This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Knowledge Isn’t Power - Paul Krugman at the Gray Lady: "[W]hatever serious people may want to believe, soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power."
• #SpeakBeautiful: Reinforcing a dangerous metric - jennydavis at the Society Pages: "In its very name, #SpeakBeautiful centers physical attractiveness as the proper metric with which to measure women’s value. Rather than decenter or reject this metric, it asks women to give one another high scores."
• Technology should be used to create social mobility – not to spy on citizens - Cory Doctorow at the Grauniad: "Our networks have given the edge to the elites, and unless we seize the means of information, we are headed for a long age of IT-powered feudalism, where property is the exclusive domain of the super-rich, where your surveillance-supercharged Internet of Things treats you as a tenant-farmer of your life, subject to a licence agreement instead of a constitution"
• We Suck at HTTP - Deane Barker, Gadgetopia: "We have broken HTTP.  We’ve done it for years in fits and starts, but apps have completely broken it.  HTTP was a good specification which we’ve steadily whittled away."
• Can helicopter money be democratic? - Simon Wren-Lewis
• Making Do with More - Brad DeLong: "All of the extracting and growing and building and making and carrying--even the carrying from the kitchen to the restaurant table, and even the making that is the transformation of coffee grounds and water into hot caffeine-laden liquid--takes up only three in ten jobs in the United States today."
• Power from the People - Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron at the IMF(!) say "the decline in unionization in recent decades has fed the rise in incomes at the top".