Author Archives: Joseph Heath

Naomi Klein: This Changes Everything

Posted by on | economy, environment, politics

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading all the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing (not including my own), and writing up my reactions — mainly to promote conversation. Today we have Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate.

Readers of this blog may know that I’ve been having an entirely one-sided argument with Naomi Klein for over 10 years now (since the publication of the book that I co-wrote with Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell, which despite having only 5 pages or so criticizing Klein, was widely seen as a “response” to No Logo). It is certainly the case that I have spent years of my life trying to get the left in Canada to stop writing books like the ones that Klein writes. As a result, the success of This Changes Everything represents, in a very real sense, the failure of one of my more important life projects.… Continue reading

Against ranked ballot electoral systems

Posted by on | elections

One of the things that I’ve never succeeded in doing is figuring out how to do a popular or accessible presentation of some of the major findings in “voting theory.” The academic literature gets pretty complicated pretty quickly, but it has a single, unequivocal conclusion: of the basic family of voting procedures, none is intrinsically superior. If you start by working out a list of desirable, intuitively plausible criteria that you want a voting system to satisfy, you will find that no system satisfies them all. As a result, the best way to evaluate a system, in my view, is pragmatically – in terms of its likely consequences, which is to say, by the type of government and political dynamics that it is likely to generate.

There are, however, a huge number of organizations and activists pushing for various types of electoral reform – almost always claiming virtues for these systems that they do not possess.… Continue reading

In due cake

Posted by on | self-promotion

Today is the one-year anniversary of the creation of this blog. 49,374 visitors and 156,981 pageviews later, I would like to mark the occasion in two ways.

First, I thought I might provide a list of our top five most popular posts of the year, ranked by number of readers:

  1. Joseph Heath: Thoughts on Rob Ford, vol. 2 (6,223)
  2. Joseph Heath: Why people hate economics, in one lesson (4,570)
  3. Daniel Weinstock: On Israel, Gaza and double standards (3,138)
  4. Jocelyn Maclure: Le multiculturalism, un despotisme? réplique à Mathieu Bock-Côté (3,108)
  5. Joseph Heath: Abject economic illiteracy at the Globe and Mail (2,126)

You see why journalists are all missing Rob Ford?

Overall I have no idea if this is good traffic or not, I’ve never had a blog before. But I’ll take it!

Second I’d like to acknowledge the contribution of a few people who work behind the scenes: Timothy Walker (from timeanddesire) for the initial site and logo design, and Jeremy Davis for regular comment moderation and technical troubleshooting.… Continue reading

John Ralston Saul: The Comeback

Posted by on | aboriginal affairs, Canada, politics

Over the next few weeks I’m reading all the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing (not including my own), and writing up my reactions — mainly to promote conversation. Today we have John Ralston Saul’s The Comeback: How Aboriginals are Reclaiming Power and Influence.

I must admit that I have always struggled with John Ralston Saul’s books. I own several. My biggest problem is that I never know what the hell he’s talking about. It could be him, or it could be me, but something tells me it’s him. I’m constantly getting pulled up short. He’ll be writing along, and he’ll say something like “you know how whenever you do blah-blah, someone will come up to you and say blah-blah,” and I’ll be like, “um, er, no actually, that never happens to me.” It’s always like that.

Reading Saul reminds me of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where a transporter malfunction leaves Geordi and Ensign Ro “out of phase” with everyone else on the ship.… Continue reading

I drove 78 miles to the 100-mile store

Posted by on | Uncategorized

This could be the title of a country song. I have lots of friends who love to shop at The Hundred Mile Store in Creemore, which is kind of a locavore paradise. I love to bug them about it, just because, you see, they’re all from Toronto. So they drive to The Hundred Mile Store — which is 78 miles from downtown Toronto. Okay, that’s not entirely true, they’re usually up in the country anyhow, skiing or whatever, and they pop in — so they drive more like 10 or 20 miles to get there. The point is that in doing so they violate the most important rule of socially-conscious food consumption, which is the “last mile” principle. If you look at carbon impact in particular, what matters most is the last mile — how the food gets from the store to your home, because that’s the inefficient link in the chain, where the big environmental impact is felt (mainly because the food is no longer being bulk delivered, it is disaggregated, so the social cost of transportation skyrockets).… Continue reading

Graham Steele: What I Learned About Politics

Posted by on | politics

Since Canadian political writing is a cause near and dear to my own heart – and since I think that, in general, we do not produce or consume enough of it – I’m writing up a set of short reviews of the books that have been selected as finalists for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing. (Which I gather is a big deal in Ottawa, but no one else in Canada seems to pay much attention to – which is, incidentally, also the problem with Canadian political writing as a whole.) Maybe “review” is not the right word, but perhaps “reaction pieces”…

So first up is Graham Steele, he of the prosaic title: What I Learned about Politics.

I hope I’m not tipping my hand too much in saying that this book was my favourite, and certainly one that I’ll be recommending to my students, particularly grad students working on democratic theory.… Continue reading

The nudge unit in action

Posted by on | taxation

I came across this a while ago and found it quite amusing. It’s a poster that’s been up on billboards and buses in the U.K. More intrusively, they also had it popping up on ATM screens while people were waiting for transactions to be completed (which I think is kind of awesome, but also freaked a lot of people out). Patrick’s post on tax avoidance made me think of it again.

undisclosed income

There are at least three things going on here that I find interesting.

First, what the U.K. government is trying to work with here is the so-called “watching eyes effect,” whereby the sight of eyes watching you has been shown to trigger more prosocial behavior. There is a huge literature on this, but for a nice sample, see here and here. There’s some debate about how robust the effect is. Whether it can convince people to pay their taxes is an entirely open question.… Continue reading

Best political writing of 2014

Posted by on | politics, self-promotion

My book Enlightenment 2.0 was recently short-listed for the Shaughnessy Cohen prize for political writing (here), so I’ll be dusting off my tux and heading to Ottawa for the “Politics and the Pen” gala next month. And since I have some time to kill between now and then, I thought I would read the other finalists. They are the following:

 

Graham Steele, What I Learned about Politics: Inside the Rise–and Collapse–of Nova Scotia’s NDP Government

Chantal Hébert with Jean Lapierre, The Morning After: The 1995 Quebec Referendum and the Day that Almost Was

John Ralston Saul, The Comeback: How Aboriginals Are Reclaiming Power and Influence

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

 

Two of them I already owned but had not read past the first chapter of, two of them I actually had not heard of. All are very different in substance and style. So thought I would try to put together some quick reviews as well, in the next few weeks — have to be quick though, so as to avoid being accused to being a sore loser!… Continue reading

The wheels are coming off the wagon

Posted by on | journalism

This is not really a surprise, given the structure of Postmedia’s acquisition of Sun properties (buying the newspapers only). Still, it is a welcome relief:

 

sun

 

It puts me in the mood to reminisce. Everyone has their favorite Sun Media moment. Here is mine:

 

o-SUN-NEWS-HARPER-TRUDEAU-570

Now remember, this little comparison graphic is not a paid advertisement. This is… what? What exactly does one call this? Editorial content I guess.

If anyone is ever tempted to forget what Sun News was/is, I would encourage them to return to this little graphic.

P.S. by the way, I assume that Trudeau Jr. is driving the car made famous by his father, which he presumably inherited.… Continue reading

John Baird, master of wedge politics

Posted by on | politics

After 20 years in politics, John Baird is retiring. This leaves quite a hole in the Conservative Party, since Baird was by far the most effective practitioner at the federal level of a special brand of political strategy known as “wedge politics.”

What’s that you say? Baird a master of wedge politics? He didn’t seem to be all that divisive a figure… Not like Harper. In what way was he a master of wedge politics?

The problem is that most people don’t really understand how “wedge politics” works. Or more specifically, they don’t grasp the fact that it is a two-pronged strategy. The first prong, in which you find “hot button” issues that sharply distinguish your party from all of the other contenders, is the more well-known face of wedge politics. But that’s only part of the game. There is a second prong, which is arguable the more important one. And it was as a practitioner of this second prong that Baird truly shone.… Continue reading