About Chris Dick

Chris rides on his digital sway-backed donkey tilting his lance, quixotically at all sorts of causes -- some hopeless, some perhaps -- not. I enjoy your feedback. Long live rational debate.
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Healthcare Reform

By |2020-04-21T10:38:20-04:00June 30th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , |

Some years ago, I did some work for a think tank called the “Atlantic Institute for Market Studies.” It was founded and run by a brilliant, somewhat mercurial economist named Brian Lee Crowley who has since moved onto other endeavours in Ottawa.  Health care reform was a policy focus at AIMS and I did a little work on this brief and was privileged to partake in a number of very enlightening dialogues with Dr. Crowley and others whose brows were more than a little furrowed by the formidable challenges faced by anyone or any group promoting change [...]

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Unintended Consequences

By |2020-04-25T10:15:05-04:00April 18th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , , |

I was reading the Economist the other day, and an item in the back pages got me thinking about the Law of Unintended Consequences. The LUC is pervasive and profoundly important, yet I know of not a single scholarly treatment of this subject. Of course,if such a treatment did exist, it would be a litany of sometimes comic, sometimes tragic and often perverse failures, a gloomy, but instructive tome replete with hubris and the comeuppance of overly-ambitious social engineers. Sounds like my kind of subject, so let me explain what I mean by the LUC and why [...]

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Broken Politics

By |2020-05-02T09:35:59-04:00January 10th, 2014|Categories: Society|Tags: , , , , |

Many Canadians have expressed considerable bewilderment at what is going on in Washington these days. Oh civility, where art thou?  Why do so many members of Congress seem to be breaking bad and letting partisanship trump (oops, was that a pun intended?) 'the better angels of their nature'? Some points seem obvious. The incumbency problem — the ease with which most members of Congress get re-elected reduces their responsiveness to the harassed electorate — like Walter White many members suffer from delusions of infallibility; and unlike Walter, almost never receive reality checks. (This speaks more generally to [...]

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Television as High Art

By |2020-04-21T09:03:20-04:00September 27th, 2013|Categories: Culture|Tags: , , |

If someone were to ask me where the most sophisticated, sustained and psychologically compelling explorations and evocations of the human condition (my definition of high art) are coming from here and now, I would say, wait for it, episodic television.  This statement will require a good deal of defence. Most culturally sophisticated types would place television far below poetry, theatre, novels, music and even movies as expressions of profound artistic endeavour.  I think they are wrong. The case for television can be made especially episodic television where characters develop and change -- the sort of things that [...]

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