This week, I have been mostly reading the Internet. All of it:

• People's QE: no big deal - Chris Dillow: "In fact, it could be that the problem with PQE is that - if undertaken at a time of recession - it would not be radical enough."
• Welfare's last stand - Jennifer Mittelstadt in Aeon: "Military leaders embarked on a new and more ambitious social welfare programme after 1973. That year, President Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and mandated an all-volunteer force. Military leaders could no longer force citizens to join – they had to convince them. And one of their most vital tools was social welfare benefits."
• Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "Essentially, Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law. The order, issued in the form of a letter from Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, is non-binding. The country’s two top public universities have refused to comply. But dozens of public schools are doing as the government has urged."
• Economic policy often seems to have little to do with economists. Why? - Simon Wren-Lewis in the Independent: "The problem is that City economists are not the best source for advice on major macroeconomic policy issues, like what to do with the deficit. This does require a knowledge of “proper research”, the academics’ area of expertise. What we often get reported instead is what “the market” thinks about policy. This is code for the speculation of City economists who have little policy expertise and a set of biases that come from the financial sector (deficits are bad, low taxes are good)."
• A Handy Guide for Using the Oxford Comma - Akira Okrent and Mike Rogalski
• The (near) inevitability, and who and when, of Helicopter Money - Nick Rowe at A Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Struggling to get my head around the details on helicopters, easings (quantitative), where monetary ends and fiscal begins, and have a lurking suspicion that the details don't matter.
• If You See a Little Piketty in This Tax-Haven Book, That's Fine - Jesse Drucker reviews Gabriel Zucman in Bloomberg Businessweek: "During his research, Zucman had a eureka moment. For years, economists have puzzled over a mystery in obscure economic data: financial liabilities around the world consistently outstrip the reported financial assets held by investors –- by trillions of dollars. […] Those trillions were missing because they were showing up as shares of mutual funds incorporated in tax havens, primarily in Luxembourg, Grand Cayman and Ireland. His theory: wealthy investors around the world have used the investments, often made through Swiss bank accounts, to hide their wealth." And…
• Why is so much wealth hidden? Failed democracy. - Marshall Steinbaum at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "Subverting democratic control of economic policy is a big reason why inequality has gotten so high across the developed world. Zucman’s book carefully documents the result in the case of tax havens, but the lesson is far more general: Inequality is high because of past inegalitarian choices that policymakers have made, and we must revisit those choices if we’re to address inequality going forward."
• It’s not a lack of self-control that keeps people poor - Elliot Berkman in the Conversation: "The very definition of self-control is choosing behaviors that favor long-term outcomes over short-term rewards, but poverty can force people to live in a permanent now. Worrying about tomorrow can be a luxury if you don’t know how you’ll survive today. […] People who grow up in poverty quickly learn that it doesn’t pay off to save for an uncertain future if the reward they are waiting for sometimes isn’t there after the wait."
• Why Is College So Expensive if Professors Are Paid So Little? - Michelle Chen in the Nation: "SEIU's adjunct-organizing project estimates that as of 2013, "22 percent of part-time faculty live below the poverty line," significantly higher than the overall poverty rate nationwide. But the hyperinflated price tag of college has funneled toward another aspect of the higher education system: driving funds into administrative offices - a pattern "reflected in increases in the numbers of administrative positions, increases in those salaries, and increases in the percentage of college budgets going to these functions.""
• NIB: good economics, bad politics - Chris DIllow: "Even the best private equity investors back a lot of duds: Marc Andreesen has estimated that 15 of 200 tech startups a year generate around 95% of the total returns. […] And here's my problem. Our biased press will focus upon the latter. "Corbyn's bank costs taxpayers" millions would be a regular story. […] For this reason, I welcome Corbyn's refusal to kowtow to the media. It is only by refusing to play their silly games that we have any hope of a rational economic policy."
• Imagining the BBC as new - John Sheil, openDemocracy: "We find ourselves in the same position as many of those who protested and campaigned against austerity in defence of higher education: what are we in fact defending? A top-down structure, supporting a super-white curricula, with privilege-generation written in its mechanic code, run by disillusioned professors of geography whose job – it sometimes feels – is to campaign for students to pay more tuition fees for much redacted and reduced resources. What would it be to imagine a free university? What would it be to imagine a BBC free to engage confidently in rigorous debate of ideas and values?"
• So Much in Common - Ted Rall
  
• Piggate: the behavioural economics - Chris Dillow: "Initiation rites thus act as a bonding device […] This is very similar to the endowment effect - our tendency to value something merely because we have sacrificed effort or money to get it. Dan Ariely calls this the Ikea effect: having suffered the eighth circle of hell in going to Ikea and then the pain of assembling their furniture, you will value it all the more." Personally, assembling flat pack furniture just makes me want to drag it out onto the front lawn and disassemble it with a sledgehammer.
• People love Bernie Sanders policies even when they've never heard of him - VL Baker at Daily Kos
• The path from deficit concern to deficit deceit - Simon Wren-Lewis: "What a strange world we are now in. The government goes for rapid deficit reduction as a smokescreen for reducing the size of the state. No less than a former cabinet secretary accuses the Chancellor of this deceit. Yet when a Labour leadership contender adopts an anti-austerity policy he is told it is extreme and committing electoral suicide."
• Corbyn public ownership push reflects what is happening all round the world - Andrew Cumbers, the Conversation: "Cash-strapped cities and regions are rediscovering that public utilities can provide profitable and sustainable revenue streams to cross-subsidise other services in times of austerity and budget cutbacks by national governments. In Frankfurt, as in many other German cities, the local stadtwerke finances local swimming pools, parks, libraries and other public services."
• Pope Decries “Shameful and Culpable Silence” on Arms Sales “Drenched in Innocent Blood” - Dan Froomkin, the Intercept: "Thursday’s speech was not the first time the Pope has spoken out about the arms trade. He referred to it as “the industry of death” in a talk with Italian schoolchildren in May. “Why do so many powerful people not want peace? Because they live off war,” he said."
• EPA opposed DMCA exemptions that could have revealed Volkswagen fraud - Donald Robertson at the Free Software Foundation: "As Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center noted "If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.”"
• Does the deficit matter? - Richard Murphy: "So, why the obsession with the deficit? This is short term politics: Goerge Osborne has spun a line that denies both the above facts and he has (undeniably) sold it well. The UK public believe, almost alone in the world now, that deficits are in some way a threat to well being. Actually they are not. As I have already noted today, government deficits are both the foundation of private wealth and money itself. To suggest otherwise is factually incorrect."
• It's The Economists, Stupid - Ideas, CBC Radio: Good mediamacro-debunking interviews with Julie Nelson and Richard Denniss
• Of clowns and treasurers - Richard Denniss in the Monthly, a long read (from a few months ago) worth every minute: "It was a choice to throw a trillion dollars at the bankers. And it is a choice not to throw a trillion at tackling climate change. Our politicians pretend that it is a choice made by “the markets”. It’s not. It’s a choice made by our politicians."
• The unspun Jeremy Corbyn - Alex Nunns, Le Monde diplomatique: "That this movement took the form of a Jeremy Corbyn leadership campaign is doubly surprising because the man himself is the antithesis of the stereotypical leftwing firebrand. Without the rousing oratorical skills of his mentor, the late Tony Benn, and with none of the raw charisma of Alexis Tsipras, Corbyn was not perceived as a threat by his fellow MPs. Remarkably, Corbyn’s straightforward, unspun style became an asset, marking him out as a total contrast from the media-trained salesmen of the British political class."
• Samsung TVs appear less energy efficient in real life than in tests - Arthur Neslen, The Guardian: The Defective by Design floodgates open.
• Not exactly SF, but pretty fucking Orwellian just the same - Peter Watts: "[W]hat about the poor assholes with three kids, up to their eyeballs in debt, who’ve just watched their retirement saving evaporate because [Toronto Dominion Bank's] American buddies played fast and loose with the global game of AD&D we call “the economy”? What about those people who simply can’t afford to walk away, no matter how badly they’re treated? […] These are the people the bank knows it can shit all over, because they have a high Vulnerability Index."
• The Truth About Chávez: Bernie Sanders is wrong — Hugo Chávez was no dictator - Gabriel Hetland in Jacobin
• 'Cashless’ Welfare Card Slammed - Xavier Smerdon, Pro Bono Australia: Quite apart from the inconvenience and indignity of this, the plan ignores the important role of welfare payments as "automatic stabilisers", boosting local demand when unemployment is high, which in principle should create more jobs. One can't imagine every corner shop, greengrocer, butcher, etc. in the country being whitelisted under this scheme, so it's mainly a gift to the supermarket duopoly.
• I suppose I brought it all upon myself - Matthew Yglesias: "This is why thoughtful opponents of the welfare state have generally avoided making the argument that capitalism is good because it promotes human well-being. Since capitalism does promote human well-being, "capitalism promotes human well-being" sounds like a good argument in its favor. But it turns out that capitalism plus a large welfare state promotes human well-being even more. So you either need to embrace the welfare state (the correct answer) or come up with another justification of capitalism."
• Exciting New Waterfront Development Planned For Mars - The Shovel: "Mars’s waterfront will be transformed into a world-class lifestyle, cultural, retail and commercial precinct. Announcing the new development today, the Mars City Council said the 25-hectare space would include a vibrant cultural hub, exciting mixed-use public spaces, and 45,000 apartments."
• Seven everyday things poor people worry about that rich people never do - Carmen Rios, Everyday Feminism (who excel at clickbait titles): "Being poor means that every worry is secondary to money. It means that every experience is centered around money. It makes money, which is ironically something you possess little of in contrast to other people, more central to your everyday life than theirs."
• Bombs Kill Shock - Craig Murray: "The spluttering fury by the establishment […] is revealing the existence of the moral dilemma to people from whom it has been effectively hidden as a topic of legitimate and serious debate. People will start to think. That is why Corbyn is so dangerous to the establishment. He has opened a Pandora’s box of ideas."
• Corbyn's victory is the new political reality - beautifully written piece by Geoffrey Heptonstall at openDemocracy: "This century has proved to be a nightmare. Public discourse is trivialized. Culture is vulgarized. Social welfare is marketized. Education is reduced to training schemes. There is popular resistance, but in England [and I do mean England] it has only now come close to serious political realization."
• Some post-school education bodies we could do without - John Quiggin: "But the real problem is the one I identified in the deregulation debacle. The VC groups claim to speak for universities, but exclude all but 40-odd of the people who work and study in them. In the present case, wouldn’t the perspectives of research students and the academics who supervise them be more useful than those of VCs and administrators? To repeat, we need to replace UA with a body that represents students and staff as well as top management."
• Q&A: Can Corbyn revolutionise the financial sector and the Bank of England? - Anastasia Nesvetailova, openDemocracy: "During the crisis of 2007-09, the central banks on both sides of the Atlantic stepped in and played a role that they were not meant to. We are lucky that they did so. Against many economic dogmas, they were not simply lenders of last resort, they made the markets, as my colleague Perry Mehrling argues in his book New Lombard Street. They made the markets when liquidity vanished and when private participants, buyers and sellers, simply would not pick up the phone." TL;DR: Central bank independence has always been a fantasy, and banks that are too big to fail are too big to be privately-owned.
• U.S. Bombs Somehow Keep Falling in the Places Where Obama “Ended Two Wars” - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: "How do you know when you’re an out-of-control empire? When you keep bombing and deploying soldiers in places where you boast that you’ve ended wars. How do you know you have a hackish propagandist for a president? When you celebrate him for “ending two wars” in the very same places that he keeps bombing." I wonder if "hackish" is a typo for "hawkish". Valid either way, though.