Why a real sovereigntist should prefer an ongoing role within confederation

Here's a start to a sensitive topic ... surely needs to be developed a little more thoroughly.
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There has been a body of support for an independent Quebec at least since the times of René-Lévesque.

Through history there have been a significant number of independence movements, many of which were to varying extents the result of economic inequalities, oppression of cultural, ethnic or religious identities, and at times following an ideological cleavage between significant portions of a society. In the context of a democratic society with effective constitutional and legal means of recourse, these continuous tensions have the capacity to stimulate a positive dialogue leading to greater mutual understanding and improved representation of interests within a political community.

In the case of actual separations between countries, the sheer weight of unaddressed issues may have festered to the point where violence was sparked. This has resulted in newly independent states, civil wars leading to a new political paradigm dictated largely by the winners, increased oppression of the separatist groups, or reconciliation which includes a sufficient degree of sovereignty to satisfy the group that initially felt offended.

As far as I am aware, one could argue that all of these have characterized the relationship between Quebec and the Rest of Canada (ROC) at one time or another since 1867. Fortunately, the Canadian constitution, as negotiated by the largely British and French immigrants who founded our country, is very well suited towards a distribution of powers that allows Quebec more or less complete freedom to pursue its independent cultural development. The Canadian constitution dictates that the each member of the federation has jurisdiction over culture, education and their natural resources, to start a long list. There is an important historical difference to note though. Most independence movements concern regions that were conquered, were otherwise absorbed into an empire, or are postcolonial countries where some groups had no say in the design of the new state. Quebec, however, entered Canada on its own accord in 1867, and thus had the opportunity to negotiate its cultural autonomy.

Despite historical problems, such as the exclusive use of English in many government departments in Quebec, or declining manufacturing output in sectors that were important to Quebec in the earlier part of the 20th century, there is one underlying sentiment that seems to drive sovereigntists in Quebec. In particular, many Quebecois are concerned that, as an island in an Anglophone sea (North America), their culture and language are under siege. The evidence for this comes from anglicisms in the language.
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My argument that a real sovereigntist should seek to ensure the growth of an ongoing role within confederation is thus centered on the question "Is the durability of the French language in Quebec and the ongoing growth and development of Quebecois culture, as something that should be celebrated and valued, best ensured as a member of confederation or as an independent state?" I don't think that comes anywhere near the complexity of the questions in the actual referendums.

To start off with, these are very difficult questions to answer, since it’s not exactly clear what the sovereigntists want these days. It’s not even clear that most supporters of the Bloc Quebecois or the Parti Quebecois want separation. This is not a critical statement. In my mind the sheer diversity of opinions that gather under the banner of the nominally separatist parties is a good sign. In particular, it illustrates that blind faith in some indoctrinated nationalism is not a significant mobilizing factor for these parties. That bodes well for a future where Quebecois nationalism is a positive, celebratory expression.

While I think nationalism has great potential to bring diverse communities within a nation together, I would say that I tend, in a tiny sort of way, towards anti-nationalism at any kind of level. That has nothing to do with Quebec. It has to do with an historical view, having seen national pride all too often subverted to xenophobia and excessive ethnocentrism. The broad variety of opinions under the Bloc and PQ is a positive indication that non Quebecois residents of Quebec probably have little to fear in terms of negative nationalism. I will come back to this issue of positive nationalism vs. negative nationalism towards the end.
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Historians could go on ad infinitum about numerous details relating to Quebec, or other examples of movements that sought greater sovereignty for their people or region. My argument that Quebec’s sovereignty is best pursued as a member of the Canadian confederation is relatively straightforward. The first thing I do is to take up on the number one concern, which is the protection of Quebecois culture and the French language in Quebec. As such, I am actually arguing that Quebec’s cultural and linguistic sovereignty are more effectively protected and developed in the present setup than in the case of complete independence. I then consider the possible directions that Quebecois nationalism could take following independence.

Quebecois culture gets special treatment in Canada. One of the most loved and most hated prime ministers from the 1970s, Pierre Trudeau, made sure that French-speaking students across the country could have access to an education in French. This was combined with an enormous effort to offer French language studies for English-speaking students. This went along with increasing requirement for bilingualism for many public service positions, meaning that it is of strategic interest for many individuals to learn French.

I follow this up with some simple questions – would the government of Canada continue with the significant expenditures that are involved with such policies if Quebec were independent? What if placating demands for cultural sovereignty in Quebec no longer played a role in forming government in Ottawa? Would federal services continue to be offered in both French and English? Answers these questions again for an EU style arrangement.

So, the counterargument could easily be that Quebec would have greater capacity to protect its language and culture if it had complete freedom to do so. To which I might respond by asking – name one way that the present setup impedes Quebec from doing that? While Quebec's sign laws break the Canadian constitution as well international covenants on civil and political rights, the Canadian government has not directly interfered. I decline to presently offer my opinion on these laws, but it is a sure sign that membership in the Canadian federation is not going to impede Quebec's ability to look out for the durability of its culture and language.

I should be upfront that my strategy is to redefine sovereignty, such that it is an issue of maintaining cultural integrity more so than outright political independence. In this light, it is easier to see that the federal government has done quite a bit to promote the independence of the dominant language in Quebec as well as leaving plenty of space for Quebec and its people to independently maintain their cultural identity. It similarly allows an investigation of the prospects for cultural autonomy in an independent Quebec.

An independent Quebec would initially be in the same position to promote ongoing growth of its language and culture as it is as a member of the Canadian federation. I do understand that active representation on the global stage is an issue of importance for Quebec. This is an interesting area of dialogue that calls for creative endeavors in policy entrepreneurship. On the downside, let me mention that an independent Quebec would certainly face greater scrutiny for its borderline discriminatory policies as a fully independent country than as a part of Canada. An optimistic view is that independence would lead to a growth in positive nationalism which engaged in genuine celebration of a vibrant culture that has so much to offer to the global melange that is humanity.

It is important to distinguish between positive nationalism and negative nationalism. Positive nationalism is easiest to see during festivals, in the arts, or in the hospitality and welcoming nature of a nation. In general, this is a pride in one’s national identity and the drive to express it in a celebratory and passionate manner. This may be accompanied by growth in civic participation. Negative nationalism is typically characterized by a multiplication of laws that limit the expression of other cultures, increasing hostility to people from other nationalities and a belief in the ultimate superiority of one’s own culture. In general, this can be expressed as ethno-centrism and xenophobia.

I don't know which way an independent Quebec would go, but with the likely decline in economic support for the ongoing durability and development of Quebecois culture, it could become difficult to maintain the positive form of nationalism. History is too full of examples where economic challenges have been answered with increasingly negative expressions of national pride.

Meanwhile, if the feds were to rethink the significant costs in promoting the French language in English Canada, it would become increasingly difficult for Quebec to do business in its own language. Yes, there is le Francophonie, but it is generally easiest (i.e. most profitable) to do business with one’s neighbours. In this case, Quebec could truly become a very isolated island in the Anglophone sea.

I see two likely directions from there. The first is increasing pressures to pursue education in English for practical economic ends, in order to access economic opportunities vis-à-vis other countries. The other likely direction that I see is that increasing pressures to Anglicize could result in a backlash with the potential to develop into a negative nationalism that few would see as respectful. Neither of these seem to appealing options.

The present status of the dominant language in Quebec and the ongoing development of Quebecois culture is something to be proud of. Quebec has enormous freedom to support and develop its culture, in whatever way her people see fit, largely with the blessing of the federal government. Revel in it. Grow it. Quebec's cultural sovereignty is well protected in Canada, and is quite likely best served by ongoing ties between Quebec and the Rest of Canada.

Many English-speaking Canadians don't understand the relevance of language in culture because they've often lived in a monolingual environment. Many others live in cities with such thriving multiculturalism that it's hard to understand the challenges that Quebec's cultural sovereignty face.

There are far too many Canadians who see the sovereignty movement as a tool to extract concessions from English Canada. It's up to the people of Quebec to prove them wrong. Invite them to travel and experience Quebec and show them how much it has to be proud of. Be the drivers behind a genuine dialogue that explains the real importance of Quebec's freedom to independently grow as a cultural identity. Promote this identity as one that even more people outside Quebec will want to celebrate. Inform them. Educate them. Much of English Canada doesn't really believe that Quebec's culture is truly different. For me, from the perspective of someone who’s spent a good deal of time outside the West, I have to say that we have a lot more in common that you might think. Nevertheless, it is clearly important that English Canada is given the opportunity to understand just why the Quebecois love their language and culture so much.

Why raping the earth may prove to have been a great idea – and why it's time to stop

I woke up this morning with my heart running at least 110 and feeling somewhat ashamed of myself.

I'd walked into …. I don't really know where, it might have been a bar, probably one that I worked at. I don't think it was very busy at the time. I'd noticed 2 guys kicking and punching a rather young women in a park across the road as I'd walked in. Apparently I was so completely indifferent to the whole thing that I didn't even mention it to anyone else who was there.

Some idle banter carried on until one of the other characters noticed, through the window, the terrible event that was on. I looked out the window. This was a while later, and they were still administering kicks and punching in the same grueling, steady beat as before. Being four, and only two malfeasants outdoors, there wasn't even a thought about looking for some extra help. As we started towards them, the two guys split immediately in either direction. I had to run to get my phone so that coordination could be maintained between the two groups who would nail the bastards.

I ran, and ran as fast as I could for several minutes before seeing two forms come up in the distance. I continued to run, and was soon standing beside two characters. They were the girl, and one of the other guys from the bar, or … whatever it was. Damn! Where'd he go? Where’s the guy? Aw man, don’t tell me he got away. I quickly called the other two guys … where are you? Where are you? Can you still see the other guy?

They both got away. My heart sunk.

I felt ashamed, as I struggled into consciousness, due to my initial inaction. I'm the kind of guy that, when living in a neighborhood full of bars, will sit on the front step and smoke and drink coffee when there's a fight brewing after the bars close, just so that it's clear that there's a sober bystander. Perhaps some of them should have fought it out, but … it never seemed to go further than that first push. I saw what seemed to be altogether too many friendships and relationships go down the drain from that vantage point. Who knows if they remembered the next day though. I'm the kind of guy that (once upon a time this happened) will insist that a friend and I should go stop six guys who were kicking the shit out of a youngster at three in the morning. I'm the kind of guy that will irrationally tell a rather large, unknown, 6'6 guy that it's time to take it outside, in order to stop a fight with another unknown character, just to take a casual pose and ask him … why the hell were these guys about to fight anyways … it's just not worth it, y'know … . OK, so let's pretend that there are no stories illustrating the other side of that. Main point is that I give a shit and feel ashamed when I do nothing, or am not prepared to do anything, even if it was just a dream.

Then, I had a brainwave, the form of which I tried to scribble down before I woke up. That’s what follows. Perhaps the title stirs the pot a little much in tying it to this story, but this is it – Why raping the earth was a great idea, and why it’s time to stop. The tie to the unfortunate event experienced by the woman in my unconscious is fully intended to bring a sense of disgust and injustice.

So, as the lucidity faded, I realized … wait a minute, if there were three of us when I caught up, that should be a cause for celebration. We saved her, right? My heart was still beating 110. Out of excitement. We did it! Yeah, sure, the guys got away, but that’s not what mattered.

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I’d actually planned to write something about the strategic aspects of Ukrainian membership in NATO. This is way better.

I’m about to make an argument for why it was a great idea to rape the earth. Then, I’m going to argue why it must be getting damn near time to stop. She can only give so much. Are you disturbed yet? Aside from the story that provides the context, the innovation is largely redesigned packaging for relatively well-established ideas.

The first realization was that if the value of shares on the stock market was intended to represent the net present value of all future streams of profits, including a hypothetical liquidation of capital, then it’s really messed up because we’re basically setting up a system which is fully intended to concentrate every expected future profit into our hands in the present. This presents itself as an enormous incentive to ‘mine the earth’. That basically means to borrow from future generations such that we outlive our actual means from today.

Then I realized that this has enabled us to achieve the concentration of capital that we have in the present day.

The enormous capital surpluses have permitted reinvestment into R&D such that we can now get more production out of every bit of nature that we DO use. For those who see technology as the solution to environmental problems, that’s good.

So far so good for the ‘Order of the Invisible Hand.’ However, as argued and well illustrated by Jared Diamond's Collapse, we are ‘mining the earth’ right now. As seems most plainly evident, to me, in terms of maintaining inherent soil productivity in dry areas with conflict risks, the earth has a limited capacity to replenish its inherent productive potential. This rate is different for various ecosystems, depending on more variables than much of anyone is inclined to count. In that sense, we can consider the earth as possessing a certain sort of natural capital, with differing potential rates of return (linked to what may be called the upper bound on a sustainable ‘discount rate’).

The main idea in Collapse is that we are depleting this natural capital much faster than it can replenish itself. The potential result being, well … read the book. He’s an optimist. So am I. The invisible hand will certainly get to play, but it’s free pass is coming to an end. Preventing Collapse is almost certainly contingent on limiting the scope of action for the invisible hand.

What I’m saying that’s different from Diamond’s point is that, not only have we rapidly burned our way through returns that were deposited over the previous hundreds of millions of years, but we are also unfairly leveraging against the future by depleting the ability of our natural systems to produce returns when we eat into the capital base. We have exceeded this capacity in almost every single place where there are humans for some time now. However, between mining and leveraging our natural systems, the temporary surplus may have fueled an extraordinary rate of technological growth that may well permit a long term, perhaps permanent, improvement in our capacity to achieve a decent quality of life.

However, you can only eat into your savings and borrow against expected future earnings for so long before you go bankrupt. When natural systems start to go bankrupt, the effects are ... well, let me say again, read Collapse. It's happened many times before in history at a smaller scale. Sum up many similar events happening around the same time, and ... I'll leave you to find an adjective to describe the end result

I could leave it there, but it seems as though it could be interesting to flesh this out in just a little more detail. On second thought … I think I’ve said quite enough. It’d take at least a few pages to even begin developing each of the previous paragraphs, and I’m already within my target of 1-2k words.

The main point is counterintuitive. You should feel good about having played a role in raping the earth. My goal is to design a call to action with respect to the environment that is not driven by guilt. Yes, we have devastated much of nature. It could get much worse. BUT, don’t feel bad about what we’ve already done. (Well, maybe just a little bit). It has played an important role in fueling the sort of technological progress that make our lives so much better, today, and well into the future. However, we’ve leveraged too heavily against the future. The evidence is less clear in Canada than much of the rest of the world. We have an incredible basis of natural capital. Our low population density has made it easier to maintain more of our natural capital than most other countries. This is a great reason to maintain the returns we get, both economically and psychologically, as a result of leaving space for many of our natural systems to stand on their own two feet.

We are not monkeys. We’re eating into our natural capital at unprecedented rates, while mortgaging future generations in order to fund our profligate lifestyles. This can’t go on. I’m convinced that we have it in us to make sure that the apocalyptic visions of fear-mongering environmentalists never happens. We need to prove them wrong. Just imagine what will happen if we don’t. Let’s act like human beings and make sure that our actions today do not threaten the ability of future generations to live a life at least as good as ours.

Too funny to not post

This cartoon is from the Oct 18th issue of the Economist. I was going to post a link, then I remembered that their content is only free for a year. This could be considered as free advertising for them.

A short life for the Zen theory of the green economy? I think not

So, I read an article in the Globe and Mail yesterday that, at first glance, does not seem to bode well for the so-called Zen theory of the green economy.

A key step in theoretical developments is comparing theory with the real world. This has rarely slowed down neo-liberals from advocating withdrawal of the state from certain sectors which are key to long term growth, despite evidence that shows it's not always a good idea. That doesn't mean that there are no insights to be gained from studying such theory. Similarly, empirical evidence that places doubt on the Zen theory of the green economy is not evidence that there is no insight to be gained from this theoretical innovation. Rather, we could be led to ponder the true complexity of reality and the need for a diversity of conceptual lenses to understand some of the numerous aspects of any given problematic.

The article that I initially mentioned, talks about the results of a survey carried out by the Solutions Research Group , which asks Canadians and Americans where they would be willing to cut expenditures if they had to reduce spending. The most interesting result was that the internet and cell phone usage were at the end of the list. I was initially quite surprised at the results, thinking that they verified, to some extent, the Zen theory of the green economy (which, I should emphasize, is written to poke fun at the limitations of consumer theory as much as it aims to make strides in theoretical innovation). That's because it showed internet and cellular consumption as things that consumers were not willing to give up. Then I read the rest of the list ...

This is the list that was provided:

1. Big-ticket events (eg. concerts, sports)
2. Movie-going
3. DVD buying
4. Magazine subscription renewals/newsstand
5. Cable/satellite TV extras
6. Video game buying
7. Home phone
8. Mobile/wireless phone
9. DVD Rentals
10. Home Internet

I then became disheartened, realizing that every one of the things that consumers were willing to give up if they had to reduce expenditures were cultural goods, entertainment, expenditures in the information economy... etc. I then engaged in some particularly advanced logical consideration of the issue to determine that if every object belonged to the classes of goods that are mentioned above, then the survey must have largely included the kinds of goods that are often seen as promising for the green economy. A little investigation on the internet seems to have confirmed this is the case, given the main research focus of the company who carried out the survey.

This means that the survey results could be a useful indication as to which cultural, entertainment and information age goods have strong potential to succeed in an economy that provides us with pleasures of the mind that have relatively low natural resource inputs. Since the survey does not appear to have included durable goods such as new computers, new cars, new houses, consumption of gas, or other resource-intensive products such as random crap that we buy and can't easily classify into groups such as described by the survey, then it can't be said to have any direct bearing on the integrity of the theory.

Without access to the full findings of the research carried out by the Solutions Research Group, however, I can't really say much more about the link between their research and my previous work which repackaged some ancient philosophical insights into traditional consumer theory.

For the get-rich-quick folks in the crowd, the relation between the Zen theory of the green economy and the survey that I mentioned, this could bode well for stock values among internet and cellular providers. So ... BUY, BUY, BUY!!!. Just do yourself a favour and read up a bit on rent dissipation and recent changes in the regulatory environment in Canada before you actually consider doing so (at which point, you may change your mind).

Since I have some other work to do (namely, study for an exam where I have to be able to reiterate some stages relating to the derivation of some statistical tools that should prove quite useful for carrying out some details of my research interests), this essay-a-day project will have to be limited to a handful of comments on this new research.

The Free Market – If Capital Can Cross Borders Freely then Should Labour Too?

A not-so-mainstream problematic – a novel use of some very mainstream tools that (unfortunately) thwarts resolution of this problem.

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I have long been of the opinion that there was a grave injustice in the nature of open markets at the international scale. This rises from the simple point that capital can move and people can’t. First, I’m going to explain why this is grossly unjust in principle. Then, I’m going to explain how and why I came to the realization the other day that completely free movement of labour across borders is a really, really baaaad idea in the long term.

I’m not talking about the fact that I can send money around the world with minimal effort, for a few dollars, to find the best returns on money. I’m not talking about the significant psychological barriers and costs involved with relocating labour to locations with better wages either.

I’m talking about regulations. Financial capital is typically allowed to move across borders with few restrictions, while labour faces numerous restrictions on its ability to move.

One of the general reasons that we should celebrate the market is that the profit incentive is supposed lead to allocations of resources to their most efficient use. In this case, financial capital moves where it can produce the most of its products for the least amount of money. One would think, then that if the role of markets is to allow factors of production (capital and labour in the most simplified way of looking at things) to move to where they are most profitable, then this would be most easily served by a system which allowed people to move where they could find the highest wages as well as capital moving to where it could make the most profits.

Companies can move to where wages (productivity / nominal wage) are highest, in relation to what they actually pay for labour, but you can’t necessarily move to where wages are highest. This clearly benefits companies more than labour.


This is totally OK with most people in the West, since we have been the main beneficiaries of this setup for a very long time, getting access to cheap production inputs from the rest of the world without having to worry about them coming here and driving down the prices of our labour. Some would state that this isn’t possible since markets take prices as given and wages are set by productivity. It’s hard to get a grip of the effects of the truth of the matter, given that we do not presently have free movement of labour.

In any case, the economic answer to that problem isn’t terribly significant, since we live in democracies, and the public has no interest in opening the doors to just anyone who wants to come. We only let the cream of the crop in, with a nominal allocation for sympathy cases.

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I had a sudden realization the other day, and now I’ve forgotten what brought it on, that if we allowed labour to move wherever it wanted, then no country would have much incentive to educate its population. Rather, it would try to poach expertise from other countries. This already happens, but nowhere near on the degree that would happen if there was complete freedom of labour mobility.

There are positive externalities to education. This means that, although the individual benefits, they are not the only ones to benefit from that education. Society benefits to. This means that markets would lead to a sub-optimal allocation of education. The state can internalize the wider benefits of education within its borders, since taxes are paid by more or less all people. The result is that the state has an incentive to invest in public education in order to have a more productive society, while our inability to internalize ALL the benefits of our own education lead us to under-invest in education when it is at market prices. That's without even counting the inherent good of improving people's abilities through education.

So why not increase international labour mobility?

Simple. A state that can no longer internalize the benefits of a broadly educated public, who are likely to move anywhere where wages are higher, is not as likely to invest as much in educating its people. This is OK at a limited level, and may be important to allow for experts, in order to facilitate research and innovation.

However, the expected effect of complete freedom of movement of labour would therefore be a significant reduction in education across the world. The present setup where capital can move and people can’t (or can only do so in a limited sense) is not fair, but a world with free movement of labour would leave everyone much worse off. Almost…


A quick internet search before I went to post this showed that I am certainly not the first one to realize this, but I already figured that was probably the case.


Being in a position to take advantage of all sides of this problem (as an educated individual from a country with capital whose citizens have comparatively little difficulty working overseas), I have to ask myself - Have I been, as Francis Hutchinson would say, bribed by self-interest to make a biased argument? Or possibly I’m just damn lucky to be Canadian.

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Iiiiiii remember, this is exactly the same reason that cooperation on global warming is so difficult. It’s a free rider problem. Every country has an incentive to let others bear the brunt of the costs and do nothing themselves. In one case, it’s a global market for educated individuals, in the other it’s a global environment.

That calls for a heavy duty discussion of the issue of negative externalities, how they work, and why they necessitate things like prices on pollution, regulations, and so on (depending on what works best for the particular problem). The most relevant policy question driving the response being – how can Canada stimulate productivity growth (a central problem in our short-term and long-term economic prospects) and address global environmental issues (a central issue in our short-term and long term economic prospects) with a minor modification of the tax code that still leaves markets free to find efficient allocations of economic resources?

Hey! But increasing international labour mobility should smooth economic fluctuations. That's one of the main practical applications of the study of macroeconomics. Hmmm …

Lightening it up a bit with some casual commentary on Chinese investments in Africa …

9 Chinese workers were killed the other day in Sudan.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened. I believe it was 17 that were killed in Sudan at some point while I was in China.

I asked a few people there at the time what this might mean in the long term, since China claims to have a principle that no state should interfere in the internal affairs of other states. This principle may largely stem from their desire that other nations should feel no right to interfere in China`s internal affairs. To them this means, more or less, “stay out of our face about Tibet and Taiwan.” (They consider Taiwan to be a lost brother who should be reunited with the family).

Around the time there was a spread, on a number of Chinese sites, of an incredibly poor translation into Chinese, of a sarcastic posting I made on an internet forum where I insinuated that China’s interests in Africa were more or less neo-colonial. (They missed or skipped the evident sarcasm, preferring to state that I, a foreigner, believed that much like the US, Chinese interests were not remotely neo-colonial).

Back to the main story though … I expressed to a few people that I thought that the killings in Sudan would negatively impact China’s stated support for non-interference in the internal workings of African countries, thinking that as Chinese investment became more pervasive, popular sentiment would turn against them, forcing China to take some activist role in protecting their investments.

This is notably the case because most Chinese investments in Africa are carried out by teams of Chinese workers. Non-interference indeed! There’s practically no chance that the countries receiving these investments are going to be able to participate in any significant exchange of knowledge in the process. Hence, locals getting pissed off, since they don’t see the jobs.

I’m not sure whether the responses were a reflection of a wise disinterest in being critical of the CCP, the governing Party, or a reflection of naïve optimism of their government’s interest in developing a profitable yet benevolent relationship with states in Africa, but there seemed to be a consistent faith that the Chinese government was in Africa to support domestic interests, yes, but also with a benevolent interest in supporting development in Africa.

Even when I mentioned that China seemed to be doing its best to prevent the spread of Chinese expertise, it seemed to be an article of faith that there would be an eventual and significant transfer of skills. China ensured that such a transfer of skills accompanied early investments at home, and in my opinion, seem to be doing a pretty thorough job of ensuring that it doesn’t happen when they invest in African ventures. As far as those opinions in China were concerned, I noted this as an unfortunate indicator of a lack of any significant domestic pressures for the Chinese government to improve the transfer of technological knowhow towards African.

China does have a number of electoral structures, notably at the village level and among the 5000 elites who convene to approve five-year plans. Outside of China, there tends to be significant doubt that the citizens have influence on public policy. Perhaps true for most individuals, but I do think that public opinion itself can be a manner of democratic expression if the government is responsive to it, even in a country that doesn’t hold elections. I developed, in its basic form, a formal theory about this principle, to affirm a very nominal degree of democratic practice for a handful of Eastern European countries before the fall of the Soviet Union. I supposed (with an armful of citations that supported the theory) that even autocratic leaders have to respond to public opinion, since they don’t want to give people too much incentive to engage in destabilizing dissent.

The main point for that digression about democracy in China … ? Simply, that if public opinion were critical of the nature of Chinese investments in Africa, then there would be at the very least a token response by ensuring a somewhat greater transfer of technology resulting from Chinese investments in Africa. In any case, such public opinion does not appear to exist with respect to this topic.

There is a school of thought among international aid experts that conditional aid (where the recipient country must meet conditions such as buying products from the donor, or engage in some sort of reforms) is a bad thing, since it interferes in that country’s independent institutional development, while building debt to import what all too often turns out to be weapons.

The result in this case is that China can inform the world that they don’t engage in any of this conditionality crap, amounting to evidence of how generous they are with their investments in Africa. This can be tied to their support of the principle that there should be no interference in the internal workings of sovereign states. The common critique, in response, is that Chinese investments in Africa help prop up corrupt regimes and dictators in Africa.

Meanwhile, it’s plain as day that access to primary resources as inputs for the manufacturing machine at home is the main reason that China is sending so many workers to carry out projects in Africa. To be fair, they’re building lots of roads and other infrastructure while they’re there, but one has to wonder if it’s somewhat in order to make life easier for themselves, even though it is formally part of the bargain with most countries receiving investment from China. Altogether, it looks much like a classically colonial setup. Since domestic governance is maintained, it can be called neo-colonialism.


As for this claim of no conditionality … even if we were to suppose that it’s a better way of doing aid, can this claim be truly believed?

I was talking with a professor at Laval today, where I’m presently taking some courses in preparation to get rolling with my master’s in economics, who offered some interesting insight on the matter. Sylvain Dessey’s claim should, in fact, already have been plain as day, given a wee little difference between law regarding contracts in China compared to, say, Canada. I’ll explain that before getting to his point.

For starters, there are no laws which legally uphold contracts in China. Well … there sort of are, but not really. Complying with contracts there is optional, although people who break contracts may find it hard to do business in pretty short order. Word gets around. As I said, just a wee little difference.

Given a lifetime of experience making contractual agreements where the formal details on paper were far less important than the actual implicit agreement of how things would work, it can hardly be doubted that there is some degree of conditionality when Chinese investments are brought to a country. This is my own claim of support for the prof’s statement that there is, in fact, conditionality. I should mention that his remark was somewhat in passing (I would never like to put words into someone’s mouth), but was said with what I thought was a great degree of certainty. While it’s not my main area of research interest, it deals with two regions that have direct links to my main research interest, and there’s a strong possibility that further analysis of this issue may provide some insight on how the relations between these regions contains the seeds of potential solutions relating to said interest (which I’ll surely outline in a paragraph or two at some point in time in the future). So, I could say that the realization, certainly not realized on my own, that there is almost certainly some degree of conditionality imposed by the Chinese involved in these investments, could prove to be quite important.

In any case, the question of conditionality of Chinese capital inflows into Africa isn’t central to what I’m getting at here. I just thought that it’s interesting that one of the stated qualities of Chinese investments in Africa, through use of a very small bit of intuition (and there may also be evidence, but surely not in the formal contracts), can be said to be false. I’m not really pointing fingers all that negatively here. There are whole libraries worth of similar critiques levelled against the US, UK, or a number of other countries with significant economic means.

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So the big question that came back to mind when I read the unfortunate news that more Chinese oil workers were killed in Sudan is this – What will be the nature of the relationship that China cultivates with its African trade partners over the next ten or twenty years?

Will these investments continue to be between elites? Will China start to take a greater interest in making investments that more directly support increased opportunities for average people where they are carrying out projects? Will they continue to use almost exclusively Chinese labour for their projects? Will the heavy element of mercantilism in trade and development strategy, bound to lead to a) high inflation and/or significant appreciation of the Yuan or b) rapidly growing international resentment, in the long term, continue to be one of the central planks of Chinese development?

Who knows? But the central question that guides these corollary questions will be very important for those who would like to know what the nature of geopolitical alignments will look like in 50 years time, with an eye to ensuring that our multipolar future will be compatible with a dynamic security that may result, as did among European powers from Napoleon’s demise until the Crimean War, when shifting alliances prevented excessive hegemonic capacity of any major power.


As a balance, I should mention that a number of property transfer and foreign press freedoms were announced last week in China. I have a whole lot to say about these recent changes, but might not get around to them for a while. China is has rapidly embraced modernity over the last 30 years. Let’s keep in mind that the Chinese trajectory towards “mature democracy” as they call it, may very well take a course that could offer insights to us.

I really see that as a strong possibility. The exchange of knowledge is rarely a one-way street. However, the present Chinese investment strategy being carried out in Africa is an unfortunate exception to such a perspective.

Following up on the previous post ...

Just a thought …

Why do some of the global poor avoid embarking on the path of wealth accumulation? A paper that I recently read by Banerjee & Duflo, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives suggests that the poor would have to face the sheer inadequacy of their living situation, making pursuit of wealth a psychologically damaging project.

Perhaps. Or maybe they’re just more enlightened than you or I. Maybe both…

I recently developed a strong preference for the flavour of espresso over coffee, although I do like both of them. There is a shockingly insufficient supply of espresso at super-markets in Quebec, amounting to a new source of dissatisfaction for me since the grocery store nearby has no interest in carrying a decent espresso. This costs me an additional 10 MINUTES each time I buy espresso. I have no interest in taking espresso out of my Y-good matrix. I just want it. Different sort of thing, but yes, I understand exactly why people refuse to give up all their pursuit of crap. They just love their crap too much. (But life could just be so much better, without a whole lot of it.)

Zen Utility - packaging ancient wisdom into modern economic theory

To simplify ... first I critique some of consumer choice theory, then introduce the piece of ancient wisdom, then a crash course in consumer theory, then derive Zen utility, find three applications, then burn it all up in a surprise move to the Zen theory of the green economy.

The main goals are to poke fun at consumer theory and to play with consumer theory to develop a theory of development that isn't based on the number of widgets produced or the amount of useless stuff we consume.

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This is an idea that crossed my mind over the summer when going through the requisite indoctrination in consumer theory and price theory. The main intuitions that come from this indoctrination is that no matter what governments do, they always make people less happy. It assumes that we always know the effects of every choice we make, and that we are therefore always capable of ranking all the choices that we could make in a way that’s optimal to our utility.

The profs all know it's quite simplistic, although there are definitely major insights to be gained from it too, and I admit that the simplifications make it easier to start learning the math that’s needed for economics. But WOW, it felt like brainwashing by the second week. (I should mention that I don't think it's the case, and that the teaching skills of professors in economics is much better than I would have expected). Perhaps my background as a specialist in political science leads me to immediately pinpoint the ideological nature of an analytical tool. As a prof of mine, Richard Day, said many times, “the facts never speak for themselves.” In this case, just because it’s a mathematical tool doesn’t mean that it can’t carry an ideological bent.

Continuing with consumer theory … Since individuals have this infinite knowledge (or at least, infinite intuition to make choices as though they had infinite knowledge), then anything the government every does will interfere with our ability to be as happy as possible. There are a whole series of reasons that this is not true, notably market externalities and imperfect information . These are also acknowledged in the study of economics, but unfortunately, the roots of some theory bypasses these problems. It works out great for extreme libertarians or laissez-faire capitalists who parrot these ridiculously oversimplified theories to deny any potential role for the government to improve things.

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The idea ..

OK, so what is it that crossed my mind? I’ll apologize for getting a little mathematical and abstract pretty shortly. The math isn’t needed to express the point, but packaging it all up within the confines of consumer theory is something that, on the one hand I find funny for some absurd reasons, and on the other hand, I take some odd pleasure on turning consumer theory completely on its head. I’m struggling with the design of the packaging though. It makes sense to me, but this probably reads like mumbo jumbo, since few people are familiar with economics or eastern philosophy, and I’ve definitely never met an economist with a significant interest in the latter of these.

I call it the Zen theory of utility, and what comes after the next paragraph is not likely to make sense to anyone who is unfamiliar with formal economic theory. I’m trying to figure out how to develop it into a theory that is digestible by mainstream economics. There’s nothing new here, I’m just repackaging and ancient piece of wisdom into the form of consumer theory. This is totally a parody, but is also for real. The following summarizes the piece of wisdom that I’m working with.

Ever heard the phrase “desire is the root of suffering”? It’s a Buddhist principle that we suffer because we don’t have things that we want. The more we want, the more we suffer from having to go about satisfying these wants, which all too rapidly become perceived needs. Therefore, a pathway to happiness is to want less, have a greater sense of satiation for any level of material fulfillment, and therefore be able to focus on spiritual inquiry or meditation. At the extreme, you want nothing, are happy with everything you have, and have a sense of extreme fulfillment as a result of the capacity to genuine personal development when giving up all your desires.

Now to introduce the economics … Try to follow… Here’s a standard form of a consumer’s happiness, or what economists call “Utility”, that results from a given good. For example U(x) = 2x. The U indicates utility, the x indicates that utility is a function of how much x you consume, and the 2x indicates that your utility increases by 2 for each unit of x you consume. Let’s say that x is gummy bears and that utility is measured in ‘utils.’ If I eat 5 gummy bears, I will get 10 utils worth of happiness. In principle, it doesn’t matter what the resulting utility is, what matters is that I can rank the utility of one choice to another, and with our infinite knowledge we can always buy things that will make us happiest.

How about this one … U(x,y) = x^2 – y. Utility is now a function of two goods, x and y. Let’s say that x is … the number of hours spent learning stuff that gives more or better philosophical and technical tools to improve my ability to question what’s going in the world … while y is the number of hours spent memorizing or regurgitating oversimplified economic theories that tell me how governments mess things up (which they sometimes do, but it’s surely not a matter of faith). Each amount of time I have to learn cool stuff is even more pleasing than the previous one, but I dislike memorizing crap equally for each hour I have to do it.

Consumer theory appears to have some difficulty dealing with the reality that we will eventually get tired of some good, doesn’t it? Well, not really, since one of the basic principles is that people like diversity in their consumption bundle. There are also a couple simple ways that this can be expressed mathematically. One way is to have an exponent on the consumption variable less than 1 (which means that the enjoyment I get out of each subsequent unit declines, until I get to a point where consuming the next unit decreases the utility I get out of consuming so much of that good.

Alternatively, a statement such as U(x) = log(x), and lets call x thinking happy thoughts, may always increase my utility for the next period of time I spent thinking happy thoughts, but the marginal value, or the value of the next unit of time I spend thinking happy thoughts continuously declines. I will eventually get bored and go do something interesting, since the marginal utility would be higher.

So isn’t it clear how this is the Zen theory of utility? .. didn’t think so. I’m not there yet. I’m just laying some basic grounding of utility theory on the off chance that someone’s trying to figure out what the hell I‘m talking about. But IT’S TOTALLY AMAZING, JUST YOU WAIT!!! Well, I think so anyways.

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The theory …

U(x,y) = x + ln y . WTF is that? “ln” stands for the
natural logarithm, a commonly used mathematical tool to express rates of change in models of real world phenomena. The link to an image of the natural logarithm function may come in handy later on. For each unit of x, my utility increases by 1, and for each additional unit of y, my utility increases by ( ln(y + 1) – ln y ). I call them x-goods and y-goods. The whole reason I found this funny can be found be reading them out loud.

I’m going to pull a fancy little trick here and define each type of good, such that y = 1 when we consume a sufficient amount of that good such that we no longer suffer from the absence of it. That’s key here. y = 1 is whatever amount of that good is required to avoid suffering, but not enough to enjoy use of the good. This trick is commonly known as standardizing units. I’ll turn around and weight these standardized units later on. That’s allowed too.

People these days tend to experience significant disutility from not owning a bed. Since ln y is less than zero when the number of beds is less than one(presumably people don’t own half beds, but they may share beds or have high quality or lower quality beds, but for the sake of simplicity, I will define all beds as being equal and that the utility from having a bed is the same whether there are one or two people in that bed … now don’t you be getting any naughty thoughts. This is the Zen theory of utility, you hear … save that for later!).

As for me, I haven’t had a bed for years, and sleep quite comfortably. Still, that doesn’t stop me from thinking that there must be a good deal of room for a little hanky panky in the x-goods, although it’s not purely compatible with the theory. It doesn’t really fit the model since it’s one of those things where each incremental unit may increases utility for some people by more than the previous unit, over for a given period of time, but the maximum number of units over a given time period may face certain limits. In any case, I haven’t even defined x-goods yet, and in general, I sure don’t mean X-rated goods.

Another example of a y-good would be one sufficient daily quantity of food to avoid suffering. Anything less than that and you suffer, anything more and you get actual enjoyment out of things.

As for x-goods? I’m going to initially define x-goods as luxury goods, with a very narrow definition of being goods that are not perceived needs. This will change in the final movement to Zen utility.

Now, if referring to the graph of the natural log, look at what happens when you get less that a sufficient quantity of a given kind of y-good, you’ll notice that the ln function becomes significantly negative when less than 1 (in the case, the vertical axis is utility and the horizontal axis is the quantity of y, with y = 1 being the quantity of that good to avoid suffering.)

Recall the ancient wisdom, that you can find greater fulfillment when you want less. I’m going to spin a little magic now.

If y goods are all goods that we desire, then we can create a 1 x n matrix called Y (a standard name for a matrix that corresponds with a class of variable). n is the total number of y-goods, or goods that cause suffering if we don’t have a certain amount of them.

That is, that Y = [y1, y2, … , yn], a 1 x n vector. These y-goods each have a price, represented in the n x 1 vector being Py, with elements{ py1, py2, … , pyn}. Of course, yi will not always equal 1, since I may be willing to deprive myself of some good in order to increase my pleasure from a good that gives be more utility for the next dollar spent.

Some fancy utility maximization formulas could be illustrated here, but a simplification is sufficient to make the point. When the amount of consumption of y-goods increases to the point that U(Y) = 0, and the utility from the next dollar spent on each y-good is equal for the all y-goods, we can find the cost of making perceived material suffering equal to zero. This can simply be done by multiplying these vectors, such that M Py results in the total price of satisfying perceived needs.

If C-nosuf is the cost of avoiding perceived suffering associated with material wants, this can be derived as follows.

C-nosuf = min Σ pyiyi , subject to Σ ln yi = 0 , i = 1, 2, … n

That is, find the lowest price to achieve a utility of zero associated with perceived needs. If we decide to desire less of a good, is would be cheaper to avoid suffering. This could be called weighting the variables. I’m going to develop this class of weighting variables using two classical philosophical treatments, rational–choice and passions.


I should point out an important flaw in the utility maximization formula. I pretended that there are no x-goods. It is, in fact, quite possible that people might give up some y-goods, and suffer as a result, in order to buy some x-goods, even when not consuming that x-good would cause no suffering. This would happen because the consumer figured that the value of consuming a certain quantity of the luxury good provided more utility than they would get from the amount of y-goods they could consume with that money. For example, when I arrived in Australia, I only had a few hundred dollars. I then proceeded to travel on the cheap for a week, and ate simple pastas for several weeks while waiting for my first paycheque at the orchards. Of course, that had more to do with incomplete information, since I had no idea how long it’d take me to find work. I have altogether too many similar stories, largely from excessive confidence that I can find work inside a day, when it commonly takes a week. If anything, the study of economics has taught me that I’m not entirely rational, but hey, I like the way I live my life. It’s great to never know what’s going to happen.


Classical economics generally treats all choices as rational (hence consumer-choice often being called rational-choice theory). However, it seems odd to me that conventional economics then assumes that our rationality does not extend to any ability to choose preferences. There’s a half truth there, since we are animals, but our rationality is surely not limited to figuring out how to get the best consumption package given untameable passions and a given resource allocation.

I’m going to decompose the weight for each y-good into ai and ri, where a represents the ‘animal’ portion of this weighting, subject to little rational control, and r represents the ‘rational’ portion of the weighting, where (ai + ri = 1), i = 1, 2, … n, at time = 0 (in other words, before engaging in Zen weighting).

When a is relatively high for a y-good, this is probably a good that will be difficult to limit our desire for, since the desire for this good is probably linked to animal needs. That is, a is assumed to have a constant value for each individual for each y-good. This is intuitively somewhat unrealistic since it will carry a different weight as the consumption of the good increases or decreases. This has already been addressed by standardizing the consumption of each good to time = 0. The frequency of ai = 0 for all y-goods is therefore a strong predictor for an individual’s potential to reduce the cost of achieving zero utility, that is, to avoid suffering from perceived material deprivation. When r is relatively high, there is similarly a strong potential to reduce the desire for this good, and is also a good target for further minimization of the cost of achieving zero utility. In general, it is assumed that the majority of goods in the consumption bundle will have a value of ri = 1.

This only requires a minor modification of the previous minimization, such that the cost of achieving zero utility, or avoiding suffering associated with deprivation of perceived material needs,

C-nosuf = min Σ pyiyi , subject to Σ (ai + ri) ln yi = 0,
i = 1, 2, … , n
ai + ri = 1 at t = 0

Involuntarily missing out on 50% of one’s daily intake of food clearly causes more suffering than missing out on 50% of one’s daily intake of rock and roll. For the sake of simplifying the math, let’s assume that the utility function for all y-goods has the same shape and size as the natural logarithm. That’s the power of economic theory. I am at complete liberty to make completely unrealistic assumptions in an effort to make my theory coherent. I will therefore assume that all goods offer the same utility or disutility for any given value of y (recall that these are standardized to y = 1 for a sufficient quantity to avoid suffering), even when U(yi) ≠ 0, regardless of what time frame we’re talking about. The previous mathematical statement is therefore true.

ai is not assumed to be the same for two individuals. There are two reasons for this, being different starting points and a diversity of animal needs within the population.

The first reason is that, at t = 0, the value of ai may already be very low. A subsistence farmer may have an a-value of 1 for food consumption. That’s not to say that the farmer doesn’t have any space for spiritual or philosophical inquiry. It means that they are presently consuming just enough food to survive. This may equally be the case for an individual who has already made a conscious decision to seek happiness through reduction of material desires. On the other side of that is someone who feels deprived when they don’t get to eat at fine restaurants on a regular basis. In such a case ai is nearly zero.

The same two individuals can be taken to illustrate the second reason. If the subsistence farmer is a seven foot tall subsistence farmer from northern China and the fine-diner is a four foot tall French guy with skeletal dysplasia, then ai is likely to be lower for the little guy, for any initial level of expenditure on food. That is to say, that not everyone has the same animal needs.

In general, the lower bound for (ai + ri) for any good for any individual is ai itself, and the upper bound of that sum is 1. Any doubts of the upper bound arising from social pressures should not be relevant, due to an assumption that rational individuals have some degree of ability to consciously decide how much social pressures will affect their utility optimizations. Certain Janists would certainly beg to differ with the assertion that the lower bound for the weight is ai. They may be quite correct that a strong willed individual can open up additional space for meaningful spiritual inquiry when the value of ri is negative for a particular good. Such methods of spiritual investigation where animal desires are conquered by the will are likely to have an average value of r being close to zero or even negative.

The benefits of negative ri values are, to say the least, questionable, in some circumstances. Freud would certainly see the effects as destructive. Alternatively, some especially strict religious views may lead to sub-optimal utilities because of unknown negative r-values resulting from incomplete information about the animalistic origins of certain inclinations.

However, at the level of the group, negative values for some ri's may be conducive towards greater social harmony, even when the impact may be some suppression of our animal selves. To paraphrase Rousseau, we may be forced to be free by social or legal conventions, since they help us all get along better.

The general insight? MINIMIZE n FOR ALL y-GOODS, AND REDUCE ri FOR AS MANY yi AS POSSIBLE. WANT LESS, HAVE MORE.

THAT’S IT!!!!!

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Just kidding. I’m more or less done laying out the general framework, and have already spent an hour longer on this than I’d planned. But, I’ve happened across all sorts of surprising ground along the way and I’m curious to see where I end up. Surprisingly, the theoretical development is still working largely within the framework of a typical derivation in consumer theory. Mainstream packaging seems to work for this ancient piece of wisdom.

There are three strategies we can take U(X,Y) = x + ln y from here, each with their own practical applications. They all stem from the principle of reducing the number of perceived needs and reducing the weight of each need.

The first strategy is to expand consumer choice of luxury goods (x1, x2, … , xm), since the size of m for x-goods presumably increases as n is minimized for y-goods. It is more or less known ‘fact’ among economists that increased choice allows us to maximize utility more effectively. Meanwhile, x-goods presumably offer greater utility at any quantity as compared to when it was perceived as a y-good (since we can truly appreciate even the first unit when we don’t take or for granted, or see it as a basic requirement). The deduction is not overpowering, but is not inconsistent with expectations for logic in the field of economics. As such, I propose that minimizing n for Y while reducing the weight allocated to each good when calculating C-nosuf will necessarily improve utility via improved consumer choice.

The second strategy is to keep consumption constant while eliminating the suffering that results from unsatisfied material desires. This is more intuitively obvious. Wanting less stuff and being less concerned about the stuff that you really want but don’t really need (reducing the weight of this ‘need’), should lead to improved satisfaction without going through the trauma of changing consumption habits.

In case you haven’t noticed the flaw yet, I’m still treating these luxury goods as things that provide the same pleasure for each unit, no matter how much we consume. This is what led me from the CAPs above to the following points.

What ARE things that we can get more utility out of no matter how much of them we get? Could it be a class of non-consumption goods called social and personal development. The currency is time, and the returns on investment are personal satisfaction. This perhaps isn’t very compatible with the idea that ignorance is bliss. If you’re one of those types, stick with option two. It’s quite admirable as well, and is a Zen utility maximization in its own right. But you could go further.

The last strategy initially maintains constant utility at lower consumption bundles by minimizing perceived needs, allowing the individual to allocate more time to personal growth, development, and the pursuit of happiness. Utility from x-goods can now increase ad infinitum.

This next sentence is absolutely key. Progressive continuation of n minimization and r minimization, can be considered as permitting placement of one’s spiritual and social development in the category of goods that constitute X. The target is still to maximize m for x-goods and minimize n for y-goods. In such a case, the function U(X,Y) = x + ln y would come to approximate mX. Situations where x-goods approach infinity would require extreme generosity with y-goods to meet the quasi-linearity test for any given level of utility. This would be very useful indeed in driving personal growth and development en route to transcendental enlightenment, or at the very least, genuine happiness.


I knew it would lead to some interesting theory if I tried to get it on paper. I had the beginning and the end, and had no idea how to connect the dots. Cool … will certainly need some revising though.


ahaa… so say goodbye to the util!!! OK, so if you think Zen utility is bogus, then I’m not too stressed about it. Good insight for me, nonsense to you … whatever. Your appreciation of the Zen theory of utility is a y-good for me, to which I’ve attached a low weight in the matrix.


Instead, I’ve just decided to classify appreciation of the Zen theory of utility as an x-good in cases where it is appreciated as the theory of green utility maximization. Consume less, enjoy more. Place some Zen-x-goods into the Y-matrix, and there may be potential for non-material, economically valuable goods. These already exist, such as arts, culture, and many aspects of the information economy. Zen utility, bastardized and appropriated to a form of capitalist growth that could satisfy our drive to perceive ever greater standards of living in the face of tensions between technological progress and increasing resource scarcity.

No new ideas here, just recycled packaging.

Increasing the power of the majority is not always in the interests of democracy

Today's thoughts about the recent reappearance of a touchy issue to the forefront of the political landscape in Canada ...


Imagine a political system where a party leader had to be elected by party members to become the leader of that party. OK, sounds familiar.

Imagine a system where local representatives needed to either have enormous respect in their communities or belong to a party that was so popular in a riding that a seat was more or less guaranteed. Hmmm .. sounds familiar too.

Now imagine a system where the leader of the party with the largest number of seats in an election got to become the leader of the country. Maybe it depends just how many seats the largest party gets, but sure ... sounds fair enough.

Let's imagine that there was another part of the government that was typically full of people who served the national leader of any party which formed government for a long period of time, and that such distinguished service resulted in their appointment to a public body that carries out important research that is non-partisan (although not devoid of ideological preferences) because they have really good job security. This group of people can also force the government to rethink legislation if it's really bad legislation unless it's a money bill.

Waaaait a second, this couldn't be in Canada could it?Are you sure those guys are distinguished? Aren't they all corrupt party hacks that get to retire at ease in a cushy lifetime job?

Ummm... maybe sometimes, but perhaps you missed the part about these guys needing to provide exceedingly brilliant community service over long periods of time to get elected, and/or support the leader of a party who was so popular that they formed government, and that this leader had to be elected by the members of that party.

Got the topic yet?

Our brilliant leader in Ottawa, back in the country's top job with a mandate that is so strong that he must gain the support of at least one of the other significantly different parties to pass any piece of legislation, has the idea that an elected senate would improve democracy in Canada.

My take on the matter?

Well, it's pretty simple, but complex enough that a politician it endorsing would probably get eaten by the media. It doesn't fit into a 10 second media clip, so no politician is likely to take this road. It's too popular to hate people who work hard for their country for all their lives and get a job that pays somewhat more than a good electrician, I mean... it's to easy to hate corrupt politicians at the trough, since that's what we know they are. ... riiight, OK.

My argument against an elected senate in preference of it's current form. Here it goes. 1) they do good research, 2) they provide sober second thought and limit possible extremes of the majority, 3) They represent continuity for political trends over the span of the previous generation of governments.

1) The senate produces incredibly top notch research as far as a political institution is concerned. These guys have been in politics for much of their lives, understand the system, know how to pull strings to get access to previous research, and can put these tools together into knowledgeable social and economic research that ... can be a little contentious, since they don't have to worry about re-election. While I don't always like their findings or policy suggestions, senate reports are something that I can always count on to be a relatively unbiased source of research that result from a process that consults the relevant experts and are in tune with some significant portion of the public.

2) We need something to stop a majority who wants to do ridiculous stuff. This doesn't happen very often, but there's a reason that it's called the chamber of "sober second thought." The parliamentary majority is not always right, may rush through poorly thought out legislation, and are sometimes disastrously wrong.

There's a concept called the "tyranny of the majority." As far as I know, it was coined by John Stuart Mill. I'm a big fan of him. Some people consider him one of the original libertarians, but more detailed reading of his works shows that he had a good deal of common sense and genuine concern for humanity as well.

Basically, just because a whole lot of people think something's a good idea don't mean that it is. If 51% of people had the right to do anything, they might just vote to appropriate everything from the other 49%. That's not right, and that's not democracy. It's a sort of ridiculous extreme, but I think it illustrates the point.What if it was 90% and 10%? Is it democratic for such an overwhelming majority to do whatever they want? How about if it's just one person vs the entirety of society. Is the majority then allowed to deprive that individual of political expression or the ability to pursue their personal development as they see fit?

Democracy is not about 'majority rules,' it's about people having the capacity to make a meaningful contribution to political dialogue in their communities and nation. Hence, the need for anti-majoritarian institutions. The more diverse a country, the more you need them. Just imagine what unchecked majorities stood for in Nazi Germany. To which you may respond ... riiiight, but that was then and there. I'm tired of everyone calling back to Hitler as the Bogeyman to scare people into supporting such and such a change or opposing such and such a change.

OK, how about some other examples. The majority in the US long supported slavery (the majority taking advantage of a minority), and it took a bloody civil war, which could have gone either way, to put an end to it. So, was that democracy? Slavery as democracy? I don't think so. And you say ... yeah, yeah, that was then and this is now.

How about the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka? The lack of any anti-majoritarian clauses in their constitution gives the Tamils no democratic avenue to oppose the excesses of the majority. Is it a big surprise that that a civil war broke out just a few years after the Sinhalese-dominated government decided that all government jobs required testing exclusively in Sinhalese, clearly discriminating against the Tamils (who are a similar proportion of the population as the Quebecois in Canada)? To which you say, yeah... but that's somewhere else. It has nothing to do with Canada.

To which I respond, why the hell do you think that much of the older generations in Quebec resent being part of Canada. They entered the federation as an equal partner, then as more provinces joined, the English majority set up governments according to the dominant language and culture. Of course, these days the tables have turned somewhat, and there's no doubt that the durability of the French language and the economy in Quebec benefit (perhaps too much so) from the support of the rest of Canada. The list could go on and on, but I don’t think it’s necessary right now, and besides which, there are surely far more informed people than myself on the matter.

Wasn't this about senate reform? You may be wondering, what's the point of this discussion about anti-majoritarianism? Well, we already have an elected body that drafts bills and passes them. Only dodgy or contentious stuff gets turned down by the senate. Having an elected senate would increase the risk of a so-called "tyranny of the majority" becoming reality in Canada. For the sake of brevity (if you believe I know the meaning of the word), I'm not going to develop that idea right now. It's already been done quite well enough, but it's still interesting to ponder.

The following bit brings this idea forward somewhat differently.

3) The senate is an inherently conservative institution. I don't mean the political party, I mean that it's an institution that retains elements of previously (even recently) popular political tradition. It also tends to limit the ability of a government to walk in the door and engage in all sorts of radical change. Can it do that? Is that good for democracy? Well, I think so, but you may disagree.

Shouldn't any government be able to walk in the door and present all sorts of radical change if that's what the public wants? Well ... at the risk of sounding a tiny bit elitist … the public is fickle. We all can be at times. Popular opinion with respect to a particular topic can get swept up by recent events, without putting policy issues into a historical context, or without taking account of potential long term effects of a policy change. That's not elistism, that's fact. It's not said out of a lack of respect for public opinion, after all, we're all human.

Despite the fact that our country is officially a constitutional monarchy, which means that it is the role of the Supreme Court to stop the government from breaking the basic rules of the land, the majority already has control over the most powerful arm of the government, the House of Commons (although some might argue that it's the prime minister's office). That's where new laws and policies are drafted and approved, and where the money comes to and from.

What about the role of the senate in limiting rapid change? Well, let's say that the Liberals were in power for a very long time, but then got swept out of office by a Conservative majority, as happened in 1984. Consecutive Liberal governments stacked the senate with Liberal appointments, which limited the ability of Mulroney to make radical changes.

How's that democratic? Well ... I'll admit this is a bit fuzzy and would be easier to explain with the sort of probing that happens in conversation, but here goes. It's something like representation of residual support for parties and ideals that were popular in the recent past. People probably still have a good deal of support for those ideals, but we also seem to have an inherent drive for regular change in governance. A political body like the senate retains this historical support such that radical changes are somewhat limited. Of course, senators aren't so stupid as to oppose things that are incredibly popular. If 90% of the population supported a major issue that the senate opposed, it's days would be numbered. That's to say that the senate would never oppose moves that had enormous popular support, while retaining residual support from the preceding generation of governments. Meanwhile, they would represent some degree of continuity and stability in policy practices.

Hey, I said it'd be fuzzy.

Wouldn't this limit the ability of the government to act swiftly in periods of crisis? Now, I'm not an expert on constitutions, but I know a bit about them. I'm not aware of any functioning democracy that makes it impossible for the elected body to place near total control in the hands of its executive during a period of crises. The senate, in its present form, would never be able to get in the way of a government responding to a natural disaster, a health crisis, a military threat, or ... any kind of threat that I can think of.

In fact, the greatest threat to genuine democracy in many countries may well be the leader of the elected government. Not something to dwell on though. For all that certain minor changes made by the present government bear uncanny similarity to initial moves of a leader looking to consolidate power in sketchy ways (for example, party appointment of a civilian head of the RCMP, who should be selected internally among their own to avoid political police as in the infamous "communist" states ... or the aggressive attitude towards freedom of speech among party members and limited access to the press), I really don't think in the very tiniest way that we are on our way to any sort of Mussolini or anything. Just because the top dude is a control freak doesn't mean that he's a dictator. Canadians would never stand for it.

Unfortunately, these changes have been the direct result of the continued concentration of power in the prime minister's office (kind of funny for a former Reform Party member, who supposedly stands for decentralization). The senate has no scope of influence for sober second thoughts in these regards.
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As I already mentioned, the primary roles of the senate are to provide a "sober second thought" on legislation, and to provide incredibly valuable research that is informed by a lifetime of participation in public life in Canada.

Despite the inherently anti-democratic nature of a political body made up of lifetime members who collectively yield veto power and are appointed by prime ministers over the previous generation, I have just made the perverse, yet logical and just, argument that getting rid of this body will undermine, rather than improve democracy in Canada.

If you want to get rid of the Senate, replace it with something that fills the void rather than simply changing it into something that increases the ability of the majority to abuse democracy while rejecting the valuable lessons of experience from political tradition. An elected senate will only reinforce the risk of a tyrannical majority in the future. When there is even a small chance of a catastrophic end game, don't even think about playing it unless inaction will lead to a similarly pressing potential for disaster.

I'd suggest that if our glorious leader wants to improve democracy, he should take action to reduce the power of the prime minister’s office (which Chretien promised and never delivered on), and consider an electoral system which is more representative of the diversity of political views in our country.


As for an elected supreme court? Just replace “senate” with “supreme court” in nearly every place, copy and paste, rephrase a couple things, and call it my argument against an elected supreme court. Harper wants both. Multiply the relevance of Mill's insight on the "tyranny of the majority" by a hundred if it ever comes to pass.


For the record ... in case you think this is biased from political partisanship, I support the Green Party and am proud to have run for them in the most recent federal election, despite the challenges of doing so in my second language. The Green Party has absolutely nothing to gain from the present setup. My argument is that the present role of the senate is preferable to an elected one. I do, however, believe quite strongly that there must be a better way to improve on the current design of the senate. Since creating a different institution would require a renegotiation of our constitution, it seems that options that include keeping a senate in some form or another are most realistic. It's a matter of debate as to whether any reform of the senate might require navigation of the constitutional amendment process, although our glorious leader believes he can force it through his brilliant plan regardless.As for what's best? I dunno, but I have difficulty imagining how Harper's present plan would improve democracy, even though it would increase the power of the majority.

5 easy ways to refute arguments against anthropogenic climate change, risks to/from the poor, an alternative growth theory

I never expect to convince a fervent denier of climate change, but I hope to dissuade other people from buying into their nonsense.

Fact - CO2, NOx and CH4 are greenhouse gases.

Fact - increasing the proportion of these greenhouse gases warms the earth. Hence, the name greenhouse gas. This can be easily verified experimentally by comparing incoming transmission of UV and the visible light spectrum to the transmission of outgoing infrared and other heat diffusion, for each greenhouse gas. This has already been done.

Fact - the long term effects of short term warming are not completely understood. There are numerous positive feedbacks and numerous negative feedbacks. A positive feedback is something where the initial cause starts a process that makes that process speed up. An example is melting ice, which increases the rate of warming since there is less ice to reflect sunlight directly back to space. A negative feedback is something where the initial cause starts a process that acts against the initial cause. It's not clear which of these are greater. An example is that many plants grow faster when things are warmer, which increases the rate of carbon uptake in ecosystems (however, decomposition also increases with temperature, and we don't know which effect is larger at the global level, although there are certainly plenty of estimates). There are plenty more of each kind of feedback. In balance, it looks like things will warm up a heck of a lot more before control mechanisms inherent to our global climate kick in.

Fact - yes, yes, it's true that temperatures fluctuate over time, and that once upon a time it was much warmer and sea levels were much higher than today. A recent article in Science suggests that the seas were as much as 200m higher than today many, many millions of years ago. However, that changes absolutely nothing about the fact that rapid increases in greenhouse gases will lead to an unprecedented rate of climate change, at least in the short term (that is, over the next hundreds or thousands of years). The global poor, who have the least capacity to adjust in a system of entrenched property rights, will face the most severe of these devastating consequences. It's tragic.

That said, with due respect to the important role that property rights and land titles play in offering collateral or leverage that facilitates investment and thus growth. This will be a tough nut to crack. We can't expect the global poor to just sit back and watch themselves get screwed. Pure strategies such as playing nice or playing dirty are not an option. We have to look out for our interests, which will necessarily include supporting the ability of the global poor to achieve long term economic independence in the face of the significant challenges that will be faced over the next few generations.

Fact - yes, there are millions of factors other than greenhouse gases that affect the climate. Fine. Sure. Whatever. Add it to the models. It doesn't mean that greenhouse gases are not greenhouse gases.

This is my analogy for those who look to sun spots or whatever else to explain global warming. Imagine this - I tell you that a good bowl of chili has tomato sauce and beans in it. The shrill and irrational response is that there are absolutely no beans in the chili, since, as we are all well aware, some people put green chili's in their chili. ... To which I think, WTF? ... but tomato sauce and beans are the main ingredients in my chili?

For the record, I predict that Malthusian outlooks will become increasingly relevant. He was right in his own time, then largely irrelevant through the industrial revolution due to rapid growth of productivity and the fact that people chose to consume rather than breed as they got richer, but now we're approaching new limits. Hence, the focus on women's rights and education as tools to minimize population growth rates, as well as conservation movements.

You think there are no limits to growth? I think there are no limits to personal growth that can be found through spiritual and philosophical inquiry and the exploration of our creative potential. Now that kind of growth is not amenable to a Malthusian outlook.

recent research on child care

Child care isn't a topic that I usually spend a lot of time on, but I take an interest in it for two main reasons. One is that I completed a paper on the subject for a Canadian politics class a few years ago and so take interest in ongoing research relating to child care. The other reason is that this is a major area of policy debate in Canada these days.

The paper that I'm addressing is Universal Child Care, Maternal Labour Supply, and Family Well-Being, an empirical analysis of universal child care in Quebec, by Baker, Gruber & Milligian, published in the most recent issue of the Journal of Political Economy. The most notable, and surprising, results of the paper were that it claims that the increase in child care resulting from universal child care in Quebec (it had a flat rate of $5 and is now $7 per day) has resulted in an increase in aggression and an increase in health problems among young children. I will show that these results may be erroneous and are in need of further study with improved methodologies.

While I don't deny that there may be hidden social costs, as well as hidden social benefits of such programs, there are a few important points that I have about this paper, which was clearly carried out from a preconceived notion that the effects must be negative. The main outline I provide is to a) tackle the question of bias with respect to the variable 'aggression', b) refute the claim that the health effects are negative, then c) carry on my typical critique of estimated costs and benefits due to overly simplistic analysis of spinoff costs and benefits.

First, the authors don't consider the likelihood that selection bias overemphasized their results. For example, the offer of cheap child care will appeal most to those parents who are already stressed out from an overactive, anxious, or even aggressive child. The authors chose to show their results in terms of standard deviations rather than absolute amounts. While there was a significant rise in the use of child care over the period of the study, the paper does not mention that the absolute increase in 'reported aggression' was only from 1% to 1.8% of total users. If parents with problem toddlers are more likely to use the program, this could explain much of the claimed increase in aggression among children. This intuition is guided by my experience at summer camps, where parents would always offload their kids to camp for their Ritalin holiday. This tells me that some parents are more likely to take advantage of child care options outside the household when they have 'problem' kids.

One could also ask what leads parents to report aggression. The problem is that the economists who wrote the paper are dealing with reported aggression, rather than actual aggression. I can think of a simple explanation here - parents who are at work during the day are less likely to be as in tune with their children. Since they don't see their kids all the time, they may find certain behaviours more surprising and are thus more likely to report aggression. It could be relevant to say that I am not insensitive to the fact that it's not an inherent good for parents to spend less time with their kids, but it's also relevant to say that it could lend itself to being a cause of biased results in the empirical analysis.

Next, I ask, what exactly does this variable mean? What is this aggression? Do they demand more of their parents during the time that they do have with them? The operationalization of a variable is a key step in good empirical analysis, yet the researchers do not tell us in any satisfactory manner how they translated the survey results into their variable label of 'aggression. '

So, I have offered two causes that are intuitively likely to increase reported aggression without real increases in aggression among toddlers (the incentive of universal child care is more appealing to parents who are already stressed with over-anxious kids, and parents will be more surprised by such behaviours when spending less time with them). I have also raised an important question of what the variable 'aggression' means in reality. The overarching questions here are a) what causes parents to report aggression (is the increase a matter of perception or reality), and b) what the heck does this variable even mean? The paper doesn't provide any satisfying answers to either of these central questions.

Another question of interest that the authors touch on and then claim is not likely to be important, is, if the increase in aggression among toddlers participating in the program is real (not just perceived), then what does that mean? Let me start here by saying that I have already shown that the 0.8% is almost certainly an exaggeration.

The authors suggest that shifting the first points of increased social contact from kindergarten to a year or two earlier may simply shift this effect from the first year of school to the first year of child care. This would mean that the long term effect could be a) negative, due to such 'trauma' at a younger age when they could deal with the change less effectively, b) , nothing, or c) positive since children will engage in learning social norms at a younger age. I have no idea which is the case. Further research is needed. However, that research will also have similar difficulties of turning survey results into meaningful data, and they will have to tackle such methodological limitations on the head rather than ignoring them, as these researchers do.

The authors also draw attention to the negative health effects of child care. The primary variables that inform this conclusion are a greater incidence of the flu and colds among these children. There is one major reason to doubt this as a negative outcome. Simply put, exposure to pathogens is required in order for a child to develop a strong immune system. This is similar to the logic of a possible long term improvement resulting from social stresses, but is would be easier to verify empirically. This research should be left to epidemiological researchers, not economists. There are increased health care costs associated with visits to the doctor at a young age, but the likely long term improvement in the strength of the immune system means that we cannot consider an increased incidence of colds and flus among children at public facilities as an inherently negative thing. The long terms benefits may actually be substantial.

A common argument in favour of universal access to child care is that the benefits related to increased employment exceed the costs of the child care itself. The results of the empirical analysis clearly showed that more women are in the workforce as a result of greater participation in child care since the policy of universal access was implemented. We could look at this in terms of dollars and cents, or as an issue of equality and justice.

The authors take on the dollars and cents issue in an overly simplistic manner. The argument is summarized as follows - the increased tax revenues resulting from an increased labour supply do not match the costs of increased use of universal facilities. It's a common frustration for me that economists who are clearly against state provision of just about anything other than armies, police, education and property titles, continuously insist on carrying out an analysis that understates the benefits by ignoring any potential spinoff benefits. They do this by limiting their definition of spinoff benefits to only include the initial increase in taxes and corporate or individual profits, as though the effect dies off there. This may be supported by analyzing a useful piece of information called the marginal cost (which means only talking about the cost of providing the final unit ... a useful piece of information, but stems from a mysterious and misguided faith that economic efficiency is the raison d'être for homo economicus.) I might post a rather dense paper that illustrates that Darwinism, as applied to to the marketplace, played an unfortunate role in bankrupting the field of economics of its moral roots.

As was pointed out by Lucas, investment into human capital has strong potential for increasing returns. For those who aren't economists,that means that the efficiencies, or "positive externalities," associated with increased training, experience and education tend to increase as we get more of it. A women who has greater freedom to pursue education or maintain a successful career trajectory will have greater potential to reap the rewards of their investments in human capital. This adds efficiency to our economic system, may increases tax receipts, and offers a better chance for a society to realize the increasing returns that result (as happened in the Silicon Valley) when more people with similar expertise get together and grow their expertise and skills.

This leads to the simple point that women whose decision to use child care is based less on their financial position is a great bonus in terms of their ability to judge their interests. Incidentally, consumer choice theory, at the base of laissez-faire theory, states that the individual can best judge their pathway to happiness. Universal child care improves one's freedom of choice in this regard. The obvious question then, is, is public provision or private provision (funded by income transfers) the better way to go. My answer is simple. I have no idea. The most desirable solutions will be based on public dialogue, which is ultimately based on value judgments more so than 'economic efficiency.' Both analyses and both extremes have valid points. However, if the end result is increased provision of child care, then the results provided by this research in the Journal of Political Economy are equally relevant (and the questionable results are equally questionable).

To sum up, the conclusions of the paper need to be questioned with further research that a) addresses the inherent bias in the methods used in the research of interest, b) investigates the long term impacts of increased exposure to pathogens at a young age when quality public health care is available, and c) carries out a cost-benefit analysis that considers a broader definition of spinoff benefits rather than unrealistically focusing on hidden costs, while considering the inherent value of increasing the opportunity for women to pursue their personal development under a system with greater public provisions for child care.

That, all said with explicit acknowledgment that there is plenty of research to show that parent-child bonding (particularly as an infant) is important in early personal development. However, this study overemphasizes the hidden costs of universal child care while ignoring the hidden benefits.

The choice of the Journal of Political Economy, a respected academic journal, to publish this piece without acknowledging these flaws, does not bode well for those who investigate the possibility that public investments in child care can bring both economic and social benefits. I'm not saying that I know it's the underlying truth of the matter, but the recent study by Baker, Gruber & Milligan will offer ammunition to those who oppose any public forays into the field (and does an injustice to the principle of balanced, unbiased research).

On the positive side, one can be sure that more research will be forthcoming as a result of the contentious findings of their paper.