Mapping corporate ownership
Greetings patrons,
It’s time for another research update. In this letter, four things:
- Mapping the ownership networks of Canada’s billionaires
- Inflation!
- New paper in the Real-World Economics Review
- Recent interviews
Mapping Canada’s billionaire ownership networks
Back when I was defending my master’s thesis in 2013, one of my committee members asked me why I was studying the US instead of Canada. My answer was that the US has vastly superior statistics. In contrast to the expansive data available from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Statistics Canada is quite paltry. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve used it.
That’s about to change.
A few months ago, my colleague D.T. Cochrane alerted me to the fact that Statistics Canada is now collecting data on inter-corporate ownership. They’ve compiled a surprisingly extensive database on the interlocking ownership between Canadian corporations. This data is a goldmine waiting to be tapped.
The back story here is that Cochrane is using the ownership data for his research with Canadians for Tax Fairness. Along the way, he needed some help wrangling the ownership database (which is structured in a fairly obscure way). So I wrote some R code to do the job.
While playing with the database, it occurred to me that this would be a good opportunity to finally get a collaboration between Cochrane and myself off the ground.
More backstory.
For several years, Cochrane and I have been trying to collaborate on a research project. But various snafus have stymied our efforts. This time, though, I’m confident we’ll get something off the ground.
Our plan is to map the corporate holdings of Canada’s billionaire families — the likes of the Thomsons, Westons and Rogers. If all goes well, we’ll shed some light on how Canada’s gilded class structures their corporate empires.
Inflation!
In case you missed it, I recently posted a follow up to my piece The Truth About Inflation.
While writing this post, I did a bunch of research thinking that it would fit into one article. But I soon realized that I had way too much material — enough for probably three posts.
So in early 2023, I’ll be publishing more inflation research. If all goes according to plan, the first post will test Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler’s ‘stagflation thesis’. This is the idea that the normal route to inflation is through economic stagnation (rather than shortages created by rapid growth).
The second post will study the idea that interest rates reduce inflation. As it turns out, there’s precisely no evidence that this ‘solution’ actualy works. Instead, interest-rate hikes seem to be a reaction to inflation, perhaps designed to bolster the income of the moneyed class. I guess we shouldn’t be surprised by this result. Economists know everything ‘in theory’ and nothing in practice.
New paper in the Real-World Economics Review
I’m happy to announce that the Real-World Economics Review has published my piece Have We Passed Peak Capitalism? The paper uses word frequency to track the changing ideological landscape of capitalism.
If you’re unfamiliar, The Real-World Economics Review (RWER) is a gem among the trash-heap that is academic publishing. RWER is both open access for readers, and free to publish in for authors. It is also widely read, which is rare for an academic journal. I highly recommend subscribing to their quarterly issues.
Recent interviews
If you’ve got some spare time this holiday season, I recently did a couple of interviews that might interest you.
In November, Regan Boychuk and I chatted with Steve Keen and Friends about our research on Alberta oil-and-gas cleanup:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s9h-g4zmeE8
A few weeks ago, I had a wide-ranging conversation with Unlearning Economics about many aspects of my research:
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1683299908
(I also recommend watching Unlearning Economics’ recent video on value theory, as it nicely summarizes the controversy over the labor theory of value that I discussed here.)
Until next time
That’s it for this update. Thanks for supporting my work! If you have comments, don’t hesitate to reply to this email.
Cheers,
Blair