Sunday, 2 August 2015 - 9:17pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Blame Society, Not the Screen Time - danah boyd in the New York Times: "[Children] aren’t addicted to the computer; they’re addicted to interaction, and being around their friends. Children, and especially teenagers, don’t want to only socialize with parents and siblings; they want to play with their peers. That’s how they make sense of the world. And we’ve robbed them of that opportunity because we’re afraid of boogeymen."
- Meet the Master of the Old-School Clicky-Clacky Keyboard - Matt Jancer at Wired: "Mechanical (or clicky) keyboards improve typing speed and help eliminate carpal tunnel syndrome—but the real draw is the tactile feel of typing on a real keyboard; it’s the reaction of feeling the physical switches under the keys. That “feeling” is exemplified by the Model M, and has helped create a surprisingly large market for a 30-year-old piece of equipment that weighs five pounds." At one stage I had loads of these. Why did I ever let them go?
- MIT Media Lab Knotty Objects: Phone: "This video is one of a series of videos in collaboration between m ss ng p eces and MIT Media Lab for the Knotty Objects Summit, the first MIT Media Lab Summit devoted to design."
- What is "derp"? The answer is technical. : "English has no word for "the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors". Yet it is a well-known phenomenon in the world of punditry, debate, and public affairs. On Twitter, we call it "derp"."
- Why a Meaningful Boost for Those at the Bottom Requires Help From the Top - Noam Scheiber, NYT: "'We should not see this as hitting the top so that the bottom looks good in comparison,' Mr. Saez said in an email. Rather, he said, it’s about preventing the rich from vacuuming up the gains that might otherwise go to the rest of the population."
- Welfare economics and the Greek crisis - Branko Milanovic: The usually spot-on Milanovic is way off here. GDP per capita is not a valid measure of general welfare if you are, like Greece, a country rich in oligarchs (not to mention unemployment).
- The Hidden Nasties In Australia's New Free Trade Deal - Ben Eltham, New Matilda: We call it free trade, you call it union busting. Let's not quibble over terms.
- Of clowns and treasurers - Richard Denniss in The Monthly: Really good long read, basically debunking VSPs, the Confidence Fairy, and the economist on the telly who's a banker, not an economist.
- EU Infrastructure Undermines Sovereignty - Michael Hudson: "A genuine market economy would recognize financial reality and write down debts in keeping with the ability to be paid, but inter-government debt overrides markets and refuses to acknowledge the need for a Clean Slate. Today’s guiding theory – backed by monetarist junk economics – is that debts of any size can be paid, simply by reducing labor’s wages and living standards plus selling off a nation’s public domain – its land, oil and gas reserves, minerals and water distribution, roads and transport systems, power plants and sewage systems, and public infrastructure of all forms. […] No wonder Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis called the Troika’s negotiating position 'financial terrorism.' Their idea of 'negotiation' is surrender. They are unyielding. Official creditor institutions threaten to isolate, sanction and destroy entire economies, including their industry as well as labor. It transforms the 19th-century class war into a purely destructive meltdown."
- Austerity Has Failed: An Open Letter From Thomas Piketty to Angela Merkel - Thomas Piketty, Jeffrey Sachs, Heiner Flassbeck, Dani Rodrik and Simon Wren-Lewis - The Nation: "Now is the time for a humane rethink of the punitive and failed program of austerity of recent years and to agree to a major reduction of Greece’s debts in conjunction with much needed reforms in Greece."
- Yanis Varoufakis, James Dean of the European left - Philippe Marlière, openDemocracy: "He became the most hated of Syriza’s ministers in the other European capitals, and rightly so. Pragmatic, sure of himself but never arrogant, competent, funny, learned, an elegant speaker of English, Varoufakis is an atypical character in the desolate landscape of the European radical left. For all these reasons, his capitalist enemies of all creeds sniffed out the threat: Varoufakis had become the man to topple."
- Yanis Varoufakis is being pilloried for doing what had to be done - Philippe Legrain, The Guardian: "Greece’s outspoken former finance minister has long been loathed by his erstwhile eurozone counterparts, on whom he counterproductively impressed their mediocrity." The truth hurts.
- Debt Deflation in Greece - Paul Krugman, NYT: "However things play out from here — I find it hard to see a path other than Grexit — the troika’s program for Greece represents one of history’s epic policy failures. Even if you ignore the economic and human toll, it was an utter failure in terms of restoring solvency. In 2009, before the program, Greek debt was 126 percent of GDP. After five years, debt was … 177 percent of GDP."
- Hacking Team Emails Expose Proposed Death Squad Deal, Secret U.K. Sales Push and Much More - Ryan Gallagher, The Intercept: "A presentation prepared by Hacking Team for a surveillance conference in South Africa later this month shows the company complaining about the “chilling effect” that it claims regulation of surveillance technology is having on the ability to fight crime. The presentation singles out the organizations Hacking Team views as its main adversaries, noting that it is a “target” of groups such as Human Rights Watch and Privacy International and warning that “democracy advocates” are putting pressure on governments."
- A Pain in the Athens: Why Greece Isn't to Blame for the Crisis - Mark Blyth in Foreign Affairs: "Think about it this way. If 230 billion euro had been given to Greece, it would have amounted to just under 21,000 euros per person. Given such largess, it would have been impossible to generate a 25 percent unemployment rate among adults, over 50 percent unemployment among youth, a sharp increase in elderly poverty, and a near collapse of the banking system—even with the troika’s austerity package in place."
- A Day in the Life of a Prisoner - "Trevor" in The Society Pages, from prison: "In a discussion group with college students not long ago, after describing some of the opportunities available here in the penitentiary in which I reside, one student asked me if we as prisoners deserved such opportunities. I paused before answering that society deserves us to have such opportunities, because if we do not come out of prison with more skills and a more productive mindset then we came in with, we are destined to once again fail society."
- Why Greek debt is a problem - Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber: "The story of the eurozone’s relationship with Greece post-crisis is a story of external powers trying to restructure an entire political system from outside, using the crude tools of control that are available to them. The situation is somewhere between the kinds of Washington Consensus restructuring and conditionality that the IMF used to impose as a quid-pro-quo for emergency loans to countries in crisis, and the massive efforts to restructure the political systems of Afghanistan and Iraq post invasion."
- Direct aid, subsidies, tax breaks – the hidden welfare budget we don’t debate and The £93bn handshake: businesses pocket huge subsidies and tax breaks Aditya Chakrabortty at The Guardian: "Researchers and civil servants know a lot about the individuals who claim hundreds in, say, employment support allowance: every last cough, spit and missed appointment at the jobcentre. Yet of the big companies that rake off millions in direct grants, taxpayers often hear very little. The result is that the public do not know where billions of their own taxes are going."
- Germany won’t spare Greek pain – it has an interest in breaking us - Yanis Varoufakis in the Guardian: "Five months of negotiations ensued under conditions of monetary asphyxiation and an induced bank-run supervised and administered by the European Central Bank. The writing was on the wall: unless we capitulated, we would soon be facing capital controls, quasi-functioning cash machines, a prolonged bank holiday and, ultimately, Grexit."
- Feedbags - Rob Horning at the New Inquiry: "You don’t control an algorithm by feeding more information to it; you teach it to control you better. Facebook has always deferred to users because that deference allows it to gain more information that can be presumed more accurate than what it can merely infer. And it has never wanted to tell us what to find meaningful; it wants only to inscribe Facebook as the best place in which to discover our sense of meaning. "
Sunday, 26 July 2015 - 11:13am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Detention centres and State censorship - Kellie Tranter at Independent Australia: "The Government's approach has historical precedents. An order issued in 1933 by the German commander of Dachau, Hilmar Wäckerle, is instructive in terms of the mindset of officials who engage in censorship on behalf of the State. The order prescribed a program of punishment for inmates for infractions of rules including those prescribing rigid censorship concerning conditions within the camp"
- A Harvard Don is Enraged that Pope Francis is “Opposed to the World Economic Order” - Bill Black at New Economic Perspectives: "Stavins is appalled that a religious leader could oppose a system based on the pursuit and glorification of “great possessions.” He is appalled that a religious leader is living out the Church’s mission to provide a “preferential option for the poor.” Stavins hates the Church’s mission because it is “socialist” – and therefore so obviously awful that it does not require refutation by Stavins. This cavalier dismissal of religious beliefs held by most humans is revealing coming from a field that proudly boasts the twin lies that it is a “positive” “science.” Theoclassical economists embrace an ideology that is antithetical to nearly every major religion."
- Labour's choice: neoliberalism or more neoliberalism - Ben Whitham, openDemocracy: "Neoliberalism re-enchants the rich. The neoliberal assumption structuring British politics today is that a small “special class” of “wealth creators”, which three of the Labour leadership contenders describe so admiringly, are able to conjure wealth out of thin air. This assumption is false."
- Curb Your Malthusiasm - George Monbiot: "People are poor and unemployed, George Osborne and Iain Duncan Smith claimed in this week’s Sunday Times, because of “the damaging culture of welfare dependency”. Earlier this month, Duncan Smith, in a burst of Malthusiasm, sought to restrict child benefit to two children per family, to discourage the poor from reproducing. A new analysis by the Wellcome Trust suggests that the government, which is about to place 350 psychologists in job centres, now treats unemployment as a mental health disorder."
- Ultra Violence - Nathan Eisenberg at The New Inquiry: "Through the figure of the Ultra, football fandom produces a nationalism without a nation, and provides the model for a kind of violent organizing that sees its greatest historical resonance with the far right." Bloody hell. We are Sparta FC.
- Hillary Clinton ca. 1993 on Presidents Fighting Rich Corporations: "Tell Me Something Real" - Jon Schwarz at the Intercept: Can't say you weren't warned.
- Strengths and Weaknesses - xkcd:
- Barbara, tagged and monitored like a criminal - John Grayson, openDemocracy: "Electronic tagging is used in the criminal justice system to monitor offenders and to disrupt offending patterns. Imposing tags and curfews on asylum seekers, who have committed no crime, is an extension of this intrusive power that should worry all of us, for who is next?"
- The Hard Work of Taking Apart Post-Work Fantasy - Mike Konzcal for Next New Deal: "At this point, the preponderance of stories about work ending is itself doing a certain kind of labor, one that distracts us and leads us away from questions we need to answer. These stories, beyond being untethered to the current economy, distract from current problems in the workforce, push laborers to identify with capitalists while ignoring deeper transitional matters, and don’t even challenge what a serious, radical story of ownership this would bring into question."
- The euro was a big mistake, and Greece is paying the price - Timothy B. Lee at Vox: "So if you wanted to help Greece, you'd want to start printing more money in an effort to lower interest rates, boost demand, and bring down the country's unemployment rate. On the other hand, if you were just focusing on the German economy, you'd reach the opposite conclusion."
- Many ‘benefits scroungers’ are hard working people you rely on for your care - Elizabeth Cotton at the Conversation: "Of the 1.4m people working in social care, 160,000 are earning less than the living wage, particularly domiciliary carers who are paid only for their 15 minutes of contact time and not their travel between clients. Not earning enough to live puts us in a precarious position, and when we are precarious at work we are vulnerable to burnout, bullying and failures in our duty of care."
- Bernie Sanders Blasts Greece's Creditors - Daniel Marans at HuffPo: "'Let us not forget, after World War I, the Allies imposed oppressive austerity on Germany as part of the Versailles Treaty,' Sanders said in the statement to HuffPost. 'As a result, unemployment skyrocketed, the people suffered, and the policies of austerity gave rise to the Nazi Party. We cannot let a situation like that ever happen again.'"
- 'Tis The Season For Middle And Upper-Class Entitlement - Stuart Rollo, New Matilda: "Our good treasurer is the example par excellence of this system in action. While publicly demanding an ‘end to the age of entitlement’, Mr Hockey, who is paid $366,000 dollars a year by the Australian public and owns a property portfolio valued at around $10 million dollars, continued his long standing practice of claiming $270 a night from the taxpayer to stay in his own family home whenever he is in Canberra, a house that has increased in value from $377,000 in 1997 to around $2 million now. Totally legal, and completely unethical."
- British Tribunal Flip-Flops on Wrongful Surveillance of Amnesty International - Jenna McLaughlin at The Intercept: "The tribunal notably did not rule that the U.K. spy agency’s initial interception of communications was unlawful, just that retention rules had been violated." That's okay then.
- Watchdog Tries to Verify Coordinates of Afghan Health Clinics; Gets a Surprise: "“Thirteen coordinates were not located within Afghanistan,” the letter [from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR)] reads. Additionally, 13 more were duplicates, 90 clinics had no location data and 189 coordinate locations had no structure within 400 feet. One set of coordinates was in the Mediterranean Sea."
- Why we recommend a NO in the referendum – in 6 short bullet points - Yanis Varoufakis
- The IMF: An inexcusable, incorrigible failure - John Quiggin: "The IMF has understood from the start that the austerity policies it has imposed are economically unsound and a repetition of past failures. And yet it has been unwilling and unable to do anything else."
- The something for nothing culture - Chris Dillow: "I know someone who has made almost £400,000 tax-free without working - equivalent to almost 20 years of getting the maximum welfare benefits the Tories are considering. […]That someone, of course, is me. And the £400,000 is the tax-free profit I made from rising house prices."
- Yemen Is Starving, and We’re Partly to Blame - Chris Toensing, Foreign Policy in Focus via Juan Cole: "80 percent of people in the Arab world’s poorest country are in danger of starving to death under a U.S.-backed blockade and bombing campaign."
- The ideologues of the Eurozone - Simon Wren-Lewis: "The problem for the Euro project is that it has become captured by an economic ideology, and austerity is that ideology’s principle weapon. A self-confident and mature Eurozone would be able to tolerate diversity, rather than trying to crush any dissent. A Eurozone captured by an ideology will insist there is but one path, and that the imperative of austerity is too important to accommodate democratic wishes."
- My experience of 'signing on' at the Job Centre - Nicholas Glover, openDemocracy: "So whilst the Government’s analysis of Britain as marked by welfare dependency and worklessness continues to conjure up popularised notions of ‘shirkers’ and ‘skivers’ and helpless dependents – the ‘undeserving’ and ‘deserving’ – the job centres do the dirty work by creating hostile and shaming environments for all those who find they need social security. "
- Minister No More! - Yanis Varoufakis: "I consider it my duty to help Alexis Tsipras exploit, as he sees fit, the capital that the Greek people granted us through yesterday’s referendum. And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride."
Sunday, 19 July 2015 - 10:13am
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Niall Ferguson Fights Back Against Smear Campaign by Fact-checkers, Facts - Johnathan Chait at New York Magazine: "Committing the odd factual error is an occupational hazard in journalism. For Niall Ferguson, the commission of error is more than a hazard. It’s a cherished way of life."
- It's About The Bubble, Stupid: Tony Abbott's Magical Housing Growth Stimulus Strategy - Ian McAuley tries to teach the PM about housing bubbles: "Unless one is about to trade down or emigrate to Spain (where the bottom has fallen out of the housing market), the gain is illusory: it’s simply price inflation. If you have a portfolio of shares or a Brett Whitely painting on your wall, you may gain some value from a higher market value of such assets because you can sell them, but a higher value of your house is meaningless." Here's yer graph porn of the week:
- Academics attack George Osborne budget surplus proposal - Phillip Inman at the Grauniad: Atrios calls Osborne the Stupidest Fucking Person On The Face Of The Planet. I see your Osborne, and raise you a Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey (see above).
- Professors do far less teaching than the public imagines - Clay Shirky at Crooked Timber: I'm inclined to think this is less a matter of professors retreating into the ivory tower than retiring tenured academics being replaced by adjuncts. Clay Shirky is a smart guy, and I have a very small sample size to go on. Last I looked, there were three people with the title of professor at my local campus. In over two years at a nominal university, the only time I've ever been in the same room as anybody who's ever held the title of professor was at the Bellingen launch of Richard Hil's new book.
- What's Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled - Mike Konczal at Rolling Stone: "For-profit schools are turning out like Enron, or mortgage-backed securities designed to explode. They are yet another marvel of the financial world that turned out to be a fraudulent Ponzi scheme."
- What is Reform? The Strange Case of Greece and Europe - James Galbraith at the American Prospect: "Either the Greek government will concede too much, lose its support and collapse, in which case whether the end result is another receivership or Golden Dawn, democracy is dead in Europe. Or, in the end, the Greeks will be forced to take their fate—at enormous risk and cost—into their own hands, and to hope for help from wherever it might come."
- Our Meat Market for Workers: How Coles And Woolworths Benefit From Worker Exploitation - Godfrey Moase at New Matilda: "Labour hire contractors forcing workers to live with 29 other people in a regular suburban home is not the sort of behaviour we should accept in Australia. And by the International Labour Organisation’s measures, making workers live in particular housing, as a condition of employment, is an indicator of forced labour. What once was genuinely seasonal casual work is now a way of life for millions of workers in Australia – it is estimated that 40 per cent of all those in the workforce are currently employed on zero-hours contracts."
- Nicola Corbyn and the Myth of the Unelectable Left - Craig Murray: " I was saddened by readers’ comments [...] in which Labour supporter after Labour supporter posted comment to the effect “I would like to vote for Jeremy Corbyn because he believes in the same things I do, but we need a more right wing leader to have a chance of winning.” There are two answers to that. The first is no, you don’t need to be right wing to win. Look at the SNP. The second is what the bloody hell are you in politics for anyway? Do you just want your team to win like it was football? Is there any point at all in being elected just so you can carry out the same policies as your opponents?"
- Actually existing Europe - Yudit Kiss at openDemocracy: "How is it that Greek PM, Tsipras, who tries to relieve the suffering of his people, is a less acceptable EU negotiation partner than Viktor Orbán?"
- Buy a Joe Strummer Replica Guitar with Your Sex Pistols Credit Card Because Layers Upon Layers of Irony - Lisa Wade at the Society Pages:
- I'm a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards. - Koritha Mitchell at Vox: "I don't have the luxury of simply changing my syllabus to make my students more comfortable. You see, I'm also black and a woman. There aren't a lot of other people like me — women of color hold just 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions nationwide. My very presence makes some of my students uncomfortable because I do not fit any picture society has given them of an expert."
- Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans - Lee Seigel, NYT: "The reported consequences of having no credit are scare talk, to some extent. The reliably predatory nature of American life guarantees that there will always be somebody to help you, from credit card companies charging stratospheric interest rates to subprime loans for houses and cars. Our economic system ensures that so long as you are willing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, you will keep being enthusiastically invited to play the economic game."
- Who Said It, Henry Kissinger or…? - Greg Grandin at the Nation: "That, Kissinger said—trying to establish the domestic will to break the back of adversaries—was what he and Nixon tried to accomplish in Vietnam. “Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger said, “is really secondary.” It’s not that remarkable a statement. At least it is honest: What matters is the effect that the will to bomb (or, if possible, actual bombing) has on us, providing a sense of purpose so we can bomb some more."
- Gawker’s Idealism Is Exactly What the Labor Movement Needs - Richard Yeselson, New Republic: "The best thing intellectuals can do for the labor movement is also the best thing they can do as individual workers: come together, form a union, and then shout it out to the world." Also related:
- If We Don’t Hang Together … - the ever-brilliant Jonathan Rees for Vitae: "What’s so maddening is that university administrators think professors will take on that extra burden without the quality of education suffering there. Cancel that. What’s so maddening is that the universities willing to employ that strategy simply don’t care if the quality of the education suffers there."
- Bernie Sanders on Obama's "Biggest Mistake" - Jon Schwarz at the Intercept: "I think it’s unlikely that Obama’s demobilization of his supporters was actually a “mistake.” As Ganz put it in 2010, Obama saw his supporters “like a tiger you can’t control”; Ganz speculated that the president’s real goal was simply to “keep the machine on for the next election.”"
- Bubble! - Paul Krugman at the New York Times: "So Jeb! is basically promising that as president, he can generate Florida-style bubbles, which bring disaster when they burst, to the rest of America!"
- A Heavy Price To (Kind Of) Stop The Boats - Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "Immigration is complex. But the Abbott government’s approach is alarmingly simple. It is a policy of ruthless Machiavellianism that subordinates everything to the vacuous metric of boat arrivals, with neo-fascist imagery and a savage apparatus of state sanction."
- A dance of destitution - psychology's clash over coercion - Carl Walker at openDemocracy: "Job centres are being turned into ghettos of deficit annihilation, with job centre staff, mental health practitioners and mental health service users corralled within them. Mental health practitioners cost the state, job centre staff cost the state, people not working cost the state and people receiving medical treatment cost the state. This policy initiative simply puts them in one space and compels them to eat each other up."
- The IMF “Defense” of it Actions against the Greeks is an Unintended Confession - Bill Black at NEP: "Blanchard and the IMF know that an economically-literate deal does not “require difficult decisions by all sides.” It requires, instead, the troika to cease its destructive demands that Greece “bleed the patient” to “heal” it. The troika’s austerity demands forced Greece into a Great Depression that is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s in terms of sustained, obscene unemployment rates."
- Inside the mind of Bernie Sanders: unbowed, unchanged, and unafraid of a good fight - Paul Lewis for the Guardian: "‘I did win my last election with 71% of the vote. So it’s not just like someone walked in off the street and suddenly they’re Hillary Clinton’s main challenger. We’ve been doing this a few years.’"
- People Aren't Better Off Than Income Trends Show - Matt Bruenig at Demos (US): Young people want Candy Crush Saga, old people want Last Night of the Proms. Apples and oranges. Swings and roundabouts. Lets call the whole thing off.
- Bad Aunty: Seven Years On, How ABC Lateline Sparked The Racist NT Intervention - Chris Graham, New Matilda
- Greece, The Euro and Gunboat Diplomacy - Karl Whelan at Medium: a comprehensive timeline of the crisis Europe didn't have to have.
- Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? - Alesina, Glaeser & Sacerdote 2001, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (via Krugman): "Since racial minorities are highly overrepresented among the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute disproportionately to these minorities. Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. […] Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state."
- Which Students Get to Have Privacy? - danah boyd: "The reason that I get grouchy is that I hate how the risks that we’re concerned about are shaped by the fears of privileged parents, not the risks of those who are already under constant surveillance, those who are economically disadvantaged, and those who are in the school-prison pipeline."
Sunday, 12 July 2015 - 4:49pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- A Bibliographic Review of Neoliberalism - William Davies in Theory Culture & Society which, as the name suggests, comes with a mild Foucault warning: "In place of profitable production, neoliberalism discovers sources of profit through expanding risk calculus into non-productive areas of social life, which can then be drawn into the financial economy. When it transpires that some of these risks cannot be handled by the private financial economy, they are transferred to the state." Great little synopsis.
- The economic consequences of austerity - Amartya Sen in the New Statesman: "“An inefficient, unemployed, disorganised Europe faces us,” says Keynes [in 1919], “torn by internal strife and international hate, fighting, starving, pillaging, and lying.” If some of these problems are visible in Europe today (as I believe to some extent they are), we have to ask: why is this so?"
- RCEP: the trade agreement you’ve never heard of but should be concerned about - Belinda Townsend, Deborah Gleeson, Ruth Lopert: New rule. For any agreement said to be a trade agreement, we can a) assume it mostly isn't about trade, and b) assume it's bad and automatically reject it.
- Doug Cameron Takes Aim Over 'Slap On The Wrist' For 'Egregious' Worker Exploitation - Thom Mitchell at New Matilda: "Working six days a week, for between nine and 11 hours a day, 30 employees from the Philippines received roughly a third of the pay they were promised. […] For the 13 Chinese workers, even more vulnerable because few of them spoke any English, the abuse was worse." Hooray for the flexible labour market. Didn't realise Cameron had quit politics and joined the Labor party. Still, he seems keen to continue fighting, even with both hands tied behind his back.
- Facing psychological coercion and manipulation has become a daily part of claiming benefits - Felicity Callard and Robert Stearn at the Conversation: "In the past, conditionality related to things like refusing to take a job after receiving three offers of work. This was hardly beyond criticism. Now, the supposed absence of positive affect can trigger some form of sanction. “Lack of work experience or motivation” is one of the criteria for being sent on a Community Work Placement – six months’ unpaid community service for 30 hours a week."
- Digging Your Own Grave: Evil Employers Can Lay You Off, But You Don’t Have To Go Quietly - Ted Rall: "What if the standard response of a laid-off employee in the United States was not to leave quietly, but to sabotage computers with viruses, trash their office, break as much equipment as possible, and go out kicking and screaming?" Direct action gets satisfaction, as the Wobblies would say.
- Citizenship discussion paper offers a misleading take on this right - Rayner Thwaites, the Conversation: "Australian citizenship is not a contract. Talk of “contract” is a loose and misleading use of legal language. More fundamentally, citizenship is not dependent on performance. Australians are a mixed bunch, ranging from community saints to those convicted of terrible crimes. Those falling in the latter category don’t cease to be Australian. Citizenship status is not normative in that way."
- Did the Bush Invasion of Iraq “Create” ISIS? - Brian Glyn Williams at the GMU History News Network: "One Sunni’s anguished complaint captures the sentiment of this group that felt it had been arbitrarily removed from power by the Americans after ruling Iraq since the 1500s. This source stated “We were at the top of the system. We had dreams. Now we are losers. We lost our positions, our status, the security of our families, stability. Curse the Americans, curse them.”"
- Inequality of opportunity: Useful policy construct or will o’ the wisp? - Ravi Kanbur and Adam Wagstaff at Vox: "Any attempt to separate circumstances from effort – to identify that portion of the inequality of outcomes which is a legitimate target for redistribution – is fraught with empirical and conceptual difficulties. Fine-grained distinctions between inequality of opportunity and inequality of outcomes do not hold water in practice, and we are likely to greatly underestimate inequality of opportunity and hence the need for intervention."
- Grexit: end of the illusion - John Weeks, openDemocracy: "The Greek public debt cannot be paid in full and will not be. Even the cast-iron austerian Wolfgang Schäuble must know that. Greek government submission to the neoliberal EU project or forced exit was the Troika game plan from the moment Syriza formed a government."
- Adam Smith’s Pin Factory: Capital vs division of labour - Cameron K Murray: "The 18 distinct operations Smith recounts could just as easily be conducted by the same labourer on 18 different days to generate the same output per person over an 18 day period as in the case where labour is divided between workers."
- Why Sen is right about what is being done to Greece - Simon Wren-Lewis: "Yes, this is a battle over resources, but it is a battle where one side is using its power to pursue a policy that is very short-sighted, involving incredible hubris, and which is ultimately self defeating. The Troika are not acting in the long term interests of those they represent. This is I believe what Amartya Sen was saying when he compared these negotiations to the Versailles agreement. "
- Greece’s Debt Burden: The Truth Finally Emerges - John Cassidy at the New Yorker: "As long ago as 2010, when Greece was first bailed out, many knowledgeable observers, including some members of the I.M.F.’s board of directors, worried that Greece would never be able to pay back all of its debts—its total debt burden is about a hundred and seventy five per cent of the country’s G.D.P.—and advocated imposing a haircut on its creditors. Rather than doing this, the European Union, the European Central Bank, and the I.M.F. loaned the Greek government money to pay its creditors, which were mostly European banks, at a hundred cents on the dollar. In the now-famous words of Karl Otto Pöhl, a former head of the Bundesbank, the bailout “was about protecting German banks, but especially the French banks, from debt write-offs.”"
- Minister No More! - Yanis Varoufakis: The most reasonable person in the negotiations has been asked to stay at home. "And I shall wear the creditors’ loathing with pride."
- America Snores When Christian Terrorist Threatens to Massacre Muslims - Dean Obeidallah at the Daily Beast: "Doggart […] didn’t mince words about his plans for the Muslims of Islamberg: “We will be cruel to them. And we will burn down their buildings [Referring to their mosque and school.] ...and if anybody attempts to harm us in any way... we will take them down.”"
- The Professor of Parody - Martha Nussbaum in 1999, on Judith Butler: "Butlerian feminism is in many ways easier than the old feminism. It tells scores of talented young women that they need not work on changing the law, or feeding the hungry, or assailing power through theory harnessed to material politics. They can do politics in safety of their campuses, remaining on the symbolic level, making subversive gestures at power through speech and gesture. This, the theory says, is pretty much all that is available to us anyway, by way of political action, and isn't it exciting and sexy?" Also "Turgid Charisma" would be an excellent name for a rock band.
- Nordic Zombie Arguments - Matt Breunig at Demos (US, not affiliated with the Blairite UK think tank): "[…] they can't, for seriousness purposes, admit that the Nordics do as well or better than the US on all important growth/innovation fronts though. That would not play well for their jobs as pundits. And thankfully, because "innovation" is just a vague placeholder without any precise meaning, they have found that thing they can say about why our horrifically brutal system truly is better and necessary for the world."
- The Bernie Sanders Moment - Todd Gitlin, NYT: "His enthusiasts cut across age lines. Tim Ashe, a Vermont state senator who got his political start working for Mr. Sanders, is 38. He has met 20-somethings and 40-somethings who say they moved to Vermont because of Mr. Sanders’s appeal — not in order to vote for him, but to live in a place that would elect him."
Monday, 6 July 2015 - 8:57pm
I find the prescription here unintelligible. School is bullying. Staff included. That's the primary function. If you had to start from scratch you couldn't design a system more efficient at generating bullying or less efficient at generating education. If you disagree, please try to recall whether you were/are a bully or merely a complicit bystander (victims tend to be under no illusions as to their status). You can't have "school based interventions" to cure school. I left school able to read and write, as I could do when I went in. Except that by the time I left I had been persuaded that these activities, like any others directed at fulfilling my potential, were pointless and likely only to draw the ire of mindless oafs. Staff included.
Sunday, 5 July 2015 - 6:14pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- Greece: The Unpicking Of Democracy, One Debt Repayment At A Time - David Tuckwell, New Matilda: "In an interview with the Financial Times [president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi] said that Greece “should understand they have lost sovereignty a long time ago over their economic policies” - lost it, that is, to the market. In another interview with the Wall St Journal he said that Europe’s social contract had become obsolete and was being dismantled."
- Profit and public health - John Quiggin: "[…] selling medicine in the same shop as alcohol is unthinkable, but it’s entirely OK for a health professional to promote and sell water as a treatment for serious illness."
- Tourists and refugees: two worlds that aren’t supposed to collide - Roger Tyers in The Society Pages: "Offshoring poor people back to poor countries by bribing cash-strapped governments is an innovative, if highly morally-dubious strategy to keep the two worlds apart. But as we see with increased regularity, the global poor keep coming, driven by poverty and war. We don’t want to see them, we don’t want them to ruin our holidays, and we don’t want to be reminded of the underlying threat they pose to our privileged way of life. But can we stop them forever? Should we?"
- Thinking about open borders - , openDemocracy: "Employers and companies benefit from the liberalisation of trade in a globalising economy; but workers do not enjoy the same mobility: is this merely a way to favor capital to the detriment of labor and, if so, should this be left uncontested? If all human beings were fortunate enough to live in reasonably wealthy countries, with acceptable living and working conditions, these questions would perhaps be irrelevant. But this is not the case, and the ugly realities of our world are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore." Also:
- The case for open borders - , openDemocracy: "In many ways, citizenship in Western democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal class privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. To be born a citizen of a rich state in Europe or North America is like being born into the nobility (even though many of us belong to the lesser nobility)."
- American Exceptionalism - cartoon by Ted Rall
- Economic arguments as stalking horses - Noah Smith, and Paul Krugman responds in Why Am I A Keynesian?: i confess I don't understand the big government versus small government debate in the context of a country that spends more on their military than the rest of the world combined. How much bigger could you want the government to get? The fact that this rarely (if ever) rates a mention in this debate shows that in fact both sides agree that size doesn't matter—it's what you do with it. The debate can really only be about whether the government should help people who need it, or let them suffer unnecessarily.
- A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society - Thomas Piketty reviews Tony Atkinson's latest book: "With Atkinson, the dividing lines between history, economics, and politics have never been strict: he has always tried to reconcile the scholar with the citizen, often discreetly, occasionally in a more forthright manner. All the same, Inequality: What Can Be Done? goes much further in that direction than any of his earlier books. Atkinson takes risks and sets forth a genuine plan of action."
- Order effects in reading and citing academic papers - Daniel Feenberg, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaulé, Jonathan Gruber: "[…] our findings confirm that presentation order can be a powerful determinant of choice in a list-based environment – and that this can have strong downstream effects, such as through paper citations in our sample." I think you'll find that a very widely-cited article by Professor Aardvark of Algiers University disputes this.
- Open Access: A Collective Ecology for AAA Publishing in the Digital Age - , , and : "“In 2011, the journal-publishing divisions of Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley reported profits equal to 36%, 33.9%, and 42%, respectively, of their sales revenue.” Exxon Mobil, comparatively, has a net profit margin of 7.31%, Rio Tinto’s is 13.69%, even JPMorgan Chase can only claim 24.57%. Volunteered academic labor, it turns out, is a far more lucrative platform for profit accumulation than fossil fuels, mineral resources, and international finance."
- I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all - Amanda Taub at Vox: "[…] if university faculty are feeling disempowered in their classrooms, that's because they do, in fact, have less power at work: the shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs and the corresponding rise in the numbers of poorly paid adjuncts means many university teachers are in a precarious position right now. […] The problem isn't the substance of student complaints — the problem is that university lecturers are so terrified of the effect student complaints could have. That's a problem to be solved by universities having faculty members' backs, not by somehow silencing the debate over identity politics."
- Inequality, Technology and Public Policy - Tony Atkinson speaking at the RSA (video): The most interesting point for me came out of the last question from the floor. When he left school in the early 1960s, Tony was hired as a systems analyst for IBM, with no training whatsoever, and trained on the job alng with others from all sorts of backgrounds, at great expense to IBM. He muses that perhaps high employment at the time created investment in training, rather than vice versa.
Friday, 3 July 2015 - 10:46pm
Y'know, instead of illicit raves in residential buildings, I think you could have officially-sanctioned "public houses", or "pubs", where people could go to socialise. These would serve reasonably-priced alcoholic or non-alcoholic drinks, would provide a space free of irritating and intrusive television screens, would not permit any kind of gambling, and would occasionally feature live music by a full band, rather than one guy with a laptop computer playing along to dreary 1970s soft rock by the Eagles and/or James Taylor. Of course, there would also need to be inexpensive and efficient public transport to, from, and between these places. Call me mad, but I think a lot of people would like such a thing.
That Greek Thing
The Greek crisis began five years ago, and the situation has been at or beyond Great Depression level for much of that time. Joe Stiglitz said yesterday that he "can think of no depression, ever, that has been so deliberate and had such catastrophic consequences: Greece’s rate of youth unemployment, for example, now exceeds 60%."
Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is the smartest and most principled person I can think of to have held such a position in any country, at least in my lifetime. However (or perhaps because of this), mainstream press coverage of his performance has with rare exception ranged from misinformation to slander—at times approaching overt racism. Here's his perspective on the breakdown of negotiations between Greece and the 'troika' of the European Central Bank, the European Commission, and the IMF:
Ministers turned down the Greek government’s request that the Greek people should be granted a single week during which to deliver a Yes or No answer to the institutions’ proposals – proposals crucial for Greece’s future in the Eurozone. The very idea that a government would consult its people on a problematic proposal put to it by the institutions was treated with incomprehension and often with disdain bordering on contempt. I was even asked: “How do you expect common people to understand such complex issues?”. Indeed, democracy did not have a good day in yesterday’s Eurogroup meeting!
Despite concessions from Syriza so significant that they prompted widespread public protest in Greece, the troika—in what Paul Krugman dubbed "an act of monstrous folly"—refused to budge an inch from the disastrous policies of the last five years. If Greece was a corporation, its debt would have been restructured to something that can be realistically repaid long ago. It takes two parties to create a bad debt, and in this case it was the previous Greek government(s), corruptly operating on behalf of oligarchs, and the troika. The Greek people are not to blame, but are currently taking the punishment. By refusing to make concessions that would, among other things, recognise its own culpability, "The troika clearly did a reverse Corleone — they made Tsipras an offer he can’t accept, and presumably did this knowingly. So the ultimatum was, in effect, a move to replace the Greek government. And even if you don’t like Syriza, that has to be disturbing for anyone who believes in European ideals." (Krugman again)
Francesco Saraceno likewise notes that:
Austerity and structural reforms need to be the only way to go. Otherwise people could start asking questions; a risk you don’t want to run a few months before Spanish elections. Syriza needed to be made an example. You cannot survive in Europe, if you don’t embrace the Brussels-Berlin Consensus. Tsipras, like [former Prime Minister] Papandreou, was left with the only option too ask for the Greek people’s opinion, because there has been no negotiation, just a huge smoke screen. Those of us who were discussing pros and cons of the different options on the table, well, we were wasting our time.
Forced to choose between certain continuing disaster, and an uncertain future that would at least restore some degree of democracy to Greece, there seems to be only one responsible option.
Sunday, 28 June 2015 - 2:05pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- “The Art of the Gouge”: NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education - Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: "Under Chairman of the Board Martin Lipton and President John Sexton, New York University has been to operate as a real estate development/management business with a predatory higher-education side venture."
- Tent cities: Seattle’s unique approach to homelessness - Sara Bernard at Grist: "Nickelsville is one of several roving tent cities in Seattle. Christened in a deliberate slam against Seattle’s former mayor, Greg Nickels, whose administration regularly cleared homeless encampments, it has relocated about 20 times since its creation in 2008."
- How to Fix Patents: Economic Liberty Requires Patent Reform - Derek Satya Khanna proffers an intellectually honest conservative/libertarian view for Lincoln Labs: "Only in a place that can honestly argue that pizza is a vegetable can someone with a straight face pretend that patents to “slide to unlock” and the idea of “podcasting” are property."
- Almost half of all people released from the prison system become homeless - by whoever does the UniMelb press releases: "Contributing report author Dr Julie Moschion from the University of Melbourne said that the study found that the longer the time spent in prison the longer the individual was likely to be homeless."
- Stop Calling the TPP A Trade Agreement – It Isn’t - Dave johnson at Common Dreams: "“Trade” is a propaganda word. It short-circuits thinking. People hear “trade” and the brain stops working. People think, “Of course, trade is good.” And that ends the discussion."
- UNSW grads the top choice for 30 most in-demand employers - Leilah Schubert of, erm, the UNSW Media Office: Sounds legit.
- Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Why We Torture Asylum Seekers, But Were Too Afraid To Ask - Lissa Johnson, New Matilda: "Julian Burnside said, “In my naivety, I thought that if the rest of Australia knew the things that I had learned, the Government’s refugee policy would not long survive.” Yet here we are, 13 years later."
- Inside NSA, Officials Privately Criticize “Collect It All” Surveillance - Peter Maas at The Intercept: "An amusing parable circulated at the NSA a few years ago. Two people go to a farm and purchase a truckload of melons for a dollar each. They then sell the melons along a busy road for the same price, a dollar. As they drive back to the farm for another load, they realize they aren’t making a profit, so one of them suggests, “Do you think we need a bigger truck?”"
- Rand Paul Got One (Huge) Thing Right - Bill Boyarsky at Truthdig: "The fact that Paul brought up the connection between the NSA’s domestic spying and local law enforcement is tremendously important. In doing so, he highlighted the fact that federal drug officers and their local allies have secret access to the NSA’s powerful information-gathering tools. Thus, they can skate around Supreme Court decisions requiring prosecutors to show evidence to defense lawyers."
- Al Qaeda Syria Boss Says That His “So-Called Khorasan Group Doesn’t Exist” - Murtasa Hussain, The Intercept: "While the “Khorasan Group” designation itself was partly a fiction created by the U.S. government, simply a nickname created for a group of people within Syria whom it wanted to bomb, it was reported at the time in hyperbolic media reports as not only a real, discrete organization, but also a more dangerous threat to Americans than the Islamic State." The world is one big Gulf of Tonkin.
- TISA: Yet Another Leaked Treaty You've Never Heard Of Makes Secret Rules for the Internet - Jeremy Malcom at the EFF: Yikes! "The agreement would also prohibit countries from enacting free and open source software mandates. Although “software used for critical infrastructure” is already carved out from this prohibition (and so is software that is not “mass market software”, whatever that means), there are other circumstances in which a country might legitimately require suppliers to disclose their source code."
- How Mainstream is Bernie Sanders? - Juan Cole: "Climate change denialists are kooks, and if we had an honest media, it would call them kooks. Instead, Bernie Sanders, whose positions are shared by strong majorities of Americans, is being depicted as the one who is out of step."
- Political donations from Universities should be prohibited - Press release from the Australian Greens: "'It is a sad reflection on the contemporary higher education sector, as well as the state of politics generally, that universities feel as though making political donations is the best way to influence the political debate,' said Senator Rhiannon."
- Niall Ferguson’s Wishful Thinking - Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate: While it's not news that ridiculous fop Ferguson continues to be wrong in every important respect, this graph is particularly telling:
I wish I could locate again the corresponding graph for employment growth since the start of the recession, which shows employment roughly following same the trendline during the recovery, despite productivity flatlining. This is what you'd expect from a punitive social security system that forces people to take the first job going, rather than the one for which they are best suited. - Poisoning the Well, or How Economic Theory Damages Moral Imagination - Julie A. Nelson: "[…] defining economics around models of individual rational choice is only one option. A far better one, with a longer history, is to think of economics as being about how societies organize themselves to support human life and its flourishing—or about how they fail to do so. Such a 'provisioning' definition of economics encompasses both markets and families, both money and care. The neurological and psychological research reveals that when we say that economics is about 'rational choice in the face of scarcity,' we stack the deck in favor of individualism and selfishness. Contrast this to saying that economics is about 'who gets to eat and who does not.' The latter packs a visceral punch and directs us towards investigating social relations."
- The age of open financial imperialism - Branko Milanovic: "[…] a combination of good statistics with lack of knowledge of history, produces useless results. It is as if one were to study today’s racial wage gap in the US without knowing that there ever was slavery."
- Beyond the Middle East: The Rohingya Genocide - Ramzy Baroud at Uncommon Thought Journal: "It is not easy to sell Burma as a democracy while its people are hunted down like animals, forced into deplorable camps, trapped between the army and the sea where thousands have no other escape but “leaky boats” and the Andaman Sea. Abbott might want to do some research before blaming the Rohingyas for their own misery."
- The Finnish Diesease - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Why can’t Finland recover this time? Debt is not a problem; borrowing costs are very low. But it’s all about the euro straitjacket. In 1990 the country could and did devalue, achieving a rapid gain in competitiveness. This time not, so that there is no quick way to adjust to adverse shocks"
- The Hypocrisy of the Internet Journalist: I’m selling you out as hard as I can, and I’m sorry - Quinn Norton at Medium: "For years, as a regular writer at Wired, I watched this system grow up with unease. I watched more companies put tracking cookies and scripts in every article I wrote. As my career went on, that list kept getting longer. Unlike most of the people I worked with at Wired, I understood the implications of what we were doing."
- What kind of government service puts public on hold for 811 years? - Kristin Natalier in the Conversation: In the punitive social security—sorry, I mean "human services" (because there is no society and certainly no security)—system, wasting time is a feature, not a bug.
- Why it would be good for the IMF if Greece stopped repaying the IMF loans - Bodo Ellmers, guest blogging at TripleCrisis: "The most effective way to prevent irresponsible lending is to make it clear to lenders that they won’t see their money back if they lend irresponsibly. This is why Greece should default on the IMF loans and force the IMF to write them off. This would substantially strengthen the more prudent voices in the IMF decision-making processes."
- The Student Loan Crisis and the Debtfare State - Susanne Soederberg in Dollars & Sense: "Educational debt has become a ticking time bomb. With over $1 trillion in outstanding loan balances, the student loan industry has a lot in common with the sub-prime mortgage industry, which went into a devastating crisis in 2007-8. Both rely on a financial innovation called “asset-backed securitization” to raise capital and to hedge risk—in other words, to raise money for loans and to reduce the likelihood that investors will lose their money."
- For Terrorist Fearmongers, It's Always the Scariest Time Ever - Glennzilla at the Intercept: "Here we are 14 years after 9/11, and it’s still always the worst threat ever in all of history, never been greater. If we always face the greatest threat ever, then one of two things is true: 1) fearmongers serially exaggerate the threat for self-interested reasons, or 2) they’re telling the truth — the threat is always getting more severe, year after year — which might mean we should evaluate the wisdom of “terrorism” policies that constantly make the problem worse."
Sunday, 21 June 2015 - 6:14pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- PPE for the people - Joel Lazarus and Neil Howard at openDemocracy: "Our alternative is called – wait for it – PPE, or “People’s Political Economy.” In the summer of 2012 we and two other Oxford-based academics/activists came together to set up their own response to this situation. We agreed to establish a political economy education project to enable Oxford communities to learn about and respond to the crisis. At its heart, our PPE is based on a simple but powerful democratic premise: that all people have the right and the ability to understand the world for themselves, individually and collectively."
- Resilience and ‘counter-resilience’ - Kevin Harris at the Neighbourhoods Blog: "if we use the term, there’s a risk of doing so in collusion with forces and ideologies that seek to embed ‘resilience’ within the status quo. This in turn […] effectively undermines other forms of resilience."
- Publisher pushback puts open access in peril - Virginia Barbour in the Conversation: "Elsevier’s new policy is a substantial tightening of its rules around Green OA. It states that, if no APC is paid, the author’s accepted version of the article cannot be made publicly available via their institution’s repository until after an embargo period, which ranges from six months to four years. In addition, the license required is the most restrictive possible, in that it prohibits commercial reuse, or use of excerpts of the work."
- Myth of the Garbage Patch - Maya Weeks, the New Enquiry: "According to Jeffrey Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, after World War II resin makers “mounted a major educational effort to accommodate the consumer to new, previously unknown plastics. People neither naturally gravitated to the stuff, nor did they instinctively throw it away, so the industry also had to insulate consumers to plastic’s disposability.” It’s no coincidence that the escalation of the abovementioned effects–the rise in hungry whales, shark attacks, dying coral, anoxic zones and so on and so forth–have coincided with quadrupled plastics production since the massive neoliberal deregulation of the 1980s."
- Income Inequalities in Perspective - Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Vladimir Popov for the ILO: All the graphs you'll need for the rest of this year's arguments over Piketty.
- Trade and Trust - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Instead of addressing real concerns, however, the Obama administration has been dismissive, trying to portray skeptics as uninformed hacks who don’t understand the virtues of trade. But they’re not: the skeptics have on balance been more right than wrong about issues like dispute settlement, and the only really hackish economics I’ve seen in this debate is coming from supporters of the trade pact."
- Sharing information on student protests - Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber: "Students and staff who are occupying and protesting: share information!"
- A Fascinating Minimum-Wage Experiment Is About to Unfold - John Cassidy at the New Yorker: "An important question, from a policy-analysis perspective, is how the new wage laws will affect employment levels in the cities that have introduced them. It is now almost twenty-five years since the labor economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger, who were then both at Princeton, published a famous study challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that raises in the minimum wage inevitably lead to declines in hiring, particularly among teen-agers."
- The University of the Spectacle - James Compton, The Public Intellectuals Project: "The University of the Spectacle inverts the academy’s core values. Students and researchers of social work, English literature or visual arts will not find themselves in these images. No sociology will be committed. Indeed, all traces of scholarship have been removed. The utilitarian managerialism at the heart of the University of the Spectacle has no time for such activities. After all, where is the value-added proposition?"
- Ten Ideas to Save the Economy #5. Reinvent Education: I like Robert Reich. He means well. But count the ocurrences of phrases like "a more competitive workforce" versus "better-informed and engaged citizens". It isn't the job of public education to save the economy.
- Austerity Bites: Fiscal Lessons from the British General Election - : "The economic crisis that hastened New Labour’s demise had nothing to do with overspending and everything to do with its uncritical acceptance of twenty-first-century financial innovation and its excesses. Before analysts conclude that Labour has no choice but to shift to the right, we need to remember the lessons of the global financial crisis: a balanced budget will not save a government from the failures of a banking sector that is too big to bail out, and mere economic facts seldom defeat ideologies."
- The Corporate Archipelago - Paul Krugman, NYT: "[…] I just participated in a panel on the future of capitalism. I know, why such a small topic? But what I found myself thinking and talking about is actually the present of capitalism — and in particular about the peculiar delusion that we live in a world of individual competition in freewheeling markets."
- Grexit and the Morning After - Yes, Krugman again; he's on top form: "[…] the bigger question is what happens a year or two after Grexit, where the real risk to the euro is not that Greece will fail but that it will succeed. Suppose that a greatly devalued new drachma brings a flood of British beer-drinkers to the Ionian Sea, and Greece starts to recover. This would greatly encourage challengers to austerity and internal devaluation elsewhere."
- The bad intelligence - This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow in Daily Kos: Now that we know what we know… y'know…?
- Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse - Chris Hedges plays Cassandra rather well at Truthdig: "The Dark Ages were marked by arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror. And I see nothing to prevent the rise of a new Dark Age if we do not abolish the corporate state. Indeed, the longer the corporate state holds power the more likely a new Dark Age becomes. To trust in some mythical force called progress to save us is to become passive before corporate power. The people alone can defy these forces. And fate and history do not ensure our victory. "
- The Big Meh - Krugman keeps hitting them out of the park: "[…] writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues — and an excuse for handling those issues badly. If you go back to the 1930s, you find many influential people saying the same kinds of things such people say nowadays […] And then, thanks to World War II, we finally got the demand boost we needed, and all those supposedly unqualified workers — not to mention Rosie the Riveter — turned out to be quite useful in the modern economy, if given a chance."
- Nash equilibrium - Tony Curzon Price at openDemocracy: "There is nothing intrinsic to game theory that says that preferences should be self-regarding or that players should not care about the pay-offs to others. That is a layer of psychology and sociology on top of Nash's mathematics and utterly separable from it. Nash's result will apply as much (or, perhaps, as little) in a den of thieves as in a paradise of saints."
- SourceForge commits reputational suicide - Simon Phipps, Infoworld: "Once the darling of open source, SourceForge has been eclipsed by GitHub and package managers, leaving it with a long, thin tail of (mostly consumer) software. It has used increasingly desperate measures to monetize the service through questionable advertising, SEO, and adware injectors."
- Reporter Who Wrote Sunday Times 'Snowden' Propaganda Admits That He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him - Mike Masnick at Techdirt: "In short: one government official told them this, and they asked other government officials, who all had a personal interest in having the answer be "yes" and after enough government officials all agreed on the same talking point, good boy Tom Harper wrote it all down and presented it as fact."