This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Sword of Democracy — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weinersmith:
• Piers Morgan, neoliberal — Chris Dillow: The goods of excellence consist in mastery of particular practices, which tend to be positive-sum: one man’s excellence can be celebrated by all. The goods of effectiveness, however, are things like wealth, fame, power and winning, and these are often zero-sum: for a winner there must be a loser.
• Australia’s Unemployment Rate Isn’t What It Seems — Jim Stanford in New Matilda: By considering all three categories of underutilised worker (officially unemployed, working but need more hours, and non-participants), we generate a much higher measure of labour market slackness: close to 17 percent, almost three times higher than the official unemployment rate.
• RealtyCorp is born — Leith van Onselen, MacroBusiness: Australia’s media duopoly is on its way to becoming one giant real estate fix. Hot on the heels of Fairfax becoming a glorified real estate agent […] Real estate is now tipped to drive NewsCorp’s earnings growth into the future as well.
• Corbyn’s Plan — Ian Welsh, declining to mince words: I have little patience for all the Brits who are wringing their hands about Labour and parking their votes in the Conservative party. This is a good, non-radical plan that will work. It is a plan of a government that wants to be good to the poor and the young. Corbyn is entirely credible regarding the lot of it, as he’s stuck by these principles all through the Thatcher and Blairite years. If you’re planning to vote Conservative in the UK, when this is on offer, you’re just an asshole, an “I”ve got mine, fuck you Jack,” or someone who has bought so far into neoliberal ideology that your political actions make you indistinguishable from an asshole, whether or not you think neoliberal policies “work.”
• Electricity retail prices too high — Public Interest Advocacy Centre: Research by energy economist Bruce Mountain, released this week, confirms that the big three electricity retailers (AGL Energy, Energy Australia and Origin Energy) are charging two to three times more to sell electricity in NSW, VIC, SA and QLD, where the market has been deregulated, than the regulated retailer is charging in the ACT.
• Incorporating energy into production functions — Steve Keen: In my last post on my Debtwatch blog, I finished by saying that the Physiocrats were the only School of economics to properly consider the role of energy in production. They ascribed it solely to agriculture exploiting the free energy of the Sun, and specifically to land, which absorbed this free energy and stored it in agricultural products. […] But rather than following the Physiocrats’ lead on energy, Smith instead saw labour—not energy—as the font of wealth (which he described in the same terms as Cantillon: the “conveniencies of life”), and ascribed the increase in productivity over time to “the division of labour" […] Economics thus lost the Physiocrats’ focus on energy, and instead descended first into the “Labour theory of value” and then into the Neoclassical (and Post Keynesian) notions of “production functions” in which energy played no role at all.
• #1246; In which is glimpsed an Opportunity — Wondermark, by David Malki!: