Quotulatiousness

April 4, 2013

Canadian public sector workers earn between 9% and 12% more than private sector workers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Once upon a time, back in the far-distant past, public sector workers got lower wages but better job security, benefits, and pensions than their private sector counterparts. Over the last few decades, the public sector wages caught up and surpassed the private sector, and if anything the benefits and pensions got better. The Fraser Institute calculates that currently there is between a 9% and a 12% premium paid to public sector workers for similar jobs (and that understates the overall differential):

Comparing Public and Private Sector Compensation in Canada examines wage and non-wage benefits for government employees (federal, provincial, and local) and private-sector workers nationwide. It calculates the wage premium for public-sector workers using Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey from April 2011, after adjusting for personal characteristics such as gender, age, marital status, education, tenure, size of establishment, type of job, and industry. When unionization is included in the analysis, the national public-sector “wage premium” (i.e., the degree to which public-sector wages exceed private-sector wages) declines to 9.0 per cent from 12.0 per cent.

Aside from higher wages, the study also found strong indications that Canada’s government workers enjoy more generous non-wage benefits than those in the private sector, including:

  • Pensions: 88.2 per cent of Canadian government workers were covered by a registered pension plan in 2011 compared to 26.4 per cent of private-sector employees.
  • Early retirement: Government employees retired 2.5 years earlier, on average, than private-sector workers between 2007 and 2011.
  • Job security: In 2011, 0.6 per cent of government employees lost their jobs — less than one sixth the job-loss rate in the private sector (3.8 per cent).

To ensure public-sector compensation is fair to both taxpayers and government workers, the report argues that better data collection is needed and suggests that Statistics Canada should gather data on wages and non-wage benefits more regularly and systemically than it does now. In addition, comparisons between the public and private sectors should focus on total compensation, not just wages or specific benefits such as pensions.

About one in five Canadian workers is in the federal, provincial, or local government civil service or related organizations, and only 15% of Canadians are self-employed. The vast majority of government workers are unionized, while the reverse is true in the private sector.

April 3, 2013

Parenting classes are a waste of time and money

Filed under: Education, Government, Health — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:02

Elizabeth and I took parenting classes, as neither of us had much experience of dealing with infants or small children before our son was born. Although the instructor was good at being re-assuring that we’d do fine as parents, almost none of the “skills” we were taught were actually of much use after the baby arrived. Since those early-90’s days, parenting courses have become even more common, but as Frank Furedi points out, no more relevant to the actual needs of parents and their newborns:

The parenting programmes promoted by government are based on a mixture of prejudice and the pseudoscience of so-called parenting research. Such ‘research’ is underpinned by a fundamental transformation in the meaning of parenting, which has been turned from a relationship into a skill. The core assumption in the government’s proposal for parenting classes is that childrearing consists of a set of practices that need to be learned by mothers and fathers. These practices are depicted as skills which can be taught by those who have the requisite professional qualifications.

No one could dispute that childrearing is something that is learned by mothers and fathers. Every human relationship involves a continual process of learning and gaining an understanding of the other person. Parents need to learn how to engage with the imagination of their child, how to stimulate her and when and how to restrain her from doing something harmful. Successful parents learn on the job. However, the really useful lessons we are learning have little to do with abstract skills, but rather are about understanding the relationship we have with our children.

The question is not whether parenting has to be learned, but whether it can be taught. Not everything that has to be learned can be taught. Parenting cannot be taught because it is about the forging and managing of an intimate relationship. And it is through the conduct of that relationship that people develop the insights and lessons suitable to their lives and conditions. One reason why professional intervention into family life is unlikely to have beneficial results is because each relationship contains something unique, which is only grasped by those involved in it.

[. . .]

However, the project of transforming parenting into a skill does have negative and potentially harmful consequences. When human relationships are recast as skills to be managed by professional trainers something very important happens in the way we conduct our personal affairs. As I argue in my study Paranoid Parenting such policy interventions cultivate a kind of learned helplessness among parents. Through exaggerating the complexity of child-rearing, parenting experts contribute to the eroding self-reliance of modern mums and dads. Inevitably, the principal outcome of such interventions is to distract parents from learning from their own experience. And yet learning from experience is the key to developing the confidence for making those crucial judgment calls that confronts parents on a daily basis.

They “held the kind of attitudes that make the Daily Mail‘s headlines look positively Left‑wing”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:47

Brendan O’Neill on the vast gulf between the bien pensant supporters of Britain’s current welfare system and those who actually depend on that system:

Comfortably off liberal campaigners are always bemused to discover that the working classes and poor do not share their love of the welfare state. Where radical middle-class students bravely spend bitterly cold evenings on pro‑NHS demos, and Left-leaning newspaper columnists write heartfelt articles about the importance of maintaining welfare payments, the less well-off seem totally unmoved by cuts to welfare.

[. . .]

Agreement that “unemployment benefits are too high and discourage work” has risen steadily among the less well-off. Only 40 per cent of benefits recipients agreed with it in 2003, while in 2011 59 per cent did. Thirty-eight per cent of working-class respondents agreed in 2003 that welfarism discouraged work; 58 per cent agreed in 2011.

The lack of love for the welfare state among its supposed beneficiaries drives liberal campaigners nuts. Why, they wail, are those on the breadline so down about the glorious postwar system of welfarism, even though it has saved their ungrateful rumps from destitution?

In Monday’s Guardian, columnist John Harris, who regularly travels around Britain to find out what the little people think, bemoaned the fact that anti-welfare “noise” always gets louder “as you head into the most disadvantaged parts of society”. This echoes a recent Guardian editorial which complained that ordinary Brits have become “more Scrooge-like” towards welfare claimants.

Or behold the bamboozled Joseph Rowntree researcher Fern Brady, who was horrified to discover that the less well-off are not remotely “pro-welfare”. Earlier this year, Ms Brady interviewed 150 families who will be affected by benefits cuts and was alarmed to find that “the majority held the kind of attitudes that make the Daily Mail‘s headlines look positively Left‑wing” — that is, they were anti-welfarism, and stingingly critical of those who claim welfare, even though they themselves claim it.

April 1, 2013

Canadian government pre-approves Cyprus-style haircuts for bank depositors

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:39

Not only can it happen here, but Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is making it explicit that it will happen here:

The politicians of the western world are coming after your bank accounts. In fact, Cyprus-style “bail-ins” are actually proposed in the new Canadian government budget. When I first heard about this I was quite skeptical, so I went and looked it up for myself. And guess what? It is right there in black and white on pages 144 and 145 of “Economic Action Plan 2013″ which the Harper government has already submitted to the House of Commons.

This new budget actually proposes “to implement a ‘bail-in’ regime for systemically important banks” in Canada. “Economic Action Plan 2013″ was submitted on March 21st, which means that this “bail-in regime” was likely being planned long before the crisis in Cyprus ever erupted. So exactly what in the world is going on here? In addition, as you will see below, it is being reported that the European Parliament will soon be voting on a law which would require that large banks be “bailed in” when they fail. In other words, that new law would make Cyprus-style bank account confiscation the law of the land for the entire EU.

I can’t even begin to describe how serious all of this is. From now on, when major banks fail they are going to bail them out by grabbing the money that is in your bank accounts. This is going to absolutely shatter faith in the banking system and it is actually going to make it far more likely that we will see major bank failures all over the western world.

What you are about to see absolutely amazed me when I first saw it. The Canadian government is actually proposing that what just happened in Cyprus should be used as a blueprint for future bank failures up in Canada.

QotD: The Social Democratic Moment

Filed under: Europe, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

The 1960s saw the apogee of the European state. The relation of the citizen to the state in Western Europe in the course of the previous century had been a shifting compromise between military needs and political claims: the modern rights of newly enfranchised citizens offset by older obligations to defend the realm. But since 1945 that relationship had come increasingly to be characterised by a dense tissue of social benefits and economic strategies in which it was the state that served its subjects, rather than the other way around.

In later years the all-encompassing ambitions of the Western European welfare state would lose some of their appeal — not least because they could no longer fulfill their promise: unemployment, inflation, ageing populations and economic slowdown placed insuperable constraints upon the efforts of states to deliver their half of the bargain. Transformations in international capital markets and modern electronic communications hamstrung governments’ capacity to plan and enforce domestic economic policy. And, most important of all, the very legitimacy of the interventionist state itself was undermined: at home by the rigidities and inefficiencies of public-sector agencies and producers, abroad by the incontrovertible evidence of chronic economic dysfunction and political repression in the Socialist states of the Soviet bloc.

Tony Judt, “The Social Democratic Moment”, Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945, 2005

March 28, 2013

Paul Wells: They didn’t call it a budget because it isn’t a budget

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:48

For example, a budget would actually provide you with comprehensible statements of anticipated revenues and spending for all the big ticket items:

I work in Ottawa and I try to stay on top of things, but this was news to me. In fact, I didn’t even notice it until four days after Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released his — er — plan on March 21. Of course, there was much chortling in the press gallery at the government’s insistence on calling its annual account of revenues and expenses something besides a budget. But the significance of the thing took a while to sink in. Flaherty and his boss, Stephen Harper, do not call their big annual document a “budget” anymore because it is no longer a budget.

A budget, as anyone who has tried to run a household knows, is the moment when you stop telling yourself soothing tales and inject a note of reality into your life. On page 64 of the 1997 budget, for instance, the government of the day gave us an “outlook for program spending” with multi-year projections for spending levels in defence, Aboriginal programs, “business subsidies” and so on. It was that straightforward.

Harper’s Economic Action Plans, by contrast, are carnivals of fantasy. EAP13 — we will use the government-approved hashtag, which I assume is pronounced to sound like a shriek of terror — is 200 pages longer than Budget 1997 but finds no room for a one-page program-spending outlook, nor indeed for a program-spending outlook of any length. Like the best funhouses, this one depends on its volume for much of its amusement value. The decision to merge CIDA into the Foreign Affairs Department is announced on the 31st page of a chapter on “supporting families and communities,” and I can only assume it is there as a reward for perseverance. The morning after Flaherty’s speech, a diplomat asked me how it is possible for a G7 country to release a budget that does not at any point say how much the government will spend on defence next year. I gave the fellow a long answer. I should have said his premise was wrong, because — stop me if you’ve heard this — it’s not a budget.

British energy prices graphically explained

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:24

At The Register, Lewis Page debunks the propaganda from the government and shows the cost components of British energy prices from the government’s own published source:

The government’s Department of Energy and Climate Change, with the current minister as mouthpiece, has just pushed out a report claiming that its green policies are saving us money now and will save us even more in coming decades. Can it be true? We can save the planet — or anyway reduce carbon emissions — and it not only costs nothing, but puts money in our pockets?

In a word, no: of course not. If that was true there would be no need for government action, we’d be acting to reduce carbon emissions on our own. And indeed, once you skip the foolish tinned quotes and bogo-stats in the executive summary, the report itself makes it very clear that in fact green policies are already to blame for most of the sustained climb in electricity prices we’ve suffered over the past decade — and that it’s going to get a lot worse.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

The blue and brown bars are what you would pay without green intervention. The rest is thanks to the greens.

So there you are, plain as day. The various green interventions in the UK and EU energy markets which have come in since the turn of the century are already costing you a hefty sum — the government have already forced up the price you pay for electricity today by nearly 20 per cent over where it would have been if they’d left matters alone. If they carry on as planned, by the year 2030 they will have managed to drive it up by more than a third over where it would normally be.

March 27, 2013

MI5 and GCHQ will include assistance from the IT industry in the fight against online crime

Filed under: Britain, Government, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:42

Two of the British government’s top intelligence agencies will team up with specialists from the IT field in a new initiative to counter online “cyber” crime:

Cyber-security experts from industry are to operate alongside the intelligence agencies for the first time in an attempt to combat the growing online threat to British firms.

The government is creating a so-called fusion cell where analysts from MI5 and GCHQ, the domestic eavesdropping agency, will work with private sector counterparts.

The cell is part of the Cyber Security Information Sharing Partnership (Cisp), launched on Wednesday, to provide industry with a forum to share details of techniques used by hackers as well as methods of countering them.

At any one time there will be about 12 to 15 analysts working at the cell, based at an undisclosed location in London.

“What the fusion cell will be doing is pulling together a single, richer intelligence picture of what is going on in cyberspace and the threats attacking the UK,” a senior official said.

John Leyden at The Register has more:

The programme, which follows a successful pilot scheme in 2011, is designed to support the wider aims of the UK’s cyber security strategy: such as making Britain the best country in the world to do e-business and protecting critical components of the national infrastructure (ie banks, utilities, telecoms and power grid).

Eighty companies from five key sectors of the economy — finance, defence, energy, telecommunications and pharmaceuticals — were encouraged to share information as part of the pilot scheme. The wider programme (involving a reported 160 organisations, at least initially) will allow access to a secure web-portal to gain access to shared threat intelligence information in real time, the BBC reports.

[. . .]

Terry Greer-King, UK MD for internet security firm Check Point, commented:

“This is a key step forward for both Governments and business in fighting web attacks, and reducing their impact. It’s essential that organisations collaborate and share intelligence with each other to track emerging threats, mitigate their severity or block them before they cause damage. Fighting threats together is much more effective than fighting alone.”

“In 2012, our research found that 63 per cent of organisations were infected with bots, and 54 per cent infected with malware that they didn’t know about. Any move which helps to reduce these figures is very welcome,” he added.

March 26, 2013

Irish municipal workers fear for their jobs after fixing a pothole … without getting Health & Safety approval first

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Europe, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:05

There are some stories which are just too silly for words:

THREE county council workers have been suspended from duty for attempting to fill in a pothole outside Carrigaline.

There has been outrage at the suspensions, which were imposed by the local authority after a health and safety inspector came across the workers carrying out unscheduled repairs to a road.

The outdoor crew were suspended on full pay pending an inquiry, and are now fearing for their jobs.
Council workers must pre-plan road works, fill in reports detailing the repairs to be carried out, and use the appropriate signage to alert the public.

It’s understood workers were on their way back to a council depot in Carrigaline when they spotted a large pothole on the road surface.

They decided to stop their vehicle to repair the pothole, even though it was not on their official list of jobs. They had earlier been carrying out scheduled repairs on the Carrigaline to Crosshaven road.

A health and safety inspector came across the workers carrying out the unofficial repairs and reported them to the local authority for a breach of health and safety guidelines.

Take diet change recommendations with a pinch of salt

Filed under: Food, Government, Health, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:59

Yes, yes, I know salt is one of the most dangerous substances known to man. Well, this week, anyway. Next week they may decide to recommend doubling your daily intake instead of reducing it. It’s an example of the nanny state’s long history of providing inconsistent — and sometimes even dangerous — dietary advice:

The government told people to switch from saturated animal fats to unsaturated vegetable fats. But that advice may have killed a lot of people. As David Oliver notes, a recent study “in the British Medical Journal” shows that ”those who heeded the advice” from public-health officials “to switch from saturated fats to polyunsaturated vegetable oils dramatically reduced their odds of living to see 2013,” incurring up to a ”60% increase in risk of death by switching from animal fats to vegetable oils.” This possibly deadly medical advice has a long history:

    Fifty years ago the medical community did an about-face … and instead went all in on polyunsaturated fats. It reasoned that since (a) cholesterol is associated with cardiovascular disease and (b) polyunsaturated fats reduce serum cholesterol levels, it inescapably followed that (c) changing people’s diet from saturated fats to polyunsaturated fats would save a lot of lives. In 1984 Uncle Sam got involved – Time magazine reported on it in “Hold the Eggs and Butter” – and he made a big push for citizens to swap out animal fat in their diet for the vegetable variety and a great experiment on the American people was begun.

As Oliver, an expert on mass torts, points out, it is hard to ”think of any mass tort, or combination of mass torts, that has produced as much harm as the advice to change to a plant oil-based diet” may have done.

Some federal food-safety regulations have also harmed public health, such as the “poke and sniff” inspection method “that likely resulted in USDA inspectors transmitting filth from diseased meat to fresh meat on a daily basis.” The Obama administration has foolishly discouraged potato consumption, even though potatoes are highly nutritious, even as it has subsidized certain sugary and fatty foods, and promoted bad advice about salt.

Tunisians troll their own government with memestorm

Filed under: Africa, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Timothy Geigner on the Tunisian response to a government that fails to comprehend YouTube:

You will remember the nation of Tunisia for being a flash point of the Arab Spring revolution, in which social media and the internet played a massive role, as well as for the post-revolution government’s subsequent crackdown on those tools that brought them into power. There seems to be something of an ongoing problem within Middle East governments, in that they simply don’t recognize how to handle popular dissent, often taking on the very characteristics of the dissenter’s complaints to an almost caricature level. In that respect, while it may sound silly, any government learning to deal with the open communication system of the net is going to have to come to terms with memes and the manner in which they spread.

Which brings us back to Tunisia. They seem to have a problem with this Gangnam Style, Harlem Shake combo-video produced by some apparently fun-loving Tunisian students (the original was taken down due to a highly questionable copyright claim, by the way, because while even the Tunisian government wasn’t evil enough to block the video, a bogus DMCA claim had no such qualms).

You can guess how the Tunisians reacted…

March 21, 2013

The technological imbalance between security and threats

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:17

Bruce Schneier on the power of technology in a security context:

A core, not side, effect of technology is its ability to magnify power and multiply force — for both attackers and defenders. One side creates ceramic handguns, laser-guided missiles, and new-identity theft techniques, while the other side creates anti-missile defense systems, fingerprint databases, and automatic facial recognition systems.

The problem is that it’s not balanced: Attackers generally benefit from new security technologies before defenders do. They have a first-mover advantage. They’re more nimble and adaptable than defensive institutions like police forces. They’re not limited by bureaucracy, laws, or ethics. They can evolve faster. And entropy is on their side — it’s easier to destroy something than it is to prevent, defend against, or recover from that destruction.

For the most part, though, society still wins. The bad guys simply can’t do enough damage to destroy the underlying social system. The question for us is: can society still maintain security as technology becomes more advanced?

I don’t think it can.

How Russians view American foreign policy moves

Filed under: Government, Middle East, Politics, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In short, they don’t believe it’s mere ham-handedness, arrogance, and incompetence — they think it’s only supposed to look that way:

It’s instructive to view ourselves through a Russian mirror. The term “paranoid Russian” is a pleonasm. “The fact is that all Russian politicians are clever. The stupid ones are all dead. By contrast, America in its complacency promotes dullards. A deadly miscommunication arises from this asymmetry. The Russians cannot believe that the Americans are as stupid as they look, and conclude that Washington wants to destroy them,” I wrote in 2008 under the title “Americans play monopoly, Russians chess.” Russians have dominated chess most of the past century, for good reason: it is the ultimate exercise in paranoia. All the pieces on the board are guided by a single combative mind, and every move is significant. In the real world, human beings flail and blunder. For Russian officials who climbed the greasy pole in the intelligence services, mistakes are unthinkable, for those who made mistakes are long since buried.

From a paranoid perspective, it certainly might look as if Washington planned to unleash chaos. The wave of instability spreading through the Middle East from Syria is the direct result of American actions. [. . .]

If the Russians sound mad, consider this: there is another substantial body of opinion that sees an evil conspiracy behind American blundering in the Middle East, and it votes for Ron Paul and Rand Paul. I am not suggesting that Sen. Rand Paul is a paranoid, I hasten to clarify: I have never met the man and don’t presume to judge his state of mind. But his popularity stems in no small measure from conspiracy theorists who think that the U.S. government really is planning to criss-cross the continental United States with killer drones and pick off American citizens on their home soil. A lot of the same people think that America invaded Iraq on behalf of the oil companies (who would make a lot more money if Iraq were zapped by space aliens) or by the Israelis (who never liked the project from the outset). A fair sampling of such paranoia gets posted on the comments section of this site.

Thus we have the strangest pair of bedfellows in modern politics, the Russians and the rubes. Try to explain to them that George W. Bush was a decent and well-intentioned man without a clue as to the consequences of his actions, and they will dismiss it as disinformatsiya. Tell them that the New York Times and the Weekly Standard both believed in the Arab Spring as the herald of a new era of Islamic democracy, and they will see it as proof of a conspiracy embracing both the Democratic and Republican establishments. How, the paranoids ask, could two administrations in succession make so many blunders in succession? It stretches credibility. I wish it were a conspiracy. The truth is that we really are that dumb.

March 20, 2013

Paul Wells says Harper and Flaherty have learned a lot about budgeting

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Of course, this isn’t necessarily a good thing:

One thing Stephen Harper learned soon after he became Prime Minister was that Canadians have little intuitive grasp of decimal places. A government does not get 1,000 times more credit for spending $1 billion on something than it does for spending $1 million. In fact, it does not get twice as much credit. As long as the government notices a problem and nods at it, it wins approval from voters who care about that problem. So not long after his man Jim Flaherty started delivering budgets, a Harper era of small and essentially symbolic investment began.

Similarly, the ability to tell the difference between a little belt-tightening and a wholesale cut to a government service or department is not a widespread skill. So as long as the government offers only the vaguest information about its spending cuts, few Canadians will go searching for details.

This general numerical dyslexia will come in handy this year more than most, as Jim Flaherty tries to meet a zero-deficit target that is suddenly rather close — 2015, give or take — while dealing with a lousy economy.

Barack’s secret spying club

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

In Reason, Jacob Sullum explains why the ruling against the promiscuous use of National Security Letters was needed:

After 9/11, Congress loosened restrictions on national security letters (NSLs), a kind of administrative subpoena, first authorized in 1986, that the FBI uses to demand information from phone companies, Internet service providers, and financial institutions. According to the Justice Department’s inspector general, NSL “requests” skyrocketed from a total of 8,500 between 1986 and 2000 to more than 56,000 in 2004 alone.

The Obama administration has made liberal use of NSLs, which in 2010 allowed the FBI to peruse information about 14,212 American citizens and permanent residents — a new record — without bothering to get clearance from a judge. If you were one of those people, the odds are that you will never know, because NSLs are almost always accompanied by instructions that prohibit recipients from discussing them.

[. . .]

Secrecy frustrates challenges to counterterrorism tactics even in the case of Obama’s most startling claim to executive power: the authority to kill people he identifies as members or allies of Al Qaeda. In January a federal judge ruled that the Freedom of Information Act does not require Obama to disclose the Justice Department memos that explain the legal rationale for this license to kill.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon expressed frustration with this result, saying, “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the Executive Branch of our Government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws, while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.” In his State of the Union address the following month, Obama promised to make his “targeting” of suspected terrorists “even more transparent.” I’ll disbelieve it when I don’t see it.

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