This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Why you've never heard of a Charter that's as important as the Magna Carta — Guy Standing in openDemocracy: At the heart of the Charter [of the Forest], which is hard to understand unless words that have faded from use are interpreted, is the concept of the commons and the need to protect them and to compensate commoners for their loss. It is scarcely surprising that a government that is privatising and commercialising the remaining commons should wish to ignore it.
• How about a little accountability for economists when they mess up? — Dean Baker in Democracy Journal (via Richard Murphy and the Guardian): Suppose our fire department was staffed with out-of-shape incompetents who didn’t know how to handle a firehose. That would be really bad news, but it wouldn’t be obvious most of the time because we don’t often see major fires. The fire department’s inadequacy would become apparent only when a major fire hit, and we were left with a vast amount of unnecessary death and destruction. This is essentially the story of modern economics.
• Electricity costs: Preliminary results showing how privatisation went seriously wrong — the Australia Institute: Two decades ago Australia embarked on an experiment with the privatising, corporatising and marketization of the electricity sector. The proponents at the time assured the nation that everything would be better. Clearly that is not the case; between December 1996 and December 2016 Australian prices increased by 64 per cent but electricity prices increased by 183 per cent […] In this paper we have examined the type of labour employed now compared with two decades ago. Electricity is now management heavy with a blow out in the number of managers relative to other workers. In addition electricity now employs an army of sales and marketing and other workers who do not actually make electricity.
• How to Sneeze Like I Do — the Oatmeal:
  
• We should take pride in Britain’s acceptable food — David Mitchell being all David-Mitchelly in the Guardian: A phrase really jumped out at me from a newspaper last week. The Times said a recent survey into Spanish attitudes to Britain, conducted by the tourism agency Visit Britain, “found that only 12% of Spaniards considered the UK to be the best place for food and drink”. That, I thought to myself, may be the most extraordinary use of the word “only” I have ever seen. […] Because, if “only” still means what I think it means, the paper is implying it expected more than 12% of the people of Spain to think Britain was “the best place for food and drink”. That’s quite a slur on the Spanish. How delusional did it expect them to be? What percentage of them would it expect to think the world was flat? I know we’re moving into a post-truth age, but 12% of a culinarily renowned nation considering Britain, the land of the Pot Noodle and the garage sandwich, to be the world’s No 1 destination for food and drink is already a worrying enough finding for the Spanish education system to address. It would be vindictive to hope for more.
• Reinventing the wheel — Chris Dillow: In both the UK and US, wage inflation has stayed low despite apparently low unemployment – to the puzzlement of believers in the Philips curve. Felix Martin in the FT says there's a reason for this. The “dirty secret of economics,” he says, is “the central importance of power.” Inflation, he says, is “society’s default method of reconciling, at least for a while, irreconcilable demands.” And because workers don't have the power to make big demands, we haven’t got serious inflation. What's depressing about this isn’t just that it’s right, but that it needs saying at all.