Clean Slate: New Ideas for Justice & Democracy

This is the audio version - you can read the original text here: -30- Dougald Lamont’s Substack is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Dougald Lamont’s Substack at dougaldlamont.substack.com/subscribe

For 50 years, governments have been doing exactly what conservatives want The reason the economy and the world are so incredibly messed up, and that people are so angry, and divided and desperate, and that nothing seems to change no matter who gets elected is not because governments haven’t listened to neoclassical rules, it’s because they have . The idea that the problem with the economy is the g...

Proponents of Modern Monetary Theory have predicted many of the crises that neoclassical economists completely whiffed on, because they actually measure and include data in their model that orthodox economics does not. What is even more egregious, however, are the superficial criticisms of MMT deployed to criticize it, which amount to not understanding it, because they can’t see how it fits in wit...

There is plenty of hand-wringing, and not much else, about the rise of far-right extremism in “the West”. Of course, there have always been such elements, but there is genuine and bitter hatred as societies splinter into tribal factions, some of them blatantantly lawless violent criminals. Authorities like police are often unable to cope with these disturbances, because from a practical point of v...

I’ve done a video about Residential Schools and Residential School denialism, because it's becoming a bigger issue. Angus Reid, who's a pollster, ended up leaving Twitter, talking about churches being burned and about claims around Residential schools. And it's really important because the sad - the really tragic part about this is that we're not actually fighting about history. The history is act...

Read the original post here: https://dougaldlamont.substack.com/publish/post/143346997 Canada has a housing crisis - a private market crises. Builders, lenders, investors. We have a debt crisis attached to the housing crisis. But it’s all private sector. So why is the Federal Government being asked to intervene? Because the private market is broken.  Canada also has a productivity problem - a priv...

Things don’t have prices, people do. When we buy something : we are paying people to release it to us. It's easy enough to chalk up problems to and prices to "supply and demand" - when the actual interaction between buyer and seller has one more, really important dimension: control. Prices are affected by how much control over supply, and control over demand that each side has. To show the differe...

Larry Wilmore is a complete genius. I like him for lots of reasons - he is a truly brilliant and hilarious award-winning writer, producer, comedian He has some of the most incredible insights you have ever heard into communication, and politics. On Larry’s podcast - Black on the Air - from January 16, 2021 - just ten days after the January 6 assault on the US Capitol, he helped explain communicati...

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Some years ago, I stumbled across a post by a man named Maciej Ceglowski, where he told the story of how the world forgot the cure to a deadly disease . Ceglowski was re-reading The Worst Journey in the World , the account of Robert Falcon Scott’s failed 1911 expedition to the South Pole. You can read Ceglowski's excellent post here: https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm Learning the...

The hyperinflation in Germany is one of the best known such episodes in history. To give an indication of the level of inflation, a loaf of bread that cost 160 marks at the end of 1922 cost 200,000,000,000 (200 billion) marks a year later. Many economists, historians and news articles will seek to explain the dangers of hyperinflation by citing the German government, but the history is almost enti...

“The middle-class society I grew up in didn’t evolve gradually or automatically. It was created, in a remarkably short period of time, by FDR and the New Deal. As the chart shows, income inequality declined drastically from the late 1930s to the mid 1940s, with the rich losing ground while working Americans saw unprecedented gains. Economic historians call what happened the Great Compression, and...

Welcome to our first podcast! Sorry about any issues with audio quality. This is the audio version of our first printed article - The Single Most Important Thing We Can do to Address Canada’s Economic Challenges, in podcast format for your convenience. While some economic indicators in Canada are ripping higher, the struggles Canadians are facing are undeniable, and the current policies of the Ban...