The Zero Room

I don't quite follow all of this, as I'm pretty ignorant of how central banks actually function, and also there are some graphs in it; my brain shuts down as soon as it sees a graph.

The take-home message though seems to be this: there are three superficially distinct ways in which a government could finance investment to kick-start an economy in times of depression, recession, or "liquidity trap". You can use Plain Vanilla Deficits (PVD - spending more money than you take in because you're the government and you can), Overt Monetary Financing of Government (OMFG - getting the reserve bank to give you the money before you spend it, because you're the government, etc.), or People's Quantitative Easing (PQE as proposed by Corbyn - getting the reserve bank to give money to a new National Investment Bank, which will fund your worthy causes, because yada, yada). The practical differences all seem to come down to precisely who it is that signs their name on the "give me money, please" chitty, and how many carbon copies you need. Presumably, among better informed people than myself, one of these options looks more politically acceptable than the others, which will all turn your hair instantly white with shock.

Where any of these differs from "traditional" Bernanke-style Quantitative Easing, is that QE just has the reserve bank standing out on the street corner shouting "Free money! Get yer free money over here! Great big wads of it!" to passing private investors. When these investors don't want to sink any money into anything productive because they're terrified that, for instance, the other post-2007 shoe is about to drop, they won't take the money at any price, and you've achieved nothing. Worse, what money you have managed to offload has probably gone into unproductive rent-seeking and/or speculative activity by people wealthy enough to handle the losses of playing in the casino economy. Thinking that some sort of democratic process could possibly reach a consensus on useful ("shovel-ready") public projects to finance (by putting a positive number on one side of a balance sheet and an equivalent negative value on the other side) may sound wildly radical, but it beats investing in a dole queue.

More at NEF: "The Bank of England’s own research indicates that just 5% of households own 40% of the assets boosted [by 2009-2012 QE]. QE became a way to shovel more wealth into the hands of the already wealthy."

And here's Simon Wren-Lewis on Central Bank Independence and MMT: "A National Investment Bank can be set up perfectly well based on borrowing from the market, and you can ensure it gets the funds it needs by a government guarantee. The only reason you would avoid trying to do that is because the NIB debt would count as part of the government’s deficit, and you were worried about the size of the deficit. The last people who should be worried in this way are followers of MMT. " Yes, but politics. I think there's something to be said for having a clear public distinction between consumption and investment, even if in reality it's a purely a matter of accounting.

This week, I have been mostly sleeping, and reading:

• What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won - Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future: "Nobody expected to be actually talking about him being the nominee and all that. But whether he is or not, the discussion Sanders wanted HAS been triggered, and an amazing list of supporters now exists. Now there is the hope that he and we can build a movement out of it that lasts past this election."
• Fuck Nuance - Keiran Healy: See also the interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. I freely admit that I'm struggling with identifying any consistent body of practices that distinguishes sociology from, say, social psychology, or history. I'm also not entirely sure it needs one. But there's certainly a rich and inexhaustible seam of discourse on the theme of UR DOIN' IT WRONG!
• NYT Claims U.S. Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: "For the NYT to tell its readers that the U.S. — one of the leading cluster bomb states on the planet — is actually one of the countries that “have not yet joined the treaty but have abided by its provisions” is nationalistic propaganda of the most extreme kind."
• The Great Wealth Transfer to the London Elite - Craig Murray: "Now the brilliance of the trick is that, as it is labeled a benefit, the left fight to keep housing benefit as though it benefited poor people. In fact this is a great illusion. It does nothing of the sort. What would truly benefit poor people is lower rent or affordable homes. Housing benefit goes straight into the pockets of the landlord class." Welfare recipients aren't. Austudy, Newstart, whatever: all but a handful of change ends up with landlords.
• Other People’s Dollars, and Their Place in Global Economics - Paul Krugman, NYT: "The Aussie dollar plays no special role in the world monetary system, yet Australia has consistently attracted bigger inflows of capital relative to the size of its economy — and run proportionately bigger trade deficits — than the United States. What’s important for both capital and trade, it turns out, is whether your economy offers good investment opportunities under an umbrella of legal and political stability. Whether you control an international currency is a trivial concern by comparison."
• Some Rules for Teachers - Anne Boyer at The New Enquiry: Rule 12 applies to any public speaking, in my experience. "12. thoroughly prepare class, including making preparations to abandon your preparations entirely"
• Quantitative Easing for People: The UK Labour Frontrunner’s Controversial Proposal - Ellen Brown: New rule. Nobody is allowed to cry "ZOMG! Zimbabwe!" while there is a single unemployed person, or a scintilla of unmet demand.
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• Why franchises care more about their coffee than their people - Ashlea Kellner et al. from Griffith University, in the Conversation: As Humphrey McQueen points out, the whole point of franchising is to finance expansion using other people's money. Just as the franchisor outsources cost and risk to the franchisee, so the franchisee offloads this burden on to their workers.
• Joe Hockey’s unscripted moments of truth reveal what the Government really thinks - Warwick Smith for The Age: "When Hockey tells Sydneysiders to get a good, well-paying and secure job if they want to enter the property market, he is telling us what this government really thinks. If you don’t have a job that pays much better than the average wage then you don’t deserve to own your own home. If the best you can do with your life is be a teacher in a public school or a nurse or a waiter then you’re not worthy of his concern or interest. Get a better job, then come talk about your problems."
• The Art of Capital Flight - Ken Rogoff at Project Syndicate: "Just five months ago, Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, told an audience in Singapore that contemporary art has become one of the two most important stores of wealth internationally, along with apartments in major cities such as New York, London, and Vancouver. Forget gold as an inflation hedge; buy paintings." I used to know a Coffs-old-money scumbag who would boast about his Norman Lindsay prints. The money value of them, that is; not any intrinsic virtues. The sad empty lives some people lead…
• 99 percent Utopia and money - Branko Milanovic and insomnia give us an interesting thought experiment: "So, there is, I think, already now a limited, but growing, number of goods and services whose marginal cost of production is so low that they are practically free. (The average cost of production is not zero, but to an individual consumer these goods appear as free.) Consider now the behavior of people. Do they go to Starbucks stores and fill their pockets with free paper napkins or grab free ice cubes? No. Do they go to free open-air concerts day after day and fight for the spots? No. Once you know that such goods will be plentiful and free, you do not keep an unreasonable stock of them, nor do you fight to get them. You know they will be around when you need them."
• Range of reactions to realism about the social world - Daniel Little: "And what about the concept of a market itself? Can we understand this concept realistically? Do markets really exist? Maybe the most we can say is something like this: there are many social settings where stuff is produced and exchanged. When exchange is solely or primarily governed by the individual self-interest of the buyers and sellers, we can say that a market exists. But we must also be careful to add that there are many different institutional and social settings where this condition is satisfied, so there is great variation across the particular "market settings" of different societies and communities. As a result, we need to be careful not to reify the concept of a market across all settings."
• Why Bernie Sanders Should Add a Job Guarantee to His Policy Agenda - Pavlina Tchernerva at NEP: I can't remember if I saw this a month ago when it first came out. It deserves multiple mentions anyway, as it's a terrific summary of the arguments for government as employer of last resort. "The private sector is simply not in the business of satisfying unmet basic needs or providing employment for everyone. But once most basic needs are met, will there be enough work for the JG participants to do? I’m convinced, yes. As Warren Mosler says, “There is no limit to the ways we can serve one another”. My worry is that even if we mobilized everyone who wanted to work in a private and public initiative, there would still not be enough manpower to do all the things that we sorely need—especially concerning the environment."
• And the Winner is (should be)…. Fiscal Policy! - Francesco Saraceno: "In a liquidity trap the propensity to hoard of the private sector becomes virtually unlimited, so that monetary policy (be it conventional or unconventional) loses traction. It is true that the age of great moderation, and three decades of almighty central bankers had made the concept fade into oblivion. But, since 2008 we were forced to reconsider the effectiveness of monetary policy at the so-called zero lower bound.Or at least we should have…"
• Economics in Two Lessons: Income Distribution - John Quiggin: "For a very poor person, an additional hundred dollars could mean the difference between eating and not eating. For someone slightly better off, it may mean the difference between paying the rent and being evicted. For a middle class family, it might allow an unexpected luxury purchase. For someone on a million dollars a year, it would barely be noticed." And Rawlsian fiscal policy has an unlikely champion:
• Trump Is Right on Economics - Paul Krugman: "Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong."
• The Usual Warmongers - Craig Murray: "Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population. Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria. Who should be bombed exactly – ISIL or Assad – appears unimportant, so long as there is bombing. Indeed, the Murdoch Sky News, the Mail and the Blairites are contriving to build a narrative that Jeremy Corbyn, the SNP and bleeding hearts like myself are responsible for the death of little Aylan and hundreds like him, by unreasonable and inhuman opposition to a bit more bombing."
• Fed Up with the Fed - Joe Stiglitz at Project Syndicate: "The “jobs gap” – the difference between today’s employment and what it should be – is some three million. With so many people out of work, downward pressure on wages is showing up in official statistics as well. So far this year, real wages for non-supervisory workers fell by nearly 0.5%. This is part of a long-term trend that explains why household incomes in the middle of the distribution are lower than they were a quarter-century ago. "
• Taking Corbynomics Seriously - Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate: "Under conventional quantitative easing (QE), the central bank buys government securities from banks or corporations and relies on the extra cash that it “prints” to stimulate private spending. But studies suggest that much of this money goes into speculative activity, risking asset bubbles, rather than being channeled into productive investment. An alternative would be to distribute the central bank’s newly issued money directly to housing associations, local councils, or national or regional investment banks – any organization that could carry out infrastructure projects. This is what Corbyn proposes. "
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• The Syrian Refugee Crisis and the ‘Do Something’ Lie - Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: "While there’s no doubt many of the refugees are escaping Assad’s bombing of cities, the boy in question, Aylan Kurdi, wasn’t: He was escaping ISIS and the US bombing of his hometown of Kobani, far from anything the Assad government is doing. A no-fly zone would not have saved his hometown. An absence of fueling jihadists by the United States and the subsequent bombing of said jihadists by the United States? Perhaps."
• Kickstarter Focuses Its Mission on Altruism Over Profit - Mike Isaac and David Gelles, NYT: "Public benefit corporations are a relatively new designation that has been signed into law by a number of states. Delaware, where Kickstarter is reincorporating, began allowing public benefit corporations in 2013. Under the designation, companies must aim to do something that would aid the public (such as Kickstarter’s mission to “help bring creative projects to life”) and include that goal in their corporate charter. Board members must also take that public benefit into account when making decisions, and the company has to report on its social impact."
• School questioned Muslim pupil about Isis after discussion on eco-activism - Vikram Dodd in the Guardian: "In a response to the legal action, Central Foundation school said it should be dismissed. According to legal documents related to the case it added: “It is unarguable that at the relevant time (May 2015) the school was required as part of its safeguarding responsibilities to be aware of the dangers of radicalisation. […] The school added: “This safeguarding step can not be criticised, as the school had due regard to its overarching duty to safeguard pupils and the need to prevent them being drawn into terrorism.”"
• Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet - Jim Dwyer, NYT: "“Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,” Mr. Moglen had said. “You can’t inspect it.” That was five years ago. On Tuesday, Volkswagen admitted it had rigged the proprietary software on 11 million of its diesel cars around the world so that they would pass emissions tests when they were actually spreading smog."
• How Much of Your Audience is Fake? Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads. Hasn’t worked out that way. - Ben Elgin, Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, and Joshua Brustein at Bloomberg: Nothing we didn't already know, and to be honest I didn't even read more than half of it, but a useful link to send the next entrepreneur you meet who talks about "clicks", "landing pages", and "conversion rates".

This week, I have been mostly half-heartedly finishing another academic term, while reading:

• Joseph Stiglitz: “Deep-seatedly wrong” economic thinking is killing Greece - Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking: The common observation that the problem with Europe is economic union without political union is not strictly true. It's that economic union has been used to impose a kind of political union that would never have been accepted through a democratic process.
• The ‘flipped classroom’ is professional suicide - The never less than brilliant Jonathan Rees at the Daily Dot: "As Leslie Madsen-Brooks of Boise State University concluded after her school began capturing classroom lectures and posting them to iTunes: “In an age where people seem to think that education is just a matter of ‘delivering content’ that translates into mad workplace skillz, I’m uneasy about providing the university with any multimedia content that could be aggregated into a enormous-enrollment course taught by a grossly underpaid and underinsured Ph.D.”"
• The MOOC revolution that wasn’t - The Daily Dot have also snaffled the always-brilliant Audrey Watters: "Rather than education for all, MOOCs now merely promise education for employability. This new narrative, according to George Siemens, one of the originators of the MOOC concept, casts education as simply skills training—a far cry from President Lyndon Johnson’s description, 40 years ago, of higher education as “a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity, and increased personal reward.”"
• Two real-life accounts of the effect of benefits sanctions - Peter Dwyer at the Conversation: Irritable Duncan Syndrome is caught out making up qualitative evidence in favour of punitive anti-welfare. Meanwhile non-fictional people suffer.
• Email from a Married, Female Ashley Madison User - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept points out that it's complicated: "The private lives and sexual choices of fully formed adults are usually very complicated and thus impossible to understand — and certainly impossible to judge — without wallowing around in the most intimate details, none of which are any of your business. That’s a very good reason not to try to sit in judgment and condemn from afar."
• DIY Tractor Repair Runs Afoul Of Copyright Law - Laura Sydell, NPR's All Things Considered: "[…] the little computer screen lets him know when something is wrong. Unfortunately, Alford isn't allowed to fix it. John Deere has a digital lock on the software that runs his tractor. And it won't give him the key. If something goes wrong with one of his tractors Alford has to take it to an authorized John Deere dealer — the closest one is about 40 miles away — or a John Deere rep has to come visit him."
• Data is not an asset, it’s a liability - Marko Karppinen at something called Richie that makes "app components": "If you work in software development, sooner or later you learn that code is a liability — all things being equal, the less code you have, the better off you are." Yup. "You can’t expect the value of data to just appear out of thin air. Data isn’t fissile material. It doesn’t spontaneously reach critical mass and start producing insights." But it produces graphs. Stupid people love graphs. Stupid people in positions of authority really love graphs. I don't think you fully understand the app maker's job. It's not your business to produce the emperor's new clothes; it's your job to praise them.
• Writing, Typing, and Economics - JK Galbraith the Elder, writing in 1978 for the Atlantic: "[…] because the real world is so funny, there is almost nothing you can do, short of labeling a joke a joke, to keep people from taking it seriously. A few years ago in Harper's I invented the theory that socialism in our time was the result of our dangerous addiction to team sports. The ethic of the team is all wrong for free enterprise. The code words are cooperation; team spirit; accept leadership; the coach is always right. Authoritarianism is sanctified; the individualist is a poor team player, a menace. All this our vulnerable adolescents learn. I announced the formation of an Organization to combat this deadly trend and to promote boxing and track instead. I called it the C.I.A. — Congress for Individualist Athletics. Hundreds wrote in to Harper's asking to join."
• The UK Hits Moral Rock Bottom - Craig Murray: "On the day that it is revealed that 2,380 people in three years died within 14 days of being declared fit to work by an ATOS assessment and having benefit stopped, we also have 45 of the most appalling members of the political class elevated to trough it for life in the House of Lords, at a possible cost to the taxpayer of 67,500 pounds per week in attendance allowances alone."
• The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended - Jenna McLaughlin at the Intercept: "The track pad controller, they said, can hold up to 2 megabits of memory. All the different “chips” in your computer — from the part that controls the device’s power to the chips in the keyboard — also have the capacity to store information, like passwords and keys to other data, which can be uploaded through firmware updates. According to the public documents from other members of Five Eyes, it is incredibly difficult to completely sanitize a device of all its content."
• Tortured in Guantánamo, Uncharged Prisoner Details a US-Created Hell - excerpt from Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi: '"What terrorist organizations are you part of?" "None!" I replied. He put back the bag on my head and started a long discourse of humiliation, cursing, lies, and threats. I don't really remember it all, nor am I ready to sift in my memory for such bullshit. I was so tired and hurt, and tried to sit but he forced me back. I cried from the pain. Yes, a man my age cried silently. I just couldn't bear the agony.'
• I don’t teach critical thinking, I teach the material - Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net: "Obtaining truth is hard and there is no magical form of thinking called “critical thinking” that can be separated from specific domains. Aside from a very simple general rules of thumb, such as “don’t be emotional in arguing” or “show my your evidence,” the best way to be improve your thinking is to learn from those who have spent a lifetime actually trying to figure out specific problems." An ontological excision long overdue.
• Homes for the homeless - Suzie Cagle in Aeon: "The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes."
• All our needs are social - Branko Milanovic: " We are social beings. It was stated by Adam Smith very nicely that our needs vary in function of what we consider to be socially acceptable. In a much quoted passage, Smith contrasts a man living in a relatively poor society who is content with a roughly-hewn shirt and another one, living in a richer society, who would be ashamed to be seen in public without a linen shirt. Smith was drawing on his own experience, having observed how what is socially acceptable, i.e., what are our “needs”, has changed in his own lifetime as England and Scotland had become richer. "
• The case for realism in the social realm - Daniel Little: "In short, the social sciences do not possess the remarkable coherence and predictive accuracy of physics, so confidence in realism is not grounded in the high level of success of the enterprise. Sociology is not like physics. But equally, the concepts of the social sciences are not "hypothetical constructs" that depend upon their role in a developed theoretical system for application. It is therefore possible to be piecemeal realists. Again, sociology is not like physics." But: …
• Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: WTF!? - Brad DeLong: "But if you ask physicists whether the entities of Einstein's theory are really there, they will say: "Of course not: Those entities do not satisfy the quantum principle.[…]" There is something there. But just because your theory is good does not mean that the entities in your theory are "really there", whatever that might mean..." Which gets back to Chomsky's point that no scientist since Aristotle has tried to "explain" anything. We've been modeling things, with varying degrees of fidelity.
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  - Clay Bennett in Truthdig
• Whitewashing the IMF’s Destructive Role in Greece - Michael Hudson in CounterPunch: "The tragic Greek experience should stand as a warning of the need to withdraw from the rules that have turned the eurozone into an economic dead zone, and the IMF and Troika into brutal debt collectors for European, U.S. and British banks and bondholders. This is not a story that the mainstream press is happy to popularize."
• SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE BODY: The nipple - Todd Beer: "The social construction of the body may be hard for some students to understand because so much of the body seems to be tied to biology. How we treat nipples depending on who’s body they are attached to demonstrates the power of society." Listen to Beer. Free the nipple; it rhymes with tipple.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Why The Ted Rall LA Times Scandal Matters [legal analysis] - Tom Ewing at aNewDomain: "In the absence of any real evidence whatsoever and by the Times own description of what happened, here’s one possible conclusion: The LAPD simply asked the Times to fire Ted."
  
• Curator of the Future - George Monbiot: "The middle ground is a magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves. […] Nothing was more politically inept than Labour’s attempt before the election to win back UKIP supporters by hardening its stance on immigration. Why vote for the echo when you can vote for the shout?"
• Nanny state submission - Cameron K Murray: "[…] it is not clear that “sin taxes” on alcohol are an effective way to change the binge drinking culture, and in fact might have the opposite effect. Those who choose to drink alcohol may change their patterns of consumption to only drink to get drunk. Why pay so much for alcohol unless you are going to get drunk?"
• Whistleblower Says Asylum Seekers Waterboarded And Zip Tied By "Thug-Like" Guards On Nauru - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "I’ve seen members of the [Wilson] Emergency Response Team exit tents and later I’ve seen asylum seekers come out of these tents, come out of them covered in water, coughing."
• The great Labour purge is underway - Michael Chessum, openDemocracy: "One post currently doing the rounds on Facebook states: “If you know that someone who has recently signed up as a member, supporter or affiliate, who is not in fact a supporter of the Labour party, you should email their name to leadership2015@labour.org.uk with proof.” The post concludes: “Please do report anyone you suspect should be ineligible – and you too could be called a star by the Compliance Unit”."
• Neoliberal epidemics: the spread of austerity, obesity, stress and inequality - Ted Schrecker and Clare Bambra of Durham University, in The Conversation: "Focusing on the social determinants of health – the conditions of life and work that make it relatively easy for some people to lead long and healthy lives, while it is all but impossible for others – we show that there are four interconnected neoliberal epidemics: austerity, obesity, stress, and inequality. They are neoliberal because they are associated with or worsened by neoliberal policies. They are epidemics because they are observable on such an international scale and have been transmitted so quickly across time and space that if they were biological contagions they would be seen as of epidemic proportions."
• But What’s It Really For? - Robert DiNapoli in Arena: "The very thought of tax revenues being lavished on education as a species of social investment long ago lost all credibility, and as a result universities have faced a perfect storm of budgetary axes falling faster and harder than those that split the skulls of the monks of Lindisfarne when the Vikings came knocking in the eighth century. The managers and education ministers who wrought this have possessed about as much feel for the real dynamics of teaching and learning as those Vikings did for the texts they ripped from the gospel books whose gem- and gold-encrusted covers they coveted. The pages that carried those texts’ real, living purpose they chucked into a convenient bog on their way back to their ships. Efficiency rules, for plunderer and executive alike."
• Greece is for sale – and everything must go, Nick Deardon, openDemocracy: "The beneficiaries are corporations from around the world, though eyebrows are particularly being raised at the number of European companies – from German airport operators and phone companies to French railways – who are getting their hands on Greece’s economy. Not to mention the European investment banks and legal firms who are making a fast buck along the way. The self-interest of European governments in forcing these policies on Greece leaves a particularly unpleasant flavour."
• Three-word slogans have left Abbott with an economic quandary - John Quiggin for the Drum: "Let's start with "debt and deficits". The Gillard government handed this issue to Abbott on a plate, with Treasurer Wayne Swan's obsessive pursuit of an essentially meaningless return to budget surplus. The rhetoric surrounding this goal made it impossible for Labor to defend its successful use of deficits to stimulate the economy at the time of the Global Financial Crisis. The result was that a government that had outperformed the entire developed world in terms of economic management was presented, and presented itself, as a set of wasteful spendthrifts."
• War and technological progress - John Quiggin again: "Opportunity cost reasoning leads us to ask what was foregone to release the [scientific and technological] resources [for war work]. In large part, the answer is ‘research of the kind that made these developments possible’. War gives great urgency to the “D” part of R&D, at the expense of R."
• Fairy Tales - Krugman at The Paper of Record: "As Mike Konczal, channeling Kalecki, pointed out some time ago, arguments rejecting Keynes and declaring that only business confidence can achieve full employment serve a very useful political purpose: they empower plutocrats and big business, while rendering populists impotent."
• Techno-optimism & low investment - Chris Dillow: "If you spend £10m installing robots in a factory today you might be able to undercut your non-robotized rivals. But if a new company later installs better robots for £5m, it will undercut you and destroy your profits. […] This is true not just of process innovation but product innovation too. For example, Nokia benefited hugely from the first wave of innovation in mobile phones, but suffered hugely from the later wave which gave us the smartphone. "
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• Did socialism keep capitalism equal? - Branko Milanovic: "The implication is of course rather unpleasant: left to itself, without any countervailing powers, capitalism will keep on generating high inequality and so the US may soon look like South Africa."
• "Don't Owe. Won't Pay." Everything You've Been Told About Debt Is Wrong - Charles Eisenstein at Truthout: "Positive money refers to money created directly without debt by the government, which can be given directly to debtors for debt repayment or used to purchase debts from creditors and then cancel them. Negative-interest currency (which I describe in depth in Sacred Economics) entails a liquidity fee on bank reserves, essentially taxing wealth at its source. It enables zero-interest lending, reduces wealth concentration, and allows a financial system to function in the absence of growth."
• The Upsurge in Uncertain Work - Robert Reich on the precariat: "On demand and on call – in the “share” economy, the “gig” economy, or, more prosaically, the “irregular” economy – the result is the same: no predictable earnings or hours. […] It’s estimated that in five years over 40 percent of the American labor force will have uncertain work; in a decade, most of us."