Better work

Among Canadian university graduates, the success rate (twice the median income or more) is greater than the OECD average, yet the proportion of those making half the median income or less (almost 18% of all university graduates) is by far the highest in the OECD.4 Temporary employment Much has been made of the growing decline of permanent, full-time employment and the rise of precarious work. [...] On the one hand, there are those who claim that the advance of computers in pattern matching, communication, perception, and other non- routine, cognitive skills will spread the downward job spiral to high-skilled work.15 On the other hand, there is a view that the significant advance in education and the application of technology in the developing world will result in the ability of countries suc [...] One was the near-revolutionary response to the calamity of the Great Depression in the 1930s, premised on the view that markets sometimes fail and it is the role of government to set things right. [...] The other was the more evolutionary emergence of the view, during the 1970s and 1980s, that markets must be allowed to function with far fewer constraints and that government too often and unnecessarily gets in the way.28 The Great Depression — Enter Keynes Prior to the Great Depression, economics taught that the marketplace was self- correcting. [...] It is not a great leap from these assumptions to the view that the performance of a company is best judged in terms of the value of its shares, and that the primary obligation of managers is to increase the value of their company’s shares.