This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Pregnant Silence — George Monbiot explains why the big problem isn't the number of people; it's the number of other animals bred for those people to eat in their lifetime: Perhaps it’s no coincidence that so many post-reproductive white men are obsessed with human population growth, as it’s about the only environmental problem of which they can wash their hands.
• Do we still need microfoundations? — Daniel Little. I've been thinking about this in both the economics and sociology contexts. As desirable as it would be to reduce macroeconomics to microeconomics and social forces to the actions of individuals, insisting on such a reconciliation before any work can be done would be like rejecting gravity until Einstein came along to explain Newton's spooky force as the geometry of spacetime. Or denying Einstein the bodge of the cosmological constant in special relativity, or forbidding the use of dark energy in contemporary cosmology. Of course you can take provisional place-holding assumptions to unhealthy extremes, for instance by insisting that your model works perfectly well under the conditions in which it works, and that everywhere else, it is reality which is at fault. (So that is why we didn't see the financial crisis coming, your majesty.)
• Poor research-industry collaboration: time for blame or economic reality at work? — Glyn Davis: We need teams of managers with the expertise to translate promising early research into commercial development. […] These people – venture catalysts – could work with inventors to package opportunities for investors. ZOMG! MOAR MANAGERS!!!
• The Most Perverse Story to Justify Inequality: The narrative of economic elites — Eric Michael Johnson, Evonomics: When we were children we wouldn’t have understood that using financial derivatives to repackage subprime loans in order to resell them as AAA-rated securities was an unfair thing to do. Few of us today (including members of the commission charged with overseeing the financial services industry) can even understand that now. But we did know it was unfair when our sibling got a bigger piece of pie than we did. We began life with a general moral sense of what was fair and equitable and we built onto the framework from there. Chimpanzees, according to this study, appear to have a similar moral sense. The intricacies of what we judge to be fair or unfair would seem to have more to do with human cognitive complexity than anything intrinsically unique to our species. In other words, what we’re witnessing here is a difference of degree rather than kind.
• Bernie Sanders is a Socialist and So Are You — Ted Rall: Setting aside the rather idiotic idea of voting for a candidate because everyone else is voting for her […] I have to wonder whether an electorate that knows nothing about socialism is qualified to vote at all.
• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  
• MMT and Bernie Sanders — Randy Wray at New Economic Perspectives: I think people are enthusiastic to finally have a candidate who is not the Wall Street candidate. Bernie’s spending priorities match those of the vast majority of the population—and are not supported by the top 1% on Wall Street. I think that if elected Bernie would give us an updated version of Roosevelt’s New Deal. The original New Deal is what brought America into the 20th century. We need a similar effort to bring us into the 21st.
• Yanis Varoufakis: Australia is a ‘plaything’ of world economic forces it cannot control — Martin Farrer in the Guardian: “Australia – especially Sydney and Melbourne – has always insulated itself from facts about the world. Aided and abetted by the remarkable flow of capital towards the property market in Sydney and Melbourne, it has created a false sense of wellbeing,” he told the Guardian.
• “Socialism is as American as apple pie” — Bernie Sanders, via Occasional Links and Commentary: What this campaign, from my perspective, is about, and I say this in every speech that I give: It's not just electing Bernie Sanders to be president (and I surely would appreciate your support) but, very honestly, it is much more than that. Because no president, not Bernie Sanders or anybody else, can implement the kind of changes we need in this country unless millions of people begin to stand up and fight back.
• Recently Bought a Windows Computer? Microsoft Probably Has Your Encryption Key — Micah Lee at the Intercept: One of the excellent features of new Windows devices is that disk encryption is built-in and turned on by default, protecting your data in case your device is lost or stolen. But what is less well-known is that, if you are like most users and login to Windows 10 using your Microsoft account, your computer automatically uploaded a copy of your recovery key — which can be used to unlock your encrypted disk — to Microsoft’s servers, probably without your knowledge and without an option to opt out.
• DDoSing a regulator: A how-to manual from Facebook’s Free Basics — Rohin Dharmakumar, Times of India Blogs: […] a DDoS attack is one in which the perpetrators use a large number of unwitting PCs and servers to launch an attack on a site, so as to prevent the latter from serving its legitimate users and performing its stated function. What Facebook had carefully and deliberately crafted in India was a method to overwhelm [India’s apex telecom regulator] TRAI with a distributed set of responses that didn’t have anything to do with its consultation paper or questions.
• Some Big Changes in Macroeconomic Thinking from Lawrence Summers — Adam S. Posen, Peterson Institute for International Economics RealTime Economic Issues Watch: In a working paper the Institute just released, Olivier Blanchard, Eugenio Cerutti, and Summers examine essentially all of the recessions in the OECD economies since the 1960s, and find strong evidence that in most cases the level of GDP is lower five to ten years afterward than any prerecession forecast or trend would have predicted. In other words, to quote Summers’ speech at our conference, “the classic model of cyclical fluctuations, that assume that they take place around the given trend is not the right model to begin the study of the business cycle. And [therefore]…the preoccupation of macroeconomics should be on lower frequency fluctuations that have consequences over long periods of time [that is, recessions and their aftermath].” The business cycle is dead. Hysteresis rules, OK?
• The political aftermath of financial crises: Going to extremes — Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, Christoph Trebesch at VoxEU.org: The typical political reaction to financial crises is as follows: votes for far-right parties increase strongly, government majorities shrink, the fractionalisation of parliaments rises and the overall number of parties represented in parliament jumps. These developments likely hinder crisis resolution and contribute to political gridlock. The resulting policy uncertainty may contribute to the much-debated slow economic recoveries from financial crises.