This week, I have been mostly going to pieces, so only reading this much:

• The Optimism Error — Robert Skidelsky proposes a British Investment Bank to fend off hysteresis: So we now have a situation in which the main tools available to government to bring about a robust recovery are out of action. In addition, sole reliance on monetary policy for stimulus creates a highly unbalanced recovery. The money the government pours into the economy either sits idle or simply pumps up house prices, threatening to re-create the asset bubble that produced the crisis in the first place. We already have the highest rate of post-crash increase in house prices of all OECD countries. This suggests that the next crash may not be far off. [Though I disagree vehemently with the view that "printing money to pay for public spending should only be a remedy of the last resort". Money creation through central-bank-funded fiscal deficits should be the norm for any government that does not want to hand responsibility for money supply to commercial banks, who are responsible for channeling money into the very bubbles Skidelsky is worried about.]
• Australian copyright reform stuck in an infinite loop — Kathy Bowrey in The Conversation: For example, section 113M allows libraries and archives to make “preservation copies” of original material that is of historical or cultural significance to Australia, but they are not allowed to make these copies available to patrons except through a terminal on site. As a researcher I am not allowed to make an electronic copy of the material so I can use it in writing up my research. As is common practice in libraries I would probably be allowed to transcribe a document by hand. However transcribing by hand is, as a matter by law, no different to a digital reproduction. Why does this law require me to spend public research money to physically attend the institution, perhaps also requiring an airfare and accommodation expenses, so I can take out my quill?
• Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and Medicare for All — Dean Baker, CEPR via Econospeak: Ordinarily economists treat it as an absolute article of faith that we want all goods and services to sell at their marginal cost without interference from the government, like a trade tariff or quota. However in the case of prescription drugs, economists seem content to ignore the patent monopolies granted to the industry, which allow it to charge prices that are often ten or even a hundred times the free market price. (The hepatitis C drug Sovaldi has a list price in the United States of $84,000. High quality generic versions are available in India for a few hundred dollars per treatment.) In this case, we are effectively looking at a tariff that is not the 10-20 percent that we might see in trade policy, but rather 1,000 percent or even 10,000 percent.
• SWEET HOLY F---!!!! — exclaims Brad DeLong:
  
• Neoliberalism, public and private goods and the digital revolution: Part one — Nicholas Gruen at Club Troppo: […] if knowledge and digital artefacts are always and everywhere a potential public good, you’d expect that expressing the collective interest in that fact would lead to a role for collective institutions (not necessarily government) representing the public interest as a countervailing force against private interests. As Robert Kuttner argues, an identifying idea of progressives since the turn of the 20th century if not before that capital needs a counterweight – in the state and other collective institutions. An obvious agenda is IP, which is becoming progressively more unbalanced towards the interests of private IP holders (Will Mickey ever go free?). Likewise arrangements for the creation of knowledge about drugs is a big mess, incredibly poorly suited to the interests of lower income countries but also to economic efficiency more broadly.
• The Citadel Is Breached: Congress Taps the Fed for Infrastructure Funding — Ellen Brown: Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-Oregon), ranking member on the House Transportation Committee, retorted [to Ben Bernanke], “For the Federal Reserve to be saying [deficit spending] impinges upon their integrity, etc., etc. — you know, it’s absurd. This is a body that creates money out of nothing. [I]f the Fed can bail out the banks and give them preferred interest rates, they can do something for the greater economy and for average Americans.”
• The Remarkable Bernie Sanders Journey That Will Overcome the Crowning of Clinton — RoseAnn DeMoro of National Nurses United at Common Dreams:
  
  Enthusiasm for the Sanders campaign, the transformative program that he presents, which is really the program NNU and grassroots activists have long championed, is off the charts, and continuing to grow.