This week, (actually posted a day late, but back-dated) I have been mostly reading:

• Older Students Learn for the Sake of Learning — Harriet Edleson at the "Well, d'uh!" desk of the New York Times: For lifelong learners the focus is outward. At Osher, classes are not specifically skill-based, like learning a language or weaving. Instead, students generally delve into subjects they may have been interested in for years but simply didn’t have time to study.
• Report From the Student Privacy Frontlines: 2015 in Review — Annelyse Gelman, Electronic Frontier Foundation: This year the fight to protect student privacy hit a boiling point with our Spying on Students campaign, an effort to help students, parents, teachers, and school administrators learn more about the privacy issues surrounding school-issued devices and cloud services. We're also working to push vendors like Google to put students and their parents back in control of students’ private information.
• Japanification Revisited — Ian Welsh: In choosing the method we chose to do the bailouts, we also made the choice to have a shitty economy. Employment has never recovered, in terms of the percentage of the population, and will not (we’re about to hit a recession), wages are down for much of the population, and all the gains of the last economic cycle have gone to the top three to five percent. Mind you, there was an historic stock bubble. The rich are even richer than they were in 2007. Obama and Bernanke’s policy has done what it was intended to: It has preserved, and then increased, the wealth of the rich.
• The corporate university and its threat to academic freedom — Sean Phelan in openDemocracy: It would be simplistic to suggest that the corporate university represents an ideological vision spontaneously brought into being by a managerial class. As recent changes to the governance of New Zealand university councils – rescinding the guaranteed representation of both students and staff – suggests, the desire for a corporate university is often a state-led political project, pushed by governments who want to reduce public funding to universities, and reconfigure the university as little more than an engine of economic growth.
• Neoliberalism and its forgotten alternative — David Ridley, openDemocracy: Sociologists and social scientists need to be a part of an active process of giving back social inquiry to the public, emancipating this deeply human and social activity first and foremost from the elitism, specialisation and instrumentalism of academia. We may need to reduce the working week even further to enable people to have time for community activities and public research. We certainly need to prevent education from being turned towards a class-based, narrowly vocational process of training people to be profit-making machines.
• Because you can never have too many charts on the economics of credit cards — Harold Pollack in The Reality-Based Community: [P]rofit margins are really high for the small group of borrowers with low FICO scores in the range of about 550. Amazingly, the industry made about $0 in cumulative profits on the top 80% of accounts that have FICO scores exceeding 630. The bottom 10% of accounts account for the majority of total industry profits. It’s also striking that the industry actually seems to lose money on consumers near the median of the distribution with FICO scores around 700, and then makes profit again on the best credit risks.
• Why Minsky Matters: An Introduction to the Work of a Maverick Economist — Victoria Bateman reviews Randy Wray's new book about the work of his mentor: As 2008 so clearly showed, we simply cannot have our cake and eat it. Financial crises are not just events that happened a long time ago in history – or far, far away in distant and much poorer lands. They are hard-wired into the capitalist system. Minsky was one of the valiant few who tried to draw attention to this fact, and one of the few to predict the global financial crisis decades before it actually hit. Unfortunately, his warnings fell on deaf ears. Like many a great artist, his popularity soared only after his death and only once the crisis hit – in what came to be known as a “Minsky moment”.
• #ResistCapitalism — Cameron K. Murray: [S]ome kind of welfare state is essential for maintaining the dynamism of the capitalist part of the economy. Without this cushion against failure, who would risk their life savings on inventing and investing in new products and innovations? Essentially we all want a mixed economy, a level of safety net that reflects the wealth of the country, and basic services provided in an equitable manner. […] But when the political power of a select few capitalists overwhelms the system to the extent that the other non-capitalist parts of the mixed economic suffer, there are obvious and genuinely satisfying moral grounds for protest.
• Facebook is no charity, and the ‘free’ in Free Basics comes at a price — Mark Graham in The Conversation isn't keen on Zuckerberg's reboot of Compuserve: In much the same way that Nestlé offered free baby formula in the 1970s as development assistance to low-income countries – leaving nursing mothers unable to produce sufficient milk themselves – Free Basics is likely to impede commercial alternatives.
• The Procrustean Economy — Neil Wilson: The data collected from [neoliberal] economies will resemble the data you would expect from the [neoliberal] model. It really can't do much else - since the policies are there to prevent deviation from the norm. Therefore when you do empirical studies what you are actually using as data is the output from a system rammed into an inappropriate model. The data is tainted and what the taint means has to be understood.
• The Fed Doesn’t Work For You — J. W. Mason in Jacobin: A rising wage share supposedly indicates an overheating economy — a macroeconomic problem that requires a central bank response. But a falling wage share is the result of deep structural forces — unrelated to aggregate demand and certainly not something with which the central bank should be concerned. An increasing wage share is viewed by elites as a sign that policy is too loose, but no one ever blames a declining wage share on policy that is too tight. Instead we’re told it’s the result of technological change, Chinese competition, etc. Logically, central bankers shouldn’t be able to have it both ways. In practice they can and do.
• Globalisation and currency arrangements — Bill Mitchell: The thesis advanced by many analysts is that globalisation has reduced the capacity of the nation-state and forced governments to adopt free market policies at the microeconomic level and austerity at the macroeconomic level, for fear that capital flight will destroy their economies. It is a neatly packaged thesis that the political Left has imbibed, and, in doing so, has undermined the progressive basis of these institutions and left voters with little choice between right-wing parties and the social democratic parties who formally represented the interests of workers and acted as mediators in the class conflict between labour and capital. The major distinguishing feature these days between these two types of parties, who were previously poles apart in approach and mandate sought, is that the so-called progressive side of politics now claims it will implement austerity in a fairer way. These austerity-lite parties, buying into the myth that globalisation has undermined the capacity of the state to pursue full employment policies with equitable income distribution, do not challenge the basis of austerity, but just quibble over who should pay for it.
• In 2016, let's hope for better trade agreements - and the death of TPP — Joe Stiglitz via the Guardian: In place of global trade talks, the US and Europe have mounted a divide-and-conquer strategy, based on overlapping trade blocs and agreements. As a result, what was intended to be a global free trade regime has given way to a discordant managed trade regime. Trade for much of the Pacific and Atlantic regions will be governed by agreements, thousands of pages in length and replete with complex rules of origin that contradict basic principles of efficiency and the free flow of goods. […] Obama has sought to perpetuate business as usual, whereby the rules governing global trade and investment are written by US corporations for US corporations. This should be unacceptable to anyone committed to democratic principles.
• ObamaCare’s Neoliberal Intellectual Foundations Continue to Crumble — Lambert Strether via Naked Capitalism: Obama gives an operational definition of a functioning [health insurance] market that assumes two things: (1) That health insurance, as a product, is like flat-screen TVs, and (2) as when buying flat-screen TVs, people will comparison shop for health insurance, and that will drive health insurers to compete to satisfy them. As it turns out, scholars have been studying both assumptions, and both assumptions are false. […] the population studied reduces costs, not by comparison shopping, but by self-denial of care. […] it looks like ObamaCare has replaced a system where insurance companies deny people needed care with a system where people deny themselves needed care; which is genius, in a way.
• Mainstream macro and Minsky the maverick — Diane Coyle reviews, perhaps too briefly, Randy Wray's new book: The second chapter was to me the most interesting. It’s called ‘The Road Not taken’ and sets out the broad mainstream approach against which Minsky developed his arguments. This is the neoclassical synthesis, whose foundations were laid by John Hicks and Alvin ‘Secular Stagnation’ Hansen in the early years after Keynes’s death, then by both ‘Keynesians’ like Patinkin and Tobin and ‘Monetarists’ such as Friedman. Wray argues that these camps disagreed largely over parameter values, and that they essentially bowdlerised Keynes by ignoring his emphasis on investment, finance and uncertainty. [I admit to some satisfaction, bordering on relief, at finding somebody confirming that new Keynesians and neoliberals "disagreed largely over parameter values", having just this morning confidently asserted on a uni discussion board that there has long been "broad agreement within mainstream economics over what the appropriate policy levers are, but disagreement about where these levers should be set".]