This week, I have been mostly reading:

• CNN and the NYT Are Deliberately Obscuring Who Perpetrated the Afghan Hospital Attack - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: "The headline states: “Air attacks kill at least 19 at Afghanistan hospital; U.S. investigating.” What’s the U.S. role in this incident? They’re the investigators: like Sherlock Holmes after an unsolved crime. The article itself repeatedly suggests the same: “The United States said it was investigating what struck the hospital during the night.” It’s a fascinating whodunit and the U.S. is determined to get to the bottom of it."
• Sweden is shifting to a 6-hour work day - ScienceAlert: "A study published in The Lancet last month analysed data from 25 studies that monitored health of over 600,000 people from the US, Europe, and Australia for up to 8.5 years found that people who worked 55 hours a week had a 33 percent greater risk of having a stroke than people who worked a 35 - 40 hour week, and a 13 percent increased risk of developing coronary heart disease, while a separate study found that working 49-hour weeks was associated with lower mental health, particularly in women."
• Disliking Tragedy: Facebook’s Struggle to Convey Serious News - H.L. Starnes, the Society Pages: "Facebook, when taken on the whole, is a fantastic way for people to compare each others’ lives and share pictures of kittens and children, but when it comes to a tragedy, the platform is woefully inadequate at allowing its users to parse and process the gravity of events as they unfold. It is a thorough shock to a system that thrives on irreverent links and topical memes, and when faced with an item that requires genuine reflection and thought, it is often simpler – indeed, even more beneficial – for users to turn their heads until the kittens may resume."
• The Radically Changing Story of the U.S. Airstrike on Afghan Hospital: From Mistake to Justification - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: "[O]nly the most savage barbarians would decide that it’s justified to raze a hospital filled with doctors, nurses and patients to the ground. Yet mounting evidence suggests that this is exactly what the U.S. military did – either because it chose to do so or because its Afghan allies fed them the coordinates of this hospital which they have long disliked. As a result, we now have U.S. and Afghan officials expressly justifying the consummate war crime: deliberately attacking a hospital filled with doctors, nurses and wounded patients."
• Greece Without Illusions - Yanis Varoufakis, Project Syndicate: "The shift reflects the mandate that Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras sought and gained. Last January, when I stood with him, we asked voters to back our determination to end the “extend-and-pretend” bailouts that had pushed Greece into a black hole and operated as the template for austerity policies across Europe. The government that was returned on September 20 has the opposite mandate: to implement an “extend-and-pretend” bailout program – indeed, the most toxic variant ever."
• How Scientists Search the Cosmos for Encrypted Alien Signals (And Other Ones Too) - Micah Lee at the Intercept. I listened to this podcast, and thought this was the most forehead-slapping so-obvious-why-has-it-never-occured-to-me observation ever: "In any advanced civilization, there is only a “small period in the development of their society when all of their communications will be sent via the most primitive and most unprotected means,” Snowden said. And that if we pick up signals emanating from that civilization’s homeworld, such as television shows, phone calls, or satellite communication, it will most likely be encrypted because “all of their communications [would be] encrypted by default.” Because of how encryption works, those encrypted messages would be “indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.”"
• The Ideology of Money Scarcity - J.D. Alt at NEP: "The conservatives wield every opportunity to invoke the mantra that the government is broke and its spending must be reined in, while the liberals (like senator Sanders) find themselves helpless to refute the “logic” that the many things they want the government to spend money on are severely limited by the fact that everyone (including the U.S. government itself) is competing for what appears to be a finite and limited pot of dollars. […] It’s a “beautiful” business model if your goals are to maximize shareholder profits and executive bonuses. As a business model for humanity—and for humanity as a dependent member of the earth’s community of integrated ecosystems—it is fast becoming, quite simply, an unmitigated disaster."
• How Erratic Schedules Penalize Workers - Naomi Gerstel in the Society Pages: "Hit hardest are low-wage workers and women of color – frequently women who are single mothers. Understandably, the workers affected by so much unpredictability often experience stress, conflicts, and health problems. Low-wage employees cannot afford to pay for high-quality child care or care for elderly family members – a problem made worse when they must go to work at odd hours. These workers often do not get any vacation time, another workplace perk that is increasingly available only to the most privileged employees."
• The Unanswered Question Of The Trans-Pacific Partnership: What Sovereign Rights Did We Just Sign Away? - Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "Attacking the TPP shouldn’t be too difficult, given that the government has signed a contract that ordinary Australians aren’t even allowed to see. In a properly functioning democracy, we’d know exactly what the agreement says, and what Australia is singing up to. The TPP shows that’s far from the reality."
• Bitcoins are a waste of energy - literally - John Quiggin at ABC's the Drum: "The external value of fiat money is more subtle than that of a metal coin. It is inherent in the fact that the government issuing the currency is willing to accept it in payment of taxes and other obligations. If the US government ceased to exist, people might choose to go on using US dollars as a medium of exchange for a while. Ultimately, however, all currencies without an external source of value must share the fate of the Confederate dollar and similar former currencies, becoming, at best, collectors' items. In the end, Bitcoins will attain their true economic value of zero." This is the most MMT-informed reasoning I've yet heard from Quiggin. Welcome to the church, brother John.
• The TPP’s one-way ratchet - Quiggin again, at Inside Story. Does the man ever sleep?: "Until and unless the TPP comes into effect, there is no [Investor-State Dispute Settlement] clause in trade agreements between Australia and the United States. But this was no problem for Philip Morris: the company reincorporated itself in Hong Kong, which does have such a clause in its agreement with Australia. The TPP will render such dodges unnecessary for foreign companies based in signatory countries. The big benefit will be for Australian corporations which can base themselves in the United States and then, effectively, place themselves above Australian law."
• Why Free College Is Necessary - the unreasonably brilliant Tressie McMillan Cottom in Dissent: "I do not care if free college won’t solve inequality. As an isolated policy, I know that it won’t. I don’t care that it will likely only benefit the high achievers among the statistically unprivileged—those with above-average test scores, know-how, or financial means compared to their cohort. Despite these problems, today’s debate about free college tuition does something extremely valuable. It reintroduces the concept of public good to higher education discourse—a concept that fifty years of individuation, efficiency fetishes, and a rightward drift in politics have nearly pummeled out of higher education altogether. We no longer have a way to talk about public education as a collective good because even we defenders have adopted the language of competition. President Obama justified his free community college plan on the grounds that “Every American . . . should be able to earn the skills and education necessary to compete and win in the twenty-first century economy.” Meanwhile, for-profit boosters claim that their institutions allow “greater access” to college for the public. But access to what kind of education? Those of us who believe in viable, affordable higher ed need a different kind of language. You cannot organize for what you cannot name."
• Generation Debt - Mike Konczal in the same series of articles for Dissent: "Higher education also provides one of the last spaces for young people not shaped solely by market values. The American liberal arts model is unique in that it allows for experimentation, learning, and community-building. Attacks on higher education haven’t simply been about raising tuition but about dismantling this model itself. A notable example is Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s recent attempt to remove phrases such as “improve the human condition,” “the search for truth,” and “public service” from the state university’s mission, reorienting it simply toward the needs of business."
• Learning Nothing In Europe - Paul Krugman, NYT: "My spending is your income, your spending is my income, so if everyone slashes spending and tries to pay down debt at the same time, incomes fall and debt problems probably get worse. […] But German officials see this all as a tale of their virtue versus everyone else’s lack thereof. This means that nobody will change course aside from the ECB, which is in the process of finding out just how limited monetary policy really is when interest rates are already very low and fiscal policy is pulling in the wrong direction."
• 3 reasons why the Tories' obsession with 'hardwork' is blind idiocy - Gabriel Bristow, openDemocracy: "Have you ever heard somebody say that the cuts are 'ideological', rather than an economic necessity? Well, this is precisely what they mean. As [Jeremy] Hunt lays out so magnificently, cutting in-work benefits is a 'cultural signal' intended to somehow magic up some national spirit of graft. Not to worry that the crux of the issue is that low pay is set by unscrupulous employers and bears no relation to how hard people work whatsoever."
• What Ever Happened to Google Books? - Tim Wu in the New Yorker: "Unfortunately, Google made the mistake it often makes, which is to assume that people will trust it just because it’s Google. For their part, authors and publishers, even if they did eventually settle, were difficult and conspiracy-minded, particularly when it came to weighing abstract and mainly worthless rights against the public’s interest in gaining access to obscure works."
• Human Capital and Knowledge - Paul Romer: There are Grand Theory alarm bells to be heard in every sentence here, eg. "Here is the true micro-foundation that I used to think about human capital. Human capital is stored as neural connections in a brain."
• The Bezzle Years - John Kay, Project Syndicate: "The joy of the bezzle is that two people – each ignorant of the other’s existence and role – can enjoy the same wealth. […] Households in US cities received mortgages in 2006 that they could never hope to repay, while taxpayers never dreamed that they would be called on to bail out the lenders. Shareholders in banks could not have understood that the dividends they received before 2007 were actually money that they had borrowed from themselves."
• "The country can't afford" - Chris Dillow: "The cost of tax credits is NOT the £29.5bn which the government spends on them. This is a transfer. Instead, the costs are the deadweight costs associated with them: for example, the cost of administering a complex system (which is one reason why I prefer a basic income), or the disincentive effects they create - for example, the higher taxes levied on other people to pay tax credits. The latter are, however, moot: a big purpose of tax credits is to raise in-work income and so incentivize work. Whether tax credits are therefore a cost at all is thus questionable."
• 12 Questions Every Economics Student Should Ask About Their Education - Post-Crash Economics Society: I find this checklist more useful than vague assertions of acquired "learning outcomes" and "graduate attributes". Shame my university doesn't teach economics, or history, or philosophy, or…
• Sociology as Un-Learning - Afshan Jafar, the Society Pages: "At 10:37 a.m., exactly 12 minutes since class was supposed to start, I put my phone away, picked up the syllabus and started class as if nothing unusual had just transpired."
• Clinton's opposition encourages some TPP foes, but provokes critics who see it as political maneuver - Meteor Blades at Daily Kos: "Whether it's a fair judgment or not, Clinton's reputation for triangulation and an excessive wet-finger-in-the-wind approach to policy is going to dog any leftward change in viewpoint—or seeming change—that she makes throughout the campaign, even when those new viewpoints are ones her liberal critics support." I'm just not won over by Hillary's new sheep's clothing. At the end of the day, she still likes to kick back and enjoy a few brewskies with old pals like Greenspan and Kissinger.
• Politics as therapy: they want us to be just sick enough not to fight back - Michael Richmond, openDemocracy: "The capitalist class would like us to be just sick enough not to fight back, but not so sick that we cannot work. The challenge for us is to find ways of organising and helping each other so that we can find adequate levels of social reproduction, care and support to give us a platform to engage in the therapy of class struggle."
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• Why the U.S. Owns the Rise of Islamic State and the Syria Disaster - Gareth Porter in Truthdig. A handy primer: "Pundits and politicians are already looking for a convenient explanation for the twin Middle East disasters of the rise of Islamic State and the humanitarian catastrophe in Syria. The genuine answer is politically unpalatable, because the primary cause of both calamities is U.S. war and covert operations in the Middle East, followed by the abdication of U.S. power and responsibility for Syria policy to Saudi Arabia and other Sunni allies."
• Australia Forgets that Code is Cultural: Replaces History and Geography with Computer Science - Jenny Davis in the Society Pages: "Before leaving his post as Australia’s Education Minister, Christopher Pyne approved a major restructuring of the public school curriculum. […] This replacement fundamentally misunderstands the deeply social nature of programming and code. To treat technical skill as somehow separate from socio-historical knowledge is not only fallacious, but bodes poorly for the future that the curricular shift is intended to improve. Computer science is historical and geographic. Code is culturally rooted and inherently creative."
• Uncovering The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs - Merve Emre - Digg: "I have heard bemused stories of how applicants to elite, cultish hedge funds and Silicon Valley startups are asked to take a Myers-Briggs test early in their job searches, only to be weeded out as unfavorable candidates based on their type. I have heard of managers who exploit personality profiles, invoking type to bully, shame, and strong-arm their employees. Employees, for their part, have little recourse. Ironically, personality testing's status as a pseudo-science — as opposed to a hard science, like DNA or medical testing — means that there are no legal safeguards in place that protect employees from discrimination based on type."
• Dear Old Trump University - Tom the Dancing Bug by Ruben Bolling
• Ben Bernanke Is Fed Up - Chad Stone, US News: "In Bernanke's harsh but accurate judgment, "fiscal policymakers, far from helping the economy, appeared to be actively working to hinder it." He's talking about Republican congressional efforts to use "must pass" legislation – e.g., raising the legal limit on total federal debt or approving annual spending bills to fund the government – as bargaining chips to achieve deep cuts in government spending, even when the economy is weak."
• Is Money Corrupting Research? - Luigi Zingales, NYT: "A paper can be misleading or economical with the truth even when not blatantly false. And reputational incentives work relatively well only for academic papers that circulate widely in the relevant academic community and are independently scrutinized in peer review. […] A scarier possibility is that reputational incentives do not work because the practice of bending an opinion for money is so widespread as to be the norm."
• Surgical Strike - George Monbiot: "There are no simple solutions to the chaos and complexities Western firepower has helped to unleash, though a good start would be to stop making them worse. […] Twelve years into the conflict in Iraq, 14 years into the fighting in Afghanistan, after repeated announcements of victory or withdrawal, military action appears only to have replaced the old forms of brutality and chaos with new ones. And yet it continues. War appears to have become an end in itself."
• Does apathy to the political system among young people point to a crisis in Australian democracy? - Travers McCloud from the Centre for Policy Development: TL;DR: Yes.
• Must-read: The Neoliberal Arts: How college sold its soul to the market - brilliant essay by William Deresiewicz in Harpers: "Instead of treating higher education as a commodity, we need to treat it as a right. Instead of seeing it in terms of market purposes, we need to see it once again in terms of intellectual and moral purposes. That means resurrecting one of the great achievements of postwar American society: high-quality, low- or no-cost mass public higher education. An end to the artificial scarcity of educational resources. An end to the idea that students must compete for the privilege of going to a decent college, and that they then must pay for it."