Amazing:

Invented by a group of engineering students at Harvard, it’s a soccer ball that harnesses the energy of play, using kinetic and inductive coil technology.

After a session of footie, an LED lamp can be plugged into the sOccket, providing light for activities normally impossible after dark. A fantastic solution in many developing countries, in those areas where families have limited or no access to electricity, and often use kerosene to light their homes. Tested in South Africa after last year’s World Cup, it provided three hours of power after a mere fifteen minutes of play.

(via Soccket to ‘Em | Toronto Standard)

Since this blog is called Live Free or Die, I feel I should occasionally try to focus on issues of freedom. This essay is a thoughtful refutation of an infuriating argument:

The deeper problem with the nothing-to-hide argument is that it myopically views privacy as a form of secrecy. In contrast, understanding privacy as a plurality of related issues demonstrates that the disclosure of bad things is just one among many difficulties caused by government security measures. To return to my discussion of literary metaphors, the problems are not just Orwellian but Kafkaesque. Government information-gathering programs are problematic even if no information that people want to hide is uncovered. In The Trial, the problem is not inhibited behavior but rather a suffocating powerlessness and vulnerability created by the court system’s use of personal data and its denial to the protagonist of any knowledge of or participation in the process. The harms are bureaucratic ones—indifference, error, abuse, frustration, and lack of transparency and accountability.

I attended a conference on the uses of healthcare information once and confronted the “nothing to hide” argument from a physician. However, his point was that he wanted to know if people had a condition that might affect their performance, so he could exclude them.

UPDATE: I was going to make a separate post, but on reflection I’ll just draw your attention here to Mike Konczal’s article today on the National Surveillance State. Konczal quotes from a paper by Jack Balkin on the specific dangers to freedom that a Kafka-esque information-gathering bureaucracy can create. I particularly liked this bit:

Ordinary citizens can no longer assume that what they do will be forgotten; rather, records will be stored and collated with other information collected at other times and places. The greatest single protector of privacy— amnesia—will soon be a thing of the past. As technology improves and storage costs decline, the National Surveillance State becomes the State that Never Forgets.

(via Single serving levees | Kottke)

In the wake of the Democrats’ upset victory in a NY special election yesterday, Jonathan Chait lays out the unpopularity of the Republicans’ goals, and their methods of concealing them:

One favored tactic has been to keep the issues of taxes and spending separate. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush passed large tax cuts that mathematically implied the need for cuts in popular spending programs. But they fiercely denied the implication, and left the work of spending cuts for the future, so that the tax cutting could proceed without any acknowledgement of the priorities it required. Indeed, Republicans understood very clearly that obscuring the trade-off was the entire key to gaining public acceptance …

… this political method naturally leads to very large deficits. The Republicans have now fashioned themselves as the party of fiscal discipline, an imperative that drove them to do something they haven’t tried since 1995 — actually lay out a budget that reconciled their priorities on spending and taxing. This was a huge mistake. As happened in 1995, this laid bare the wild unpopularity if their choices.

He also quotes Henry Olson of the American Enterprise Institute with some thoughts that I believe are relevant to Bruce Anderson’s point:

… blue-collar voters react differently to issues than the GOP base does. They are more supportive of safety-net programs at the same time as they are strongly opposed to large government programs in general. These voters crave stability and are uncertain of their ability to compete in a globalized economy that values higher education more each year.

My point here is not to inform you about US politics. It’s that fundamentally there is a very similar dynamic going on here in Canada. Forget the jibes about “American-style politics”: this is just a matter of math. You cannot keep cutting taxes without running deficits unless you also cut services, and most people won’t like that.

Regardless of what some columnists like to think, Stephen Harper’s party did not win power as the party of fiscal discipline and then get forced by their minority status into maintaining high spending levels. As Stephen Gordon has shown, the GST cut that Harper promised in his first winning platform put us on track to a deficit right off the bat. I’d assume that Harper didn’t make that pledge expecting to win a minority.

Their most recent budget continued this habit of promising lower tax rates without honestly identifying commensurate spending cuts.

Sooner or later, something will have to give. Either the government will drown in its own deficits, or services will start to be cut and the divergence between Harper’s aims and Canadians’ desires will become apparent.

I’d actually wager that both will happen: spending cuts that are insufficient to bring down the deficit will nevertheless create sufficient pain to trigger an electoral backlash. That is, after all, what happened to the Tories in Ontario — many of whom are now making federal fiscal policy.

As a result of this logic, I think it’s extremely premature to proclaim a lasting realignment of Canadian values or politics.

Jeffrey Simpson’s column today is about a blue-ribbon panel report on economic strategy, commissioned by the Premier of Alberta:

Recommendation One – dead on arrival – says: “stop diverting money received from the sale of non-renewable energy assets into the general revenue fund.” In other words, stop paying for today’s services with resource revenues, which are volatile, unpredictable and should be set aside for investments tomorrow. > Recommendation Two – also dead on arrival – says: “finance current expenditures using current revenue.” Translation: raise taxes equivalent to about 30 per cent of expenditures. Further translation: impose a provincial sales tax and/or raise personal or corporate tax rates.

Simpson is probably right that this report won’t have any impact on the province’s politics. What he doesn’t mention (I think it’s supposed to be implicit) is that its ideas are actually really good ones, and they’d produce tangible improvements in future quality of life for Albertans with minimal present impact.

What perplexes me is that leading Albertans can endorse this view but no viable political movement can form behind it. It’s obviously not impossible to convince electorates to back sensible policies — viz 1995, or for that matter Norway — and it doesn’t seem like Alberta’s centre-left parties have much to lose.

What should concern Alberta is the fact that regulatory approaches [as opposed to a carbon tax – ed.] generally look at each facility and ask what that facility can afford to pay. Alberta has some of the highest value uses of carbon emissions in the country …

You should also note some important aspects of our royalty framework, which states that the government will,”recognize any new environmental fees or levies as an eligible cost of doing business, and therefore deductible in determining royalties on oil sands projects.” In addition, the costs of building and operating a project, were they to be increased by adding GHG emissions control technologies such as CCS, would lead to a longer period before project payout, and thus a longer period at lower pre-payout royalty rates.

Translation -any increased costs brought about by GHG regulations will be paid for, in part, by Albertans via the deduction of increased costs from royalty payments.

This will be very interesting. I hold out faint hope that we may see an actual policy from this government yet. The irony being that our Economist PM has chosen the least economically efficient approach to the problem.

Bob Wachter has a great piece today on cutting healthcare costs. The basic message is that small-bore, behavioural change initiatives will end in regression to the mean:

Schroeder’s bottom-line message is sobering. While he applauds the fact that we are now trying several new strategies (curbing fraud and abuse, using electronic health records, paying for performance) layered on top of the traditional ones, he writes, “it seems naïve to assume that these latest efforts will be any more successful than their predecessors.” He continues,

In the long run, reining in costs will require mobilizing political forces that can withstand the inevitable claims of rationing sure to come from the industries currently benefiting from the 17% of the economy spent on healthcare, and from consumers who have come to expect unlimited access to what they feel they need.

We are fortunate in Canada to have a system that does, in fact, allow for rationing, and where the interests of payers are reasonably well-balanced with those of providers. There are clearly political problems — generated on both sides — but there is also an ability to control costs when required, as the graph on page 2 of this CIHI report shows.

As a result, I’m optimistic that the cost structure of our public healthcare system will be manageable as the population ages. If healthcare becomes “unaffordable”, it will likely be a revenue problem rather than a cost problem per se. I think that people who are worried about rising healthcare costs and an aging population ought to focus more on the question of “how do we sustain revenues” than “how do we start cutting costs now”.

Nevertheless, we obviously should do what we can to make the most of the money that we spend on healthcare, both so that we can minimize harmful rationing (i.e., not covering children’s optometry appointments, or basic dentistry) and to free up money for other government priorities. And the quote above highlights two points that we ought to be clear about when discussing how to achieve healthcare savings.

The first is that miracles don’t come for free. Anyone who claims that we will achieve significant cost savings by spending vast sums of money on eHealth or chronic-disease management or by firing a few public servants is deluding themselves. These initiatives (some of them, anyway) may have other positive effects and may be worth paying for, but they are not a panacea for the problem of rising healthcare costs. In fact, it’s worse than that: in the short run, they will cost money; in the long run, they will probably continue to cost money.

The second point, the inverse of the first, is that controlling healthcare costs ultimately comes down to politicians doing two very hard things: (a) deciding which services to pay for, and for whom, and (b) demanding that healthcare providers accept lower prices for their services. The major challenge is not finding something else that lowers costs — it’s doing those things as painlessly as possible.

But unilaterally pledging to pour money into the system for years to come, as parties on both sides of the political spectrum have done recently, reduces the leverage available to do both of those hard things. And there is very little else to be done that will make any kind of difference.

Rob Silver must be the most popular of all Liberal-watchers these days, and deservedly so:

Each [interim leadership] candidate should release a letter – 250 to 300 words should do it – explaining what they plan to do over the next 12 to 24 months as interim leader. We all agree the role is important as we start to rebuild so how do they intend to use the position to move the party forward? Spare us vague platitudes; I want some specifics. Engage the “grassroots”? How do you intend to do so? Toward what end? Give me some metrics. Focus on fundraising? New members? Again, we’ve heard it all before – how should we judge your interim leadership when your term is done?

I tried to do some research into Rae and Garneau the other day, to see if they had ever put such ideas onto paper, or given a speech to this effect — and I found nothing from either one. All I dug up was an old speech from Rae with exactly the kind of platitudes that Rob mentions above.

The lesson of the last god-knows-how-many years has to be: communication is not just about telling, it’s about persuading. Ignatieff tried to adopt Obama’s rhetorical devices — like his habit of saying “you got to” when most Harvard professors would say “one has to” —but what neither he nor any other member of our party has tried is what really makes Obama unique: explaining what he is thinking and trying to convince other people to agree.

I am not such a naif as to believe that the power of persuasion is the only political currency that matters, like in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”. But at this particular moment, the key criterion for determining our future leader ought to be the power to convince more Canadians to join the Liberal Party and adopt its views — and not the power to convince other insiders to do your dirty work for you. From this shallow base, the Liberal Party must start with persuasion, leading to support, to engagement, and to fundraising.

Granted, too, the primary criteria for the interim leadership are different than for the big event. But I think this is something we have to start getting good at now, not in 6 - 24 months or whatever Alf Apps says the timetable is now.

From the “link-does-not-constitute-endorsement” file, Gwyn Morgan asserts that slashing government spending is the only way to protect, er, our “strength”.

Beginning with the sheer lunacy of endorsing Britain’s fiscal policy at this juncture, there’s so much wrong with this piece that I really can’t be bothered to fisk it thoroughly. But here’s one graf that I think is critical to understanding how wrong-headed this rhetoric is:

Retirement of the baby boomers not only means lower income tax revenues, but lost economic growth due to the already serious inability of employers to replace these skilled workers.

With an unemployment rate of 7.6%, you’d think that replacing retiring workers would be relatively straightforward. And if it’s not, you’d think that solving the problem might involve investing in education, not slashing government spending.

Maybe it would even be worthwhile for wealthy Canadians like Mr. Morgan to pay slightly higher taxes to make those investments possible?

Or for the government to stop subsidizing oil companies like EnCana — “reducing the number of people receiving government support”?

Via Mark Jarvis.

In words attributed to the Prime Minister in the 1995 Budget Speech *Minister of Finance 1995: 2+ “The time to reduce deficits is when the economy is growing. So now is the time.” In Canada, economic growth was a precondition of fiscal consolidation, not a hoped-for outcome.

Martin’s spending cuts were far from painless, but they occurred against a background of vigorous economic growth, a trade surplus, no inflationary pressure and easing monetary policy. The fiscal contraction did have some impact on GDP: Growth slowed from the sizzling rate of 4.8 percent in 1994 to 2.8 percent in 1995 and only 1.6 percent in 1996, but remained all the same in positive territory, recovering to over 4 percent in 1997.

I believe this also has lessons for us, today.

Ontario’s government has begun cutting budgets and jobs; Ottawa is likely to follow. Meanwhile, unemployment is still high, job growth is anemic and GDP growth hovers around 3%.

To my untrained eye, it looks like a fiscal contraction could plunge us back into recession — or at least, significantly delay the recovery.

I know what use the Conservative Party has for this swarm of offices. It lets them stuff cabinet with the right gender, ethnic and geographic qualities to facilitate re-election, and reward dozens of the boys and girls.

Every ministry or ministry of state brings not only perks plus what passes in Ottawa for status. It brings extra money. As do the dozens of parliamentary secretaryships that support this bloated cabinet. This isn’t about managing the government, it’s about managing the governing party.

I’m building up to a longer post about this. “Managing the governing party” is a key frame for understanding Harper’s decisions, and a better, more predictive frame than “Harper likes giving voters the finger” or “Harper is evil incarnate”.

Bruce Anderson, on May 9:

It’s easy to read the public mood as though voters want politicians to have modest aspirations, to stay out of our pockets and out of our way. But this analysis, if technically accurate, is also incomplete. Voters are more likely to re-engage around big ideas than smaller, “better management” style propositions. Canadians are not opposed to grand projects simply because they are large. Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift didn’t sell, but not because it was a big idea.

Bruce Anderson, today:

The biggest change I find is an erosion of the instinct that when big problems emerge, government should build big programs to solve them. Today, many people are content with a government that embraces the “do no harm” principle. …

But over the years an increasing number of voters have grown skeptical about whether ambitious government works very well.

Big solutions can sound good, but can also cost a lot, and results can be hard to see. A party that promises to avoid the policy equivalent of the long bomb can sound pretty reassuring to those who are having a hard time making ends meet, filling a gas tank, or figuring out how to save enough money to retire on.

Hmmm.

Perhaps sharing the “research” itself would be a good start. It should be to hand, since it must have been done in the last 2 weeks.

UPDATE: It occurs to me that, in all our history, it’s hard to name a single federal election that was won by promising a big idea. When parties make big, winning promises, it is usually to reverse their predecessor’s policies and not to advance new ones - to respond to the sense that things used to be better, rather than to make them better. The big policies that we associate with past political victors rarely formed part of a campaign, or were implemented by a minority government.

In short, the New Bruce Anderson(tm) may be on to something.

UPDATE 2: I received a very nice email from Bruce saying that he’d considered this point but didn’t have the space in his column to address the inconsistency. I’ve asked for permission to post the explanation he provided.

In August, 1944, the supplies of parcels and cigarettes [the camp’s standard currency] were both halved. Since both sides of the equation were changed in the same degree, changes in prices were not anticipated. But this was not the case: the non-monetary demand for cigarettes was less elastic than the demand for food, and food prices fell a little. More important however were the changes in the price structure. German margarine and jam, hitherto valueless owing to adequate supplies of Canadian butter and marmalade, acquired a new value. Chocolate, popular and a certain seller, and sugar, fell. Bread rose; several standing contracts of bread for cigarettes were broken, especially when the bread ration was reduced a few weeks later.

I think this was originally via Krugman.

This piece from Deborah Coyne articulates some of the specifically Canadian challenges to building a coalition of the haves and the have-nots (and the have-wants). In particular, the obstacle that our system of have and have-not provinces poses to national unity:

No national leader or national party currently focuses on their role to speak out for all Canadians and remind us of our reciprocal obligations as citizens of this great country – the kind of commitment and solidarity that transcends provincial boundaries and condemns indifference to the plights of others, whatever our residence.

However, it is a stronger moral case than a practical one.