This week, I have been mostly… I don't know what I've been doing. Meanwhile, this happened in my sharply curtailed idle reading:

• Economic Rationality Explains Everything and Nothing — Geoffrey Hodgson, Evonomics: Utility maximization can be useful as a heuristic modelling device. But strictly it does not explain any behavior. It does not identify specific causes. It cannot explain any particular behavior because it is consistent with any observable behavior. Its apparent universal power signals weakness, not strength.
• Everyone But the Media Saw Trumpism Coming — Ted Rall: “We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated,” [New York Times journalist Nicholas] Kristof wrote. Most Americans are working-class. In other words, Kristof and his colleagues admit they don’t cover the problems that affect most Americans. Again: why does he still have a job?
• Is an Aussie debt crisis around the corner? — Leith van Onselen, Macro Business: Admittedly, the real concern is that 40% of all mortgages are interest-only mortgages, which are more vulnerable […] Whether or not Australia is likely to experience some kind of financial crisis within the next three years is a moot point. But having one of the world’s most overvalued housing markets, combined with overly indebted households and an extreme reliance on offshore funding, is hardly a good situation to be in and the opposite of prudence. And…
• The seven countries most vulnerable to a debt crisis — Steve Keen, Real World Economics Review Blog: They are, in order of likely severity: China, Australia, Sweden, Hong Kong (though it might deserve first billing), Korea, Canada, and Norway. […] Timing precisely when these countries will have their recessions is not possible, because it depends on when the private sector’s willingness to borrow from the banks—and the banking sector’s willingness to lend—stops. This can be delayed by government policy—as it was in Australia in 2008, via a strong government stimulus, the restarting of the housing bubble by a government grant to first home buyers, and the boom in investment and exports set off by China’s own stimulus program. But the day when credit growth stops can’t be put off indefinitely. When it arrives, these countries—many of which appeared to avoid the worst of the crisis in 2008—will join the world’s long list of walking wounded economies.
• Are We Facing a Global “Lost Decade?" — Steve Keen, for the Private Debt Project [tl;dr: Yes.]: The tragedy is that although there are methods by which we could escape the global private debt trap into which we have fallen we are nonetheless prisoners of an economic orthodoxy that will prevent us from employing them... The main barrier here is simply the ignorance of the supposed experts on economics about the nature of money. While mainstream economists continue to spout naïve arguments about money and banking, the politicians who rely upon them for guidance are unlikely to attempt anything other than the poorly targeted and largely ineffective policies that Japan has persisted with for the last quarter century. A global “Lost Decade” is entirely probable.