This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Australian universities must eschew narrow fixation on jobs — Lee Duffield in Independent Australia: If you accept that education is education at any level and might be about more than the immediate jobs drive, consider also liberal thought — which works around cultivation and self-cultivation of the individual, free person. Liberal thought supports the idea that if you have properly studied something, you have a good chance of being able to do anything. If you are well read and empowered by other deep studies, you can competently take charge of your own vocational search and become a useful thinker in society across a whole range of human activities. It is the idea that universities putting resources into best academic standards will be bound to produce good outcomes for the professions, research, society in general.
• The next cryptocurrencies — Jen Sorensen:
  
• Answers from the MMTers — Stephanie Kelton and Randall Wray at the New Economic Perspectives blog: A few days ago, Jared Bernstein posed some Questions for the MMTers in order to gain a “better understanding [of our] arguments.” We appreciate his interest in our ideas and, especially, his direct appeal for clarification of our views.  He raised four big questions, which our Australian counterpart, Bill Mitchell, has already answered in his own three-part series.  What follows is a response from two North American MMTers.
• CES Shows That the Future Will Not Work — Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: A new article by Taylor Lorenz in the Daily Beast, CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work, by virtue of doing what tech writers are never supposed to do, namely report as opposed to cheerlead, is being buried despite its importance. Lorenz went to the what is the biggest, most important consumer tech trade show in the US, and arguably the world, and found that tons of the great new gotta-have-them wares in the pipeline don’t work. As in unabashedly, obviously don’t work or are so ludicrously not fit for purpose as to be the functional equivalent of not work. This inability to even credibly fake next gen products, and worse, not even be embarrassed that they aren’t performing, is proof that the tech industry has gone past an event horizon into a state of obvious collective impotence and not one cares or even seems to regard it as unusual.
• Economist James K. Galbraith isn’t celebrating Dow 25,000 — interview by Greg Robb of MarketWatch: The Dow is not a serious indicator of the condition of the economy. What we’ve had is a long but fairly slow expansion and a lot of reduction in the effective size of the labor force. Employment ratios have risen a little, but they are still way below where they were 10 or, for that matter, 20 years ago. I think there are really major changes in the structure of the economy going forward. The share of business investment has been quite low, share of construction has been very low, and that means the economy is being driven increasingly by the consumer. The consumer is dependent upon the access to debt, auto loans, consumer loans and student loans. Those things will build up over time until such time as there is a crack and households decide that they no longer wish to access the credit — at which point this phase of the expansion will end.
• #1370; The Avian Informant, Part 2 — Wondermark, by David Malki !: