A friend asked me what I have to say about the results of the ‘historic’ Quebec election. It seems that the French press have slightly misread the tea-leaves on this one if those relying on such coverage see the victory as having some meaningful contribution to global independence movements.

After all, support for sovereignty among Quebecers is at historic lows after the separation question was narrowly defeated in a 1994 referendum. The newest generation of Francophone Quebecers is certainly still seized by the belief that Quebec’s distinct culture requires a high level of autonomy within the Canadian federation, but the focus is on determining the society’s own future, not leaving Canada.

Marois’ victory is historic in one sense – if she succeeds in forming a government with the minority of seats she won, she will become Quebec’s first “première ministre” (emphasis on the “being a lady”). It is also historic in another way, but probably not in the way you would imagine. Because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, Marois’ Parti-Quebecois (PQ) was able to win a plurality of seats despite receiving a lower percentage of the vote than previous elections where another party formed a majority government. Looking province-wide rather than seat-by-seat, it’s their second-lowest level of support in any election since 1973.

As for what it might mean, even if they had received a strong mandate: the PQ itself nominally supports independence, but their game is a long one, indeed: their goal is only to have a referendum on independence “at some point” and almost certainly not before the next election. They realize that there is insufficient support in the province to win a vote – so their main goal is to increase that support by getting into fights with the federal government. Another party, that promised an immediate referendum, received negligible support. Why then, was Marois able to form government? First, Quebec has been seized by a sizeable political corruption scandal, which goes at least as far back as the last PQ government, but which Jean Charest’s Liberals did nothing about during their ten years in power – save for being strongarmed into holding a public inquiry; unfortunately for them, voters assumed that the dirty laundry belonged to the people currently living in the house. Second, the province was seized by protests causing significant disruption which, though sparked by a student strike against a proposed tuition fee increases, eventually expanded to include concerns about civil liberties and a challenge to neoliberalism more generally. Opponents and supporters of the protests both felt that Charest’s government had failed them, either for being too heavy-handed, or not being heavy-handed enough. A new party, the CAQ, essentially billing itself as the law and order option bled much of Charest’s support away, despite being nominally sovereigntist. Despite the softness of her position, Marois was also able to attract supporters of the student strike to vote against Charest with her mixed message of solidarity with the students, bolstered by one student leader standing as a candidate for the party (successfully).

The second explanation of the victory is, unfortunately, also what makes the election historic. And not in a good way. It can easily be claimed that the PQ campaign marked the greatest amount of fear-mongering against linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities of any election in Quebec – at least in the last fifty years. One key plank of the PQ platform was the exclusion from any public employment – firefighters, clerks, teachers, doctors, police, administrators, secretaries, policy advisors; anything – of anyone wearing a visible religious symbol. We are talking about firing a significant number of public employees, essentially because of what religion they belong to. Another was disqualification from any elected office of anyone who does not speak French – presumably, despite the province’s large English minority population, a job which could be ably done by the electorate. The PQ then reversed and said this would only apply to new immigrants…sigh. The subtext here was a concern about those people (read: immigrants) who could not speak ‘proper’ French, i.e. who were not pure-laine. All of this, of course, was backed up by spurious claims about threats to the French language and Quebecois identity in the province.

These things might have scared away some voters. The PQ has traditionally been seen as a progressive alternative, and I know many anglophones who voted for another, left wing sovereigntist party, Quebec Solidaire, while holding their nose on the sovereignty issue. The PQ was obviously happy to be rid of anyone of this stripe who might have voted for them in the past. It was clear that the PQ’s strategy, and a successful one, was that any loss was significantly made up by the support of a base rallied by the worst forms of paranoid, parochial, pseudo-racialist nationalism, ensuring that they did not vote for another sovereigntist party, or simply choose to stay home. It seems to have worked; the only thing which prevents it from significantly tarnishing the great affection I have for my adopted province is that it worked, but only barely. The victory they were able to scrape out of deploying these tactics was a narrow one.

So, is the Greek government a massive overspender? Greek government spending as a portion of GDP is 49.5%. This compares to 56.2% for France, 43.8% for Canada, an OECD average of 44.5% and a Euro area average of 50.5%. That’s 2010 numbers. In 2007, Greece was at 46.6, France at 52.4%, Canada at 39.4% and the Euro area and OECD averages at 47% and 41.4%, respectively.

Are the Greeks, as suggested by many commentators, a lazy nation which retires early? Recent numbers from Eurostat on employment rates [direct link, pdf] show that Greek participation in the labour market until age 64 are not lower significantly lower than elsewhere in Europe. The overall employment rate for 20-64 year-olds is 59.6%, compared with a Euro area of 64%. Among 59-64 year-olds, the Greek rate is just over 3% lower than the Euro area’s 46% average. As this data shows, the source of the lower Greek numbers are caused by a lower participation rate for women: the employment rate for men is 1% higher than the 75% reached on average in the Euro area. The gap between Greece and Germany, which currently has a 71% employment rate among 20-64 year-olds would have a more significant impact on competitiveness if it weren’t for the significantly lower GDP per capita in Greece.

So it’s true that Greeks are retiring somewhat earlier than elsewhere in Europe – but one might consider them entitled, considering that they work more hours per year than anyone else in Europe. They work 25% more hours per year than the average European, 200 hours per year – the equivalent of five weeks work – longer than Americans. So, even taking into account the retired and unemployed, Greeks aged 20-64 are still working on average, 1222 hours per year, compared to a European average of 1040 hours per year. Lazy greeks, indeed.

The question then becomes, how did the government get into such dire financial straits? The answer is that the richest and best-paid in Greece don’t pay their taxes: Germany collects 37% of its GDP in taxes, Greece 29.4%. As of 2010, two thirds of Greek doctors self-reported incomes under 12 000 Euros – in a country with a GDP per capita of twice that amount – which entitled them to pay no tax at all. The Greek crisis is not about the average worker; it is about Greeks best-paid, and if they had been paying taxes for the last ten years, Greece would not be in the financial mess it is in right now. No doubt, the failure to collect those taxes falls on the shoulders of the government, but that is no justification for the amount of calumny which is continually heaped upon the Greek people for this mess.

In late October, parliament voted against adopting Bill C-300, which would have provided some level of human rights accountability for Canadian mining (and oil and gas) companies operating beyond Canadian borders. The bill, originally introduced by Liberal MP John McKay, was defeated 140-134 by the votes of a unanimously opposed Conservative party, and supported by the absence of numerous Liberal party members. Among those who chose not to appear was Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

The bill had passed two earlier Parliamentary votes. Most believe that the vote was a result of aggressive, last-minute lobbying from industry representatives, who claimed that firms (read “they themselves”) would be driven to incorporate elsewhere were the bill to become law.

What drastic measures would the law have imposed were a Canadian company involved in a ‘violation of international human rights standards’? As put concisely by Canadian Business Magazine, the project in question “…would become ineligible to receive financial services from EDC, and the Canada Pension Plan could no longer invest in [the Corporation’s] securities.”

There may have been problems with the administrative scheme set up under the Bill, shortcomings which could have been overcome if more MPs had taken an interest in rendering the bill workable. One would expect that kind of effort from a party, and a leader, which have made their name promoting human rights values. Their decision can hardly be called disappointing, however, since that would require the result to be out of character. In practice, Ignatieff has made an art of supporting those values while undercutting the rights themselves.

How is it possible that human rights protection, seen as trumps in Canadian law, fell so easily to the wayside when it came to regulating business practice? Chris Brown, an international relations professor at LSE, has put the matter plainly: “The enforcement of rights by the international community has been determined, in practice, by the foreign-policy imperatives of the major powers, and political, commercial and financial considerations frequently get in the way of a high-priority, even-handed policy on human rights.”

The vote on C-300 draws that lesson squarely, but also sharpens the edge of its rule: in buying into a standard for the protection of human rights, even middle powers don’t feel that they can afford to pay for more than lip service.

—
Refs: Chris Brown, “Universal Human Rights? An Analysis of the ’Human-Rights Culture’ and its Critics” in Robert G Patman, ed, Universal Human Rights? (Houndmills [England]: Macmillan Press, 2000) 31, at 40

Is it the internet killing the publishing industry, or just plain old anti-competitive practices? Take the comments of Colin Robinson of OR Books on their reasons for not selling through Amazon:

To sell our titles, Amazon would require a discount of 55% or even 60%, that’s $11 or $12 on a $20 book. Amazon would use some of this money to discount the book to its customers — that’s what gives it its edge. If, as a publisher, you try matching their reduced price, Amazon will insist your new, lower price is the basis for their discount, so they can cut their price still further. That makes it pretty much impossible for you to compete with direct sales to your customers.

In fact, it makes it impossible for any other seller to compete with Amazon. Insisting on the lowest possible price is fine – insisting on a price that’s half of the otherwise lowest price is ridiculous.

One of the fascinating thing about globalization is the cases like these which blur the line between monopoly and monopsony. Speaking of which, it is time to break up WalMart, whose success is tied, contrary to what might be thought, not primarily to egregious anti-union practices, but from globally exercising a pseudo-monopsony on purchases, and acting as a local monopsony employer hundreds of times over. Here, then, is a lesson to those starting law school: you can be on the side of the little guy and efficient markets by focusing your career on competition law.

ht to paperpools, quoting Huffington Post

For your enjoyment, a juxtaposition, followed by an offering of sorts. First, the point:

As reported by the Chronicle of Higher Education, some faculty at university business schools in the United States have begun outsourcing their grading work to India, Singapore and Malaysia. Professors, apparently, still hand out the final grades, but based on a scoring made by the assessors on the basis of “the elements in the rubric.” Such outsourcing is not without its upsides:

The company [EduMetry] advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with sophisticated commentary, because they are not juggling their own course work, too.

The company argues that professors freed from grading papers can spend more time teaching and doing research.

Comments, designed to help students understand their strengths and weaknesses, are often much more comprehensive than they would be were course TAs assigned to do the work. And assignments turnaround is only three or four days. Yet the program has its critics: not only do most students have no contact with their graders, but such contact is impossible. Worse, the marking is, by design, uninformed by classroom experience.

Which leads to the counterpoint:

The tutorial is at the core of undergraduate teaching and learning at Oxford. It offers students a unique learning experience in which they meet regularly with their tutor, either on a one-to-one basis or with one or two other students. Undergraduates attend, on average, one hour-long tutorial every week and undertake a considerable number of hours’ preparatory work for each tutorial, including background reading, essay-writing and problem-solving.

The language of ‘tutorial’ misses something, I think, for most North American students. A long book of essays on the Oxford tutorial contains a simple description which throws some light on the peculiar pedagogical object:

[The tutorial] does not replace other methods, such as instruction by lecture or in class. Indeed, it assumes all these, and includes their results in the preparation of a weekly essay, which is presented orally, listened to by the tutor and discussed immediately. The whole process – of reading, discussion, arrangements for the following week – takes up little more than an hour.

Yet there is variation. James, a fellow Scholar who read history at Oxford, once described to me one of his fondest memories of his undergraduate experience: James reads his essay, the tutor frowns, furrows his brow and offers a generous ‘no’, James tries on the argument again, and again the furrow-browed ‘no’, and in its turn the argument again, step-by-step, James explaining how some event should be interpreted or why someone else’s interpretation can’t stand, or what the implications of one interpretation is for another set of facts, and each version satisfying James a bit more than the last, but not satisfying his tutor enough to offer anything other than a litany of rejections, a sphinx generous enough to offer second chances when the riddle the student had set himself remains unanswered.

This whole process continuing not for an hour, but for two, three, three and a half hours, and as the process wears on, the two of them going to lunch as James steps through the same basic outline but each time trying to sharpen the weakest bits or leaving deadwood behind, eventually the tutor offers at the end of a version a single question after lifting his chin in a way that might imply…but ultimately settling his chin down just in time to coincide with the now, let’s say,  12th  ‘no’, delivered with an almost-sheepish smirk, a kind of apologetic grin combined with raised eyebrows.

But at least now there is a question, and maybe James if he is lucky gets one more question before finally one of them having to leave for some other appointment, no ‘yes’ finally being offered, the sphinx standing unscathed as it were, but ultimately the argument being much sharper than it had been, the punchline being that this had in fact been among the best of his essays, with the real measure of its strength being the amount of time he had been offered, not the amount of per se feedback. Tutorials, almost to a one, are unmarked, there thus being no need for a ‘rubric.’

( I was a course tutor for a first-year course at McGill last term. In addition to an hour each week of interactive discussion of the lecture material with two separate groups of 20, I had a weekly office hour where any of those students could drop by. I think, in the end, about 5 of them came to do anything other than pick up an assignment. I didn’t, generally, mark the essays, or the midterms, or the exams of my own students, and even where I did, robust commentary on their work wasn’t part of the job description. I certainly wasn’t required to attend lectures. )

My point isn’t that Oxford gets it right. What exactly is on offer in such an education is a topic for a different post. Here is a third thing to put the juxtaposition in the relevant context: university lectures for many universities are now provided free online. Berkeley, for example, provides not only audio, but full video for about three dozen of its undergraduate courses per term. And of course, one can these days get a whole university degree online, though some might question whether such an experience is truly a ‘university education’ at all.

It would be unfair to entice the reader down such an unsatisfying trail without providing a preliminary hint of where thinking about these developments might lead. So for those who have been waiting, here’s the riddle. Why do we still have universities? It’s not that there aren’t socially useful functions universities might serve. Yet the reasons universities should in fact serve those functions, contra other possible arrangements, are nebulous at best. When I was in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, and had a chance to meet with Paul Davidson, head of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, I asked him the question. It will have to suffice to say of his answer that it included neither almost-sheepish grins nor apologetically-raised eyebrows. I for one am on the side of the universities – the question is, are the universities themselves?