This week, I have been alternately scrambling about in a mad panic and hiding under a rock in a state of denial. While there, I was mostly reading:

• Ambiguity aversion in politics - Chris Dillow: "There's a link between David Cameron's holiday snaps and the moral panic about migrants. The link is ambiguity aversion."
• The Philosopher of Surveillance. What Happens When a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy? - Peter Maass at The Intercept: "It is rare for mid-level experts — the ones conducting the actual surveillance — to frankly explain what they do and why. And in this case, the candid confessions come from the NSA’s own surveillance philosopher. The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?"
• The distribution of pay and the willingness to quit among U.S. workers - Nick Bunker, at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "Specifically, the authors show that the probability of a worker quitting is quite sensitive to changes in the average wages of their peer coworkers. In fact, workers seem to be much more sensitive to peer wages inside the firm than outside the firm. And more specifically, workers who end up earning less than their peers are more likely to quit."
• Strategic Quantitative Easing – public money for public benefit - Josh Ryan-Collins, New Economics Foundation: "Debate was sparked last week by Labour Party leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn’s proposals for a ‘people’s quantitative easing’, where the Bank of England would create money to invest in large scale infrastructure and public projects like housing, energy, and transport." So outrageously sensible it just might work.
• The forgotten grassroots voices of Greece - Carl Packman, openDemocracy: "[The Syriza] government was formed promising a programme of household debt restructuring that would have, in turn, allowed normal Greek workers and families a decent standard of living which didn’t include large chunks of their eroding wage packet spent on debt repayments. This move would create the grounds on which more Greeks become solvent, which in turn brings more consumer spending, creating jobs, bringing in more tax revenue which can be used to invest in the kind of skilled jobs the recovery relies on – and not a continuation of the low-skilled employment that reverses this recovery, as shown by the [General Confederation of Greek Workers] representatives."
• Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web - Brewster Kahle: Nobody could accuse Brewster of thinking small. I have one quibble: It's not at all clear that people need a money incentive to publish online. Indeed the majority currently pay for the privilege of doing so with their privacy. It's leaving commercialisation out of the platform that made the Web capable of beating proprietary online networks.
• Competitiveness and Class Warfare - Paul Krugman, NYT: "International competition is a mostly bogus notion; class warfare is very, very real."
• What Happens When You Leave Nazi Quotes On Tabloid News Stories? The Readers Love it - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "In an experiment that bodes poorly for the future of the Australian media, a pair of satirists teamed up to see what would happen if they posted actual quotes from Nazi leaders in the comments section of the Daily Mail Online, the British news outlet which recently launched in Australia."
• The Future of Work: Why Wages Aren't Keeping Up - Robert Solow at Pacific Standard: "It is essential to understand that what we measure as wages and profits both contain an element of rent. The purpose of the Treaty of Detroit was to freeze that allocation. What happens to it now is not so much a matter of economic law. It depends on bargaining power, business attitudes and practices, social norms and public opinion."
• Why I Support Corbyn For UK Labour Leader - Steve Keen in Forbes: "Critical observers like Corbyn have seen that [mainstream economic] advice doesn’t work: the economy has grown more slowly and been less stable because of these policies. So he expresses skepticism about them, which is justified by experience. But the general public and politicians, who have fallen for the extreme version of the mainstream, think this makes him “economically illiterate”. This is the invidious situation in which Corbyn finds himself. I don’t know whether Corbyn supports the alternative positive view of government deficits put forward by non-mainstream economists like myself, Bill Mitchell and Bernie Sanders’s advisor Stephanie Kelton. But I know that he rejects the mainstream view in favor of government surpluses. That’s enough for me to support him as leader over any of the other candidates."
• China’s Long Minsky Moment - John Cassidy, The New Yorker: "[…] what we are observing in China is the unusually elongated aftermath of a “Minsky moment”—that dreaded moment, named after the late post-Keynesian economist, when euphoria is replaced by pessimism, asset prices start to plummet, lenders discover that their creditors can’t replay their loans, and an economic downturn begins. Or, as Deng Xioping might have put it, we have a Minsky moment with Chinese characteristics."
• As Anti-Austerity Candidate Surges, 'Corbynomics' Catches Fire in UK - Deidre Fulton, CommonDreams: Nothing new in this article; I'm just reveling in it.
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• Will you commit class suicide with me? - Rolf Straubhaar, openDemocracy:
  
• The Dutch “basic income” experiment is expanding across multiple cities - Maria Sanchez Diez, Quartz: "Detractors say that such schemes are expensive and harmful to the economy, since they don’t stimulate people’s initiative to work. And some complain that these programs just feel unfair." To which one should respond, define "work"; and sorry, but negative solidarity (my life is miserable and pointless, so yours should be, too) isn't a valid argument.
• Facebook Is Diving Into the Presidential Race. Yes, You Should Be Worried - Thor Benson, Truthdig: "This is a concern, Calabrese said, because it could completely change the playing field in the political arena. If Facebook knows you’re a liberal woman in Oregon who wants to protect the environment, it can tailor ads to make a politician appear to be in line with your ideals, even if that isn’t entirely the case. […] Say, for example, that good ol’ Donald Trump has said he’s interested in protecting a certain wildlife refuge (for whatever reason), but overall he’s not a huge fan of maintaining environmental standards and regulations. Facebook could just focus on the one time he said something you might agree with and show you that information."
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Rand Paul is decrying the irresponsibility of U.S. fiscal management; why, we haven’t been debt-free since 1835. Clearly, disaster looms, and has been looming for 180 years. But that’s nothing: Britain hasn’t been debt-free since at least 1692."
• With hundreds of thousands of new supporters, Labour is on the verge of something big – what a complete disaster! - Mark Steel at the Independent: "The fervour around Jeremy Corbyn is extraordinary, but it wouldn’t be fair to suggest he’s the only Labour politician who can bring large crowds on to the streets to greet him. Tony Blair is just as capable. In his case the crowds are there to scream that he should be arrested for war crimes and to throw things at him, but that’s being pernickety; he can certainly draw an audience."
• Guest Contribution: “Recent Experience with Monetary Sovereignty” - Helen Popper of SCU (Santa Clara, not Southern Cross) at Econbrowser: "Economists aside, heated political controversy in many countries – including Argentina, Greece, Iceland, and the United Kingdom – suggest that people on the street believe monetary sovereignty is real and that it’s relevant. Are they wrong?" tl;dr: No.
• Inverting the rhetoric of inequality - Chris Dillow: "In fact the biggest risk-bearers are often not bosses at all, but workers. It is they who invest all or most of their biggest asset (their human capital) into a single venture. […] Inequalities are legitimated in part by an ideology which presents bosses as heroic, forward-looking wealth-creators and their opponents as dreamers and ideologues. This turns the truth on its head." Faith (magical and misguided) in human capital theory is not necessary to extract the salient point: real risk falls on the powerless. Senior managers with golden parachutes and the members of multiple boards can hedge their bets.
• Even if the police don’t kill me, a lifetime of preparing for them to just might - Ezekiel Kweku, Pacific Standard: "You are not like the other children. You can’t get into the same juvenile mischief your white friends get into. You represent something more than yourself and your family when you are outside this house. You will have to be twice as good as other people to be as successful as them. Remember that the wind is against you, remember that you will never be allowed to be ordinary, and so you can never allow yourself to be ordinary."
• Most Evil Op-Ed Ever? Writer Wishes For Katrina-like Storm to Hit Chicago - Adam Johnson, AlterNet: "These op-eds aren't just whimsical thought experiments. They're trial balloons that lay the groundwork for later radicalism. They not only normalize the exploitation of tragedy as a virtue, they dehumanize those disenfranchised by these attempts to do so. If they seem intuitively vulgar it's because they are. They attempt to condition us to this type of sociopathic corporate thinking and to begin seeing our fellow citizens not as individuals, not as human beings, but as speed bumps getting in the way of 'progress.'"
• What Jeremy Corbyn supporters can learn from Margaret Thatcher - Ian Sinclair, openDemocracy: "There is, in short, no unchanging historical or political forces, or logical reason, why Corbyn couldn’t be prime minister." Apart from the clear fact that he's an extremist because he's not in favour of nuking people, a stance that Polly Toynbee criticises as recklessly favouring reality over symbolism: "I imagine, but I don’t know, that the potential leaders would not choose to spend tens of billions on these four submarines. But Labour is pledged to them, because any hint of unilateralism brands the party as unelectably reckless. I can argue against Trident, but Labour in opposition dare not." Clearly, unilateralism is electoral suicide. Having the courage to say "You might as well vote for the other fellow", which worked so well for Milliband, is the mark of a serious politician.
• Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know - Frank Pasquale, Aeon: "Limits on data collection will frustrate big-data mavens. The CEO of ZestFinance has proudly stated that ‘all data is credit data’ – that is, predictive analytics can take virtually any scrap of information about a person, analyse whether it corresponds to a characteristic of known-to-be-creditworthy people, and extrapolate accordingly. Such data might include sexual orientation or political views."
• For sale in Spanish 'paradise': entire villages. Cheap. - Sara Miller Llana at CSMonitor.com: "“This is as near as paradise as I can think of,” says Mark Adkinson, who founded the Galician Country Homes real estate firm and has recently begun marketing abandoned villages. It would be the stuff of dreams were it not also the symptom of a problem clouding Galicia's future: The area is essentially dying. The Galician statistics institute warned recently that this region of northwest Spain could lose 1 million residents in the next 35 years, or roughly a third of its population."
• Why Bernie Sanders Should Add a Job Guarantee to His Policy Agenda - Pavlina R. Tcherneva at NEP: I think we (meaning the US and every other country, too) need both a Job Guarantee and Universal Basic Income, the latter functioning as a flat-rate (and therefore progressive) tax credit that puts an admittedly very approximate value on non-labour-market work. Though JG is the low-hanging fruit, politically ("What? You would prefer to see people collecting the dole and not working?").
• Sensible is the new extreme: Jeremy Corbyn, And The Terrifying Prospect Of Policies The Punters Actually Like - Jeff Sparrow in New Matilda and Why Republicans Vote for Bernie - Thom Hartmann at Truthout
• Why Shouldn't Copyright Be Infinite? - Eric Crampton, guestblogging at the EFF: "Australia National University’s Dr. George Barker suggested that New Zealand could do well by strengthening its copyright legislation. He warned against the fair dealing exceptions that have crept into the law and asked, “Why not have copyright law like property law—i.e. it lasts forever?”"