COVID-19 and Guaranteed Basic Income GBI – Minimum Income
March 20, 2020 By Wade Rowland It’s a commonplace to observe that an existential crisis clarifies thought. Frequently, it offers opportunity to do the impossible, to get things straight. Case in point: the graduated income tax, by now universally accepted as the most equitable way to raise money for running any country, was brought in during the crisis of World War 1. It is still with us because it works much better than the system of customs and excise taxes it largely replaced. It was introduced, reluctantly, by a Conservative government, under Sir Robert Borden. It was...
Read MoreA preface to Morality by Design
I have spent much of my working life toiling in various fields journalism, a craft that allowed me to indulge an obsessive interest in trying understand to the big, existential questions of our time, and then pass along whatever insight I’d gleaned. Decades of research into politics, media, corporate crime, energy policy, environmental pollution, climate change, and, most recently, the impact of technological innovation led me more and more frequently to wonder: “Why is this happening?” and “Why do we let it happen?” Those sorts of questions, it would eventually occur...
Read MoreMorality by Design: technology’s challenge to human values
The introduction: How do you build a utopia? What does it take to construct the best of all possible worlds? Thomas More chose the name Utopia (in Greek, it means no-place) for the ideal society he described in his Renaissance masterpiece of 1516, written as a young man long before he served as Lord Chancellor to Henry VIII (and was beheaded for his trouble). The book was a visionary critique of fractious English society which More described as a “conspiracy of the rich,” in which the “greedy, unscrupulous and useless” lived off the labour of others. In Utopia, he sketched a form...
Read MoreA Murderer’s Apology: The Raymond Williams Trial
© 2010 Wade Rowland If a long career in journalism has taught me anything about watching and reading the news, it is that the details of any story that can be described as “horrific” are best avoided. They usually teach nothing worth learning, and they can leave a permanent, toxic residue in the mind and spirit. These days I teach mass media literacy to university students, and in preparing for my undergraduate class last Friday, I felt I had no choice but to say something about the story on everyone’s mind, the Raymond Williams trial. That drove me to spend some time...
Read More“Critical Moral Realism as an approach to thinking about, and teaching, ethics in communication studies.”
Media Ecology Conference June 28, 2019: Panel 2.4.10 “Critical Moral Realism as an approach to thinking about, and teaching, ethics in communication studies.” By Wade Rowland A brief biographical note: about two-thirds of my working life has been spend in print and television journalism; the remaining third has been in the academy, mainly at Ryerson, Trent, and eventually at York University. As a journalist, I had found it crucially helpful to have a credible, time-tested framework of ethical standards within which to pursue my work: standards like objectivity, balance, fairness,...
Read MoreAbout Wade Rowland
Ranked among Canada’s leading literary journalists, Wade Davies Rowland has written more than a dozen books on subjects ranging from television journalism, organized crime, and international environmental law to his current concerns, which include communications technology, the philosophy of science, and technology and human values. Full author bio.