This country has an immense opportunity to reinvent itself with this budget and transform itself into a “green economy.” But if this metamorphosis is to take place, the budget cannot contain a bunch of giveaways to industry wrapped up in a nice green bow. Instead, it needs to hand out gift certificates with green strings attached that will help Canada’s economy grow while protecting its natural capital.
Yesterday I would have ranked country music as one of my least favourites. Now, thanks to CBC Radio 3, I’m a big fan.
Fantastic photos of the Sun, via The Big Picture
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
Michael Pollan describes the upcoming food crisis in an open letter to the next President of the United States.
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation.
The core of his solution is:
… we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine
Like most Canadians, I’ll be at the polls today for the 2008 Federal Election.
In the past several elections, I’ve cast my vote for the party with the best climate change plan. The consensus among economists is that any credible plan must set a price on carbon emissions. My personal preference is for a predictable and transparent price to influence consumer spending, so I favour a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade. Enlightening discussions of these issues are available at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Jeffrey Simpson’s column at the Globe and Mail, or his book Hot Air
Until now this voting principle has meant a vote for the Green Party who support a tax shift from income to pollution. My expectation for this vote was not that the Green Party would gain any direct political power, rather their environmental plan would gain political profile and convince the Liberals and Conservatives to improve their plans. A carbon tax is now a central component of this year’s Liberal Platform with the Green Shift. Both the Conservative Pary and NDP support a limited cap-and-trade system on portions of the economy, with the Conservatives supporting dubious “intensity-based” targets.
Although I quite like the central components of the Green Shift, I’m not too keen on the distracting social engineering aspects of the plan. Furthermore, the Liberals have certainly failed to implement any of their previous climate change plans while in power. Nonetheless, I do think (hope?) they will follow through this time and I prefer supporting a well-conceived plan that may not be implemented than a poor plan. Despite my support for this plan, I think the Liberals have done a rather poor job of explaining the Green Shift and have conducted a disappointing campaign.
In the end, my principle will hold. I’m voting for the Green Shift and, reluctantly, the Liberal Party of Canada.
But the Black-Scholes model is quite different. It uses a model of the future to describe the present. In the absence of this model, or some equivalent of it, present stock options have no reasonable assigned value. What then is the test of the model? Presumably, it is that if one uses it as a guide to buy these options and, as a result, goes broke, one will be inclined to re-examine the assumptions.
In this article Nassim Nicholas Taleb applies his Black Swan
For us the world is vastly simpler in some sense than the academy, vastly more complicated in another. So the central lesson from decision-making (as opposed to working with data on a computer or bickering about logical constructions) is the following: it is the exposure (or payoff) that creates the complexity —and the opportunities and dangers— not so much the knowledge ( i.e., statistical distribution, model representation, etc.). In some situations, you can be extremely wrong and be fine, in others you can be slightly wrong and explode. If you are leveraged, errors blow you up; if you are not, you can enjoy life.
Without God - The New York Review of Books
Steven Weinberg provides a great overview of the tension between science and religion and a discussion of morality in the absence of God.
Living without God isn’t easy. But its very difficulty offers one other consolation—that there is a certain honor, or perhaps just a grim satisfaction, in facing up to our condition without despair and without wishful thinking—with good humor, but without God.
A detailed and fascinating portrait of Stephen Harper. As the article points out:
The core of any government reflects the personality of the prime minister, because everyone in the system responds to his or her ways of thinking, personality traits, political ambitions and policy preferences. Know the prime minister; know the government.
Harper has been an enigma and learning more about his personal policies and approach to governance is very useful while thinking about the upcoming election.
A general summary of the article comes from near the end:
And the long-distance runner – bright, intense, strategic, cautious and confident in every stride – has certainly got things done, from merging two parties, to winning a minority government, to fulfilling most of his campaign promises.
He also has pursued two broad changes in the nature of the federal government: giving the provinces more running room by keeping Ottawa out of some of their affairs and giving individuals a bit more money in the form of tax reductions, credits and child-care cheques.
And yet, despite these policies that he assumed would be popular, despite all the problems on the Liberal side, despite raising far more money, despite governing in mostly excellent economic times, despite stroking Quebec, despite gearing up for elections, his Conservatives have yet to break through decisively.
A New Bank to Save Our Infrastructure - The New York Review of Books
A proposal to create a new institution to fund and co-ordinate infrastructure investments.
Dan Gardner . Harper economics
Dan Gardner interviews Harvard University economist Gregory Mankiw on climate change economics. The article is an interesting description of the differences between cap-and-trade and carbon tax policies.
So why is the cap-and-trade option preferred by almost all politicians? As usual, it’s politics. Under cap-and-trade, politicians can claim they are hitting “big polluters” while leaving the ordinary person unscathed. That’s nonsense, of course. Costs borne by big polluters will be passed on, so the ordinary person pays either way. But with cap-and-trade, unlike a carbon tax, the cost to the ordinary person is hidden.
The cycles in economic fashion show how far economics is from being a science. One cannot think of any natural science in which orthodoxy swings between two poles. What gives economics the appearance of a science is that its propositions can be expressed mathematically by abstracting from the real world.
kung fu grippe - Better
www.kungfugrippe.com/post/4858…
This is an excellent post by Merlin Mann and something I’ve been thinking about a fair bit recently.
Now that I’m halfway through my parental leave with Kelly and the kids, I’m wondering about all of the distractions I have opted into – especially on the internet. When I have a few free minutes, is refreshing my Twitter feed really a priority? It shouldn’t be. So, I’ve been cutting back, cancelling my Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Last.fm, etc. accounts and trying to be much more careful with my time and attention.
Senate Report on “Emergency Preparedness in Canada”
This report is well worth a read just for the direct – almost sarcastic – writing. Some of the report’s commentary on the bureaucratic replies to the senate committee’s queries is fantastic.
globeandmail.com: Half-truths and zingers on the campaign trail
www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/s…
I wonder about this too. Why do politicians pretend to be “regular” people. Don’t we want extraordinary leaders?
The ’80s: Were They Really That Bad? : NPR Music
NPR’s All Songs Considered provides an entertaining discussion of ‘80s music. They play some classic bad '80s music, but also find some great songs from the decade.
Even before the writ has dropped, the Tory campaign has made clear its intention to portray Mr. Harper as a minivan-driving hockey dad from the suburbs. The Liberal Leader, Stéphane Dion, by contrast, is to be ruthlessly caricatured as a wimpy and elitist academic of the mad-professor type.
Is it really good for future generations - the alleged beneficiaries of this deluded parsimony - to pass down a clapped out wreck of a town in need of major repairs and upgrades, long-deferred works that become more expensive with every minute they are neglected?
globeandmail.com: Debt free in a clapped out wreck of a town
Only when significant numbers of people lived downtown, planners believed, could central cities regain their historic role as magnets for culture and as a source of identity and pride for the metropolitan areas they served. Now that’s starting to happen, fueled by the changing mores of the young and by gasoline prices fast approaching $5-per-gallon.
Many hospitals put the drugs “on reserve,” but an apparent cure-all was too tempting for some physicians, and the tight stewardship slowly broke down.
Medical Dispatch: Superbugs: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker