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".