Deep breath… I started writing this becauese at work we got in trouble for talking about sensitive political and religious topics. One of my ‘comrades’ cleverly figured out that we could tilt the discussion onto a slightly more academic axis. He asked me what I knew about John Maynard Keynes. I know a little. I dealt with Keynes [...]
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I wasn’t comfortable with it until I heard a constitutional expert explain on CBC Newsworld that prorogation is normally used when parliament has an especially large, complex set of legislation to consider, and it’s deemed best for MPs to return to their ridings, meet with their constituents, and look at matters from that perspective. Before [...]
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I’ve finally quieted my mind and collected my thoughts about the events in Ottawa this weekend — just enough to make sense of things by way of juxtaposing an older post on the meaning of integrity in politics. In that post I held up Barack Obama as a paradigm of integrity, arguing that: Having established a [...]
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It really pisses me off. In many ways I favour the Conservatives’ apparent pragmatism and restraint, but all of their statements have a peculiar, pungent aroma that I can’t quite identify, that makes me distrustful. The other parties are no better; in some ways they’re worse. Paul Wells expressed all this again yesterday in his characteristic way: The immediate post-election period is [...]
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Being home sick today I’ve had all kinds of time to post but my mild fever and interrupted breathing got in the way of the writing process. I’ve done a lot of reading today on the Citigroup bailout (pretty much all of it is here now, via Mark Thoma); I wanted to comment on it [...]
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Tim Brown of IDEO shares my curiosity: I am very interested in what new behaviors might emerge this time around and ultimately what innovations they may inspire. Will it be something to do with people changing their attitude toward saving versus spending? Will the growing uncertainty of the world encourage us to look for lives that [...]
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Remember after 9/11 when George W. Bush said everyone should go shopping — “or the terrorists will win”? But wasn’t the economy supposed to have receded anyways, without the terrorist attack? There was the super-hyped dotcom bubble and then Enron and the accounting blowup. Things needed to cool down. Then the attack happened, the reactions of Bush [...]
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As I write this I’m watching this conversation, part of Harvard Business School’s centennial celebration, with John Doerr, Jeffrey Immelt, James Wolfensohn, Meg Whitman, and Anand Mahindra. To tell the truth, I wasn’t expecting much, but it turned out to be pretty interesting and insightful. At the very least it’s refreshing to see top business leaders referring directly [...]
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Rolling Stone‘s star political columnist has a new blog. Here and here he wades into the finance crisis, demonstrating (as if it was necessary) why Rolling Stone is the very last publication you should read for anything other than music and pictures of famous people: The reason I thought it necessary to even write about this at [...]
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Just as there are benefits of appreciating our economic situation in terms of a long-run historical perspective, it’s also wise to appreciate our economic situation as just one aspect of our whole political situation. I’ve been thinking about this in light of recent events and reading parts of Tony Judt’s latest book, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten [...]
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Yesterday I dealt briefly with the long- vs. short-run looking forward. Today I want to deal with the long- vs. short-run looking back. We are always in a zone of imperfect visability so far as the history just over our shoulder is concerned. It is as if we were in the hollow of the historical [...]
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