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Why is it that a substantial body of social science research finds that conservatives are happier than liberals?

A partial answer: Those on the right are less likely to be angered or upset by social and economic inequities, believing that the system rewards those who work hard, that hierarchies are part of the natural order of things and that market outcomes are fundamentally fair.

Those on the left stand in opposition to each of these assessments of the social order, prompting frustration and discontent with the world around them.

The happiness gap has been with us for at least 50 years, and most research seeking to explain it has focused on conservatives. More recently, however, psychologists and other social scientists have begun to dig deeper into the underpinnings of liberal discontent not only unhappiness but also depression and other measures of dissatisfaction.

One of the findings emerging from this research is that the decline in happiness and in a sense of agency is concentrated among those on the left who stress matters of identity, social justice and the oppression of marginalized groups.

There is, in addition, a parallel phenomenon taking place on the right as Donald Trump and his MAGA loyalists angrily complain of oppression by liberals who engage in a relentless vendetta to keep Trump out of the White House.

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Opinion | The Happiness Gap Between Left and Right Isn't Closing - The New York Times

Columbia University president Minouche Shafik is, on paper, a very impressive person. She has been a vice president at the World Bank, a deputy managing director at the International Monetary Fund, deputy governor at the Bank of England, and director of the London School of Economics. She has served on the boards of the British Museum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and was named a Peer of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Seconds United Kingdom in 2015.

In 2021 Shafik published What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract for a Better Society. True to its hypercredentialed author, the book was celebrated by some of the biggest names in international economics and social policy: European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde, World Trade Organization Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf, and the American philosopher Michael Sandel, to name fiveall of whom attested in some way or another that Shafiks little book was indispensable for building a better world.

Few early readers of What We Owe Each Other could have imagined that its author would, within a few years, propel herself to the authoritarian vanguard of U.S. politics. Fewer still would have guessed that the vector for this metamorphosis would be a major American university. But Shafiks disastrous tenure at Columbia has exposed undemocratic currents flowing through the elite milieu that once celebrated her. Read as the memoir-manifesto of a woman who turned riot police on unarmed students, What We Owe Each Other serves as an unwitting guide to the intellectual precarity of the reigning liberal ordera document revealing what can go wrong when liberals treat democratic legitimacy and public consent as merely incidental elements of the liberal political project.

The book would be less harrowing if it were simply devoid of insight. But beneath the Obama-era bank director clichs (Automation! Nudge! Secular stagnation!), Shafik conveys a handful of solid policy proposals, emphasizing that nice-guy humanitarian impulses often turn out to be good for economic growth and productivity. She wants higher taxes on capital and better benefits for labor; longer parental leave and more state support for parents; affordable education and quality health care for all. The world would be a better place if more peers of the realm were on board with the books agenda.

But Shafik bills What We Owe Each Other as a new social contract, invoking the tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Rawls. Social contract theorists are interested in much more than policy wonkery. They try to define the bounds of legitimate government by asking how individuals in an ungoverned state of nature would agree to be governed. For Hobbes, the state of nature was so violent and chaotic that rational individuals would readily consent to the authority of an absolute monarch to establish law and order. For Locke, the state of natures material bounty meant that governments were required to respect the natural rights of individuals, including the right to own private property. Rousseau arrived at democracy by envisioning a state of nature populated by peaceful and compassionate noble savages, while Rawls declared that social inequality could be justified only if inequality improved the living standards of the worst-off. (It might, for example, be OK to pay doctors more than migrant workers because even societys poor residents benefit, ostensibly, from a functioning medical system.)

Although these different thinkers reach very different political conclusions, they are alleven Hobbesoperating within a fundamentally democratic paradigm: Governments are justified by some kind of appeal to the consent of the governed; the state of nature is the key philosophical tool for establishing how people reason through their rights and obligations to each other.

It is striking, then, to see that Shafiks social contract doesnt involve a state of nature at all and isnt actually a deal that individuals reach with other individuals.

When I refer to the social contract, therefore, I mean the partnership between individuals, businesses, civil society and the state to contribute to a system in which there are collective benefits, she writes.

In one blithe sentence, Shafik assumes into legitimacy the major institutions of liberal modernity and declares them partners in a cooperative project, without inquiring into whether or how these institutions might be democratically justified. What we owe each other ends up depending a lot on where we live, what institutions we are affiliated with, and how those institutionssay, for instance, Columbia Universityare governed. How these institutions resolve internal disputes is at most a sideshow; how they might fit into a narrative about free individuals choosing their future together is not even contemplated.

Shafik is, to be clear, calling for institutional reforms. She rejects the state-vs.-market dichotomy. She wants to see institutions bearing more collective risks and individuals receiving more of societys collective output. The successful businesses of the future, she argues, will operate with an eye toward social responsibilities beyond short-term shareholder profits, and ultimately find themselves better regulated and better off.

Enlightened companies will increasingly see environmental sustainability, paying their fair share of taxes and commitment to their employees and communities as central to their strategies, Shafik writes. Investors, meanwhile, will increasingly factor such commitments into their valuations of firms share prices, and financial markets will reward firms that manage these risks intelligently.

All of this sounds very nice and would no doubt be an improvement from the privateering corporate status quo. But which of these various public duties will the successful business prioritize? What should investors do if, say, labor and environmental interests conflict? How might other institutionsColumbia University, perhapssort out competing claims? What can different members of the university community reasonably expect from their schools investment management? What rights do individuals outside the formal management hierarchy have when they want to change the way an institution operates? Where does change come from, and when is it legitimate?

These are not easy questions to answer, and Shafik doesnt do so. Instead, she pivots from talking about the social contract to discussing social contracts of varying generosity that whole countries, rather than individuals, can choose from, depending on the balance of power between people and institutions that happens to prevail. Its an extraordinary philosophical bait and switch in which Shafik substitutes a variant of neoliberal economics for the democratic considerations of social contract theory. Shafik clearly feels real sympathy for the downtrodden, but her narrative is not about self-government, consent, or consensus. What We Owe Each Other is essentially a lengthy meditation on the observation that greater economic productivity will enable more generous social contracts.

I like improved productivity as much as the next Excel dweeb, but this results in some really weird musings on politics. In most countries today the evolution of social contracts depends on the structure of the political system, Shafik writes. Democracies tend to be better at delivering longer lives for their citizens and better economic outcomes, but selectorate countriesShafik cites China as an examplecan also deliver effective outcomes for their citizens. After some hemming and hawing, she concludes, Achieving a better social contract is ultimately about increasing the accountability of our political systems. How this happens will vary between countries. OK!

Shafik mentions free media once, in her final chapter, as part of a description of real-world democracies, and includes the phrase safeguards of freedoms of association and collective action in a graphic on Page 178. Otherwise, there are no discussions of free speech or free press in the book. The word dissent does not appear.

One particularly striking aspect of the state-enforced repression sweeping Americas universities is that so much of it is being ordered by people who are supposed to be the good guys in standard liberal accounts of todays political quagmire. University of Virginia President Jim Ryan was the author of a good book on segregation and education before he tear-gassed his students. Joe Biden has made some genuinely moving speeches on the highest ideals of the American political tradition, and he really has overseen the best U.S. economic performance in at least a generation. But when police started arresting pro-Palestinian students at dozens of campuses nationwide, Biden smeared the protesters and defended the crackdown by declaring that dissent must never lead to disorderan axiom worthy of King George III. Liberal leaders seem to know what to do when democracy is threatened from withoutnothing focuses the mind like a glowering autocrat. But throughout the campus crisis over Gaza, liberal leaders in the United States and Europe have repeatedly failed to maintain liberal values when they are challenged from within.

Over the course of the school year, Shafik steadily escalated student protests over Israel into an intractable institutional conflict. Today Columbias donors and its administration are essentially at war with the schools faculty and student body. Students want Columbia and its endowment to divest from Israel, and they keep appealing to democratic processes and procedures to illustrate the legitimacy of their demand. In addition to establishing encampments, theyve submitted a referendum on divestment to the Columbia College student bodythe universitys undergraduate liberal arts schooland received a vote overwhelmingly in support. Shafik, meanwhile, has invoked her institutional authority to deny that demand, and called on the state to enforce her authority. To win her most recent battles, Shafik has basically had to shut down the school: This years graduation ceremony is canceled, and its hard to imagine Shafik enduring any event where students and faculty would congregate.

Columbia, it seems, could benefit from an updated social contract.

Continue reading here:
Columbia protests: I read the university president's old memoir-manifesto. Yikes. - Slate

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Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre speaks at the National Prayer Breakfast in Ottawa on May 7.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press

Ever since the Liberals unveiled their surprise increase in the capital-gains tax in last months budget, the question on everyones lips has been: what will Pierre Poilievre say about it?

Well, maybe not on everyones lips. But certainly on some peoples. Conservatives, for instance. After all, conservatives are supposed to be against taxes and tax hikes, of all kinds. And leaders of the Opposition are supposed to oppose.

Surely the Conservative Leader would have to take the bait. Otherwise he would have to explain to his followers why he had once again failed to oppose the governing Liberals on a major question of economic policy as he had failed to do on subsidies for electric vehicle batteries, for example, or on the ban on replacement workers.

Well, the days have just flown by, and at last we have our answer. Intriguingly, its: What are you asking me for? Only instead of a craven abdication of leadership, the talented Mr. Poilievre has managed to turn it into a boast, even a philosophical credo.

In a striking piece in Fridays National Post, Mr. Poilievre acknowledges that, indeed, investors and business leaders have been pressing him to lead the charge on the capital gains issue. Why, theyve fairly been blowing up my phone.

They yelp: What are you going to do about this?

My answer: No. What are you going to do about it?

Whoa. Who saw that plot twist coming? But theres a point to it. Business, he complains, has been too content to roll over in the face of Liberal attacks on investment and entrepreneurship. Gutless executives prefer to suck up to the Liberals, relying on their useless and overpaid lobbyists rather than taking their case directly to the voters.

Got a beef, then, with the Liberals? Youre on your own. Why should I sell your bleat?

This represents an evolution in the populist, anti-corporate pose Mr. Poilievre has been trying to strike of late. Read quickly, it might even look like Mr. Poilievre is giving business a bit of tough love, urging them to show greater self-reliance, less dependence on government.

And its true: business has been all too willing to cozy up to the Natural Governing Party over the years, accepting destructive and intrusive government regulations as the price of government handouts. Any leader that put a stop to this sordid exchange would earn the thanks of a grateful nation.

But if that was what Mr. Poilievre meant he could have said so. He might have said:

Dont bother coming to a Conservative government for handouts, because we wont give you any.

And dont waste your time lobbying a Conservative government, either. Were going to do whats right for Canada, whether business likes it or not.

So: You mind your business, and Ill mind mine. Ill stay out of business, and you stay out of politics.

But that is not what he says in the piece, is it? He doesnt say he will stop giving handouts to business. And far from telling businesses to stay out of politics, hes effectively demanding they enlist on his side.

On the one hand, he warns that he wont take up any of their policy proposals unless business has already sold the public on it:

[Business] will get nothing from me unless they convince the people first When they start telling me about your ideas on the doorstep in Windsor, St. Johns, Trois-Rivires, and Port Alberni, then Ill think about enacting it.

On the other hand, on those policies he does take up, he wants business to provide him with political cover:

If I do pursue your policy, I expect that you will continue to advocate for it with those same Canadians in those same neighbourhoods until the policy is fully implemented.

As campaign messages go, its pretty nervy: I wont lift a finger for you if it involves the slightest political risk to me. But I expect you to carry water for me, for as long as it takes.

Its not that he wants business to stop sucking up to the Liberals, in other words, so much as that he wants them to start sucking up to the Conservatives: preparing public opinion for policies he can then adopt in safety, and campaigning for them and by implication him until they have been adopted.

Notice the language, too. I, me, my. If I pursue your policy. I expect. Start telling me.

I get it: hes on a roll. He obliterated his rivals in the leadership race. Hes 20 points ahead in the polls. Not only does he not owe business any favours, but hes in a position to start issuing demands.

But I cant be the only one left with the impression that it all seems to have rather gone to his head.

More here:
Opinion: Poilievre to business: stop sucking up to Liberals and start sucking up to me - The Globe and Mail

The families and CEOs behind Canadas largest grocery retailers have donated more than $150,000 to the Liberal and Conservative Party over the last two decades, data from Elections Canada shows.

That puts the owners of Loblaw and Empire among the top political donors in the country, according to a political financing expert.

Corporations have been banned from giving to federal parties since 2004, but that hasnt stopped billionaire families like the Westons (owners of Loblaw) and Sobeys (owners of Empire) from frequently giving the maximum annual amount allowed.

These families split the spoils fairly evenly between the Conservative and Liberals, indicating they think of donations as a down payment to ensure corporate-friendly policies from both parties.

Donations buy influence with politicians, Duff Connacher of Ottawa-based Democracy Watch said. Psychologists have shown the best way to influence people is to give them a gift or do them a favour. Even small gifts create an unconscious sense of obligation.

In the midst of a cost-of-living crisiswith historic visits to food banks and one in four children suffering from food insecuritythe practices of the grocery giants have come under intensified public scrutiny, sparking a boycott movement against Loblaw this month.

Loblaw, Empire, and Metro control nearly two thirds of the entire retail food market in Canada and pulled in record profits topping $6 billion in 2023, aided by widespread price-gouging.

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and opposition leader Pierre Poilievre have taken turns accusing each other of cozying up to the corporate elite, Conservatives and Liberals have both consistently obliged their grocery donors.

The Liberal government forked over $26 million to Loblaw and Costco for new fridges and appliances. Under the former Conservative government of Stephen Harper, grocery retailers started pocketing tens of millions of dollars in subsidies intended to make food more affordable in Canadas north.

Neither party has advocated for stricter rules to ensure Loblaw cant repeat its tax evasion scheme of the 2000s, when it deprived the federal government of nearly $400 million in revenue by stashing money in Barbados.

For the past few years, the New Democrats have pushed for a windfall tax on the record profits of grocery giants. Justin Trudeau initially rejected the idea, calling it simplistic, then shifted to vaguely threatening to implement it, without following through. Meanwhile, the Conservatives have expressed constant opposition.

Alongside their history of donations, the corporate grocers have recently turned to a PR blitz, claiming they are innocent of the accusations of profiteering and putting the blame instead on higher costs of supplies.

But a study last year by economist Jim Stanford found clear evidence that they have used the cover of inflation to raise food prices well beyond their costs.

According to StatsCan data, grocery retail profits in 2023 doubled from what they were pre-pandemic, and their profit margins massively increased too. And it wasnt because Canadians were buying more food. Canadians are actually buying fewer groceries than before the pandemic, Stanford concluded, but paying much more for them.

Yet neither the Liberals or Conservatives have advocated for restraining the ability of corporate retailers to squeeze huge profits from the most basic essentials of life. Committed to a shared neoliberal political consensus, both parties pretend the state cant use its enormous power to intervene in the marketplace to alter profiteering behaviour.

According to Conacher, donations often buy inaction from governments, but it can be harder to track that.

Most of the battle is over whether these companies will be strongly regulated, he said. If voters or citizen groups are clamouring for reforms, what big business is looking for is inactionand politicians can do them a favour by simply not doing anything.

That may be one reason why weve seen the Liberal government resort exclusively to coaxing and cajoling.

They gathered grocery CEOs for a gabfest in Ottawa where they elicited a promise to stabilize prices. Theyve made tweaks to the countrys competition law that lawyers have described as window dressing. Theyve pushed for a toothless, voluntary, industry-developed grocery code. And theyre courting foreign multinational companies to enter the Canadian market to bring down prices (though Walmarts entry in the 1990s didnt particularly help do that).

I have faith that they will come to the table with solutions, Industry Minister Franois-Philippe Champagne said of the grocery giants in the fall without any plausible reason. As of the first quarter of 2024, Champagne has his definite answer: their record profits have only kept rising.

Poilievre has released no details about what his grocery reforms would look like. Instead, hes claimed incorrectly that higher prices and food bank use are entirely a result of the governments carbon tax. (Economist Trevor Tombe has estimated that the tax is responsible for a fraction of an one per cent increase).

Meanwhile, the PR firm of Poilievres chief advisor, Jenni Byrne, has been exposed for lobbying on behalf of Loblaw in Ontario.

Neither party has ever suggested the kind of policies that would make a genuine impact: price controls to prevent companies from jacking up prices, regulations that would bar them oligopolistic price-fixing and vertical domination, or a publicly-run, non-profit grocer that could provide affordable alternatives and genuine competition.

Records on federal political donors have only been kept since 2004, when Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chretien brought in a ban on corporate donations in the wake of the sponsorship scandal.

Since then, members of the Weston family have given $34,036, the Sobey family $110,262, and Metros CEOs Eric La Flche $6,179.08, relatively evenly split between the two main parties.

Instead of stopping big money from flowing to the main political parties, the ban on corporate donations has only obscured it, according to Conacher.

The pattern has been clear, he said. When business donations have been banned, suddenly executives, their spouses, and sometimes their kids are giving, substituting for what the business used to give. The only way to stop that is to dramatically lower the donation limit to what an ordinary voter can afford, no more than 100 dollars.

Individuals are currently allowed to give a maximum of $1,700 yearly to a federal party, along with another $1,700 to local riding associations, nomination contestants, and leadership candidates.

Giving to both Liberals and Conservatives isnt just a feature of these family food empirestypically all of Canadas wealthiest have given to both political parties.

The last time Canadian Business published its list of the top 100 richest families, 56 donated to the Liberal Party and 61 donated to the Conservative Party (with many giving to both).

Its a long-standing corporate insurance policy that appears to be continuing: a way to guarantee pro-corporate government regardless of which party is in power.

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Grocery giants paid for friendly Liberal, Tory policy with decades of donations The Breach - The Breach

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau makes his way to question period on April 30 in Ottawa.Adrian Wyld/The Canadian Press

Its 2024, and Justin Trudeaus Liberal government has tabled the foreign-interference bill that would have been so useful in 2019.

A new offence for foreign interference, with serious jail time as the penalty, would have been in effect before the last election. A foreign registry would not just be on the drawing board, but in place and working years before the 2025 election. Now it will almost certainly come after the vote.

The Canadians from diaspora communities who were intimidated by proxies of foreign governments or police and felt like there wasnt much of a response when they called the cops maybe theyd already feel more secure.

But Mr. Trudeaus government hemmed and hawed and delayed. Then there was a year and a half of troubling headlines and half a public inquiry and, finally, legislation about foreign interference.

By now, even the Liberals have to wonder how much trouble they might have spared themselves if they had just done this stuff sooner. Only the screaming urgency of political necessity made them act, and by the time they did, political damage had been done.

Even the hodgepodge of security measures in this bill have been on the to-do list for a long time.

Five takeaways from the foreign-interference commissions report

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has for years complained that a few words in the 1984 CSIS Act accidentally set up legal barriers for them to collect easy-to-obtain information about foreigners from sources outside Canada. Mondays bill proposes to fix that with the addition of one word.

If anything, the message carried by Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc and Justice Minister Arif Virani was not that they were taking the initiative to protect Canadians as a new age dawns, but rather that they were finally updating outdated laws. Mr. LeBlanc noted the CSIS Act was written before the digital age and Mr. Virani remarked that it changed sabotage laws that date from the 1950s.

Still. Finally, some important measures are on the table.

The new foreign-interference offence is an attempt to make it possible to prosecute interference that has been hard for Canadian authorities to pursue.

In the past five years, U.S. prosecutors have charged a number of Chinese nationals and Americans with intimidating Chinese expats in the U.S. in an attempt to coerce them to return to China and face arrest.

In Canada, prosecuting the same act has required proving harm to national interest, but the new bill removes that condition, making it easier to prosecute the offence of inducing someone to do something with threats or intimidation at the behest of a foreign state.

Thats a step up in consequences for working with a foreign states secret police. Now, Chinese Canadians or Iranian Canadians who feel intimidated might feel something will happen if they call the cops.

The bill would create a foreign-agent registry, requiring transparency from people who arrange with foreign governments to lobby, do public relations, or disburse funds for a foreign government in an attempt to influence Canadian politics or government.

Thats a long-awaited transparency measure that is supposed to tell us who is acting for a foreign government in Canadian politics and make it possible to prosecute those who do it secretly without registering.

But even after all this time, the bill did pull a punch in that it does not allow for the government to demand registration for a broader set of activities by people working for states that are deemed more serious threats.

Britains 2023 National Security Act created a similar registry but also established a second tier of registration, for a broader set of activities, for people working on behalf of countries designated as threats so that, for example, a private investigator hired by that country would have to register.

Its been a long wait. Kenny Chiu, the former B.C. MP who was targeted by a misinformation operation during the 2021 election campaign, faced attacks over his calls for a foreign-agent registry. That was three years ago.

Now the bill must wind through Parliament, and a bill this complicated which also adds new secrecy provisions to criminal trials dealing with national-security issues should not be rushed. Even if it passes through Parliament this fall, the registry would only be set up in another year, in late 2025.

But a lot of time got away, and the Liberals big national-security update is now an exercise in cleaning up a mess.

Original post:
Opinion: The Liberals' delays on foreign interference carry profound costs - The Globe and Mail