There are a lot of Canadian superstars. In the world of ideas, there are individuals like Philip Tetlock, Steven Pinker, Alex Tabarrok, and David Card. But like most Canadian superstars, these people became recognized in the context of working in the United States, and speaking about American or global issues. In contrast, Joseph Heath is a Canadian superstar, who works in Canada and primarily publishes in the Canadian context. Heath is as sharp as any thinker in the US and merits my strongest endorsement. 

What I most appreciate about Heath is how simple yet compelling his writing is. Reading Heath is rarely mind-blowing, but it is almost always a mind-expanding. He is incredibly effective at helping you crystallize fundamental concepts that, despite thinking about for many hours, you never truly grasped.

Heath achieves this by constructing simple systems that allow the reader to understand the exact mechanics of how some idea or policy will interact with reality. As a professor of philosophy, Heath is extremely analytical. He has an incredible ability to explain economic concepts and issues of social justice by clearly articulating the expected consequences a proposed intervention has to our broader systems. Heath’s bread and butter is noticing collective action problems most people overlook, and identifying Pareto improving choices that society should be making.

Heath now blogs at Substack. You can read the archives of his old blog, or read one of his many excellent books.

• On the Problem of Normative Sociology
  • the tendency for people to focus on what the cause of a problem ought to be, rather than what it actually is, often leading to solutions that are ineffective because they are based on incorrect assumptions about how reality operates
• Why the Culture Wins: An Appreciation of Iain M. Banks
  • explores the world of Iain Bank’s Culture series, where technology has resolved basic social issues, leading to a post-scarcity society where culture evolves free from economic constraints, driven purely by its ability to replicate itself
• Review of Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments
  • a rebuttal to Tyler’s philosophical book, including discussion on potential threats to economic growth, positional goods, and temporal discounting
• Why Canada is so successful
  • structural reasons why Canada is so successful
• On the Disappearance of the Centre-Right in Canada
  • on what happens when Conservatives fall out of love with market mechanisms and optimize for vibes
• Final Ford
  • a reflection of Toronto’s infamous mayor, Doug Ford, and the rise of wealthy, yet lower class politicians
• Lessons for the Left from Olivia Chow’s Faltering Campaign
  • an overview of Heath’s framework for understanding politics: one axis focussed on benefiting the rich vs the poor (largely through things like redistribution, or preserving freedom), and the other focussed on expanding the output frontier vs assuming a fixed amount of resources that cannot be increased
• Hobbes’s Difficult Idea
  • on the tendency for nearly everyone to fail to recognize collective action problems
• The Problem with Critical Studies
  • on the shortcomings of modern critical studies, where many works are driven by normative arguments that fail to clearly define or defend the stated moral commitments, often using vague language that caters to niche academic audiences without engaging broader or opposing views
• Social Constructivism: The Basics
  • on the tendency for people to believe that because things like gender or race are socially constructed, they can easily be modified, leading to a failure to grasp reality
• The Problem of ‘Me’ Studies
  • on the tendency for modern scholars to use their personal lives and experiences as the basis of their scholarship, leading to weak research and defended by accusations of insensitivity
• What do libertarians and pedophiles have in common?
  • a critique of libertarianism, based on the idea of the “self-control aristocracy”, where those with exceptional self-control fail to grasp how policy changes may lead to hardship for those without strong self-control
• thoughts on President Trump
  • about the hazardous dynamic that arises as a consequence of people realizing the American political system is unreformable — and generally, about the lack of ability for the US to provide competent governance
• These houses are the source of a great many problems in the world
  • how increases in wealth get eaten up by positional arms races in consumption and do not lead to people feeling better about their financial situation
• Why a Conservative government would be bad for Ontario
  • why Heath favours public spending over private spending, as private spending gets absorbed into competitive consumption and fails to increase welfare, while public goods, not subject to competitive consumption, are more likely to increase welfare
• Misunderstanding Public Pensions Vol. 2
  • how public insurance, by solving market failure, can generate massive efficiency
• How Do We Feel About a National Daycare Program?
  • Heath dissecting the prospect of a national daycare program through the quintessential Heath model
• Why are carbon taxes so low?
  • an overview of the compelling reasons why we do not want to tax carbon too highly: as people in the future will be richer, have better technology, in addition to there being many other ways to help future people, and taking into consideration a discount rate for future lives
• The Forever Campaign
  • how political campaigning is a collective action problem, and a discussion of the costs of our political leaders choosing to optimize for reelection/power over good governance
• Absent-mindedness as Dominance Behaviour
  • how the common trait of professors being forgetful and absent-minded should be seen as a social dominance behaviour
• The Bottleneck in U.S. Higher Education
  • the University of Toronto alone educates more students than the top 10 US colleges combined; US colleges are overcapitalized and could educate many more students; to the extent they don’t, its an admission their business model is to extract rents rather than educate
• A Simple Theory of Cancel Culture
  • cancel culture is not a product of a new political ideology, but rather, materialized from a structural change in the dynamics of social interaction facilitated by the development of social media
• Redefining Racism
  • on the semantic shell game of conflating different definitions of racism, with very different meanings, for political aims
• The Paradox of American Multiculturalism
  • how an obsession with a certain kind of discourse on black-white racial conflict has made it impossible to develop healthy multiculturalism in the US
• Why Are Racial Problems in the United States So Intractable?
  • complicated and lengthy, but the best article on US race relations I’ve read
• Americans need to find some way to debate Black nationalism
  • on why there is no room for healthy discussion in the US on black nationalism
• What the United States Could Learn from Canada on Immigration Policy
  • common sense ways US immigration policy could provoke less nativist backlash

• academic,
• economics,
• joseph heath,
• philosophy,
• politics