Author Archives: Joseph Heath

A note on hypocrisy

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This is a long-standing pet peeve of mine. Many people, and most noticeably many journalists, do not seem to have a clear understanding of what hypocrisy is. To keep things simple, let’s go with the everyday definition of hypocrisy as “saying one thing, while doing another.” This is fine, except that it’s important, when accusing people of hypocrisy, to pay careful attention to what they are saying. In particular, it is important to pay careful attention to the distinction between what people would like the general rule to be, and what their preferences over their own actions are, given the existing rules. (Viktor Vanberg and James Buchanan introduced the term “constitutional preferences” and “action preferences” to distinguish the two, which is maybe not the best terminology, but their discussion of the distinction is invaluable.)

Let me give a concrete example. I was reading a little article the other day about Bill Gates’s five favorite books of 2014.… Continue reading

Slow Wednesday nostalgia file

Posted by on | culture

Back when the earth was young, and I still believed that music mattered, I used to have a favorite song. If you had asked what I thought the probability was of anyone producing a worthwhile cover of that song, I would have said zero. But then I came across this:

(Hint: give it until at least 3:28)

Okay, off to my departmental Xmas party now.… Continue reading

Stephen Harper, warmonger

Posted by on | politics

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a warmonger. Yes, you read that right. You haven’t accidentally wandered over to rabble.ca. I’m not trying to score cheap points either. I’m just observing a fact. Stephen Harper is pro-war. He thinks that war is something worth doing. He thinks that war has numerous redeeming qualities.

Various commentators have pointed this out. After all, how many political leaders go out of their way to celebrate the beginning of the First World War? Or who thinks that the War of 1812 is more worthy of commemoration than the adoption of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms? The Harper Government is constantly sending out weird press releases, celebrating the anniversary of some battle or skirmish that no one has ever heard of. (The various quixotic initiatives undertaken by the government on this front have been documented in some detail by Ian McKay and Jamie Swift in their book, Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety.… Continue reading

Oil prices: is this what the endgame looks like?

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If there’s one conference that’s been generating a lot of talk lately, it was the “stranded assets” conference held a couple weeks ago in Toronto for investors, sponsored by Suncor and Royal Bank. I wasn’t able to make it, but more and more I’m wishing I had. The “stranded assets” concept has to do with the fact that, right now, proven fossil fuel reserves are about four times larger than what we can safely burn (i.e. without causing dangerous climate change). So roughly 3/4 of the world’s current, proven oil reserve are “unburnable carbon.” As a result, oil extraction has now become something like a giant game of musical chairs, where everyone wants to get as much out of the ground as they can before the music stops. For investors, the issue is important because the stock valuation of the big oil companies suggests that investors are still valuing these reserves as though they will all be extracted and sold.… Continue reading

The Economist drops tiny truth bomb

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One of the things that I look forward to in The Economist is that they have a little “Canada beat” with usually one article per issue on something that’s been going on here. It’s never something that I don’t already know the details of. What is interesting is just hearing an outsider’s perspective. Sometimes what’s interesting is seeing what people outside the country consider the biggest news story going on here. Often, however, what’s interesting is that they describe events in ways that Canadians never would, because we’re too wrapped up in things, or because our own national discourse is somewhat distorted. (For example, The Economist will typically describe the Liberal Party of Canada as a centre-left party, or even just a left-wing party, because any party that is, on most issues, to the left of the U.K. Labour Party strikes them as appropriately designated “left-wing.” Canadians, by contrast, tend to situate the national political parties by comparing them to one another.)

Anyhow, I got a chuckle this week, when they chose to describe the federal government’s income-splitting proposal in the following terms:

The prime minister, Stephen Harper, defends traditional family values and recently announced tax incentives for women to look after their kids at home.

… Continue reading

Bad arguments against capitalism, vol. 1

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Most of us have probably heard, over the years, an enormous number of arguments against capitalism. This is not all that surprising. Looking around, it’s easy to find irrationality and waste in the way that our economy is organized. But turning this into an argument for wholesale change in the system – as opposed to just an argument for regulation and readjustment – is much more difficult. Because in order to argue that “the system” needs to go, you need to be able to provide at least some reason to think that some imagined alternative system is going to be better.

And yet lots of people ignore this obligation. There are many egregious examples of this, with Naomi Klein’s recent book being a typical example. (It’s a 500+ page denunciation of capitalism, without any serious attempt to explain what the alternative is supposed to look like.)

On the other hand, the way that economists have presented the basic argument for capitalism, over the past half century, has tended to invite this style of criticism.… Continue reading

What lesson should universities learn from the decline of newspapers?

Posted by on | education

Just to give away the answer at the outset – I think that there is an important lesson to be learned, because the basic business model of a research university is similar to the business model of a traditional newspaper, in that it relies up the aggregation of two goods, one basically public the other basically private, along with the sale of the two as a forced “bundle.” What kills the business model is when customers figure out how to get one without the other. Thus the shopping mall killed the traditional department store by disaggregating the sale of different categories of goods. The internet is killing the traditional newspaper by disaggregating the different “sections” of the paper. The question for universities is whether they can preserve the “bundle” that they have traditionally been selling, or whether that two will inevitably be disaggregated.

So let me now take a stab at explaining what all that means.… Continue reading

Evolution of a sound bite

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A while back, Barack Obama made a speech in which he said the following:

There are a lot of wealthy, successful Americans who agree with me—because they want to give something back. They know they didn’t—look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own… If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

Here a link to the video for anyone who wants to watch it again (Fox News ran it hundreds of times, and spent literally hours discussing its import). The quote became kind of famous, because the word “that” in the penultimate sentence is ambiguous. If you want to make sense of what Obama said, then the natural reading is that “that” refers to the “roads and bridges” of the previous sentence, making it a truism.… Continue reading

I seem to recall having written a book about this…

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This paper by Jonathan Toubol (“The Hipster Effect: When Anticonformists all Look the Same”) has been getting a lot of play yesterday and today. Setting aside all the cutesy math, the basic dynamic driving his model is, as far as I can tell, exactly the one that Andrew Potter and I described in The Rebel Sell. What I find particularly interesting is the role that delay plays in his model, since Andrew and I also argued that delayed propagation of style was a major force sustaining counterculture, again for exactly the reason that Toubol represents. This was the basis of our contention that, because cable television, and subsequently internet, significantly reduced delay in propagation, counterculture was becoming more difficult to sustain.

On his website, Toubol points out that he was not trying to make a contribution to sociological theory. So I am not faulting him in observing that there is one crucial component of the phenomenon (“anticonformists all look the same”) that he fails to explain: Why are there only two states for the population types to switch back and forth between?… Continue reading

Grandeur et misère du système québécois de services de garde à l’enfance

Contribution invitée, par Luc Turgeon, professeur adjoint à l’École d’études politiques, Université d’Ottawa

La possible modulation des tarifs pour les services de garde en fonction du revenu familial suscite la gronde. Dimanche dernier, des milliers de Québécoises et de Québécois ont d’ailleurs manifesté à travers la province pour dénoncer ce scénario présentement à l’étude par le gouvernement libéral.

Journalistes et analystes ont également critiqué avec véhémence ce projet de modulation des frais de garde. Camil Bouchard, l’un des architectes de la politique familiale québécoise, a parlé de “déconstruction tranquille” du système québécois de services de garde éducatifs. La chroniqueuse Marie-Claude Lortie a quant à elle évoqué la fin de l’universalité du programme de garderies et déploré l’intervention du gouvernement libéral dans “un système qui fonctionne”.

Il y a de bonnes raisons de s’opposer à la modulation des tarifs. On peut, en particulier, se questionner sur l’impact politique d’une telle approche. Est-ce que les plus riches, par exemple, voudront continuer à payer plus d’impôts s’ils doivent contribuer davantage aux services de garde?… Continue reading