This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Thomas Piketty on the rise of Bernie Sanders: the US enters a new political era — Thomas Piketty in Le Monde via the Guardian: In many respects, we are witnessing the end of the politico-ideological cycle opened by the victory of Ronald Reagan at the 1980 elections.
• Lobbyist Superdelegates Tip Nomination Toward Hillary Clinton — Lee Fang, The Intercept: There are 712 superdelegates in all, which is about 15 percent of the total delegates available and 30 percent of the total needed to win the nomination. If the nomination process is close, superdelegates may effectively pick the party’s presidential nominee, potentially overriding the will of voters. [This is why "Jeb!" couldn't make it in the big league. His vote-rigging skills are inadequate. Bernie has already won 2016 by a far wider margin than Gore won 2000, but Debbie Wasserman Shultz can halt a landslide with a single Medusa glare.]
• Sydney Uni’s sweeping restructure: cutback and fightback ahead — Dylan Griffiths at Solidarity Online: On the last day of work for 2015, the University of Sydney’s Chancellor, Belinda Hutchinson, announced a drastic restructure of the University. The decisions were made in a secret Senate meeting days earlier. They include amalgamating ten faculties and six schools into six faculties and three schools and cutting down 122 degrees to 20 degrees.
• The free market is an impossible utopia — Henry Farrell chats with Fred Block and Margaret Somers about Karl Polanyi, Washington Post: In the first instance the market is simply one of many different social institutions; the second represents the effort to subject not just real commodities (computers and widgets) to market principles but virtually all of what makes social life possible, including clean air and water, education, health care, personal, legal, and social security, and the right to earn a livelihood. When these public goods and social necessities (what Polanyi calls “fictitious commodities”) are treated as if they are commodities produced for sale on the market, rather than protected rights, our social world is endangered and major crises will ensue.
• If you thought one Bernie Sanders was good, how about 100 of him? — Anoa Changa in the Guardian: I am a part of an initiative called Brand New Congress. Many of us are former Sanders campaign staffers, who are hoping to help elect Bernie Sanders-like candidates in at least 100 different districts in the next two years. […] The aim is to run one campaign for hundreds of candidates. Instead of running the races separately, we will be centralizing fundraising, awareness raising and organizing for campaigns across the country. Our unified process will level the playing field, and thus permit new leaders to rise up from the ranks of our working and middle class.
• ‘You want a description of hell?’ OxyContin’s 12-hour problem — Harriet Ryan, Lisa Girion and Scott Glover, LA Times: Reps were ordered to visit doctors and “refocus the clinician back to q12h.” Doctors needed to be reminded “on every call,” they were told. “There is no Q8 dosing with OxyContin,” one sales manager told her reps, according to a memo cited in an FDA filing. She added that 8­-hour dosing “needs to be nipped in the bud. NOW!!” If a doctor complained that OxyContin didn’t last, Purdue reps were to recommend increasing the strength of the dose rather than the frequency. There is no ceiling on the amount of OxyContin a patient can be prescribed, sales reps were to remind doctors, according to the presentation and other training materials. […] An analysis of the medical records of more than 32,000 patients on OxyContin and other painkillers in Ontario, Canada, found that one in 32 patients on high doses fatally overdosed. […] OxyContin “does a great job of keeping me out of a wheelchair and moving...for 8 hours. Then I start going into withdrawal,” one patient wrote on an online message board in 2004.
• Reclaiming Innovation — Jim Groom and Brian Lamb in Educause Review Online: The myriad costs associated with supporting LMSs crowd out budget and staff time that might be directed toward homegrown, open-source, and user-driven innovation. Indeed, institutional leaders may refuse to support alternative systems, such as blogs and wikis, lest they draw attention and users away from the "serious" enterprise learning tool, diverting resources and endangering investments. If a technology is sufficiently large and complex, it can dictate policy, resource allocation, and organizational behavior far beyond its immediate application.
• The Faulty Foundation of Higher Education — Todd Rose, Ed.D., and Ogi Ogas, Ph.D., who have qualifications, in Psychology Today: Within our Taylorized system of college education, a Bachelor of Arts in Civil Engineering is designed to be equivalent to a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature, each diploma held to represent an equal unit of learning independent of who a graduate is or which college she graduated from. This uniformity was intended to ensure that the brain of every student who earned a diploma attained the same level of “critical thinking,” “civic awareness,” “cultural literacy,” or some other normative set of skills or knowledge.
• Why Britain’s Housing Crisis Heralds the Next Financial Crash — Steve Rushton at Occupy.com: Housing prices in London have risen by 50% in the last five years. If the U.K. property bubble goes boom, it will be proportionally biggerthan the U.S. housing bust at the onset of the financial crisis in 2007. How did we get here? For starters, U.K. banks in 2015 lent over £1 trillion ($1.4 trillion) for housing, accounting for 70% of newly made loans. The result is that when this bubble pops, it could catalyze another global financial meltdown. While there are many other possible triggers, the next financial crash is more likely than not.
• Guest Post: POSITIVE MONEY IN ACTION — Geoffrey Gardiner's Modest Proposal at New Economic Perspectives: The system of transaction accounts at the central bank will be used to keep track of the population. Every person will be allocated an account at birth and vital details will be recorded and updated. The records will include a record of the person’s genome. The bank will issue identity documents. The transaction account number will be the person’s identity and passport number, and also the number of his or her tax account. Transaction account statements will be sent automatically to the tax office, which will have the duty to debit it with all assessed taxes. Every immigrant or visitor to the country will get an account and give similar identity details.