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 Greek finance minister on IR game theory

Posted by on | Uncategorized

Yanis Varoufakis, the new finance minister of Greece, on international relations game theory in today’s NY Times:

“If anything, my game-theory background convinced me that it would be pure folly to think of the current deliberations between Greece and our partners as a bargaining game to be won or lost via bluffs and tactical subterfuge.

The trouble with game theory, as I used to tell my students, is that it takes for granted the players’ motives. In poker or blackjack this assumption is unproblematic. But in the current deliberations between our European partners and Greece’s new government, the whole point is to forge new motives. To fashion a fresh mind-set that transcends national divides, dissolves the creditor-debtor distinction in favor of a pan-European perspective, and places the common European good above petty politics, dogma that proves toxic if universalized, and an us-versus-them mind-set.”… 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

Affaire HSBC: la pointe de l’iceberg

Posted by on | economy, taxation, Uncategorized

Au terme d’une enquête de longue haleine, en collaboration avec 60 autres médias issus de 47 pays, le journal Le Monde vient d’exposer au grand jour un vaste système d’évasion fiscale orchestré par l’institution financière britannique HSBC (qui n’en est d’ailleurs pas à son premier scandale)

La nouvelle fait déjà beaucoup parler, notamment à cause des célébrités impliquées, mais les véritables vedettes de l’affaire, ce sont les chiffres : 180,6 milliards d’euro transférés dans le plus grand secret vers Genève, par l’entremise de comptes HSBC appartenant à plus de 100 000 clients et de 20 000 sociétés. Et cela, uniquement entre le 9 novembre 2006 et le 31 mars 2007.

Il s’agit d’activités illicites, il est donc par définition difficile de connaître l’ampleur des sommes impliquées par les structures et mécanismes de l’évasion fiscale. Cette enquête, basée sur des archives numérisées dérobées à la filière suisse de la Banque HSBC, a donc le mérite de jeter une lumière sur cette réalité, même si ce n’est que de façon partielle.… Continue reading

Physician-Assisted Dying: What Now?

Posted by on | Canada, criminal justice, health care, public policy, Quebec, Supreme Court (Canada)

Five years ago, I agreed to join an “expert panel” of the Royal Society of Canada. Our mandate was to provide a broad assessment of end-of-life care in Canada, and to make recommendations on how it might be improved. One of the recommendations that we made in our 2011 report was that there was no ethical justification for the maintenance of the criminal prohibition preventing physicians from helping their critically ill patients to die a dignified death, one that conformed to their wishes, and avoided them needless suffering.

I was therefore naturally very pleased when the Supreme Court of Canada issued its judgement in the Carter case, declaring that those articles of the Criminal Code were incompatible with Canadians’ Section 7 rights to life, liberty and security of person. Looking back at the 1993 decision in which a 5-4 majority had ruled that those articles were not in fact unconstitutional, a unanimous Court this time argued, in essence, that the empirical environment in which it was now being asked to render judgment had changed.… 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

Vaccination is a collective action problem

Posted by on | Uncategorized

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post about the difficulty many people have grasping the logic of collective action problems — where the outcome of an interaction is bad, but where no individual has an incentive to stop doing the thing that is leading to that bad outcome (here).

I’m reminded of this problem every morning these days, since vaccination has been in the news, first with the NHL players, and now with a measles outbreak in Toronto. The debate over vaccination is a perpetual source of frustration for me, because people insist on treating parents who refrain from vaccinating their children as irrational, whereas in most cases they are not being irrational, they are actually free riding, which is perfectly rational, in at least one sense of the term (i.e. the one used by economists). Thus they should be criticized for acting immorally, as opposed to irrationally.… Continue reading

The (messy) ethics of freedom of speech

Posted by on | culture, journalism, multiculturalism, political philosophy, politics

A few days ago, I took part in a very interesting panel discussion on the issue of free speech. The panel was prompted by the tragic events that took place in Paris a couple of weeks ago. One of the most interesting aspects of the panel was that despite our disagreements, none of the participants actually thought that the brutal murders at Charlie Hebdo actually raise any particularly interesting issues to do with freedom of speech as it is usually understood. As far as I am able to tell, hardly anyone thinks that the cartoons that the satiric magazine has published over the years warrant censorship. Even commentators who believe that there are cases in which the state appropriately steps in to limit freedom of speech – cases in which speech promotes hatred toward an entire group, for example — acknowledged that Charlie Hebdo steered clear of the line separating ridicule directed at religion, religious symbols and religious beliefs on the one hand, and contempt or hatred directed at a group of people, on the other.… Continue reading

Cynicism or stupidity? the eternal question

Posted by on | environment, politics

The other day, speaking in Davos, finance minister Joe Oliver expressed his commitment to maintaining a balanced budget in Canada. He described it in the usual terms, as an “ethical issue” having to do with intergenerational fairness. “We think it’s wrong to burden our children, our grandchildren with expenditures that we’re incurring today…”

Now as most educated people know, this is an economic fallacy. It’s not as though we’re eating in a restaurant en famille, then when the meal is done the parents skip out and leave the children to pay the bill. When the government borrows money, it creates both an asset and a liability, both of which get handed on to future generations, making it a wash as far as “our children and grandchildren” are concerned (e.g. some inherit the Canada Savings Bonds, and the revenue stream that goes with them, others inherit the tax liability associated with paying out that revenue).… Continue reading