millions of dollars they just spent on both sides, but particularly the Republicans. This is the reason those millions were spent. The new Congress hasn't even been sworn in yet, but the Republicans are already making sure that the first thing they do is reward their financial backers, and who cares really if this has nothing to do with the mandate they received from the American people. The Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, passed by Democrats after the Great Recession, is far from perfect, but for the most part it's attempt to reign in the kinds of crazy financial engineering from Wall Street that underpinned the recession are commendable. This is a move to partially roll it back.

As for the order of magnitude increase in the individual political contribution increase from $32,400 to $324,000, this is something that both sides are more or less happy with. The system in its current state operate by funnelling huge amounts of money from the rich and the special interest into the political process (in exchange for favours like the change in derivatives law mentioned above). Republicans do it but so do the Democrats. Of course, with the SuperPAC system, huge amounts of money get to flow in regardless, but this allows more to flow a little easier, and also flow through the establishment political groups easier opposed to the putatively at arms length away that the SuperPACs are supposed to be.

However, the GOP base largely doesn't like the enormous amounts of money in politics either, it is one of those points where progressives can find common ground. This happens despite the view of the base because the base doesn't matter nearly as much as entrenching the system does. Obama and some Democrats do use this issue as a political talking point, but while attacking the system rhetorically, they also make use of it (I can't really oppose this, putting themselves at a disadvantage would be silly). At the end of the day, though, the nice rhetoric is going to get lost in the reality of a system that is become increasingly entrenched in big money politics.

There are a few riders intended more for the base that don't come about as a payoff to a financial interest. They effectively block marijuana legalization in DC (against the wishes of the people as expressed through ballot initiative). And they cut funding to the environmental protection agency which fits both bases: the populist GOP base hates the EPA and approves of cutting it, but so does a range of special interests who wants environmental regulation as lax as possible.

It is interesting that the GOP has worked to form a long deal, funding the government until next September. Effectively what happens is that all the spending levels and the like continue at previously negotiated levels, just with these different riders attached. In previous years since the Democrats lost the Senate in 2010, there have been a series of pretty contentious showdowns with the GOP effectively putting as hostage both the funding of the government and defaulting when the government hits its debt ceiling. The idea was to force substantial spending cuts, including entitlements like Social Security, from the Democrats. This led to the whole business of the sequester which eventually fizzled, largely because even when Obama offered an enormous amount of concessions I and many Democrats opposed, the GOP still couldn't take yes for an answer.

While it is a lame duck Congress at the moment, the Republicans could easily have opted for a shorter term deal and push the big concessions shortly after taking Congress. Instead, they have opted for the timing that effectively allows for one big showdown halfway through the final two year stint of Obama's presidency and will lay the groundwork and framing for the 2016 presidential battle.

I think this is good for both sides. For someone on the left like me, I think this tactic is good because I think it will lessen the severity of the concessions the Republicans will demand, that it won't be some enormous Grand Bargain that sets the structure of entitlements for the next generation. It will be a much smaller package of spending cuts and other reforms that will be demand that might hurt, but won't hurt as the kinds of options that were floating around during the Sequester period. In other words, punting to next September is really a punt to the next president. For the right, this is a good tactic as while some may ideologically wish for a bigger win, they are correct to think that the public does not and generally did not take too kindly to them holding the government funding and debt as hostage. A framing in 2016 where they tried to spending cuts by playing a game of chicken with Obama in his last year is not a framing that is particularly kind to them.

The one thing not decided is the big immigration fight. That one got punted until February and will undoubtably be e big public showdown between Democrats and Republicans for this year.

Regardless of this political calculus, the earlier issues still slip in. They may hit the status quo button, but things like the changes to the financial markets, changes to campaign finance laws, these happen regardless.

Adorable Coming Out Video from Connor Franta

2014-12-08T14:58:00.001-08:00

Because it's always worth taking a moment to reflect on what really matters in life:

John Tory's ascension and the Metro's ridiculous narrative

2014-12-03T22:33:00.000-08:00

As John Tory is now officially the mayor of Toronto, everyone - particularly the media - is in search of an appropriate narrative to go with it. Some of those narratives are good and some are bad, but the Toronto Metro (a free daily mainly consumed on public transit) choose a just laughably terrible narrative.

Before I get in to it, note that nothing has actually happened to change whatever narratives we had about John Tory before. All that happened was the pomp and circumstance of officially becoming a mayor, and that ceremonial nonsense is more or less entirely uninteresting in terms of telling us something about what the Tory administration might be like. Not that this stopped the Metro.

The cover story doesn't appear to be online (but is maybe loosely based on this). It shows four quirky pictures of Tory smiling with the heading "Tory let's his true face show - His human side". We are quickly told that the "inaugeration taught us a lot about life with our new mayor" and that "bits of his real personality [was] peeking through".

Um, okay. Going through a formal inaugeration ceremony get's at his "real personality", "true face" and "human side"? Well, let's see what this real personality really is all about then! We are told that only partially using notes is somehow meaningful, and he apparently genuinely likes his family in a way Rob Ford apparently didn't. He also dropped a line about people of other skin colours so apparently throwing out a token platitude is getting at his "real personality". Puhlease.

I'm having fun, obviously. Media has to run narratives on events and silly puff pieces about this are everywhere, this is just one of many. It is just sad because these early narratives are so important and to run it as the front page on a newspaper with massive readership when it is so vacuous is frustrating.

The narrative that actually matters:
There actually is a pretty important thing we have learned recently about John Tory recently that will profoundly impact his governance of the city and creates the perfect narrative to talk about. Namely, is first major action is to stuff the executive with conservatives and Ford loyalists, ignoring the left flank of the council. As in, all that bullshit about working together and "One Toronto" was nonsense, as we probably could have guessed. As soon as it came time for real action, it is going to be a very conservative, very Ford-esque mayorship just without the drama (we can hope).

Now that is a real action that one can put a real narrative on. Why isn't this on the front page? Why is it stupid comments about how him walking off camera momentarily to shake someone's hand a sign of him being genuine? Some will be glad he is doing this, other's will hate it, but it is actually consequential in a way that some inaugeration ceremony simply isn't.

Fearing GOP tactics, Toronto style:
Now if all that isn't infuriating enough, you'll like the "expert" analysis from Siri Agrell who was quoted on the front page puff piece but gets into the grittier stuff buried on page 20. Tory is just "hedging his bets, alienating the left to avoid retribution from the right. The people on the left side of the equation will continue to work towards what they want to achieve, but if you spurn people on the right there's a greater possibility that they'll make life difficult for you."

Firstly, how terrible does this make the right look? The right are apparently these little spoiled children who will huff and puff at you if you don't appease them while the left are actually decent enough humans to continue to work towards what they want to achieve. I don't think she is necessarily wrong, but it does make me glad to be on the adult side of the table.

More importantly, this is just terrible strategic advice. Tory is a conservative, OF COURSE the right is going to vote with him. Thinking they are suddenly not going to vote with him if Tory puts in some downtown progressive in the executive is nonsense. The actual problem is that the council has a tonne of left leaning members that he has to win over if he wants to actually accomplish anything. Spurning them for the easy solution of the conservative old boys club is not going to help with that one bit.

This is just such a nonsense strategy, and it is often the strategy we see from the right in the US. Appeasing the right is something that the establishment like Boehner and even moderates like Obama feel they need to do. The Tea Party is given a tonne of deference despite being crazy goons. But the left? No, no, nobody needs to appease those guys. They are going to keep fighting for what they believe regardless. So you get this continual shift to appease the people on the right and do everything to be nice to them and you can't even put a downtown progressive into the executive anywhere.

Rob Ford's fond farewell:
The final issue that is just tickling me is Tory's choice of a first move by proposing a symbolic motion to praise Rob Ford for his service. Are you freaking kidding me? No, I don't think this issue is all that illustrative of Tory's approach to the city either, but symbolically it is just terrible. Rob Ford was literally stripped of every mayoral power council could strip from him due to, well, you know the damned story. He doesn't need an iota of praise, least of all from John Tory who is supposed to be symbolically representing change from that garbled messed. I get it, he wants to try and appease the Ford base or whatever (and clearly doesn't care about Chow's base), but it was still simply the wrong thing to do.

The Conservative's scripted talking points get them into trouble

2014-11-26T13:23:00.001-08:00

This little scandal Tories have gotten themselves into is a bit delightful, but underscores a more important point about the dissemination of talking points.

The problem started when a Conservative operative secretly recorded a conversation including, allegedly, Banff-Airdrie Liberal candidate Marlo Raynolds saying some not-so-lovely things about the people benefiting from the Conservative's income splitting proposals. The problem? It now appears it wasn't the Liberal who said it, but the conservative supporter he was talking to.

In the short time after Sun news put this up, no less than four MPs - including Employment Minister Jason Kenney - used the quote to mock the Liberals in the House of Commons. Now that they have been caught in error, they are refusing to apologize.

This is a pretty minor scandal, of course, and mainly gives a source of amusement at the egg-on-face. The larger point though is that this only happens in the scale it did because of the way the Conservatives disseminate their talking points. It isn't as if these different MPs all happened to watch Sun news and each independently thought it was a clever jab they could throw at the Liberals. Instead, it was understood by all that today this was the talking point to use. And each MP in turn dutifully showed up to take their turn at the bat with it.

This process happens every day, and most of the time the talking points are silly. But this time the talking point was also just flat wrong. The larger criticism isn't that one of the talking points turned out to be false; that is going to happen every once in a while no matter how dutiful one is. The criticism is more on the nature of how these talking points get disseminated and how it makes the entire political process - particularly in the House of Commons - so vapid and vacuous where any attempt at a serious dialogue is eschewed in favour of repeating the talking points of the day no matter how ridiculous (and in this case false) they are.

These days, when something goes wrong in car manufacturing, there are often recalls measuring into the millions. The basic reason is that because of standardization, the exact same part is used in so many different cars and models so that if anything little thing goes wrong, it becomes a massive recall. This is the basic dynamic here. Tory talking points are so quickly and widely disseminated that if one of them proves bad, you have this whole swath of people that need to come forward to apologize. They are in the business of mass production of talking points, and are experiencing one of the pitfalls that comes from that.

The NDP's 7% problem

2014-11-24T16:55:00.000-08:00

The NDP's biggest problem electorally isn't a question of policy or values or leadership or connecting with voters or just about anything else perennially brought up to explain their difficulties in the polls both federally and provincially across Canada. Their big problem comes down to one stat: only 7% of Canadians think they will win the next federal election, less than a fifth the number the Liberals get. If nobody thinks they can win, there are going to be hordes of theoretical supporters who will vote instead for the person they think might win, typically a Liberal.

Of all the questions you can poll people on, this is the number the NDP polls worst on. Large numbers of people generally like the NDP, generally like Mulcair, and generally like values and policies that the NDP prioritizes. If that was all that mattered, they would be competitive. However, if large numbers of people don't bother actually voting for them because basically nobody thinks they can actually win, none of this matters.

This basic dynamic has long plagued the NDP, but never before have they had as much of an opportunity to reverse it. In 2011 they went to record highs, become the Official Opposition while reducing the Liberals to a seat count in the thirties, and staking the claim as heir apparent to the federal throne. They elected a competent - although not particularly likeable - leader who has received mainly plaudits by the press and had little negative press. And they rightward shift of the NDP puts their policies and values firmly within acceptable territory of the Canadian public when polled.

If there was ever a moment in time where the NDP could reverse the "but they won't win, so why vote for them?" dynamic, this was it. What do they get? Seven percent. Seven heart-sinking, demoralizing percent that cements the dynamic as being as alive as it ever was. The Liberals, by the way, get 39% and the Tories 25%.

Abacus ran the numbers in more depth in Quebec recently comparing the Liberals and NDP and they paint a similar, if less extreme picture. Quebecors would prefer (60%) Mulcair over Trudeau and think his values are closer to their own (55%). But they think Trudeau is more likely to win (67%). The key though is in how they are actually going to vote. 56% of people will vote for whoever they think is most likely to beat Harper.

There are always going to be loyalists who will vote for their party even if they are going to lose. Indeed, while I am not a loyalist, I have written in past many reasons why one might want to vote for third parties beyond them actually going to win. However, a majority of people are not going to do this. They are going to pick and choose between the Liberals and the NDP to find the party they think will win.

The silver lining for the NDP is that latent support for them is likely much higher than election results and polls indicate. Indeed, this is precisely what happened in the so called Orange Wave in Quebec in the 2011 election. When it suddenly became clear that the NDP had a real shot, a huge portion of the country very quickly moved camp to the NDP and there became something of a self fulfilling prophesy where appearing like a possible winner was the key to giving their first huge win in the province. The NDP can only hope something similar happens outside of Quebec in the future, that the base of support for their party is really much larger than sometimes appears, it just doesn't manifest in elections since nobody thinks they can actually win. Gain enough momentum to convince people they might win, and it may become a tipping point that propels them to actually do so.

Tech on the Side: Airbnb vs Uber and the power of mobile

2014-11-24T14:23:00.000-08:00

Airbnb and Uber are similar in many ways. They both use tech (particularly mobile) to solve a distribution problem and they are both market darlings with skyrocketing valuations. They are both massively disrupting the established hotel and taxi industries respectively, complete with significant legal battles in these highly regulated industries that have arguably outdated business models and regulations.

The distribution problem works like this: Airbnb makes it vastly easier for anyone to rent out their property and become effectively a hotel; Uber makes it vastly easier for anyone to rent out their time and vehicle and become effectively a taxi. Previously, the resources (houses and cars/drivers) were plentiful, but there wasn't an effective distribution mechanism to connect customers to providers so we relied on the traditional hotel and taxi industries which provided a distribution system, but a distribution system that cut out small players. You had big dedicated hotels and large taxi fleets, not any old person with a spare room or a car and time to spend.

That said, there is an important difference between the two that illustrates the power of mobile. Uber is entirely dependent upon everyone having a smartphone. That is, the system just wouldn't work with a desktop site because people are calling their Uber rides out and about with their smartphone, they see the car approach on their smartphone, they pay on their smartphone, etc. The smartphone is integral to the entire experience.

Airbnb, however, works just fine as a desktop website. They could have just as easily operated a decade ago. The reason is that booking a place to stay on a trip is something you typically do far in advance, and can easily peruse at your pleasure at home or at work. For the most part*, the service is just as useful on the desktop website as on the mobile app (and there isn't even an iPad app for it). Airbnb in this way is much closer to eBay (which started as an entirely desktop site). Yet, Airbnb didn't exist until the smartphone boom.

Today, huge swathes of computing is being transferred from desktops, laptops, even tablets, to smartphones. This change is not exact, however. That is, people don't switch the amount of computing they did on the desktop to doing the same amount on a smartphone, they typically vastly increase their use. So it isn't just that people start using Facebook on phones opposed to the desktop, they also use Facebook quite a bit more.

This is the basic dynamic with Airbnb. Smartphones are so effective at reducing the friction of computing, that they end up doing far more computing and are much happier using computing solutions to solve problems. Airbnb has made a pretty frictionless system for both customers and home owners to be able to connect the two groups. It isn't that this model doesn't work in a desktop only world - it does - it is just that computing in general is so much easier and more convenient that people can do this from anywhere with the power of their phones. And they do, in droves.

The potential globally of smartphones truly is enormous, and I believe we are still only scratching the surface.

*This is not to say there are not advantages of mobile. Mobile makes finding a place to stay while travelling on the fly far easier, and particularly for hosts they get to manage their bookings without disrupting their lives since it can all be done on mobile.

Dealing with Climate Change and Inequality

2014-11-15T21:09:00.000-08:00

Two of the defining problems of our times are wealth inequality (both globally and within the first world) and climate change. With any socioeconomic order - our mixture of capitalism and government being just one - there are going to be consequences both good and bad. There are going to be challenges that the socioeconomic order is particularly good or bad at addressing. The point of this post is to expand on how these two defining problems - global warming and inequality - are products of our particular socioeconomic order, that they are two problems that our system is particularly ill-equipped to deal with.

Government vs Markets:
We have this mixture of systems because markets and governments have different strengths and weaknesses. By using a combination of the two, we are able to try and minimize the weakness of each.

On the market side, a negative externality occurs when the cost of a particular market transaction (going fishing, say) is not directly felt in full by the immediate actors in the transaction, but negatively affects others. For instance, in a fishing habitat, any individual fisherman contributes to a problem of over fishing which lowers the future availability of fish. While in aggregate the externality becomes very negative, the contribution from any individual fisherman is quite small and they would be in their rational best interest to continue fishing since the cost of their overfishing is spread out among so many others. This is the so called tragedy of the commons.

Capitalism as a socioeconomic construct is particularly poor at addressing tragedy of the common problems. Because the system is one where individual and voluntary actions are free to occur, there is no mechanism in capitalism, by definition, to pay the costs of negative externalities. It is perhaps ironic that one of the greatest strengths of capitalism is its ability to finely tune pricing structures to account for the costs that it "sees" with ruthless efficiency, yet one of its greatest weaknesses is the inability to "see" certain types of costs.

In contrast, government is very successful at dealing with these types of problems. By using the fiat power that governments have, they can manage tragedy of the commons situations by, say, putting regulations on fishing in a fish habitat to prevent the negative externality of unsustainable declining fish populations. Indeed, many of these environmental roles like legislating against certain forms of pollution tend to be where the role of government is most complementary to the role of markets and has the strongest cases for government intervention.

Global Warming:
Global warming is the mother of all negative externality problems, where the true costs from our energy consumption paradigm doesn't manifest itself locally, but manifests itself in the "commons" of our global ecosystem. The consequence of climate change is felt widely, but for any individual there is a massive cost with marginal gain for changing their individual actions to help. We all drive to work and heat our homes (in the first world, at least), and each individual contribution to global warming is miniscule. The cost benefit analysis for an individual is clearly to continue. But these effects on aggregate are enormously consequential.

The problem for global warming is that despite it being exactly the type of tragedy of the commons problem that government, not markets, are best suited to address, there simply lacks a sufficiently powerful global governance mechanism to make this happen. It is a global problem, but we don't have a global government to impose regulations by fiat.We have been reduced to try and form some agreement between countries to voluntarily act together.

This has been, for the most part, rather unsuccessful and actually suffers from a tragedy of the commons problem itself, just at a larger jurisdiction. Thinking of countries as individual actors in a larger market, the tragedy of the commons problem returns. Any individual government would be massively advantaged if it didn't have to pay the cost of dealing with climate change while everyone else did the heavy lifting. Somewhat unsurprisingly, no comprehensive agreement has yet been made.

Inequality:
I previously wrote about how the dominant role of government (both descriptively and normatively) is wealth distribution, providing a massive net equalizing force on our world that taxes disproportionately from the wealthy but distributes education and infrastructure and healthcare and so on relatively equally. This underlines just how staggeringly powerful the tendency for capitalism to be unequal really is. The basic dynamic (which can be expanded on at some length) is that the tremendous opportunities that capitalism provides are easiest to take advantage of from those who have resources, which means that the benefits of capitalism disproportionately accrue to those with resources.

Within a country like Canada, inequality is a problem but it is a problem that is mitigated considerably by our redistributive government policies. As a progressive, I believe we should do more, but we are undoubtedly doing a lot already. Between countries, however, inequality falls to the same problem that global warming does, namely a lack of sufficiently powerful governance at the inter-country level. It isn't exactly zero; the UN, the WTO, and the like, curb some of the rough edges. There is a small (relative to GDP) trickle of wealth voluntarily from rich to poor countries. However, these redistributing effects are nothing like what they are within countries, and help explain why there is such staggering differences between the countries, and between whole continents.

Both of these two problems are problems coming from the market side of our socioeconomic system, problems that would normally be left for the government to try and ameliorate but due to their scale are particularly difficult to deal with. This shouldn't be taken as a criticism of capitalism per se. Indeed, we have some pretty striking examples in history of one way things can go horribly bad when the role of government is taken to far. Nonetheless, for our mixture of the two, the two biggest problems of our times are products of market side that the government side is ill equipped to deal with. Indeed, perhaps together they make the case that we should strengthen considerably our inter-country governmental organizations.

Income Splitting and Progressive Taxation

2014-11-01T15:40:00.001-07:00

The motivation behind the idea of Income Splitting is quite reasonable. Namely, under the current scheme, two families with identical total income can be taxed at substantially different rates, depending on how that income is distributed between both parents. Given the fact that families do very often function as a singular economic unit dividing up total income among the family and not individual income, this makes little sense.

The problem is that in Harper's attempt to fix this asymmetry - a problem probably worth addressing - further asymmetries were introduced. In particular, the bill is highly regressive. At the bottom it helps single parents not one iota. And it helps low income families whether neither parent makes a higher income not one iota. But it helps families with one high income earner and someone who stays at home to raise the kids a tonne. That is, much more often than not it is helping out higher earning families than it is helping lower earning families.

The result is a shift that makes our tax code less progressive on average. I have long advocated for policies that attempt to be at least neutral on the progressive/regressive spectrum. I would be OK with trying to remove that asymmetry, or at least removing it to some degree, if it was coupled with further policies that didn't tilt the spectrum so badly. For instance, one could imagine switching to the US model of allowing joint fillings (a sort of uncapped Income Splitting; Harper's version caps it at $50,000 transferred and $2000 profited), if this was coupled by a change to the income tax code that made it more progressive, or added benefits to single families or other ways to help out lower income families. Doing this would help to limit the odd asymmetry that the Conservatives have identified when motivating this policy, without the consequence of making our tax code less progressive.

Even the premise - that families with equal income ought to be taxed equally - doesn't necessarily hold. There are meaningful differences between a family with two parents who make $30,000 a year and a family where one parent makes $60,000 a year, such as the fact that in the former you probably have twice the number of hours being worked. I'm not convinced these two situations really ought to be taxed identically, nor that this asymmetry is a more important one than many others such as the asymmetry between single parent families and dual parent families which often have stark differences in the length to which resources go.

In many cases, what can seem "fair" when one looks a specific policy such as a specific tax, turns out to be rather unfair when looking at society as a whole. Consider the idea of flat taxes, where everyone is taxed at the same proportion of their income. When thought of one its own, this seems like a very fair tax system and indeed many on right advocate for it and to some extent I can see why. The problem is that we live in a rather regressive world. The case for progressive taxes is to in some sense balance out the inherently regressive nature of our capitalist society so that when considering all these factors - and not just taxes - we get something a bit more equitable. So a "fair tax" may not actually be all that fair, and Income Splitting is precisely one such example.

The political angle:

As Harper starts gearing up for a new election (and years of squeezing and some fancy accounting after many years of Harper deficits give us a surplus once more), he has been dribbling out various populist policies like this one. They are all tax cuts (he is a Conservative, afterall) but ones that are very targeted. There is the increase of the child fitness tax credit (which I support in principle, but rather it wasn't a tax credit which is an inherently regressive move when one has a progressive tax system). There is the increase of the TFSA to $10,000 per year which I have opposed with qualifications here. And now we have the income splitting move.

These are quite different than Harper's initial big tax moves which cut the GST (which I support as the GST being a flat tax is bad for the regressive/progressive system) and cutting corporate tax rates (which I oppose). Both of those are big moves. These are much more targeted. And they are targeted right at their upper middle class, largely white Conservative base. To someone making $100,000 a year with a stay at home wife, they can get taxed less by splitting their incomes, get tax savings when they save, get tax savings when they put their kids into hockey, and so forth. To the single parent struggling to make ends meet, none of these do anything. It is one demographic being helped and another (one much more in need of help) being ignored. And it is a demographic being helped that the Conservatives know will help them win elections.

While I can see the motivation and the appeal, I don't believe this is being done because the Conservatives think it is the right thing to do. Even former Finance Minister Jim Flaherty infamously believes it is not the right thing to do. They are doing it because it is a good political move.

Government's dominant role: redistributing wealth

2014-10-29T23:43:00.001-07:00

The dominant effect of government on society is to redistribute wealth from the richer members of society to the poorer. One can support or oppose this idea, but as a simply descriptive point about what the effect of governments are, this is by far the dominant one. We live in a capitalist society that has a lot of forces which create inequality (which, again, one can support or oppose) and governments act as a partially countervailing measure, reducing the degree of inequality but hardly eliminating it.

There are two major sides: taxation and spending. From a taxation perspective the point is obvious; we have a progressive tax system that has a disproportionate share of government revenue coming from the wealth portion of the population. However, almost all major government spending programs also result in great equalizers. There are obvious things like social assistance programs for the poor, the elderly, the disabled and so forth. But everything from education and healthcare to minor aspects like government parks are predicated on a system that dispenses the value largely equally (everyone gets K-12 education regardless of income, everyone gets to enjoy government parks) despite being pair for rather unequally by the rich.

Healthcare: the great equalizer:
In a country like Canada, healthcare is one of the biggest equalizers of all. I have cancer (well had, it's all good now), which was unfortunate for me. I lost the lottery, if you will, and on this particular aspect of my life was less lucky than my noncancerous friends. However, despite being unlucky in this sense I was not put in any further financial inconvenience, and I only had to suffer through my surgeries and that was it. The excellent healthcare I received was, in effect, paid for by those who remain healthy and didn't need it yet are still taxed for it.

This is a good thing. If we had to choose a society under the veil of ignorance (ie we don't know what place we are going to have, such as whether we do or do not get cancer), we would want a society where the consequences are minimized when one is unlucky enough to get cancer. It smooths out the costs so that it is only the medical consequences, however daunting, and not added financial costs paying for healthcare, that affect an individual.

A point not always stated:
This point is fairly obvious, I think, but doesn't always get stated. It is perhaps one of those 'can't see the forest for all the trees' situations. In different ways, both the left and the right tend to downplay this basic reality.

People on the right tend to rail against the very idea of wealth retribution (Obama's infamous "spread the wealth" gaffe to Joe the Plumber is a prime example) despite offering only incremental tweaks to a system predicated on just that. Rhetoric from some parts of the left may give the idea that our government system is one that privileges the rich and the corporations on the backs of the common folks when in fact the government system is a massive distribution of wealth downwards.

An equalizer, but we are still unequal:
Despite the fact that we have this massive wealth distribution machine at the centre of our economy that taxes progressively more from wealthier people but spends either equally or more towards poorer people, our society is nonetheless still strikingly unequal. This is a function of having a capitalist society, as I will expand on more in a further post.

What the exact degree of inequality we ought to have is probably unknowable, there are certainly arguments that the status quo is still too unequal. On this blog I tend to argue that we should have more government action that results in reducing the level of inequality in our society. I advocate for a more progressive taxation system, a more robust social safety net, and stronger institutions that benefit wide swathes of the population, all of which works to reduce the degree of inequality in our society. One can agree or disagree on this normative point of what we ought to do, but I think the framing is nonetheless important. Those that advocate cutting of such programs and adding flat or regressive elements into the tax code should own the fact that they are reducing this equalizer and risking a more unequal society.

Unequal most where governments don't act:
Consider some of the most egregious places where inequality occurs, such as the contrast between the first and third world or the concentration of wealth in the top, say, 1000 people in the planet. It is in these most egregious examples where the great equalizer of government is either not present or isn't functioning meaningfully.

Take inequality between first and third world countries. Because governments largely operate at a national or smaller level, the act as equalizers within countries, but not between countries. Instead, the third world rely on only a small (often 1% or less of GNI) in charitable transfer from the first world. We don't have a global government structure that counteracts the global inequalities in the way that we have a national government structure that counteracts inequalities without our country.

For inequality at the very top, our progressive tax structures tend to max out in the hundreds of thousands in income. Indeed, there are various tricks whether capital gains taxes in the US or using offshore tax shelters and the like where the richest end up managing to game the system to pay an amount that ends up being rather far from progressive.

Social equality:
Governments have long had a role not just in this more economic transfer of wealth, but in various forms of social inequality. A lot of the inequality comes based on differences in race, gender, sexual orientation and the like. Before government action, society adopted structures that perpetuated this inequality. While it is perhaps minor in comparison to the big earlier wins in, say, the civil rights era, simple and obvious issues of equality today like marriage equality mean that gay people receive the same kind of equality that others do.

In many ways inequality is one of the defining issue of our times. We can disagree on what we think is the best way to combat it, or to what degree it even needs to be combated. But to even start that conversation, we must understand how one of the biggest forces affecting the balance is the government. It is it's defining role.

Tech on the Side: Apple numbers: languishing iPad sales a function ofthe phone subsidy model

2014-10-20T14:56:00.001-07:00

The ability to make phone calls on a modern smartphone is now just one app among many. For most people it isn't even close to the most used app with Facebook, YouTube, messaging, games, and the like dominating usage. And it is also an app with many competitors like Skype and Google Hangouts and other VOIP phone services that will likely continue to grow in the future (imagine a future where mobile graphs are facebook account or email account centric, not phone number centric).

With the increase in phone size led by Samsung and picked up by Apple with the 5.5" iPhone 6+, we now get a spectrum of device screen sizes from 3.5" up to 10"+ at most sizes and price points in between. While some apps are still segregated by screen size (features or whole apps that are phone only or tablet only), for the most part you can do any of these apps on any device size. Except, of course, for phone calls. This is the main differentiator between phones and tablets, and when thought of as "just another app", it makes it seem rather arbitrary.

I generally am a big fan of extra screen size which makes a richer and more immersive experience - particularly for video, reading, and games - than smaller sizes. The unavoidable trade off is somewhat reduced mobility, and the avoidable trade off is whether it is a "phone" or a "tablet". People can choose where exactly they fit on the "bigger size vs lower mobility" trade off.

I have an old pre-Android Samsung stick phone and recently preorded the iPad Air 2 as an upgrade for my aging iPad 2. Effectively this means that I have the biggest - and thus best for me - experience for almost all the apps and then for that one app of the phone I am unbundling the experience by having to carry around the aging legacy phone for that rarely used phone app, but I get the benefit of a legacy plan so cheap that no cheaper are currently available in Canada after the 2 year contract switch.

New numbers from Apple show that my experience is certainly a rarity. While the iPhone is still growing well and a massive moneymaker, sales of the iPad have stalled for several quarters. Instead of the larger screen and better experience growing usage, the standard seems to be that people buy a smartphone first, and then they might also buy a tablet, in much smaller numbers. Especially with 5.5" iphones, it is hard to see why one would also get a 7.9" iPad mini. I think the larger device offers a better experience, but not enough to justify two devices to take around with you. Even aside from the cost, most won't want to carry both and there will always be unnecessary friction in the user experience between multiple similar devices. It is a truism that the best device is the device you have with you, and most won't have two.

Part of this may simply be that people disagree with me on the size vs mobility trade off, with people preferring the mobility of the smaller size. And part may be that for that one app - the phone - you really need to use a pair of earbuds or a bluetooth device as holding it up to your ear is cumbersome which creates an advantage for smaller devices. So it may be that people really do prefer that smaller size.

However, I think another part of this is based on the result of the subsidized phone model. A brand new top of the line iPhone or Android costs $199 on a subsidized plan, making the headline number pretty damned cheap. Most of this subsidization comes from selling overly expensive plans for that one phone app - extra minutes and the like. Back in the day, operators charged insanely high costs for very low data text messaging until message over the internet plans operating on effectively arbitrage forced first world operators to bundle text messaging for free, more representative of their true costs. However, these kinds of subsidization plans for tablets are either nonexistent or off in the background somewhere not usually notice.

This model where one primarily buys a voice+data plan on a subsidized smartphone where it is mainly the voice part that is paying for the subsidization, arbitrarily encourages people to continue buying phones and not tablets. This then means that when people decide to buy a tablet as well as a smartphone, it is usually not data equipped which then limits its mobility and encourages the smartphone use.

There are certainly advantages to smaller screen devices. But I contend that a reasonable portion of the large asymmetry between "phones" and "tablets" is not a function of people preferring smaller screen devices that are easier to carry and easier to use the phone app with. It is a function of an outdated business model that creates this sharp asymmetry between the two. Add in the culturally reinforcing effects that people tend to follow the buying patterns of others, and the upside down asymmetry between Apple's phone and tablet businesses can be largely explained. For myself, I'm happy with the 10" iPad Air 2 as arguably the best mobile device - phone and tablet - on the market with my cheap old legacy phone hidden in my bag for the rare times I actually want to make calls outside of wifi availability.

Consequences for the tablet market:
A somewhat strange phenomena is going to occur next quarter. The iPhone ASP is going to up now that the iPhone 6+ is a 100 premium (and that the value proposition on increased memory is higher). But the iPad ASP is going to go down as there is a new $250 dollar entry tier and the iPad mini 2 (almost as good as the iPad mini 3) is now $300.

Indeed, Apple tablets are distinctly secondary in quality to their phones. This is most clear for the iPad mini 3 which didn't even get the new A8 processor (basically just Touch ID and the gold colour option). While the iPad Air 2 got much more significant upgrades, it still is behind the iPhone in terms of cameras, and new features like Touch ID are coming a generation behind. All of this paints the picture that tablets are having to drop in price and be somewhat less feature laden than their smartphone counterparts.

This is, I think, part of the same analysis on the subsidy phone model and the dynamic of phone first, tablet possibly second. As tablets don't get the big initial cost subsidy, and are perceived as an extra, they have to be cheaper, and hence they don't get all the features to drive down costs. This reinforced the idea that tablets are lesser than phones and perpetuates the asymmetry. If the tablets were getting all the latest perks - and and given the same priority in subsidy that phones get - I suspect a lot more would be sold.

Why Canada is going to war in Iraq: From Harper's Mouth

2014-10-03T17:24:00.000-07:00

I recently wrote a post about the motivations for middle powers like Canada to join international coalitions for wars such as the recent war in Iraq.

Now that we have seen Harper official justification for the war to Parliament, it is worth noting how closely what I said tacked with what Harper himself said. We don't have to do some form of loose guesswork as we do with, say, Russia where the motivations of the leadership is wildly different from their public statements. Here, Harper is proudly and publicly proclaiming more or less what I suggested.

Most of the speech is identifying how ISIS are bad people doing bad things that ought to be dealt with. However, for a middle power like Canada the question is why do we specifically need to get involved. Surely, adding a few CF-18s and logistical support to the international coalition isn't a make it or break it difference on ISIS's capabilities. The section of Harper's speech justifying why specifically Canada ought to be involved is quite short, and quite telling:

"Indeed, we should be under no illusion. If Canada wants to keep its voice in the world, and we should since so many of our challenges are global, being a free rider means one is not taken seriously."

We are going to war because Canada's leadership wants to be able to sit at the big boys table on the international stage, with the semblance of influence that implies. Our small contribution won't make us safer, nor does it provide a good return on investment when thought of from humanitarian grounds. But neither of these is the goal. The goal is to maintain our credibility and limited influence on the international stage.

For many middle powers like Canada that didn't follow the US/UK into the war in Iraq a decade ago, it was long a mark of pride, symbolizing that we were willing to engage in liberal interventionism in the "right" war of Afghanistan while standing up to the imperialism of the US in the "wrong" war in Iraq. As the years dragged on and Iraq descended further and further into chaos while the ostensible justifications for the war went up in smoke, this sense of moral superiority only increased.

ISIS is largely a product of the failure of nation building in Iraq, having existed under one name or another since the civil war in Iraq kicked off by the US invasion. The world is rightly horrified at the atrocities ISIS have committed and the desire to do something - anything - to stop it is certainly well founded. Unfortunately, while bombing ISIS may achieve not unimportant goal of stopping their advance, it is merely a bandaid on top of the larger structural problems that simply haven't been resolved in a decade of war in Iraq and show no signs of being resolved any time soon in Syria.

Regardless, nothing in the above paragraph explains the decision to go to war. A decade ago Harper wanted to follow the Americans to war. Now he finally gets his chance to be included. It is the inclusion that matters and forms the core motivation, not any specific security or humanitarian objective.

Harper's small but important lie on Iraq

2014-09-27T11:36:00.002-07:00

Harper got caught in a lie important enough that the US Secretary of Defence's office took the somewhat rare move of embarrassing Harper by telling everyone it was indeed a lie.

Namely, as reported by Global News, Harper made something of a big show that the US was asking for Canadian help in the newest war in Iraq. Turns out, it was the other way around, where Harper asked the Americans if Canada could help out and the document Harper was referring to was a response to this.

Now, does it really matter who asked whom first? At the end of the day, after all, it should be the actual decision to engage or not that matters, and a little change in the initial framing doesn't have a large consequence. However, I argue both that it does matter and, further, that the lie is telling of the larger structural relationship between the Canada (and other middle powers like Canada) and the US.

Firstly, going to war is a big deal and our leaders have a basic responsibility to be transparent about the motivations that leads to the decision to engage. We have seen in the past (ironically with Iraq being the most egregious example) how distortions in the initial framing can lead to public support for a war that subsequently proves to be a complete disaster whose initial framing was entirely bogus. Leading aside the question of whether Canada should or should not engage in Iraq, that decision should be made objectively without our leaders trying to falsely spin the scenario into one that is more politically palpable.

I once wrote a post that discussed how middle powers like Canada - or more correctly their leaders, if we wish to avoid the anthropomorphizing - want to bolster their international credibility by being participants in global actions like wars. They wish to be seen as active participants who have influence and power. Great powers (mainly the US) mainly want these international coalitions that include partners like Canada because it lends legitimacy to their actions. These rather different aims lead to the broad international coalitions in wars like Afghanistan.

As Wikileaks cables documented after the fact, when it came to Iraq, Canada quietly offered to help out with various naval and logistical support. It was clear to Jean Chretien that the Canadian public didn't want "boots on the ground" but whatever else help Canada could be behind the scenes they were more than willing, as long as publicly it appeared that Canada was against the war. The Americans rebuffed this. The point was that the US didn't care about the little bit of logistical support, they wanted the legitimacy that would only come from Canada being loud, prominent participant, not a quite help on the sides.

This situation repeats that lesson. The middle power, Canada, wants to be involved, it wants that perception of influence and importance on the world stage. But Harper knows as well as Jean Chretien knew that the Canadian public generally doesn't like wars and framing the war in a way acceptable to the public is of key importance. Here, it was that we were responding to a request for help from the Americans opposed to trying to elbow ourselves into the grown up table is key. For the superpower, however, the little bit of logistical support and a few F-18's that Canada may offer are likely not that important. What is important is the legitimacy that a Canadian inclusion would provide to the war. That legitimacy is undermined when it appears like the Americans are trying to bully the Canadians into being included but considerably strengthened when it appears as if it is Canada who is trying to join in on the noble fight.

Paul Calandra's parliamentary apology:
This same basic point was emphasized in this weeks charade during Question Period. Mulcair asked a perfectly reasonable question about the length of engagement and Parliamentary Secretary to the PM Paul Calandra responded with a complete non sequitur, which led to something of a tangle between Mulcair and the Speaker and, finally, after much derision in the media, a tearful yet still nonsensical apology from Calandra. That almost all answers (and a good number of the questions) ever asked or answered in Question Period are just ridiculous partisan trolling as being obvious to anyone who has ever tuned in and speaks to a much larger problem in our Parliamentary system, particularly during majorities where the majority party can simply evade any semblance of transparency.

In this specific issue, here we are again musing over the idea of contributing to a war - and issue one might think is of some importance - and the Conservatives are still quite happy (for Calandra's remarks were clearly appreciated by caucus) complete evading any attempt to have any form of dialogue on the issue. What we get is Harper falsely trying to frame the issue and getting rebuffed for his lies from the Americans, while in Parliament his secretary makes absolute zero attempt to engage in any serious way. This is how we choose to go to war in Canada.

Olivia Chow loses when the race is about Rob Ford

2014-09-08T16:08:00.001-07:00

On paper, the Toronto Mayoral race should be a cakewalk for the NDP's Olivia Chow. Consider, it is down to two conservatives who will split votes on the right and a single progressive on the left, from a city who has previously had the political makeup to elect NDP candidates like David Miller. Indeed, part of the failure of the left in the 2010 race was because of vote splitting on the left that not only won't hurt the left, it now hurts the right.

But of course, it isn't any two conservatives, it is a generic fill-in-the-blank conservative in John Tory and, well, the indescribable Rob Ford. While for most people in most cities, municipal politics is a low key and somewhat mundane affair, in Toronto everyone knows about Rob Ford. Everyone has an opinion of Rob Ford. Everyone either really likes, or really hates Rob Ford. Rightly or wrongly (and I very much think it is wrongly) this election is going to be about Rob Ford and this central fact tilts everything.

It is a chicken and egg problem. If the number one goal is to get rid of Rob Ford, you go with the person who appears most likely to win. And the person who will be most likely to win is the one that is getting all the support. Right now that is John Tory.

This isn't about left or right, it isn't about this or that transit plan, it isn't about Chinese immigrant vs quintessential white male politician, it isn't about the NDP or the the PCs, it isn't about contrasting visions for Toronto, it is about who is most likely to beat Rob Ford. That's it.

I like Olivia Chow because I believe that her values and policies are in the right place, not because she is particularly adept at portraying the impression that she alone is most likely to win an election. A race about whether you can beat Rob Ford isn't the kind of race she will excel at.

While Rob Ford's long circus of nonsense is as unacceptable and ridiculous as one can imagine, what has always been most dangerous about Rob Ford is that he might be able to enact some of his far right Tea Party agenda. Thankfully, council blocked him for the most part, particularly after his first year and it has been a long time since he was setting policy.

The problem is that when one thinks of reasons not to vote for Rob Ford, one can easily come up with a laundry list of crack and alcohol and lies and whatever else. But what probably isn't at the top - what may not even make it on the list - is a failed vision for Toronto.It is that failed far right vision for Toronto that is most disastrous and that is the part that I believe Olivia Chow best represents an antidote to.

When the conversation is about the vision for Toronto, I think that Olivia Chow is an able candidate who can win the election. That is her strength. She can win hearts and minds over this vision. But as long as the conversation is focused on Rob Ford - for him, against him, around him - this simply won't get airtime. In the Rob Ford-centric conversation we are having, John Tory looks to be the next mayor of Toronto.

Olivia Chow is going to have to fight hard in the next couple weeks to put the conversation back on her terms.

Tech on the Side: Amazon vs Apple

2014-09-08T12:38:00.000-07:00

While Apple is a wildly profitable money printing machine that hoards its cash and returns billions to shareholders, Amazon makes no official profit. As Benedict Evans points out, this is just a sleight of hand for Amazon has numerous profitable businesses, it is just that it reinvests every penny back into the business (or, more correctly, all its various new subbusinesses) and has skyrocketing capital expenditures to go with its skyrocketing revenues.

Which is right? Ought Apple to be reinvesting its phenomenal wealth? Ought Amazon to be returning money to shareholders? I argue that, broadly speaking, both are taking the optimal strategy and the difference is a function of different key products.

Both companies are premised on an idea which after it was implemented is obviously and vastly superior to what came before it. The smartphone/tablet market is enormous, and everyone recognizes the value that smartphones create over the previous era of cell phones and how integral they are to so many of ours lives these days. For Amazon, the ability to have enormous selection with low prices, all done from the comfort of your home (or smartphone!) is vastly superior for tonnes of things than going through a brick and mortor store. They are both fabulous ideas, and as the big first movers to drive the innovation of these two great ideas, Apple and Amazon get richly rewarded for it.

When you are clever and lucky enough to be the first mover on those once in a decade big ideas, the goal is to capitalize as much as possible. Apple clearly has done this is spades. It has completely dominated taking most of the profits (with Samsung, nobody else makes anything meaningful) from this industry and while it still probably has room to go has saturated the developed world probably something close to as much as it reasonably can with its business model. And it has done this all charging very high margins and being able to print billions and billions of profits.

For Amazon, however, the market is rather different. If you consider online retail, it undoubtedly crushes everyone. If you consider retail generally, however, Amazon takes maybe 1% (after ignoring gas, food, building supplies, etc). Apple can't realistically expect a 20x revenue growth, unless there are many iPhone level innovations out there none of us can think of that only Apple can. But is it so unreasonable to imagine a not too distant future where people rarely shop in physical stores and, say, 20% of US retail is through Amazon?

Amazon has so much more room for potential growth than Apple does that they are justified in doing everything they can to grow. This means pouring all of that money from the profitable portions of Amazon into the new and growing portions of Amazon to try and get that growth. There simply isn't a need to waste long term potential by pushing for on paper profits right now.

On a related note, one of the sillier criticisms of Apple is that it is somehow lacking in innovation because it hasn't come up with a new ipod/iphone/ipad category creating device that completely transforms the entire industry or creates a new one from thin air. Possibly the iWatch will be added to the list, time will tell. The problem is that such massive, industry changing innovations are incredibly rare and one can't just will them into existence, regardless of how much of an innovative genius you are. The 2007 iPhone was certainly a remarkable piece of innovation and now the smartphone market is measured in the billions and all the phones are something like that original iPhone. But how many markets that sized are actually sitting there ripe to be innovated given current technological capabilities? I can't think of any, and I doubt any that criticizes Apple for lack of innovation can do so either.