Sunday, 1 May 2016 - 6:38pm
This week, I have been mostly reading:
- The Zombie Doctrine — George Monbiot:
The freedom neoliberalism offers, which sounds so beguiling when expressed in general terms, turns out to mean freedom for the pike, not for the minnows. Freedom from trade unions and collective bargaining means the freedom to suppress wages. Freedom from regulation means the freedom to poison rivers, endanger workers, charge iniquitous rates of interest and design exotic financial instruments. Freedom from tax means freedom from the distribution of wealth that lifts people out of poverty.
- The full employment productivity multiplier — Jared Bernstein in the Washington Post:
What if stronger demand led to full employment? And what if that gave their workers enough bargaining power to push up labor costs? Then, to maintain their profit margins, [otherwise low-wage, high inefficiency businesses] would have to find efficiency gains to offset their higher wage costs. Less turnover, for example. Less reason to hang onto extra workers who weren’t always needed but were cheap to have around. And this is a description of stronger demand leading to higher productivity.
- NHS: New report reveals marketisation is failing — Richard Murphy:
I do know something about markets, quasi-markets and organisation structures and what I can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that if there are buying and other management inefficiencies in the NHS then they can be blamed fairly and squarely at successive governments who have thought that introducing market practices would help its efficiency. They were wrong. Markets do not drive everyone to efficiency, especially when NHS organisations cannot, ultimately, fail. All they can do is create division.
- Wondermark #1196; The Currency of Cute — David Malki:
- Problems with Economics: The Cult of Utility — Ian Welsh:
Basically, utility says, “Whatever action people choose to take is the one from which they derive the most usefulness.” This is known as revealed preference. This is a circular definition; metaphysical in the worst sense. Any action we take is utility maximization. A person can never fail to maximize utility (within their budget), because their actions are what defines the actions’ utility.
- Australia guts government climate research — Scott K. Johnson, Ars Technica:
Staff at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) received an unpleasant e-mail when they came to work Thursday morning, one that outlined some specifics of long-awaited restructuring plans. The gist of the message? You've done such a good job, we have to let you go.
- “Negative” Interest Rates and the War on Cash — Richard Werner, who speculates persuasively about the war on cash being also a war on not-for-profit banking, but I can't quite follow him all the way to tinfoil hat territory where all commercial banking is eliminated and all citizens of credit-worthy standing are microchipped by the central bank:
The main reason advanced by the Bank of England for wanting to abolish cash is that it wishes to stimulate the UK economy, and to do so it wants to use interest rates. Since rates are already zero, it is now only reasonable to lower them into negative territory. However, to make such a policy effective, the possibility to move from electronic money into cash needs to be taken away. If cash is abolished, we can then enjoy the benefits of negative interest rates – or so the official narrative goes. This story is so full of holes that it is hard to know where to start.
- Must-read: Our dysfunctional monetary system — Steve Keen, Real-World Economics Review Blog:
The fetish for small government and budget surpluses means that the government has […] effectively abrogated money creation to the private banking sector. This strategy had no obvious negative consequences while the private banks were on a credit-money-creation binge—as they were effectively from the end of WWII till 2008. But once private debt began to dwarf GDP and the growth of credit slowed to a trickle, the inherent stupidity of this policy became apparent. In their attempt to promote the private sector, conservative proponents of small government are actually strangling it. […] Rather than understanding the real cause of the crisis, we’ve seen the symptom—rising public debt—paraded as its cause.
- A Scheme to Encrypt the Entire Web Is Actually Working — Andy Greenberg at Wired:
It’s available to websites anywhere in the world—even far-flung countries like Cuba and Iran that sometimes aren’t served by other major certificate authorities. And it’s automatically configured with a piece of code that runs on any server that wants to switch on HTTPS. “This is the silver bullet that…lowers the barrier to encrypted web communications,” says Ross Schulman, the co-director of the cybersecurity initiative at the New America Foundation. “It brings the cost of executing a secure website down to zero.”