Banning the bulb harder than it looks

I wrote a piece last week that riffed off Virginia Postrel's excellent rant against California's attempt at legislating incandescent bulbs out of existence. Five years ago, the government of Ontario and the Canadian federal government both set forth a plan to similiarly ban incandescents. 

It turns out that replacing inandescents with compact fluorescent bulbs is not as simple as waving a legislative wand. Part of it is consumer resistance -- nobody likes CFLs. But a deeper issue is environmental: CFLs contain mercury, and many of the governments that jumped at getting incandescents out of the stores made no plans for disposing of CFLs. 

Quelle surprise, then, to find that the Canadian government has not exactly met its five-year target. As Rachel Mendleson of Canadian Business reports today, Ottawa has very quietly delayed the implementation of the ban until 2014:

As a department spokeswoman told Canadian Business: "The delay is required in order to consider the concerns expressed about availability of compliant technologies and perceived health and mercury issues, including safe disposal for compact fluorescent lamps." 

Meanwhile, technology and good sense has a way of teaming up to defeat misguided social engineering. Mendleson reports that Sears has decided to replace all of the incandescents in its stores with not CFLs, but LED lighting -- and even they had to try out a number of brands before finding a bulb that was reliable. 

Why inequality matters

I have a feature in the new issue of Canadian Business magazine about rising inequality and why it matters. Excerpt:

Barack Obama might have swept to power two years ago on a banner of “Yes we can” social solidarity, but his biggest opponents right now, in the Tea Party movement, are more concerned about the effects of his policies on middle-class tax rates. In fact, almost the only ones in America who are leading the charge to soak the rich these days are the rich themselves: Warren Buffett, for example, has been arguing for ages that “people at the high end, people like myself should be paying a lot more taxes.”

This seems paradoxical, but it isn’t. In his 2006 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, the Harvard economist Benjamin Friedman argued that economic growth is crucial to the social and political well-being of a nation. In the absence of growth, people look for answers in intolerance and fear — which is exactly, and not coincidentally, what the Tea Party leaders are selling.