jsburbidge | Entries tagged with social issues

Consider this: "For most of the Middle Ages and in most parts of Europe it was more common for lords to have land and lack men to work it than the reverse." - Bartlett, The Making of Europe.

This is why it is the "sturdy beggar" who is the villain of the Elizabethan Poor Law: prior to the agricultural and industrial revolutions, and with limited exceptions for larger urban areas, there was always employment available.

It was true for almost all prior time as well, always excepting some of the great cities of the ancient world, going back to our hunter - gatherer days. "He who does not work will not eat" was driven into our spines as a moral precept by hundreds of thousands of years of selection, as regards the able bodied.

However, that order of things has been only generally applicable for the past two or three generations, and is about to collapse entirely. It is not that eliminating some jobs by automation or the creation of greater efficiencies reduces the amount of work available as such: that is just another variant of the "lump of labour" fallacy. Replacing the number of people required to do, say, cleaning tasks in a small business does not necessarily lead to a reduction in employment: it may instead allow a reallocation of resources which increases the generation of revenue, for example, with no net decrease in employment numbers. And a general increase in productivity does not normally hit an overall ceiling: there is in practice no limit to the general market for "luxury" (not necessary) goods as productivity rises and prices decline, even though there is a ceiling for any given product. (This is the engine which drove the expansion of the European economies during the Industrial Revolution.)

But the old work was heavily dominated by the requirement for a strong back and arms, or a willingness to perform simple tasks repetitively[1]. We have replaced farm-hands, navvies, and stevedores with operators of mechanized equipment, production-line workers with supervisors and maintainers of robots, and secretaries with the expectation that every employee will use a word processor; we are now on the way to displace truckers and taxi drivers with automated vehicles.

(There are some offsetting trends: someone who cannot do long-hand multiplication and division can now do a job requiring those calculations if that person can use a calculator. Bad handwriting is no longer a barrier to written communication.)

The trend is towards a significant subset of society - those, say, for whom just managing to get out of high school[2] would be an achievement and who lack the social "intelligence" to function well in a retail or personnel role[3] - who may never show up in employment statistics because they give up, soon after leaving school, even looking for work.

An interesting side glance may be spared here for the concept of "workfare", beloved of the Republicans and the Mike Harris Tories. A few minutes' consideration will reveal both why this is a bad idea, on a policy basis, and why it's almost a pure expression of the old ingrained attitude.

To begin with, if the work is deemed to be worth less than the minimum wage, then you've violated the idea of having a minimum wage - society does not value it enough to consider it worth doing. (And note that the costs to society of supervising such a programme probably make the costs above that of the minimum wage in any case, so it's not even a case of getting work done cheaply.) This is likely to be a simple case of Sisyphean make work.

If the work is worth doing, then it should be done at market levels of remuneration - otherwise workfare becomes just a way of stealing work from other workers.

If it's suited to the skills of the worker, then offering it as a job rather than offering welfare with enforced labour would make more sense. (This is where the underlying moral basis of the case becomes visible: in the assumption that you have to force people in this situation to work, presumably because they are lazy.)

If it's not suited to the skills of the worker, then it will probably be done badly. Furthermore, time spent performing the work takes away from the time people have available to look for work which does match their skills. (The same argument can be made against requiring people to take the first job they can do - Ph.D.s driving taxis - to receive benefits: it reduces the full benefit to society those people can make, even if they spend longer finding positions.)

Workfare is fundamentally just a reflection of the view that people should be expending effort to get paid even if the effort is worthless (an attitude which is not deployed against rentiers).

There is also a contrasting trend for important work to go unpaid. I'm not thinking, here, of unpaid interns; I'm thinking of the fact that local hospitals seem to have almost as many volunteers assisting with patients as they do paid staff. My parents' local city art gallery is largely staffed by volunteers; I believe the AGO relies on them as well, though to a lesser degree. These tend to be older people, retired but still active.

The proclamation of the end of work turned out to be premature, or naive, or possibly both. But the mechanisms connecting performing a valuable role in society and having the wherewithal to subsist on are becoming disconnected.

Let's consider a few different examples:

First, those hospital volunteers. They don't mark the end of normal work in the sense of jobs being automated away: they represent it in the form of jobs which are wanted but society is unwilling to pay for. Luckily for hospitals, charitable volunteering is respectable, the skills involved - basically, standard people-skills of the ESFP variety - are common, and they can fill slots with older retirees rather than younger people who would want wages. This is not very different, in principle, from school systems which won't pay STEM teachers salaries competitive with other employers of competent STEM graduates, but instead get far less-qualified people to take crash courses and then teach poorly.

And there's no point in pointing out that this is in part because of an absence of a direct market. (For-profit hospitals for the rich would actually hire staff to make life easier for the patients.) That is, the indirect connection between paying (by way of taxes) and receiving services (when sick) is a poor motivator. The point is that we don't want a market relationship here - we want a decent hospital experience for the poor, just as we want decent math teachers, generally, in all the schools. But, as a society, we (or at least a politically critical subset of us) don't want them enough to pay higher taxes.

The same observation may be extended to things like a minimum guaranteed income: it's generally agreed to be a good idea, but all we ever see are pilots. (It should net out less costly than our current mishmash of welfare, EI, and other income support programmes, but getting there would be pricey, and it would combine into one programme what is currently a mix of federal and provincial programmes.)

At the other end of the scale, consider the impact on the trucking industry of self-driving long-haul trucks. Even if they're self-driving only on the long haul, with local drivers doing pick-up and delivery in urban areas, the displacement possibilities are massive - not just truckers, but the infrastructure in restaurants and other support that they make use of.

Those affected are likely to be at the difficult end of the spectrum regarding effectiveness of retraining. Some will be retained for the more complex elements that are left; but skills in driving are transferable mainly to other driving jobs, and the same automation which would be eating into trucking would also be diminishing those other pools as well.

This goes well beyond issues with late-stage capitalism; a thoroughgoing public reassessment of the relation between work, productivity, and leisure is called for here.

[1]Although this was exacerbated by the industrial revolution, it is also a fair description of much of the work of a farm hand or a spinner/weaver. In a home environment the worker had more freedom to vary tasks, but many of the tasks were simple, repetitive, and requiring as skills principally dexterity or strength.

[2]I note with regard to the OSSLT exams, designed to measure basic literacy, that 92% of "Academic" stream students pass on the first try; 44% of "Applied" programme students do do. This corresponds to the skills required to read instruction manuals.

[3]People who can present well socially fill a niche which cannot be automated, at least at the high end. Even if one imagines that it will be possible to walk into some clothing equivalent of Amazon Go eventually and be measured and fitted by a set of machines, it's inevitable that the equivalent shop in the West End will have attendants providing personal attention to the higher-end clientele.

ETA: On the matter of hospital volunteers, see this Guardian article on NHS volunteers

How things have not changed:

R.H. Tawney, writing of the English working class in 1929 (in Equality):

"They still often accept quite tamely an organization of industry under which half a dozen gentlemen, who are not always conspicuously wiser than their neighbours, determine the conditions of life and work for several thousand families, and an organization of finance which enables a handful of bankers to raise and lower the economic temperature of a whole community, and an organization of justice which makes it difficult, as Sir Edward Parry has shown, for a poor man to face the cost of obtaining it, and an organization of education which still makes higher education inaccessible to the great majority of working-class children…"

There have been some few adjustments in the U.K. since 1929, but looking instead at the United States as it is today, this seems like a fair description, not only of where things stand, but of the direction in which things are going.

So the primates of the Anglican Communion have imposed some minor sanctions on the ECUSA (essentially booting it off some committees -- stronger sanctions were voted on but failed 15 to 20) for allowing a redefinition of marriage to include same-sex couples. No steps were taken regarding other churches within the Anglican Communion which, at least de facto, allow for same-sex blessings.

The oddity of this may be summarized by saying that the groups pushing for sanctions do not recognize marriage as a sacrament -- they are overwhelmingly Evangelical and Protestant, and, now that Rowan Williams has gone, there may be no primate firmly enough in the Anglo-Catholic camp to worry about the special status of marriage, derived from its sacramentality, per se, which is the only concern specifically addressed by this particular line in the sand.

There's a whole sheaf of issues which swirl around the question of the sacramentality of marriage in the Church, and there are a number of ways of framing them.

One is to point out that the solemnization of marriage was not (until after the Reformation) a function of the clergy (this changed with the Anglican Canon Law and in the Roman decree Tametsi both of which were put in place to put social control on the problem of forced or "unauthorized" marriages (i.e. elopements). This has led to the proposal in some quarters (to which I am sympathetic) that the Church should get out of the business of conducting marriages altogether, leaving that to the state (following the Civil Law model) and merely bless unions once created. (See, for example, Mtr. Maggie Helwig's submission to the Commission on the Marriage Canon (PDF warning).) This recognizes that in this day when most marriages are by licence (and where the licence is a superior control to that provided by the traditional banns) the rationale for a clerical involvement in the marriage itself (as opposed to a blessing or recognition of the union) is long past.

This neatly sidesteps the immediate practical problem regarding having to make a decision regarding how to treat civil same-sex unions from a sacramental position. It remains open to somebody concerned about this to treat a same-sex blessing as a sacramental with a similar external form to the sacrament of marriage, just as a blessing of a "traditional" marriage by the church would be another sacramental (the marriage, the sacrament itself, having been performed outside the church). It means that discussion about marriage as a sacrament become a side-issue to the broader social justice issues.

There are two problems with this. The first is that it is unlikely to be adopted: Mtr. Helwig's submission was not picked up by the final report of the commission, and the sentimental / social attachment to marriage in a church setting is too strong to get it easily accepted. The second is that taking as a ground to stand on the historical fact that requiring solemnizations of marriage "by" the Church is a late development ignores the fact that the Church was heavily involved in the regulation of marriage after the ceremony (not only in its handling of annulments but in e.g. the regulation of allowed periods during which sexual activity was curtailed such as Lent). (See Haw, The State of Matrimony for a treatment of the rules regarding marriage and annulment in the late mediaeval and early modern English Church.) The "clericalization" of marriage is not directly tied to the church's concern with marriage. Even if we push the period of focus back to the late Roman period, and shortly after, when the actual rules governing marriage were those of the old Roman Law (or Germanic customary law in some cases: see Julia M.H. Smith, Europe After Rome, for some discussion of this) the theological analysis of marriage was built up on a different basis.

It is sometimes said that marriage was a civil institution which the church recognized and (eventually) treated as a sacrament. This is not really true. In none of the relevant contexts for the Church in the first four centuries could marriage have been considered purely "civil". Jewish marriage customs and rules followed the Jewish Law, which was emphatically religious; the Roman marriage was equally grounded in (pagan) religion, as it treats the family as a cultus of which the paterfamilias is a domestic priest (see La Cité Antique by Fustel de Coulanges). However, it is certainly true that the institution of marriage as Paul found it (critically Paul, as his writings on marriage are the primary basis on which a sacramental understanding has been built) was one having an existence external to and independent of the Church. And the Dominical words regarding marriage (which the East has taken as one of the counsels of perfection and the traditional West as binding legislation) make no claims about the institutional nature, or the specific implications of the vows themselves.

This is where things begin to become interesting, long before we get to the issue of the sacramentality of same-sex unions. What Paul extracts from the institution of marriage as he encounters it, and what was common to "marriage" in its various forms from Jewish through Hellenistic to Roman, through the Germanic period and that of Christendom until the last half century of so is the idea that an essential inequality in the relationship whereby the husband is dominant but loving ("the head") and the wife is submissive and loving is a sacramental mirror of the relationship between Christ and the Church, and more generally between the human and the divine. The sacramental theology of marriage has been built on this particular feature.

However, just as the previously unquestioned assumption that a primary purpose of matrimony was "for the procreation of children, to be brought up in the fear and nurture of the Lord, and to the praise of his holy Name" began to be questioned in the early 20th Century (note the Lambeth declaration on contraceptives as early as 1930) and has now run head on into issues of overpopulation as a violation of the stewardship of the earth, so the assumptions of the inherent inequality of women within the estate marriage have been under attack for well over a century (the first Married Woman's Property Act, which deep-sixed the concept of coverture, was passed by the Imperial Parliament in 1882), and it would be fair to say that in much of the West (or at least the urban West -- there are definitely holdouts such as the Southern Baptists) the majority view of marriage is that it is a relationship between equals. (It would not be overdoing it to say, though, that this is still an ongoing war, given the virulence of the dismissive and/or abusive language directed at women in many fora who act as equals in general social contexts, let alone marriage.)

You can see the traces of this changing in the early parts of Busman's Honeymoon where Peter and Harriet are arguing over using the 1662 or the 1928/1929 marriage vows (which removed the word "obey"). It is on that changed underlying understanding of marriage that same-sex unions are based, socially and in law.

Does the "matter" of the sacrament, the one that Paul knew, continue to exist with such a changed understanding? Or is it the case that an inherently "better" (on other grounds) state as a norm has succeeded it (one which can at most claim to be a sacramental, with a special status as a successor to one of the seven sacraments? Because the Dominical commendation of marriage is not the basis of the way in which its sacramentality has been understood, and it is not an exclusive statement.

Yet this is effectively the particular line in the sand that the Primates' meeting drew. It will please nobody: the conservative block do not regard it as nearly enough: they want a thoroughgoing purge of the liberals, along with an equally thoroughgoing protestantization of the Anglican Communion -- many of the really conservative ACs have already left for Rome or points East and are not a significant force outside Forward in Faith in the UK, and they are probably the only conservative group for which a defence of marriage as a sacrament is likely to be the primary issue (in principle, ACs on the left can share the same concern while generally supporting LGBTQIA-friendly endeavours in just about every other way. The progressive block is outraged at this level of sanction and given the history of social change (in England in particular) on this matter and there will still be the question of what to do when the three-year sanction of the ECUSA is finished.

I was at a Homeless Memorial Service on Tuesday where one speaker characterised the relative lack of expenditure on homelessness as (basically) a result of "tax cuts for the rich hurting the poor".

That has a certain amount of effective truth -- "keeping taxes low" tends to benefit the rich more than it does the moderately well off, and much more than it benefits the poor -- but it is, essentially, a lie which makes the speakers / listeners in a largely middle-class or working-class crowd feel better about themselves than they should.

The evidence from the last municipal election, looking at a ward-level breakdown (if we take votes for Ford as those most committed to keeping tax rates low, and least likely to allocate resources to reducing homelessness[1]) is that it is the less well-off -- the working poor, essentially -- who made up a very large part of the Ford vote, based on ward-level analyses. Much of the rest of that vote was classically middle class. (The really well-off tended to vote for Tory, with Chow as a second choice.) There are obviously other contributing factors -- right/libertarian political views among some of the well-off and the right end of the political spectrum -- but simply pointing at the rich is to let all the rest of us off too lightly.

At a provincial/federal level, other factors enter, of course, but even those are hard to categorise as simply rich vs. poor. (A resentment of large cities by rural and small-town voters, for example, is a factor here, especially for a Federal government which has a rural/suburban base; so is the resentment of Ontario in other parts of the federation.)

At the same gathering, Michael Shapcott (who was in my year in Law School) noted that there were on the order of 90,000 applicants on the current waiting list for assisted housing and approximately 700 units being built.

This got me to thinking: assume that the way to address homelessness in a tight market is simply to build a lot of assisted rental stock[2]. (Discount the cost here, temporarily, even though it's on the order of, at a guess, 30 billion dollars[3]: in principle the federal government could raise the money, if necessary by raising taxes. Do note, though, that this is ten times the size of the 2014 deficit.) Likewise, assume that a single high-density building is about 25 stories high and has about 20 units on each floor. (This falls somewhere between 60-floor Le Corbusier projects and low-rise developments with far less density but more liveability.) Then each building would have 500 units. To address a list of 90,000 head-on would mean building 180 buildings; In addition, assume that you want liveability, so no more than five buildings per development, with a mix of green space and market-rate units as well, and commercial units to avoid the problems of e.g. "food deserts". Then you have 36 separate high-density developments spread throughout the city... what would they displace? What would be the impact on labour availability for other construction projects? What sorts of transit infrastructure would be needed? If you assume lower-density developments, the area required expands...

90,000 is the number of inhabitants, not units, in a reasonable-sized city and the TCHC currently handles about 58,000 units. Current residential building starts of all categories currently is running at a little over 25,000 units per year, although it has bounced around between about 50,000 / year to about 25,000 / year.

It's clear that this approach is just not feasible politically: aside from the tax increases (30 billion is over 10% of the existing expenditures in the federal budget, and that doesn't include costs for electrical, sewer, transit, and other infrastructure which would be required), the firestorm from expropriating the land needed would be immense. It's the scale of project which typically takes place only after something like a tsunami, earthquake, or the Blitz. This doesn't mean, though, that this sort of thing would be impractical if it had been a priority all along -- building units gradually as demand increased would be practicable in a way that a head-on assault on the backlog is not, though still posing political challenges.

Michael cited Medicine Hat's Housing First initiative in his remarks. The linked article indicates that Medicine Hat had 1,147 people using emergency shelters, and cites no numbers for an assisted housing waiting list; Toronto has 4,635 spaces, and demand at times effectively exceeds capacity. This suggests that Michael was (probably deliberately, for rhetorical effect) mixing apples and oranges by raising this example but also citing the waiting list size: eliminating the demand on shelters by using a Housing First approach is a daunting but feasible project; addressing the 90,000 waiting list he mentioned in the same way is not. (And that itself ignores the claims of queue-jumping if people in shelters get housing ahead of people at the head of the TCHC waiting list.)

That doesn't mean that pressuring all levels of government to address the supply of units directly isn't worthwhile: no matter what, that in itself clearly is insufficient at present. But treating that as the primary component of a programme to reduce or eliminate homelessness and housing shortages is almost certainly misguided; a broader approach is clearly needed.

[1]This was a theme in Chow's campaign, although it didn't get highlighted, and it is certainly emerging as a theme in Tory's administration, although it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

[2]Which is probably not even the general direction of a right approach, although certainly an expansion in available flats to rent is a necessary component in a tight market. The more fruitful approach would be to address root causes with a mix of a guaranteed annual income policy towards income support, tighter rent controls (to prevent simple profit-taking by landlords of increased income in the hands of renters), better mental health support to assist with the bottom rung of the homeless as well as other mental health costs which society does not deal very well with, aggressive educational supports, etc.

[3]Assuming about 300,000 per unit at cost, which is a wild guess based on non-luxury condominium prices and subtracting an assumed profit percentage; it's at the right order of magnitude, at least. A big chunk of that would be expropriation of land, which would have a knock-on effect op putting pressure on the rest of Toronto's housing stock. The demand this would place on labour, though, might drive wages up. On the good side, unemployment would temporarily drop.

Last night there were two closely following occurrences on CBC Radio One which really had me shaking my head.

The first was the weather after 10:00, which was a forecast for Friday night. Last Friday night.

The second was a discussion on Jian Gomeshi regarding "rape culture", with a typical talking head, two sided discussion. I could imagine a useful and nuanced discussion regarding this, but this was neither: they must have gone out of their way to find somebody (Heather Macdonald) who would do all of the following: try to redefine the term to apply only to university and college campuses; try to restrict the discussion to situations involving excessive consumption of alcohol; recommend that young men should be encouraged to show "chivalrous" behaviour towards young women[1]; favour measures placing the onus on potential victims rather than potential predators; reject findings because of a gut feeling that the numbers weren't believable; try to use the issue as a springboard to a "young people are sliding downhill" attitude; argue that the fact that parents / young women want to get into campuses (specifically, Yale) which have some publicity around having difficulty with student sexual assault is evidence against rape culture (on campus) rather than an illustration of rape culture (in the general society).

(For the record, I think that especially in light of the fact that Canada replaced the offence of rape with several variants of "sexual assault" decades ago, and in light of the fact that a number of the standard components of "rape culture" seem to be non-specific to sexual assault or gender relations at all[2], the term "rape culture" could probably stand to be replaced with a better term.)

I have low expectations of the CBC generally, since they gutted CBC FM. However, this was definitely extreme even for them.

[1]Since "chivalrous" behaviour embeds a whole set of assumptions about inequality of power / privilege it's basically another side of the same coin as denigration, not a counter to it.

[2]I observe that the component made up of "boys will be boys" extends not just to serious mistreatment of women but to (sometimes quite serious) vandalism of physical property (and, at least in the not too distant past, mistreatment of visible minorities[3]) in the name of "pranks", which implies to me that what drives it is not just related to rape culture but a more general problem society has with expecting and enforcing mature behaviour.

[3] Cf. Joe Hall's "Full Moon and Welfare Cheques".

The Ontario Government is getting into a frazzle about the failure rate of public school students in mathematics, offering bonuses for teachers doing skills upgrading. Fingers have been pointed at the teachers' math skills, their math teaching skills, the curriculum, and other possible culprits.

There is, of course, a long-term issue with teachers and math skills, in that someone with good math skills coming out of university can find more attractive areas to specialize in than teaching.

However, I have spent the past several years watching my daughter deal with the curriculum, and I do think that there is a problem with it: it fits the needs of almost no children. It flits from topic to topic in such a way that students who have difficulty do not get enough drill to master the issues; but it also allows for no real exploration of the issues by students who are good at math, for the same reason.

They will have a two or three week unit on series, for example, which could be extended to any number of interesting things to explore; but then there will be a sharp break and they'll move on to an equally short unit on, say, geometry.

And while we're on the topic of math skills in the general population, maybe we should ask: what skills?

A few weeks ago I was on public transit and saw an ad designed to popularize the idea of a need for math skills. The example problem it gave was a simple word problem of the sort which requires conversion from words to a simple polynomial and then solving for x. It was soluble by someone with high-school math trivially. But I thought: for someone who does not work in the sciences or engineering, where is that type of skill necessary? Certainly not in everyday life; nor, I think, in accountancy or other similar fields, where numbers tend to be delivered and manipulated in quite a different way. So for a student with an interest in (say) history and languages, there's no obvious reason for this sort of skill to be considered a critical one: yet the provincial curriculum makes it important. In contrast, estimating probabilities and risk in a back-of-the-envelope manner is probably more important in day-to-day life; humans are notoriously bad at it. Understanding some of the underlying issues around encryption (such as the difficulty of factoring large primes, or the ease of doing frequency analysis) is becoming a generally useful skill set (not the ability to do it, but the understanding of what is hard and what is easy).

Students who have the potential to be good scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and the like need a far more challenging, ambitious, and interesting curriculum than we are giving them. (A genuinely competent 17-year-old should be able to handle Hardy's Course of Pure Mathematics if properly prepared.) Students who are not going there need only a fraction of what we are shoving down their throats. (When was the last time I really needed, say, trigonometry at the high-school level? I don't have to measure very many things by angle-and-one-side mechanisms; either I need more -- Fourier analysis, full-blown trigonometric functions, etc., or I need none.) And the relatively rare students who have the ability but are interested in everything -- literature, history, philosophy, and languages as well as maths and sciences -- can handle the more difficult stream and benefit from it.

There was a press release by the CAA a while back which their deputation is repeating at the budget hearings in Toronto today. It says that motorists pay for the road system, i.e. are not subsidized.

The problem is that even if all their numbers are correct, it shows only that they don't understand the nature of the revenue system.

They count things like the gas taxes and any vehicle-specific taxes towards their totals. However, these are not user fees; they are taxes which go into general funds.

There are also special excise taxes on alcohol and tobacco, and there are probably other taxes buried elsewhere. There are certainly taxes buried in imported consumer goods on which customs duties are charged. (Excise taxes used to be the largest source of government funds, at one point before the introduction of the income tax during the First World War.) But we don't consider the hefty taxes which are part of the price of a six-pack of beer as money which goes to support, say, the addiction research and health care systems. Governments tax things which people are willing to pay more money for (or else adding taxes would reduce sales and reduce the take from the tax levies), and cigarettes, drink, and gasoline are high up on the list of products where raising prices tends to have a relatively small effect on demand.

Similarly, property taxes do not go into a special fund dedicated towards utility infrastructure costs.

Some of the Ontario provincial gas tax (14.7 cents / litre) is, in fact, not directed towards general funds. It is, however, explicitly set aside for transit purposes, not for supporting the road system. However, this is still a diversion out of general funds, and not a user fee.

Only if the various taxes, collectively, were to be properly characterised as a user fee would the claim made by the CAA make any sense.

One way that this plays out, very practically, points up the difference. The excise taxes go to the federal government (which raises them under its general revenue power under s. 91(3) of the Constitution Act, 1867). The Federal government, however, has no authority over highways and streets, although it can choose to fund provincial initiatives, if it chooses, via its general spending power. The provincial government applies the tax (which is considered a direct tax, even though it is buried in the price) under its direct taxation powers under s. 92(2). The government does pay for provincial highways directly, but other roads are maintained and built by the municipalities. (And there are fewer provincial highways than there used to be, as a result of the Harris government's downloading in the 1990s.) The net effect is that most money is spent on roads by the level of government which does not collect gasoline taxes, and a substantial amount of tax is raised by a level of government which does not maintain roads at all.

It is perfectly normal and legitimate that it plays out this way. Most services provided by government cost money which cannot, practically, be raised by means of immediately offsetting fees. Transfer payments are the obvious example, but consider also (for example) monies for public libraries, hospitals, police, and public schools.

The CAA claim is only suited for some sort of Libertarian polity where all levies are dedicated user fees. The system of government we have never has been organized that way, and never will be, for both practical and political reasons. It is a pure piece of propaganda, and should be treated as such.

It's a truism to say that law and social norms do not always coincide. Law is frequently behind social change -- intellectual property issues at present come to mind; so does the fact that in general statutory criminal offences which get repealed for obsolescence typically get repealed long after they have become obsolete (blasphemous libel was not taken seriously as a charge long before it was removed from the law-books). It is also sometimes ahead of social change: there's little doubt that texting while driving is probably more dangerous than driving over the statutory alcohol limit, but it would be hard to tell that it was illegal in Ontario by standing at a downtown intersection and counting the offending drivers who pass by. Some drivers who text may also drink before driving (Hello, Mayor Ford), but probably relatively few of them.

This is never more critical to understand than when dealing with rights. For virtually all modern theorists, rights are creatures of law. Even when we claim rights the law does not yet allow (from the suffragettes demands for the vote onward) the demand is for them to become part of the law.

And here we run into a problem: because legal rights may be a proxy for what is actually wanted.

I'm thinking of a post over on Crooked Timber comparing the advance of feminism and gay rights, and the comments that followed it: because what was very clear is that the fundamental issues which any meaningful feminism have to deal with are not definable (practically) as legal rights: they are necessarily demands for underlying social change, which means that they are fundamentally disruptive.

Even if you start with a standard "rights" example, it starts to lead you towards a radically reconfigured society pretty quickly. Equaity in the workplace requires, among other things, that there be no implicit penalty paid differently by men and women for having a family. This in turn requires a reasonably equal sharing of child care tasks and other domestic tasks between men and women (because otherwise we are asking an employer to subsidize one partner as compared to the other). (It probably also requires the abolishing of the more general expectation of A-type devotion to your employer all the time, even off-hours, or you create a situation where couples are even more dis-incentivized (awful word) to have children than they are now.) This in turn requires a social acceptance of an abolition of much of the current divide between what are seen as men's and women's domestic roles. This is reasonably obvious, but it's also fairly obviously something that is happening slowly, if it is happening generally at all (there are certainly pockets of it, but then you can find pockets of almost any altruistic behaviour if your look for it).

(As with many if not most "feminist" examples, carrying this through thoroughly would benefit men as well as women. It would do so by providing a much better life-work balance (as the HR departments say).)

In other words, the law can provide a certain set of formal guarantees, but there will be subtle and systematic bias within that set unless social, not legal, change also takes place.

But the changes required really to carry through the change are social, not legislatable. When it comes down to getting people to accept socially and privately that virtually all roles in society are a priori neither specially male nor specially female, law is a pretty useless instrument.

To take another example, violence against women is a result of several factors, some of which can't really be changed (men are typically bigger and stronger than women), some of which apply to all forms of violence but can be changed (social willingness to accept the use of physical force as a means of expression at all), and some of which apply to women in particular. Among the latter we can point out particularly the tendency to treat women as property[1] (or, more generally, as being of sufficiently lower status), which is a special case of the tendency to see an implicit disparity of power and status between a man and a woman, and always in the man's favour. (This is as much true of models which imply that the man should protect the woman as in those which allow him to thrash her; the damage done by the latter is simply more immediately obvious and less subtle.)

Power and status are not the same, but morph easily into and out of one another. You can have some sorts of power without status, and some forms of status confer very little power (I have an M.A., which is a form of status; I derive no benefit from it which could be described as power.) In general, though, the imbalances which flow from SWM status display as power in many situations.

None of this is in any way new. In fact, it's dispiriting how often it has to be said.

Changing status means changing social perceptions in ways that law cannot manage. And a lot of people have a great deal invested in the already existing set of structures driving those perceptions.

There's an easy test of the disparity in men's and women's status generally. "Unisex" always means "females dressing like males". Women can wear jeans, jackets, ties, trousers; men cannot wear skirts and dresses. (Kilts on Burn's night do not count. Show up to the office in a standard workplace in a kilt regularly and see what happens.) There's no obvious reason for this: skirts were fine for Aristotle, Cicero, and Augustine, and have some obvious comfort advantages in some situations. (Similarly, men were the peacocks in th 18th century as far as bright colours and elaborate preparation went.) The reason is simple: "trading up" in status is accepted, even if considered a little brash in some situations; "trading down" is not. We will know that the revolution has taken place when all types of clothing are considered equally acceptable to either sex.

(Note, too that addressing the whole structure of disparate treatment built into the fashion and cosmetics industries would have a tremendous impact on society. Malls like Eaton Centre would be ghost towns if they had the number of women's clothing stores reduced to match the number of men's clothing stores, and fashion is one obvious place where people have been so brainwashed by the commercial conglomerates that they would fight bitterly against them going away.)

I think it's misleading, by the way, to call this patriarchal; it's not, It's andrarchal. Patriarchy means a form of society where the authority of society and specifically the state is exercised through the heads of households: like Rome (where a paterfamilias could put to death an adult son if he chose), or the sort of society envisaged by Deuteronomy. An andrarchal society, on the other hand, merely privileges the rule of men.

So, naturally, the feminist project has not advanced in the way the gay rights project has. Many of the changes the gay rights movement have pushed for are those the law can provide: marriage rights, employment rights, anti-harassment laws. Those rights women got years ago. (1986, in Canada, when the Equality Rights provisions of the Charter came into play, although that merely backed up the Human Rights Codes which already supported those rights. I grant that the US, which has still not passed the ERA, has a problem here.)

The changes necessary to any attempt to institute anything more than formal equality run much deeper. Many of the simple slogans addressing single points seem easy enough to put in place on their own, but they take root only where underlying attitudes have changed (or at least begun to change) fundamentally. And I'm afraid I don't see anything like forces arrayed to make this anything other than a very long process.

[1]Not entirely unique, I grant: there are certainly cases of women whose attitude towards "my man" is proprietary especially as regards others. However, the ramifications of such attitudes are much smaller: I don't think any such woman would be likely to agree that the man therefore should depend on her and receive only an allowance rather than earning his own income.

This morning there was an interview on Metro Morning with Ken Lewenza, the outgoing head of the CAW, who is stepping down because he feels that someone with more energy and time to go before retirement should be the head of the new uion created by the merger of the CAW and the CEP. The discussion turned to the issues confronting the union movement and Lewenza made the usual points about the increasing wage and power equality issues in the workplace.

And I thought "you'll have to do better than that".

He made the right points, theoretically, but there was nothing there that I could see that would appeal to the people he needs to appeal to. Yes, lots of people are suffering from reduced incomes, flexibility, expectations, etc. ... but instead of looking at the trends and saying, "we need to get organized to respond to this" their reaction seems to be "Look at those overpaid people in union jobs; they need to be pulled down to our level". If you're going to appeal to the current labour force, it's going to require a new twist, and probably a lot more fire in the belly.

If you're going to be forming One Big Union, you might as well at least adopt the model of the people who were serious about it, the IWW, and bring it up to date.

Occupy tried, but for all of a general willingness of just about everyone to point at the 1%, it hasn't spread or become a self-sustaining growth movement with political pull (unlike its dark mirror-image, the Tea Party or equivalent, who are responding to many of the same forces -- senses of disempowerement and lack of options -- in their own way).
There's also the problem that most of the issues aren't just with the 1%, but structural problems which implicate a much larger swathe at the top, or towards the top, of the pyramid.

There's also the problem that (except maybe at the scale of the IWW) unions may not be in the best position to respond to the current challenges. For all of their strong points, they are very tightly tied to the current employment model (at best, they would want to replace capitalist owners with public ownership, and see how well that has worked out in North America recently for the public sector workers). But in light of the real possibility that the only way out of the tunnel may be to shift to a leisure society where basic needs are decoupled from the need to hold a job and the status (and general burden) of labour shift radically, an attachment to a 19th-20th century labour model may not be a strength.

It's worth noting that the preindustrial model, for all of its entwinement with a scarcity economy, may be somewhere to look for partial models for that shift. Many if not most preindustrial workers worked only for as long as needed to supply their needs / wants (food, shelter, drink) and then would cut out and relax for the rest of the week. A similar attitude might work better with a (relatively) surplus economy where only a comparatively small amount of labour (at the level of society as a whole) is required than one which emphasizes the dignity of labour and condemns taking time off as laziness. A great deal flows from the extension of middle-class idealization of labour -- "the devil still finds work for idle hands to do" -- to both the upper and lower classes during the 19th century: people used to aspire to being idle.

So Toronto just made it through an unusually heavy rainstorm, which is being treated as being comparable in broad to that of Hurricane Hazel (well, actually, no: it broke Hazel's record for one day of rain at Pearson (126 mm), but Hazel dropped 285 mm over two days).

Several of the problems which followed showed the importance of redundancy (in the engineer's sense), or, rather, what happens when you don't have it.

Redundancy gets a bad name outside the engineering community. It's used as a euphemism for "unnecessary". This is especially true when applied to employment contexts ("terminating redundant employees"), but even calling, for example, a set of capital resources "redundant" is frequently a prelude to arguing that they should be dispensed with.

However, redundant systems are important. In the computer world, and especially in health care, transportation control systems, and financial services, redundancy is taken as an absolute requirement: the only debate is usually over whether a system needs a hot backup or merely a secondary system which can be turned on in the event that the primary fails. Secondary sites are usually distant from primary sites (in some jurisdictions some types of secondary sites are required by law to be more than 500 miles from the primary site).

If you have no redundancy in employment contexts, then all sorts of problems show up sooner or later. I know people who are unwilling to take the time off they're entitled to (vacations, time in lieu for overtime, etc.) because their employers provide no real coverage for the tasks they perform. If a work place runs on a "lean" basis, all it takes is a single outbreak of contagious disease to bring its functioning to a screeching halt, and the stresses associated with overwork will eventually bring in their own revenges.

Redundancy is a core concept in risk management. You need to have more staff in a health care system than is needed for normal functioning of the system, or you're screwed the next time a serious epidemic comes along (or even the next time there's a confluence of unusual disasters, like an unusual number of collisions on a holiday weekend). Some risks are more likely than others -- we can be pretty certain there will be new influenza varieties every few years, but a meteor strike large enough to level even a square mile in a populated area is relatively unlikely -- and that affects where you put your redundant resources.

Or consider the Quebec ice storm of 1998. Many high voltage transmission lines failed during that storm, but the ones which did not tended to be older, not newer -- they had been built back when structures tended (by today's standards) to be "overbuilt", rather than just being constructed to a cheaper standard which would handle normal but not extreme fluctuations.

Lack of redundancy is currently a very big deal in Toronto's transit system. GO basically saturates Union Station's capacity at rush hour, and the Yonge subway line normally runs at or above capacity at rush hour on weekdays. The TTC has some spare capacity in busses, but that buffer is currently decreasing -- ridership growth is occurring faster than the fleet catches up, although there is a large order for articulated busses in the works, beginning in 2014. The Downtown Relief Line is a high priority because it will provide additional redundancy for the Yonge line.

But one thing that became very obvious on Monday, when the subway system shut down, was that there is no real redundancy at all as regards the subway. Theoretically there is, of course -- the streetcars and busses run on a grid, and if you want to get from, say, St. Clair Station to Dundas West Station (for example) you can as an individual take the St. Clair West Streetcar to Bathurst, the Bathurst bus to Bathurst Station, the Bathurst streetcar to Dundas Street, and the Dundas streetcar to Dundas West Station. But there's no capacity to handle more than a tiny sliver of the demand when both the Yonge-University and Bloor-Danforth lines shut down, and the times are very much longer. People who normally got home at 7:30 were getting home at 10:30 or later on Monday.

Or consider the water treatment system. Part of the problem was handling the volume surge in the water coming in (a capacity redundancy issue), but a second contributing factor was a dependency on power from the grid. Unlike hospitals, which maintain backup generators in case of a blackout, the stations seem to have no alternative.

The power distribution system does have redundancy built into the switching system, but the transformer station network is less resilient than is desirable: two days later there are still areas without power and the downtown is running in a "reduced power" mode, because it doesn't take much in the way of disruption to reduce capacity below the required level. (It's also not hot backup: if a single station blows, the system can compensate by routing around the problem, but it usually takes several hours to do so.)

One of the major problems with the current municipal government is that under Ford the government has avoided the sort of funding to systems which is required to provide redundancy (or even to handle growth -- the TTC in theory is supposed to maintain crowding standards below defined levels, but on some routes it does not have the funds actually to maintain those standards as ridership growth outstrips projections). This is not new -- many previous municipal governments have skimped on projects which provide benefit only at infrequent times (flood control being an obvious example) -- but it's worrying, especially in a context where severe weather events are likely to be increasingly frequent due to global climate change.

With regard to Margaret Wente's article on the passing of working-class masculinity:

The article elegizes something which should be buried as deeply as possible, unmourned. It valorized aggression and ignorance and actively rejected any intellectual values (even rejecting literacy). It is the value set of English lager louts and playground jocks.

It wasn't the only working-class, of course; there was also the working class of the Mechanics' Institutes. And the values were not restricted to the working class; they were essentially those of the huntin' shootin' sportin' gentleman: Squire Thwackum or White's Sir Ector.

These are not martial values as such for all that they were widespread in the rank-and-file; they are the values which ensured that a man would not rise above private in the army.

There is a great deal of talk these days regarding boys as having learning style problems related to girls, so that they fall behind (especially in language related skills) as they progress through school. As an ex-boy who had no problems in learning I do not believe that such problems are intrinsic to males: I believe that they are the result of socialization which aims at pushing yong males into exactly the kind of culture Wente speaks about.

I have been reading Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities and in conjunction have been bemused by the regular factoid which I run into of Jacobs being an influence on the New Urbanism.

I can't see it.

I've lived in a New Urbanist development, Cornell (in Markham, outside Toronto, since 2000 (not entirely by my own choice)). And I have seen none of the factors which Jacobs would identify in a lively and functioning city:

The density is not high enough. Not nearly. There are a reasonable number of duplexes and some townhomes, but the average density of the community, when you factor in zoned "green space", is not much higher than a typical suburb.
There is insufficient mingling of uses -- the little bit of commercial is separate from the majority of the residential area; and because of the low density, it basically supports a couple of convenience stores and some doctors' offices. There was a café for a while, but it closed for lack of business; as did the video rental store nearby. They are, I gather, talking of putting in new commercial use nearby -- in the form of a large-scale shopping mall; similarly, a community centre along thoroughly suburban lines.
The sidewalks are relatively little used, except for walking dogs -- a typically suburban use, not a particularly urban one. I used to walk to the commuter train -- not a very long walk, just over half an hour, and it gave me my exercise for the day -- and I never saw anyone else doing the same thing, over several years. Even on weekends, the sidewalks and parks were largely deserted.
The scattering of unfocussed parks echoes Jacobs' bad examples, not her good ones.

A few years ago I attended a focus group of current and ex-residents held by some of the builders. The builders wanted to build higher-density living: most of the people in the group (although they wanted the sort of amenities which go with higher-density life, like a bakery) were opposed to it, basically on the grounds that cheaper (= higher-density) housing would bring in the riff-raff. I was not amused; it's precisely the raising of density and the mix of types which makes an "urban" or "urbanist" (not "Urbanist", which would be a papal reference, I think) area work.

I was going to work today when I noticed a number (actually, an excessive number, due to the TTC's habit of selling ads for the same thing for every single slot in a subway car) of advertisements for a CBC program called "The Border". The terms of the ads suggested that it was playing up the idea that law enforcement officers have to break the law in order to do their jobs, with the implicit contempt for the rule of law which that implies. On checking the CBC website, I determined that this was a Canadian series about Canadian border issues, and not (as I had thought at first it must be) a US-set series.

I thought we were the country with values of Peace, Order, and Good Government, plus Due Process, and so forth. Not one which plays up the model of the maverick lawman.

When I was born, Canada had no "universal health care" system. Four years before I was born, my father went to graduate school in the United States and had only a very minimal sense of being in a different culture during that time.

By the time I was twenty-one, Canada not only had a universal health care system but had started to think of it (by contrast with the United States) as a distinguishing mark of the Canadian polity (although this would be ramped up even more in the ensuing couple of decades). When I was twenty-one, I went to graduate school in the United States, and felt myself to be usually in a slightly uncomfortably alien culture. (This wasn't because I hadn't been abroad before: I'd lived in France and visted a number of other countries which are, on their surface, far more different from Canada than the U.S. is.)

At present -- witness Michael Moore's new film on health care -- it looks as though the U.S. is never likely to adopt any form of universal health care, and its political culture seems to have wandered off in a wildly different direction from every other country in the world.

This seems to me to be a story not about Canada (which had changed in terms of its self-definition over the period of time) but about the United States. Up until sometime shortly after I was born there had been a broad common song-sheet, as it were, from which the Western democracies had sung. Some might be a little faster and some slower, but they were all following the same general path. Canada was rather behind the European countries on the health-care front (as on a number of others), but when it implemented health care it was recognizably acting in harmony with most of its peers. Similarly, the adoption of a set of loosely interconnected values -- a broad secularization of the official levels of social expression, the adoption of "gender" equality and later expansions of equality rights (most recently the extension of some form or another of marital rights to homosexuals -- marriage in Canada, civil unions in the U.K., for example), the relative demilitarization of society -- not only has Canada's military muscle declined since the end of WWII, but the way in which e.g. regimental churches, cadets, and other quasi-miltary or miltary-liked institutions used to be integrated with Canadian society has prety well evaporated).

Some of the changes in Canada would seem to move us more in the direction of the U.S. After all, we have much weakened the monarchical affiliations of the public arena -- no crowns on pillarboxes, any more -- and we've adopted a Charter of Rights which moved us heavily in the direction of U.S. Bill of Rights jurisprudence.

But at some point the U.S. dropped out of singing from the shared songsheet. Some of the differences may now look rooted quite a long ways back -- the evisceration of the "left" in America by the New Deal compared to other western democracies goes back to the Depression, and American exceptionalism goes back much farther than that. In the early sixties, there was already the Beyond the Fringe joke that "they have the Republican Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is the equivalent of our Conservative Party" -- although that is almost as much a commentary on the way in which the Liberals (not yet the LibDems) had dropped out of effective contention in the U.K. And there are still plenty of people in the U.S. (mainly in the cities and the "blue" areas on the American electoral map) who share ideals with the governing elites of the rest of the western societies. But the U.S. is now notable as the great holdout on public health care (see, e.g. the comments to this Crooked Timber thread). The Equal Rights Amendment was unable to be ratified. They are markedly more miltarily oriented than any other western country I've been in (the only country which has felt more suffused with a military theme was China, which is hardly Western).

You can find people in Canada who think, roughly, like "mainstream" Americans, but they are relatively few and far between. (They're still probably more common than in any other country.) Mark Steyn, David Warren, and David Frum are, after all, all Canadian in origin, and all stand rather to the right of the American spectrum.

By the time my five-year-old daughter is going to graduate school, the U.S. is likely to be so different that adjustment to its norms will probably be like adjusting to the norms of Germany, or France, rather than the nice, close, almost-cousins feeling that worked in my father's day.

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Work and Pay
Tawney on the Working Classes
Not Angels, but Anglicans
Homelessness
CBC Bizarreries
Math curricula
The CAA's study
Law, and norms, and why some change has to be "radical" to happen at all
Labour thoughts
Redundancy
Wente and Working Class Values
Jane Jacobs and the New Urbanism
What happened to my Canada?
Diverging cultures

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Entries tagged with social issues

Work and Pay

Tawney on the Working Classes

Not Angels, but Anglicans

Homelessness

CBC Bizarreries

Math curricula

The CAA's study

Law, and norms, and why some change has to be "radical" to happen at all

Labour thoughts

Redundancy

Wente and Working Class Values

Jane Jacobs and the New Urbanism

What happened to my Canada?

Diverging cultures