This week, I have entirely caught up on 2015! Next week will be January and February 2016, before uni starts the week after.

• ‘On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me’ … a bunch of econ charts! — Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg in the Washington Post. My pick of these:
  
• The Melting Away of North Atlantic Social Democracy — Brad DeLong in Talking Points Memo: Supply-and-demand tells us that when the economy's wealth-to-annual income ratio varies, the rate of profit should vary in the opposite direction. But history tells us that the rate of profit sticks at 5% per year, across eras with very different wealth-to-annual-income ratios. Piketty, however, does not tell us why. Perhaps this is because at a technological level capital does not empower and complement but rather competes with and thus substitutes for labor. Perhaps this is because of successful rent-seeking by the rich who control the government and get it to award them monopoly rents. Perhaps it is because of a social structure that leaves wealth holders believing that a 5% per year is the "fair" rate of profit and are unwilling to underbid each other.
• The road to the workhouse — Frances Coppola is rightly outraged by punitive sanctions imposed on UK benefit claimants: The workhouse ethic was that work is a moral imperative: people who have no work are morally defective and must be forced to work as a "correction". If they refuse to work, they must be severely punished. The DWP's sanctions regime looks uncomfortably similar. The sick, disabled, mentally ill and unemployed are treated like criminals even though they have committed no crime. A strict penal regime is imposed on them, with extremely harsh punishments for minor transgressions of unfair and arbitrary rules. These punishments affect not only their own health but the health of those dependent on them. Not unlike workhouses, really.
• AIPE: 8000 students in limbo as Sydney college has its registration cancelled — Eryk Bagshaw, Sydney Morning Herald: A former student of the college, Helen Fielding, told Fairfax Media she was coached over the phone by agents to sign up for a $19,600 diploma of Human Resources Management. The 21-year-old grew up in foster care and has an obvious intellectual disability. "I'm not good at reading," she said at her housing commission flat outside Newcastle.
• Home is where the cartel is — Steve Randy Waldman: If you buy a home in San Francisco today, the last thing you want to happen is for the housing affordability problem to be solved next year. If apartment prices become reasonable, you’d find yourself with a huge financial loss and an underwater mortgage. […] High rents are like poverty at the Brookings Institution, a problem we claim we desperately want to solve but don’t really want to solve because the things we would have to do to solve it would be costly and disruptive to the people whose interests get termed “we” in a sentence like this one.
• The Sneaky Way Austerity Got Sold to the Public Like Snake Oil — Lynn Parramore of the Institute for New Economic Thinking interviews Orsola Costantini of same: How do we stop powerful players from co-opting economics and budgets for their own purposes? Our education system is increasingly unequal and deprived of public resources. This is true in the U.S. but also in Europe, where the crisis accelerated a process that was already underway. When children don’t get good educations, the production of knowledge falls into private control. Power gets consolidated. The official theoretical frameworks that benefit the most powerful get locked in.
• Why Philanthropy Actually Hurts Rather Than Helps Some of the World’s Worst Problems — George Joseph, In These Times: Zuckerberg can legally offer the bulk of his "philanthropy" to any for-profit recipients he wants and still receive public acclaim for "gifting" his fortune. We're seeing the rise of a new, horizontal philanthropy - the rich giving directly to the rich - at a level that's completely unprecedented.
• It's official — benefits and high taxes make us all richer, while inequality takes a hammer to a country's growth — Lee Williams, the Independent: Thanks to the OECD report, we find that the very thing that the sacrifices of austerity were made to preserve – the growth of the economy – is the very thing they are destroying. Neo-liberal, laissez-faire capitalism extends inequality, we already knew that. But now we have the evidence that inequality harms, rather than encourages growth.
• 'Free Basics' Will Take Away More Than Our Right to the Internet — Vandana Shiva, Common Dreams: The Monsanto-Facebook connection is a deep one. The top 12 investors in Monsanto are the same as the top 12 investors in Facebook, including the Vanguard Group. The Vanguard Group is also a top investor in John Deere, Monsanto’s new partner for ‘smart tractors’, bringing all food production and consumption, from seed to data, under the control of a handful of investors. […] Smart Tractors from John Deere, used on farms growing patented Monsanto seed, sprayed and damaged using Bayer chemicals, with soil and climate data owned and sold by Monsanto, beamed to the farmer’s cellphone from Reliance, logged in as your Facebook profile, on land owned by The Vanguard Group. Every step of every process right up until the point you pick something up off a supermarket shelf will be determined by the interests of the same shareholders. More here.
• Why Are Universities Fighting Open Education? — Elliot Harmon at Common Dreams: Though universities tout [patented] technology transfer as a way to fund further education and research, the reality is that the majority of tech transfer offices lose money for their schools. At most universities, the tech transfer office locks up knowledge and innovation, further expands the administration (in a sector that has seen massive growth in administrative jobs while academic hiring remains flat), and then loses money.