Friday Reading Roundup #19

Productivity, theories of change, digital sovereignty, and a tech agenda for New York.

Happy Friday! Let’s dive straight in!

Can a Lack of Pro-Productivity Policies Explain the Secular Decline in Canada’s Productivity Growth? - Andrew Sharpe and Stephen Tapp, Centre for the Study of Living Standards/ The Productivity Institute

It’s well known that Canada has a deep productivity problem. This paper by Sharpe and Tapp gets into what role Canada’s policy mix over recent decades has played in that. Their main finding is that:

public policies have largely been pro-productivity and that weak productivity growth in Canada cannot be explained by a failure of public policy. Rather slower productivity growth reflects a decline in the pace of underlying technological progress and inadequate business investment.

I think this is a very interesting finding. The authors suggest several policy approaches to address those issues, including addressing regulatory barriers, increasing the neutrality of the tax system, supporting business technology adoption, and trade diversification.

However, I think it is worth considering whether low productivity growth rates, marked by slow technological progress and lagging business investment, are a feature not a bug of our economic system. As I explored back in the spring, why would most firms innovate or invest when they can make vast profits doing the bare minimum:

Innovate? In this economy? With these profit margins?

Addressing that and the foundational failures of shareholder primacy are matters of political economy, rather than economics per se. They need to a bigger part of our debate around fixing the Canadian economy.

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From Culture to Capability: Turning Research into Adoption and Impact - Andrew Maxwell

There are a lot of interesting thoughts in this piece by Andrew Maxwell, but this stands out to me (and to Charles McIvor from Innovation in the News):

The challenge is not to measure more, but to measure meaningfully. Each major program—from Discovery Grants to Alliance to CFI—should articulate its theory of change: what kinds of productivity or societal outcomes it seeks, and how it will know progress is occurring.

My research interviews with folks across the innovation ecosystem have consistently highlighted challenges with how programs are evaluated. They have also pointed to a lack of effective feedback loops between those designing policies centrally and those delivering on the ground.

While it isn’t a silver bullet, articulating theories of change, especially in public, would go some way to address that problem. Policymakers would be forced to actually grapple with whether they are using levers that are actually capable of effecting the change they want to see. And by doing it transparently, the door is opened to greater scrutiny and collaboration - facilitating the kind of collective sensemaking that I’ve argued for before.

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Photo by Shubham Dhage on Unsplash

Who governs the digital sphere? How U.S. proxy lobbying erodes Canada’s digital sovereignty - Brad McNeil and Helen Beny, Policy Options

A great piece that examines the federal government's cancellation of the digital services tax (DST) earlier in the year. As Beny and McNeil argue, that move raises “questions about our ability to independently develop laws and regulations for our digital economy. At risk is the capacity of our elected officials to govern telecommunications, the internet, cybersecurity and data management effectively in the public interest.”

They rightly point to how the tax was abandoned after a “sustained and indirect lobbying campaign by U.S.-based technology firms using U.S trade representatives, business associations and the U.S. executive itself.” This is an approach that “is a growing threat to Canadian digital sovereignty and one that Canadians must urgently recognize and address.”

I couldn’t agree more with this. Perhaps more troubling, it is also a worrying escalation of an existing trend.

As Abraham Newman and Henry Farrell explored in their book The Underground Empire, we have seen over recent decades a growing willingness from US administrations of both parties to weaponize the powerful economic levers at their disposal into “tools of coercion.” When paired with the descent of the US into an authoritarian oligarchy, we’re seeing the corporate capture of the machinery of government and the resulting aggressive use of US levers of power to advance the interests of US corporations.

Buckle up. This isn’t the last we’ll see of this kind of behaviour.

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Mayor-Elect Mamdani Can Build a Tech Agenda for New York and a Model for the Country - Rebecca Williams, Tech Policy Press

Thanks to Luc Lalande for flagging this one to me last week! In this piece, Rebecca Williams sets out how Mayor-Elect Mamdani can craft a municipal policy agenda to “make tech work for people rather than for extraction and exploitation.” Steps she points to include:

• Building a ‘Digital Sanctuary City’ to protect local communities from ICE by ensuring there is no requirement for digital identities or biometric surveillance as part of New York housing, schools, transit or other city services, that there is no data sharing with ICE or federal enforcement, and barring city contractors and utilities from selling or licensing data gathered while providing public services.

• Protecting workers in the age of automation by 1. ensuring agencies and major employers assess and disclose how AI tools may affect employment levels, job quality, and safety before adopting them. 2. guaranteeing rights, fair pay, and protections for gig and platform workers. 3. Protecting workers from algorithmic exploitation and digital surveillance.

• Guaranteeing fair prices and stopping algorithmic exploitation through banning surge pricing and personalized price hikes, ending landlord tech and eviction algorithms, and making corporations and data giants pay their fair share in taxes and energy costs.

• Investing in public technology infrastructure by ensuring free, citywide public Wi-Fi and affordable city-owned broadband, bolstering key departments and city systems for faster and more transparent service, and ensuring technology strengthens, not replaces, public capacity.

There are some fascinating and important ideas there. While most (if not all) Canadian cities lack the powers and the heft of New York City in implementing that kind of agenda, there is nonetheless a lot that they could and should do in the vein set out. Moreover, there is a lot more that provinces could do to have a more ambitious technology agenda.