Elections are not overpriced

I am not open to the argument that frequent elections are a waste of money or that even infrequent elections, as we operate them today, are too expensive.

This is a democracy, folks (albeit a slightly screwy democracy with a queen and a tendency toward unearned majorities).

Democracies are inefficient in all kinds of ways but the price is well worth it to keep our governments on a short leash.

You can be cynical and believe that all governments operate the same, but you can damn well be sure the government would be a different beast if it didn’t have to submit to the will of the people periodically.

Addendum: I didn’t set out to rant, but this has put me in a sour mood.

It’s a post-industrial revolution

The end of our car- and auto-centric economy is approaching, says Richard Florida today in the Globe and Mail. Propping up the old ways is not a good way to get ahead in the new economy.

Basically, we’re going through a post-industrial revolution. We’ve already had a handful of industrial revolutions which changed how people lived and worked: there was one that gave us steam power; one that gave us rails and trains; and one that gave us cars, suburbia, and consumer goods.

The latest industrial revolution also gave us Fordism, a bastardization of capitalist and command economies whereby the government structures the economy around certain industries and corporations. For example, the government accommodates and encourages the home-building and auto industries to the point that a slow down in either is major blow to the economy. I’m not knocking government interventions in the economy, but there is a clear danger that acute political incentives will not align with our long-term needs.

We don’t really get to pick our economy – it is largely determined by factors like technology and wealth. But we can either do the best with what we’re given or fall behind by resisting change.

Florida’s prescription for change?

1. We need to pour fewer resources into housing. Governments need to ecourage renting, not building and buying single family detached homes in Brampton.
2. The same goes for transportation: Cars and all the infrastructure they require are gobbling up wealth that could be purchasing new goods and services. Plus cars run on oil. Let’s have more public transit, walking, and bicycling.
3. “Last but not least, government investment can help to revolutionize the way we develop people. Human capital investments are the key to economic development. But many of our schools are giant creativity-squelching institutions. We need to reinvent our education system from the ground up – including a massive commitment to early-childhood development and a shift away from institutionalized schooling to individually tailored learning. This will require a level of public and private investment of a magnitude larger than the widespread creation of public schools and modern research universities a century ago.”

But first we have to overcome the political inertia which sustains the old way of doing things. Most people cannot remember or imagine an economy structured any way but how it is (just read the comments following Florida’s article), and there are a lot of powerful people invested in the status quo.

Ottawa is Crazytown today

This bored blogger is delighted with the insanity which has consumed Parliament. It’s the most exciting thing to happen in Canadian politics in six weeks. To re-cap:

1) The Prime Minister, extraordinary political strategist and middling leader that he is, decides the fiscal crisis would be a good time to end public financing for political parties. Completely coincidentally, this will hurt all the other parties more than his own. The cuts will be a part of the Fall Fiscal Update, a sort of mini budget and thus a matter of confidence; if it fails the government falls.

2) The Liberals and NDP, cornered and desperate animals that they are, begin talking about forming a coalition government when this one falls. This is ostensibly because the Fiscal Update doesn’t contain stimulus measures like every other respectable country is implementing, but it is more likely that the political pain of triggering a second election in as many months is not as bad as the fiscal pain of losing public financing.

3) The Prime Minister, who probably didn’t think the Liberals and NDP would even consider a coalition, backs down. The death of public financing will not be a part of today’s vote on the Fiscal Update.

4) But wait, this solves nothing! The other parties are still talking about replacing the government because there is no economic stimulus package in the Fiscal Update.

And this is where we stand at the moment.

Because prevention isn’t working

It’s common sense that testing and treatment will reduce the severity of the AIDS epidemic, but you don’t embark on multi-million dollar public health initiatives without evidence.

Reported in the Washington Post:

A combination of universal voluntary HIV testing and immediate antiretroviral treatment (ART) following diagnosis of HIV infection could reduce HIV cases in a severe generalized epidemic by 95 percent within 10 years, a World Health Organization study finds.

…

In an accompanying comment on the study, Professor Geoffrey P. Garnett of Imperial College London, U.K., wrote that this type of HIV control strategy “would reflect public health at its best and its worst.”

“At its best, the strategy would prevent morbidity and mortality for the population, both through better treatment of the individual and reduced spread of HIV,” Garnett wrote. “At its worst, the strategy would involve over-testing, over-treatment, side-effects, resistance, and potentially reduced autonomy of the individual in their choices of care. The individual might gain no personal benefit from testing and early treatment, but they would benefit from protecting partners — and who could object to that, unless they were recklessly exposing others to infection?

“It is easy to see how enforced testing and treatment for the good of society would follow from such an argument. Partial success would lead to infection becoming concentrated in those with a high risk, with an increased danger of stigma and coercion,” Garnett wrote.

All other things being equal, it is better to treat the socioeconomic conditions which perpetuate HIV infections than to treat the virus itself. But in the meantime, poverty persists and we have relatively cheap and effective drugs for HIV/AIDS, so treatment is a decent stopgap effort.

Look! A wide-screen high-quality YouTube video

You have to click through for the promised qualities, unfortunately.

It could be worse

Give yourself a pat on the back, St Catharines. The fruit of some tangential googlings this evening:

St Catharines Transit, serving some 150,000 people, moves 4.6 million passengers each year.

IndyGo, the transit operator in Indianapolis, a city of 800,000 people, moves 9 million passengers each year.

Schedules up at Pen Centre

I’m pleased to report that there are full bus schedules and maps of the city posted in all the shelters at the Pen Centre.

The next-best thing to frequent buses is knowing you can retreat into the mall for 15 minutes without missing your bus.

Silver Lining

Just the other day I was wondering if retired persons on fixed pensions are better-off during recession; after all, their income doesn’t change and prices either fall or rise more slowly. If nothing else, I’m sure they are pleased to see the price of oil back where it was in their youth.

Via Mark Thoma, Galbraith (back in 1993) outlines who has a vested interest in economic contraction:

There are the many who live in recession with a wholly secure livelihood and with a lessened fear of price increases, of inflation. They are in no real danger of loss or diminution of income. Present here are the more secure parts of the modern corporate bureaucracy. …

Similarly secure are many in the professions, professors, needless to say, some public servants, lawyers, doctors and media stars. Also very important is the modern large rentier class. And many who live on Social Security or pensions.

He goes on to demonstrate that our efforts to restart the economic engine are more unpalatable to these people than the recession itself.

The complicated nature of a recession is often lost in the bail-out hysteria.

Removing roads can speed traffic

Via The Vine:

Three scientists—Hyejin Youn and Hawoong Jeong, of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Michael Gastner, of the Santa Fe Institute—have found that sometimes you can actually speed up traffic flow in certain cities by eliminating roads. The underlying theory here, laid out by Eoin O’Carroll, is that, given their druthers, drivers don’t always reach a socially optimal equilibrium on their own.

There are so many things about traffic which are counter-intuitive. Awesome.

(photo credit)

Cut the ads, cut the fat: study

Discussions of obesity and overweight should always begin with the old aphorism “everything in moderation.”

There is nothing inherently wrong or evil about eating fast food; the trouble is in quantity. Too many hamburgers are unhealthy, and we need health to fulfil our other wants and needs in life. On the other hand, one could argue that someone who refuses to eat an occasional Big Mac is missing out on the good life, much like a teetotaler.

But we do have a quantity problem in many countries. We worry especially about children because they are innocents, not yet capable of making decisions and therefore not responsible for their actions. That responsibility falls with adults, primarily but not exclusively parents.

A study in this month’s Journal of Law & Economics (abstract only) concludes that childhood obesity in the US could be reduced by about 15% if companies like McDonalds could not advertise on television. Unfortunately, the study is only accessible for a fee and I can’t even get it through my university library yet. So there’s no way to know, until somebody knowledgeable passes judgement in the media or on a blog, if the study’s conclusions are valid.

I wouldn’t be surprised, if the study holds up to scrutiny, to see Ontario finally impose a ban on fast food advertising at least targeting children, if not adolescents and adults. It’s the kind of move the opens the government up to accusations of nany-statism, but I don’t think Premier McGuinty has a problem being our Nany Statist.

(more at CBC)

(photo credit)