Category Archives: Global Issues
Proliferation?
Though I’m certainly not equating Canada with North Korea, there is more than a slight odour coming from Canada when – on the same day that a major study ranks Canada as the world’s 12th largest arms exporter – the country decides to boycott the U.N. Conference on Disarmament because it is chaired by North […]
An analysis of the US economy by Robert Reich
I would encourage you to download this speech by Robert Reich. [Right-click on the link and choose “Save Link As” or “Save Target as”.] Reich’s key argument is that inequality is bad for business, and unless America can address this fundamental challenge, all of the secondary problems will be insoluble. The irony is that, in […]
A Choice of Words
Here’s an interesting exercise. Replace one word in the Vancouver Sun headline below, and ask how the meaning of the headline has changed. Let’s replace “admits” with “argues”. Such a change makes the revealed “truth” more a matter of debate and interpretation. Yet I’d argue that this is a reasonable change in wording, given that […]
A Review of John Gray’s False Dawn
John Gray’s popular critique of globalization and laissez-faire capitalism, False Dawn*, was originally published in 1998. It has enjoyed a resurgence as a “prophetic” account of our current global economic problems, but I think the book is better viewed as an incomplete analysis, and one that is riven with contradictions and equivocations. Gray’s clearest and […]
OECD Measures Debt via GDP
One of the most important but confusing economic benchmarks is the level of debt carried by a nation. Is it in constant or inflated dollars? How do we account for population growth and inflation? Adding to the complexity is the different levels of government in a country like Canada. Probably the best way of measuring […]
Elizabeth Warren: The Coming Collapse of the Middle Class
The following lecture features Elizabeth Warren speaking about the current crisis in (and looming collapse of) the American middle class. This presentation is almost 58 minutes, but I highly recommend it for anyone interested in long term social and economic trends and the future of the middle class. Warren is a Harvard law professor who […]
David Harvey: Getting to the Heart of the Matter
For all of the discussion about the causes of the latest economic meltdown, it’s mystified me why inequality has been largely ignored. The blame is almost always laid at the feet of proximate factors like negative savings rates, ponzi-like housing bubbles, exotic debt instruments, deregulation and a neo-liberal faith in the corrective nature of unbridled […]
Chinese Labour Costs are Going Up
A number of recent newspaper articles (for example, here and here) have been published regarding the climbing costs of labour in China. For some, this is a worrisome trend that foreshadows lower profits and higher consumer prices, and a shift in manufacturing to even lower cost (!) countries. Others note that this is a typical […]
Measuring the Internet
I remember back to the good old days of Alta Vista when they could actually count the number of pages on the ‘Net. Like McDonald’s hamburgers, the number of websites and pages now appears too large to measure. Nevertheless, here’s a really fascinating site that attempts to quantify the Internet in terms of type and […]
How Wall Street Lobbied Itself Into A Crisis
In today’s Globe and Mail (Dec. 31, 2009: B5), economics reporter Kevin Carmichael discusses a recent report from the IMF that draws a direct connection between Wall Street, political lobbying, and the current financial crisis. The IMF report has apparently caused quite a stir in the blogosphere and among the American political class. Here is […]