This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Olivier Blanchard Is Worried About Inflation In Japan — Dean Baker, master of the political economy punchline, at CEPR (US): Debt is just one way in which governments obligate their public to future payments. Patent and copyright monopolies commit the public to paying rents that greatly exceed the free market price for the protected products. In the United States these payments are approaching 2.0 percent of GDP ($360 billion a year) for prescription drugs alone. It is remarkable that public finance economists seem to almost completely ignore rents for patents and copyrights when considering the financial burdens of various governments.
• Young Iraqis Overwhelmingly Consider U.S. Their Enemy, Poll Says — Murtaza Hussain at the Intercept:
  
  “For years, many have argued that Muslims and Arabs, like other humans, don’t appreciate being bombed or occupied,” says Haroon Moghul, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding. “Finally, we have a study to confirm this suspicion.”
• What’s so Bad about the Gold Standard? — David Glasner: The gold standard did play a major role in spreading the Depression. But the role was not just major; it was dominant. And the role of the gold standard in the Great Depression was not just to spread it; the role was, as Hawtrey and Cassel warned a decade before it happened, to cause it. The causal mechanism was that in restoring the gold standard, the various central banks linking their currencies to gold would increase their demands for gold reserves so substantially that the value of gold would rise back to its value before World War I, which was about double what it was after the war. […] The Great Depression was caused by a 50% increase in the value of gold that was the direct result of the restoration of the gold standard. […] the problem with gold is, first of all, that it does not guarantee that value of gold will be stable. The problem is exacerbated when central banks hold substantial gold reserves, which means that significant changes in the demand of central banks for gold reserves can have dramatic repercussions on the value of gold. Far from being a guarantee of price stability, the gold standard can be the source of price-level instability, depending on the policies adopted by individual central banks.
• Did Capitalism Fail? Looking Back Five Years After Lehman — Roman Frydman and Michael Goldberg at INET. As the title suggests, an oldie but a goody: Market instability is thus integral to how capitalist economies allocate their savings. Given this, policymakers should intervene not because they have superior knowledge about asset values (in fact, no one does), but because profit-seeking market participants do not internalize the huge social costs associated with excessive upswings and downswings in prices. It is such excessive fluctuations, not deviations from some fanciful “true” value – whether of assets or of the unemployment rate – that Keynes believed policymakers should seek to mitigate. Unlike their successors, Keynes and Hayek understood that imperfect knowledge and non-routine change mean that policy rules, together with the variables underlying them, gain and lose relevance at times that no one can anticipate.
• The Market Fairy Will Not Solve the Problems of Uber and Lyft — Ian Welsh nails it: These business models are ways of draining capital from the economy and putting them into the hands of a few investors and executives. They prey on desperate people who need money now, even if the money is insufficient to pay their total costs. Drivers are draining their own reserves to get cash now, but, hey, they gotta eat and pay the bills. The model generalises to any low-paid insecure work. You can't afford to say no to even the worst job. I did it for nearly ten years, working harder than I'd ever worked in my life, and am now massively in debt, for the first time in my life.
• The Zombie Doctrine — George Monbiot delivers some sublime ranting: It’s as if the people of the Soviet Union had never heard of communism. The ideology that dominates our lives has, for most of us, no name. Mention it in conversation and you’ll be rewarded with a shrug. Even if your listeners have heard the term before, they will struggle to define it. Neoliberalism: do you know what it is?
• Who do faculty “work for?” — Historiann: There’s nothing like stupid from the central administration to bring a faculty together. I told my colleagues that I have a rule when it comes to any technology or software: it works for me, I don’t work for it. End of story.
• A British Bridge for a Divided Europe — Robert Skidelsky: The eurozone has weakened the nation-states comprising it, without creating a supranational state to replace the powers its members have lost. Legitimacy thus still resides at a level of political authority that has lost those attributes of sovereignty (such as the ability to alter exchange rates) from which legitimacy derives. […] The EU has tried to achieve political union incrementally, because it was impossible to start with it. Indeed, barely hidden in the “European project” was the expectation that successive crises would push political integration forward. This was certainly Jean Monnet’s hope. The alternative – that the crises would have the opposite effect, leading to the breakup of the economic and monetary union – was never seriously confronted.
• Patently Absurd Logic On Budget Deficits and Debt — Dean Baker at the Huffington Post: As much as folks may love the private sector, it was not going to make up the demand lost when the housing bubble crashed, or at least not any time soon. If we wanted to prevent a long and severe downturn like the Great Depression, it was necessary for the government to run large deficits. These deficits were not impoverishing our kids - they were keeping their parents employed. […] The fact that the deficit hawks can scream endlessly about the horrible interest burden on our children, but don’t even seem to notice the costs being imposed by patent and copyright monopolies, suggests that they are not really concerned about our children’s well-being. Alternatively, they may have a very poor understanding of economics. Either way, their whining does not deserve the public’s attention.
• Where Hope Goes to Die — Ted Rall: