Best economy reads: Is Canada a refuge for bad managers?

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A roundup of the best economic posts on the Web

'Economic nationalism is the last refuge of incompetent managers'

Stephen Gordon on Worthwhile Canadian Initiative bristles at the prospect of economic nationalism returning to the forefront of the public agenda in the wake of the Potash Corp. takeover drama.

"Just what is the problem with foreign ownership, anyway? The usual stories about low productivity and R&D being done elsewhere are hopelessly out of date. ... Probably the biggest losers are the former Canadian managers, who will be either pushed aside or down the ladder as the new owners install their people. Indeed, it is presumably the case that their justification for paying top dollar for those assets is that they can manage them better than the previous Canadian managers could. And they're probably right. "

Eds Note: Join Stephen Gordon for a live discussion on economic nationalism in Canada. Thursday, Nov. 4, at 9 a.m. globeandmail.com

Revenge of the biofuels

The Economist says technological advances may finally push biofuels into the mainstream. "... Companies working on a new generation of biofuels ... plan to make hydrocarbons, molecules chemically much more similar to those that already power planes, trains and automobiles. These will, they say, be "drop-in" fuels, any quantity of which can be put into the appropriate fuel tanks and pipelines with no fuss whatsoever." They will also have the advantage of circumventing the powerful, but inefficient, U.S. ethanol industry. "Meanwhile the feedstock could be nice and cheap: Brazilian sugar. Tariffs that block Brazilian ethanol from northern markets do not apply to drop-in hydrocarbons."

'Unions in America: Labour and the left'

Also from The Economist: "On Friday, the Wall Street Journal provided a wonderful bit of irony: despite the howls of indignation from the Democrats over private campaign spending, it turns out that the biggest sugar daddy is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a public-sector labour union that spends almost all of its cash for the Democrats. ... Since the WSJ article most of the commentary has involved arguments over possible Democratic hypocrisy, but that debate misses the point. The Democrats are electorally beholden to union support, and this often leads to bad policy."

The song remains the same

In a New York Times Oped, Paul Krugman feels like he's being 'Mugged by the Moraliziers':

"It's a sentiment that resonates not just in America but in much of the world. The tone differs from place to place - listening to a German official denounce deficits, my wife whispered, 'We'll all be handed whips as we leave, so we can flagellate ourselves.' But the message is the same: debt is evil, debtors must pay for their sins, and from now on we all must live within our means. And that kind of moralizing is the reason we're mired in a seemingly endless slump."

The end of multitasking?

A study via The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics says, "Workers that juggle too many tasks at once are less productive, leading to fewer completed tasks and a larger backlog of unfinished work. ... In the paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Decio Coviello of the University of Rome, Andrea Ichino of the University of Bologna and New York University's Nicola Persico reached their conclusions through a study of cases handled by several Italian judges over a six year period. This group of judges makes a nice study set, the paper says, because they are assigned cases randomly via a lottery system."