This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Vital Signs: Australia’s sudden ultra-low economic growth ought not to have come as surprise — Richard Holden of UNSW in the Conversation: Australia’s big little economic lie was laid bare on Wednesday. National accounts figures show that the Australian economy grew by just 0.2% in the last quarter of 2018. This disappointing result was below market expectations and official forecasts of 0.6%. It put annual growth for the year at just 2.3%. But the shocking revelation was that Gross Domestic Product per person (a more relevant measure of living standards) actually slipped in the December quarter by 0.2%, on the back of a fall of 0.1% in the September quarter. These are the first back-to-back quarters of negative GDP per capita growth in 13 years - since 2006. [Here's Bill Mitchell's less polished but more insightful review of the figures.]
• Future budgets are going to have to spend more on welfare, which is fine. It’s spending on us — ANU's Peter Whiteford in the Conversation: The social services minister has used point-in-time administrative data to show that in 2018 the share of working-age Australians on welfare fell to 15.1%, “the lowest rate of welfare dependency in over 25 years”. But the longitudinal Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) Survey finds that over the course of an entire year (2016) about one-third of working-age households contained someone who received an income support payment for some of it. The longer the time period, the more common becomes the receipt of payments. Between 2001 and 2015 around 70% of working-age households included someone who received an income support payment at some point (not including the age pension or family payments). It is one of the most important lessons of longitudinal surveys like HILDA – we, our family or friends are in this together.
• Michigan Conservatives Don’t Want to Teach Students That America Is a Democracy — Matt Stieb at New York Magazine on what really the right is really scared by in the term "democratic socialism": The proposed curriculum update in Michigan also falls in line with another type of push by conservative education advocates: cutting references to America’s status as a democracy. The first draft of the proposed changes in Michigan attempted to nix the word “democratic” from the phrase “core democratic values,” a slogan that defined virtues like equality, liberty, and diversity. Similar efforts were enacted in Texas and Georgia in 2010 and 2016, when state education boards removed “democracy” as a description of American government, or promoted the unwieldy phrase “representative democracy/republic” instead. […] In a compromise, the proposed standards now use the term “American government” as the most-frequent phrase for the nation’s electoral system, but will also include the phrase “constitutional government,” and occasional uses of “democracy.” Patrick Colbeck, the leading conservative voice in the argument, said that the term “democracy” was not “politically neutral and accurate.”
• Pete Buttigieg argues against free college. This is why progressives can’t agree about subsidizing tuition. — Elizabeth Popp Berman in the Washington Post: The Buttigieg argument goes like this: College increases the incomes of those who complete it. But the people who go to college are typically already better off. By charging them less than the actual cost of their education, we’re using the tax dollars of poorer non-college-goers to pay for the education of their richer counterparts — whose earning potential will only increase with their shiny new bachelor's degree. However standard this position seems today, historically speaking, it’s relatively novel. Making it requires two intellectual moves that didn’t take place until the 1960s. First, you have to think of college in human capital terms: as an investment that produces future earnings. Second, you need a cost-benefit approach to evaluating policy: spending the least possible money to achieve the maximum desired benefit — in this case, education. […] Not all progressives, of course, buy the “free-college-is-regressive” claim. One common counterargument is that this undermines the case for all sorts of public services. As economist J.W. Mason asks, “Suppose users of Central Park are higher-income on average; is progressive policy then to fence it off and charge admission?” Similar arguments could be made about fire stations, if you notice that they particularly benefit well-off homeowners.
• Donald Trump’s use of humiliation could have catastrophic consequences – a psychologist explains why — Simon McCarthy-Jones of Trinity College Dublin in the Conversation on the bullies we have to endure: Some individuals who are shamed will explode with humiliated fury. This is more likely if the person has high levels of narcissism. Such people have grandiose views of themselves, a strong sense of entitlement, and seek to exploit others. They are strongly motivated to maintain their self-esteem and deflect shame by placing blame on others, whom they rage against. […] Trump’s use of humiliation has the potential […] to trigger an extreme and unpredictable reaction, including on the global stage. It also risks setting a social norm in which humiliating people is acceptable. All this undermines the concept of inherent human dignity and risks a conflict in which people are accorded no inherent value.
• Off the Mark — by Mark Parisi: