This week, I have been mostly writing, but in the last couple of days, I've been reading:

• Why Are Universities Fighting Open Education? — Elliot Harmon, Common Dreams: Why were some universities opposing a rule that would directly benefit their students and faculty? When you dig a bit deeper, it looks like universities’ opposition to open licensing has nothing to do with students’ access to educational resources. What’s really playing out is a longstanding fight over how universities use patents—more specifically, software patents. Open education just happens to be caught in the crossfire.
• Paul Krugman, Bernie Sanders, and the Experts — Dean Baker at CEPR: The experts insisted that we would have a Second Great Depression if we didn’t bail out the Wall Street banks. Really? Was there some magical curse that would overcome the country if Goldman Sachs and Citigroup went out of business? Would Keynesian stimulus no longer work? We got out of the first Great Depression in 1941 by spending a ton of money fighting World War II. It is hard to see any reason why we couldn’t have ended the depression a decade sooner by spending a ton of money in 1931 on infrastructure, health care, and education. The same story would have applied in 2009.
• Q: When is a dollar pegged to gold not on a gold standard? A: From 1934-1971 — Eric Rauchway at Crooked Timber: […]as the economist Edward Bernstein (who was in the Roosevelt Treasury, at Bretton Woods, and later served in the IMF) succinctly explained, years later. 'In spite of the Gold Reserve Act, the United States was not really on a gold standard after 1933. The essence of the gold standard is that the money supply must be limited by the gold reserve. The last time that the Federal Reserve tightened its policy because the gold reserve ratio had fallen close to the legal minimum was on March 3, 1933, when the Federal Reserve Bank of New York raised the discount rate to 3-1/2 per cent. Thereafter, whenever the gold reserve neared the legal minimum, the required reserve ratio was reduced and finally eliminated. A country that loses more than half of its gold reserve, as the United States did in 1958-71, without reducing its money supply is not on the gold standard.'
• Economists Prove That Capitalism is Unnecessary: The nonsensical logic of mainstream economics — Steve Keen, paywalled in Forbes, published in Evonomics: It’s an assumption that individuals in a market economy are so all-knowing that, in effect, they don’t need markets at all: they can just work it all out in their heads. Yet if anything defines a capitalist economy, it’s the dominance of markets. So effectively the mainstream reaction to anything which disturbs their preferred way of modeling a market economy is to make assumptions that, if they were true, would make a market economy itself unnecessary in the first place.
• The West Is Traveling The Road To Economic Ruin — Paul Craig Roberts (warning: a bit of a fruitcake at times) reviews the career of "best economist in the world" Michael Hudson: Hudson learned that monetary theory concerns itself only with wages and consumer prices, not with the inflation of asset prices such as real estate and stocks. He saw that economic theory serves as a cover for the polarization of the world economy between rich and poor. The promises of globalism are a myth. Even left-wing and Marxist economists think of exploitation in terms of wages and are unaware that the main instrument of exploitation is the financial system’s extraction of value into interest payments. Economic theory’s neglect of debt as an instrument of exploitation caused Hudson to look into the history of how earlier civilizations handled the build up of debt.
• How Boots went rogue — Aditya Chakrabortty, The Guardian, in what they call "The Long Read", presumably because "You're Not Going to Enjoy This, But it's Good For You" didn't test so well with key demographics: This is the tale of how one of Britain’s oldest and biggest businesses went rogue – to the point where its own pharmacists claim their working conditions threaten the safety of patients, and experts warn that the management’s pursuit of demanding financial targets poses a risk to public health. (Boots denies this, saying that “offering care for our colleagues, customers and the communities which we serve…is an integral part of our strategy.”) At the heart of this story is one of the most urgent debates in post-crash Britain: what large companies owe the rest of us – in taxes, in wages, and in standards of behaviour.
• Explaining Why Federal Deficits Are Needed — Thornton (Tip) Parker at New Economic Perspectives [I'm definitely using this one]: The economy is like a car. Government spending is the accelerator. Taxes are the brakes. To keep going or speed up, press the accelerator. To slow down, ease off the accelerator or press the brakes. Driving too fast could lead to hyper-inflation, but that never happened here because the country always slowed down in time.