Friday Reading Roundup #6
Economic democracy, policy coherence, emerging technology regulation, digital sovereignty and more!
As a reminder, I am giving a virtual talk on May 29th as part of the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Science, Society and Policy’s Inclusive Innovation Speaker Series. If you’re interested in attending, you can find all the details and registration here!
Happy Friday! This week’s Reading Roundup includes interesting pieces from all over the place. I’m not sure there is much rhyme or reason to what has really caught my attention, so I’m not going to try to group them and will just dive straight in! I hope you find some things in there that are interesting or relevant to your work.
Restoring Economic Democracy: Progressive Ideas for Stability and Prosperity
- Various Authors, Roosevelt Institute
The Roosevelt Institute, one of my favourite places for interesting progressive economic thinking, have just released a fascinating essay collection from a range of different authors and thinkers to “cast a wide net for ideas and build a big tent for the movement” for a more robust and inclusive democracy. This is the exact kind of work I wish that we were seeing more of here in Canada. But even without that, we can draw from essays here.
I haven’t had a chance yet to read through all of them, but three essays in particular caught my attention. Mariana Mazzucato’s “The Role of a Mission-Oriented Framework for a Progressive Economy” is a nice, short restatement of her arguments in favour of missions. One particular takeaway that echoes much of what I have been thinking about and arguing (and will be talking about on the 29th) is the need for a progressive policy agenda to “offer a new narrative about how value is created”. I think that is such an important point.
Elizabeth Wilkins’s “Designing the Next Wave of Competition Policy” essay is also worth reading. Competition policy is a very live issue in Canada right now. I urge you to check out the great work and writing from the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project, including their call for Carney to double down on competition. Wilkins’s essay is a good look at competition from a US perspective. One particular argument I think is very pertinent to Canada:
Progressives make a concerted effort to ensure that the machinery of government is in fact fully and meaningfully open to the public it purports to serve—in order to set our agendas in accordance with people’s needs and wants, to involve people in the process of democratic governance, and to break control of corporate interests over regulatory policy.
Far too often, Canadian institutions are not fully and meaningfully open to the public. We need to work to change that.
Finally, Lenore Palladino’s essay “Reining in Corporate Power” is worth reading if only for the great line:
The corporation’s privileges come from the public, and we have the right to promote innovation and productivity rather than extraction.
If there is one takeaway from these essays that I hope sticks with you, it is that from Palladino. We can and should uphold our right to promote innovation and productivity rather than extraction and use the full tools available to us, including measures that Palladino advocates for, such as challenging shareholder primacy and financial sector regulation.
School meals aren’t just good for kids: they can also be good for industry
- Sarah Doyle and Alex Himelfarb, Social Capital Partners
Next up, Sarah Doyle and Alex Himelfarb make a strong case for the alignment between social policy and industrial policy, and how policies designed for social inclusion can also support the development of a more inclusive and sustainable economy.
They highlight how the federal government can leverage the National School Food Policy to “open the door to a more strategic approach to food procurement—one that shifts the focus from minimizing price to maximizing public value.” As they argue, “the benefits to children make this a worthy investment, but the return on investment could be greater” by pairing it with requirements to ensure a minimum percentage procurement budgets be spend on healthy food that is grown and made in Canada, paired with incentives for suppliers to adopt sustainable practices and decent work standards.
There is a criticism that these extra requirements are a kind of “everything bagel liberalism” that undermines the primary goal (in this case, helping improve learning and health outcomes for Canada’s children) and underdelivers the add-ons. I think that would be true if it were only an isolated effort. The key is nesting these kinds of efforts within a coherent policy framework. All government policies should be pro-sustainable practices and pro-decent work.
Another argument in Elizabeth Wilkins’s essay on competition policy, which I linked above, reinforces this. She argues that ensuring competition needs to be a “whole-of-government” effort that includes a range of other policy tools that can be used to control corporate power.
We need detailed work on how we can use existing authorities of industry regulators—in particular in the industries that deliver essential goods and services to people such as health care, housing, and energy—to curb corporate power and develop fair market rules that work to the public’s benefit.
Doyle’s and Himelfarb’s work here feeds into that bigger picture of developing fairer rules for the public’s benefit.
Is policy keeping up with science and technology breakthroughs?
- Ignacio Vázquez, Wellcome Trust
This is an interesting read on emerging technology regulation from the UK, which draws on two detailed reports by RAND Europe. The post and reports explore the key challenge of regulation: if you regulate too soon, you can prevent enormous positive potential, but if you regulate too late or not at all, huge risks and harms can become a reality.
The primary insight from Vázquez and the reports is that:
The key is global collaboration between regulators and developing new, dynamic regulatory solutions that match the pace of technological innovation. A collaborative international community can work to align existing and new laws, rules and frameworks to ensure the science can thrive in a proportional and safe way.
There are also specific insights on different technologies, such as genomics and organoids, as well as some cross-cutting considerations for policymakers:
Equity must be prioritized: Disparity in access to, representation in, and benefits from emerging technologies can lead to unequal societal and economic outcomes
Working together internationally is essential: Finding common ground for practical and actionable international alignment must be a priority for policymakers to harmonize regulatory practices across borders.
Proactively engage the public: Public trust and acceptance are vital for the success of emerging technologies.
Innovative regulation is needed for innovative technologies: Technology is developing rapidly, and regulation needs to incorporate adaptive and dynamic practices to manage the complexities and dynamics that emerge effectively.
Develop comprehensive process maps: These can serve as a guide to help researchers and others decrease the time spent on administration and simplify compliance by clarifying rules, responsibilities and processes.
I’m not sure where the Carney government stands on emerging technology regulation. In my write-up of the platform on Monday, I highlighted a commitment to regulation to protect children from online crimes. Still, beyond that, there was not much on technology regulation. It is going to be important for Canadians that they don’t fall into a trap of AI boosterism, to take just one technology, and instead pick up on the past government’s efforts, and the insights of Vázquez and others on how to regulate emerging technologies in a balanced way.
Other Reads
This really has been a week with a lot of interesting stuff coming up, so to round out the newsletter, here is a non-comprehensive, rapid-fire list of other pieces worth your time. Other interesting reads, such as the Council of Canadian Innovators’ new Mandate to Innovate report, I’ll come back to soon.
Reclaiming digital sovereignty: A roadmap to build a digital stack for people and the planet - Cecilia Rikap, Cédric Durand, Edemilson Paraná, Paolo Gerbaudo, and Paris Marx, UCL Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment & How Canada could achieve digital sovereignty - Guillaume Beaumier, Policy Options
The Liberal platform spoke a lot about sovereignty (37 times to be exact). Quite what that means in practice, and whether their policies go far enough to actually protect it, is another thing entirely. In that context, the UCL report on digital sovereignty is worth reading to see what protecting digital sovereignty looks like. Spoiler, their calls for public-led digital stacks, universal platforms, public marketplaces without lock-ins, digital sovereignty grounded in ecological internationalism, and the dismantling of stake surveillance are not measures featured in the Liberal platform.
Beaumier, meanwhile, observes that “where Canada’s digital sovereignty appears particularly at risk […] is in its dependence on American companies.” His suggestions are somewhat aligned with those of the UCL report, including focusing on developing cloud-agnostic services to avoid lock-in, reducing dependence on US companies by embracing open-source software and embarking on a vast national investment strategy to boost our digital capacities. Only the last featured in the Liberal platform, and even then, it is unclear if the new $2.5 billion digital infrastructure will exclude or limit US firms’ participation.
The Adoption of Artificial Intelligence in Firms: New Evidence for Policymaking - OECD
A chunky new 196-page OECD report on AI adoption. I’ve only had time to look over the executive summary but some highlights include that “policies and programmes to develop human capital are among the most valued and used by businesses” to support AI uptake; that the quality of public data is a priority; that collaboration with universities and public research institutions are important and can be enhanced; that dedicated public institutions can help support firm adoption of AI; that improving access to information and advice for fims should be prioritized; and finally there is a need to improve the evidence base for AI policy.
To pick on the Liberal platform again, it is noticeable that their signature AI adoption measure, a $400 million tax incentive to incentivize SMES to “leverage AI to boost their bottom lines, create jobs, and support existing employees,” is not aligned with any of these recommendations. I rather suspect it will do more to boost bottom lines than meaningfully accelerate AI adoption in Canada or impact our productivity.
Neighbourhoods as engines of change - James Plunkett,
Finally, a new piece from
, whose article “The energy at the edges” inspired my Canadian-focused post “Empowering the edges: Igniting Change Beyond Government.” In his new post, Plunkett zooms into neighbourhoods and the importance of that scale of change and how it can be a model that can spread. I particularly liked this reflection drawn from insights from neighbourhood-level work:
The limits of a centralised model of intelligence, in which policy-capacity sits at the centre and delivery capacity sits at the edges. This reflects the idea that government has a central brain that passes instructions out to limbs to do things. This reflects the deeply historic mechanical principle of separating thinking (central) from doing (local). It contrasts with a more distributed model of intelligence, like an octopus, in which intelligence is spread throughout the body.
The need for a more distributed model of intelligence and the importance of promoting state capacity through dispersed activity and capabilities rather than through some notion of central planning are increasingly top of mind for me. These topics are a big part of my Change in Practice series of posts (the most recent one is here). More on that front soon!