This week, I have been mostly reading:

• In defence of the annoying mature-age student - Stephen Owen in The Guardian (via @tregeagle): Almost all of them are amazed at the world of ideas into which they have arrived, and in which they are receiving the sort of intellectual nourishment that they thought was strictly for people other than themselves. This was also my experience; it turns out that mature-age study is transformative and can make you feel more at home with the world and with yourself, even if it can lead to risky behaviours (like postmodernism).
• Seumas Milne and His Swivel-Eyed Detractors - John Wight in CounterPunch: Now the reason it is important to establish these salient ‘facts’ about Seumas Milne and his career is that his recent appointment by Jeremy Corbyn as his press and strategy chief has unleashed such a chorus of condemnation and calumniation – by a constituency of right wing hacks, former Trotskyists turned right wing bloggers, and embittered failed Labour candidates, among others – you could be forgiven for thinking we are talking about Charles Manson rather than one of the most esteemed journalists this country has every produced.
• Australian education fails one in four young people – but not the wealthy ones - Stephen Lamb in The Conversation: The results show that while Australia’s highest-achieving students – who are more likely to be drawn from wealthier families – may be among the best in the world, there are vast differences in educational outcomes across social groups, challenging Australia’s claim of a fair education system.
• Could a new ‘basic income’ protect Australia’s most vulnerable? - Ben Spies-Butcher in The Conversation: Bernie Sanders is promoting "single payer" as "Medicare for all". Could UBI be Australia's "means-tested pension for all"?
• Martin, A Quick Word - Dan Hind skewers Martin Amis: For all their faults, Corbyn and his contemporaries on the left of the Labour party – the Bennities, let’s call them – were campaigning for equality at home and abroad. What a laugh, I know! But the things they marched for – anti-racism, gay rights, democracy in Africa and Latin America – they were right about those things, weren’t they, at a time when a lot of people were for various reasons wrong? The monosyllabic bigots were wrong, of course. But those who eloquently insisted that these things were distractions from the purity of class struggle were wrong, too.
• Causes and consequences of persistently low interest rates - Sir Charles Bean at VoxEU: This downward trend in the underlying world real interest rate had attracted the attention of policymakers even before the Crisis, with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan describing it as a “conundrum”, while Fed Chairman-to-be Ben Bernanke subsequently attributed it to a “savings glut”, most notably in China (Bernanke 2005). Other authors, such as Larry Summers (2014), have focused on the other side of the market for loanable funds, suggesting that a decline in the propensity to invest is to blame, linking it also to the slowdown in output growth.
• The Islamic State meets the laws of economics - Felix Imonti in On Line Opinion: The solution chosen by the caliphate is to turn to the gold Dinar that has as much symbolic value as is does as a means of financing the society. While gold speaks of wealth and security in the minds of most people, there is a hazard in adopting a gold currency. The value of the gold coins comes from the quality of gold metal and not from the quality of the issuer. Anyone doubting the longevity of the caliphate will be inclined to horde the coins under a rock somewhere or smuggle the coins outside. The loss of money from the economy will translate into an overall deflation as the scarcity of money raises its value; and that is likely to depress the economy even further.
• Heat Too Hot to Survive - Ian Welsh: People rag on about how bad Communism was, how many deaths it caused, but they never properly add up capitalism’s deaths. The deaths resulting from the environmental crisis, however, will make capitalism anathema to our children.
• Postal Banks Are People’s Banks: 6 Things You Need To Know About Postal Banking - Matt Stannard at Occupy.com: It’s being called “Bernie’s Brilliant Idea,”, and Bernie Sanders’s embrace of postal banking is indeed brilliant, both in timing and substance. But while his insurgent presidential campaign may give a credible boost to USPS financial services, Sanders’s endorsement is far from sufficient. To make postal banking happen requires a broad, mass coalition willing to keep pushing the issue regardless of the outcome of the 2016 elections.
• The Despotic Temptation - Ana Palacio, Project Syndicate: Unfortunately, Western leaders have repeatedly shown that they lack the patience and dedication needed to engage consistently and humbly with communities in crisis-stricken countries or to provide the reliable, incremental, and prolonged governance assistance needed to prevent state collapse. With their short attention spans and heightened sense of their own importance, they prefer the option of simply installing a despot to deal with it. They need to get over themselves – for everyone’s sake.
• Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here’s why - David Graeber:
  Notice how the pattern is symmetrical? The top is an exact mirror of the bottom. This is what’s called an “accounting identity”. One goes up, the other must, necessarily, go down. What this means is that if the government declares “we must act responsibly and pay back the national debt” and runs a budget surplus, then it (the public sector) is taking more money in taxes out of the private sector than it’s paying back in. That money has to come from somewhere. So if the government runs a surplus, the private sector goes into deficit. If the government reduces its debt, everyone else has to go into debt in exactly that proportion in order to balance their own budgets.
• Why Are We Hearing So Much about Those Damn Danes? - Josh Hoxie, OtherWords: While I doubt Americans will embrace the Danes’ love for pickled fish, I’m hopeful we might connect the dots between their successful social outcomes and their progressive public policies. Also, in Scandinavia there are so many programs, on radio and television, about the fish.
• The Okinawa missiles of October - Aaron Tovish, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists via The Intercept: By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches—and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued.
• Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the wider fallout from the Iraq invasion - David Morrison: Baroness Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Chilcot inquiry that the government was warned in advance that there was likely to be a heightened threat from al-Qaeda as a result of British participation in the invasion of Iraq. She agreed that her judgment prior to the invasion was that “a war in Iraq would aggravate the [terrorist] threat from whatever source to the United Kingdom” (p31) and that “there wasn't any particular controversy amongst the intelligence agencies about that judgment” (p32).
• Malnutrition and 'Victorian' diseases soaring in England 'due to food poverty and cuts' - Dean Kirby, The Independent And…
• Starving Irish people pleading for food from soup kitchen as last resort - Sasha Brady, Independent.ie
• Check Out Our Low, Low (Natural) Rates - Paul Krugman, NYT: [Laubach and Williams] attribute the decline in the natural rate largely to the slowing of potential output, which in turn reflects demography and what looks like a slowdown in technological progress. That’s more speculative. But the low natural rate is as solid a result as anything in real time can be. This in turn tells you several things. It says that all the complaints that the Fed is artificially keeping rates low are nonsense; rates are low because that’s what the real economy wants, and the Fed’s only alternative would be to create a depression.
• The Pain in Spain - Simon Tilford at Project Syndicate: Spain’s recovery is not quite what it seems, and there is scant evidence that what progress the country has made is the result of austerity and reforms. In fact, far from adhering to the usual austerity narrative – according to which fiscal consolidation revives business confidence and thus investment and job creation – Spain’s return to growth partly reflects the easing of austerity since early 2014. The country has sensibly resisted pressure from the European Commission to take more aggressive steps to reduce its deficit, which, at 5.9% of GDP, was the European Union’s third highest last year.
• The Tragedy of Ben Bernanke - Brad DeLong at Project Syndicate: “It seems unlikely that the influence of [monetary] policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself,” Keynes wrote in 1936. “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.” Those are words worth considering the next time we find ourselves needing the courage to act.
• When Does Technological Advancement Actually Lead to Prosperity? - Ian Welsh: Productivity in America rose 80.4 percent from 1973 to 2011, but median real wages rose only 10.2 percent and median male wages rose 0.1 percent. (4) This was not the case from 1948 to 1973, when wages rose as fast as productivity did. Increases in productivity, in our ability to make more stuff, only lead to prosperity and affluence if we are making the right stuff, and we are actually distributing that stuff widely.
• GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge - Mike Lofgren, Consortiumnews: Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians. The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means.
• For-profit education: plenty of blame to go around - John Quiggin: The real problem is that no one is willing to admit the obvious lesson, already evident from the US; for-profit education, funded by public subsidies, is a recipe for disaster.
• What the Steve Jobs Movie Won’t Tell You About Apple’s Success - Lynn Parramore at INET interviews Mariana Mazzucato: The economic crisis that followed from the financial crisis is still being felt strongly across the world. […] It’s not about lack of opportunities. It’s because businesses are choosing to hoard profits or to use them to simply prop up stock options (and hence executive pay). That is bad for innovation and there is nothing inevitable about it. At the same time, governments are being asked to cut back with the austerity craze that continues to plague many nations. So we have a crisis of investment on both the private and public side.
• Failing conventionally - Chris Dillow: The Overton Window doesn't just exist in politics, but in finance, economics and management too. Some things are inside the window and acceptable - such as mergers, "professional judgment" and orthodox QE - whilst others, such as worker management, simple investment heuristics or helicopter money, are outside it.
• The disappearing middle class is threatening American mega brands - Hayley Peterson, who is a Business Insider, apparently: The sinister euphemism of the week is "consumer bifurcation". Upper-income consumers are buying more premium treats, while lower-income individuals are purchasing discounted chocolates, [Hershey CEO John Bilbrey] said. Hershey’s has been losing market share, as a result.
• People's Deepest, Darkest Google Searches Are Being Used Against Them - Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic: Consider, for example, a person who googles “need rent money fast” or “can’t pay rent.” Among the search results that Google returns, there may be ads that promise to help provide payday loans—ads designed to circumvent Google’s policies against predatory financial advertising. They’re placed by companies called lead generators, and they work by collecting and distributing personal information about consumers online. So while Google says it bans ads that guarantee foreclosure prevention or promise short-term loans without conveying accurate loan terms, lead generators may direct consumers to a landing page where they’re asked to input sensitive identifiable information. Then, payday lenders buy that information from the lead generators and, in some cases, target those consumers—online, via phone, and by mail—for the very sorts of short-term loans that Google prohibits.
• The digital revolution in higher education has already happened. No one noticed. - Clay Shirky at Medium (via @tregeagle): Outside a relative handful of selective residential institutions, the principal function of college is to train and credential people for work. An Associate’s or Bachelor’s is no longer one way of getting a good job. It is just about the only way of avoiding low wages or unemployment. The earnings premium for having a college degree has stagnated, but the punishment for not having one continues to grow. The digital revolution is happening because a high school degree is a ticket to not very much, while the traditional form of college no longer works for the people who need a certificate of employability.