It appears, amazingly, that Canadians actually do benefit from rising inequality.

As I mentioned earlier, Canada has had rising inequality for the past 25 years. The rich have also become richer than poor have become poorer. The cause of the change has been Kaldor-Hicks efficient, then: the winners have won enough to compensate the losers and keep some change, too.

And they do!

While the median earnings have stagnated, the median incomes have gone up 11% in 25 years.

Economists are peculiar. They won’t say what’s good and what’s bad. They will say what is ‘efficient’, though. This is their way of avoiding moral judgments. It’s their way of appearing ’scientific’.

For example, nobody will say whether the growing inequality in Canada over the past 25 years has been good or bad. The rich have gotten richer. The poor have gotten poorer. Surely it seems bizarre to say that this could be a good thing. Yet, to economists at least, and in a very limited sense, the past 25 years have been good.

The reason is quite simple: the rich have gotten richer than the poor have gotten poorer.

The poorest fifth of Canadians lost 20% of their earnings, and the richest fifth gained 16%. But, because the rich were much richer than the poor, that 16% is more total money than the 20% lost. The average rich worker now earns $12,000 more than she did in 1980, and the average poor worker now earns $4,000 less. [1] There are, by definition, the same number of rich and poor workers–they’re defined relative to each other.

Of course, we also know that the rich gained more than the poor lost because GDP went up over the past 25 years. Since 50% of Canadians got poorer, the other half must have done very well to compensate. And they did. Here’s Canada’s GDP:

This is a perfect example of Kaldor-Hicks efficiency. Kaldor and Hicks said that a decision can be good if the winners make enough to compensate the losers and still have a little left over. In this case, Canadian winners made more than enough to compensate Canadian losers and still buy something nice for their husbands.

But whether they ctually do compensate the losers is a different story altogether.

[1] ‘Rich’ and ‘poor’ here represent the top quintile and the bottom quintile.

Statcan released some depressing economic statistics today.

The average person makes no more now than they made in 1980. The median income is $41,401 today; it was $41,348 in 1980.

As if that’s not bad enough: the rich have got richer. The poor have got poorer. The top quintile saw their earnings go up 16%. The poorest quintile is much worse off: they make 20% less today than they made in 1980.

Good sweet jesus. Is this a crisis? It really seems like a slow burning crisis to me. The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the rest of us don’t get any farther ahead.

Oh, and we work longer hours than we did in 1980.

France has a stunning one-legged fencer to carry the Olympic torch; she vows to defend it with her life. San Francisco has an injured Iraq war vet to do the same.

Russia hires Fedor Emelianenko. He’s not an Olympian. He’s not a para-Olympian. He’s a mixed martial arts fighter whose nickname is “The Russian Experiment”. I’m just saying, there’s something weird about a country that sends a guy who beats people up, in a ’sport’ not in the Olympics, to carry the torch representing unity (or Nazi ideology).

Not, of course, that I’d tell him that to his face.

I’ve been reading Richard Dawkins’ book “The God Delusion”. There is much to dislike about the book. Among the many reasons I dislike the book is Dawkins’ egotistical certainty. It’s off-putting.

The first, and easiest refutation of Dawkins is this, I believe: Dawkins spends the great bulk of his book refuting religion in general, and Christianity in particular. But religions are easy marks. Dawkins, if he is serious, should contrast atheism to theism. This, though, is much more difficult, and when he tries, he falls greatly short.

Dawkins says, for instance, that agnosticism is not rational. Agnostics must, he says, be able to make some kind of prediction as to the plausibility of God–and if they do, they will see that God is awfully improbable. But agnosticism is actually a perfectly reasonable position to hold–as Dawkins would know, if he were a little more sensitive.

Dawkins should know, because he contrasts science and religion, saying that science has much more majesty and is much bigger, better, and more profound. It has universes stacked like cells on a sponge, quarks that are in two places at once, space that bends. It is sublime. It is beautiful and amazing and, let’s be serious here–totally incomprehensible.

It is both incomprehensible in practice and in principle (although Dawkins would likely disagree about this latter point). In practice, I cannot understand the mysteries of the universe, and I’m reasonably bright and interested. And, of course, nobody can understand them all. Quantum physicists don’t understand quantum physics, let alone also understanding relativistic physics. It is, I think, pretty reasonable for any interested person to respond to any particular mystery with a shrug. Is the universe torus-shaped in all dimensions? Sure. Can time run backwards? OK. Are there n-dimensions joined by strings that cross space faster than light could travel? Why not? Is it possible there is a god? I guess.

Further, the universe is in principle incomprehensible. This is what Kant showed, to my satisfaction at least. We cannot understand, or perhaps even conceive things that do not fit into our phenomenal categories. Try understanding 4 dimensional space–and that’s an easy one. Nobody can; our brains are not wired for it. Try really getting your head around time running backwards, or infinities bigger than infinity. It can’t be done. And all of these are simple, pretty well explored scientific and mathematical theories. The noumenal world escapes us entirely. Could there be a god in it? Possibly. God, of course, could be far beyond our categorized understandings. It is, I think, perfectly intelligent to say that we just can’t know what is really in the noumenal world.

Finally, there is a good reason to dislike Dawkins’ personally. He is an elitist. In this video, he says he would like to study the correlation between IQ and religiosity. His conjecture is that smart people are atheists. Had Dawkins put a moment’s thought to it, he would have seen the stupidity of his conjecture. Newton: religious.The other inventor of calculus, Leibniz? Religious. Descartes, the inventor of modern geometry? Catholic. Da Vinci? Catholic. And on it goes, as it must. Of course, since most people who have ever been alive have been religious, most smart people were religious too.

In the video, he also says that politicians cannot be both smart and truthful–as they cannot admit to being atheists. This is, it seems, a great tragedy. We should, it seems, want smart, honest politicians.

Yet this way lies nastiness. For if we want smart politicians, we should want a smart electorate. And there is only one easy way to get that–limit the electorate.

Of course, the electoral system is not broken at all, or not in the way Dawkins suggests. We get the politicians we want–smart, honest, atheist or otherwise. And there is great reason to suppose that we do want something other than a smart politician. Smart people, after all, can be hired as advisors. Wise people are much harder to find. And I, at least, would trade a smart politician for a wise, kind, or modest one.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I’m an agnostic who, if pushed, admits to having atheistic tendencies.

This morning, Terry Milewski and the CBC reported that the first of the ‘Toronto Terrorists’ was being brought to trial.

The report said “Their weapons were more sophisticated than their politics” (they had wanted to kill the former Prime Minister of Canada, not knowing there had been an election).

The CBC’s proof that these are dangerous people? They had hollow-point bullets. Illegal ones! What the CBC called ‘Cop-killers!’, in fact.

Not only are hollow point bullets sold at Canadian Tire (and every corner store in Buffalo, I’m sure), they’re also, if I recall correctly, required for hunting. By law. They kill more humanely. Hollow point bullets are only illegal under the Geneva convention, which covers war. They are not illegal to possess.

Oh, also, the ‘terrorists’ had a detonator with a 10m range–i.e. a piece of string.

I heard a program once about how the media need to go to a shooting range. This is only further proof– The Toronto Sun recently ran a piece on the new handgun that shoots shotgun shells and how cops fear its introduction into Canada. It shoots .410s, a very small calibre of shotgun shell, I found out. .410s are enough to give you nasty acne, and not much more.