This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Faith in an Unregulated Free Market? Don’t Fall for It - Bob Shiller plugs his latest book in the New York Times: [T]he problem of market-incentivized professional manipulation and deception is fundamental, not an externality. In short, the superiority of untrammeled free markets — the fundamental theorem of welfare economics — has taken on the aura of a law from the heavens. Yet technology has advanced so that temptations are being manipulated ever more effectively. In fact, the real success of economies that embody free markets has much to do with the heroic efforts of campaigners for better values, both among private organizations and advocates of government regulation.
• Cynical workforce participation policy forces solo parents into ranks of unemployed - Warwick Smith: I call this “pushing on a piece of string” for good reason. Unemployment in Australia is at 6.2 per cent. There are many more people looking for work than there are jobs. So, I’d be very keen to hear how pushing more single parents and grandparents into the job market is going to be a positive thing for this country or for the individuals concerned. Taking away payments from everyone because of the actions of a tiny minority is the kind of collective punishment that society long ago abandoned in every other sphere of life.
• Grattan Institute advocates cutting university research funding - John Quiggin: Finally, lets come back to Norton’s rejection of the centuries-old scholar-teacher model in favor of a teaching-only approach. His defence of this position “the evidence that it improves teaching is less clear” is not exactly robust. Against this we can observe that worldwide, there are in fact plenty of examples of both teaching-only and research-intensive institutions. Nearly all are nominally funded on a per-student basis, whether through fees, government subsidies or both. So, what does the market test, which Norton ought to favor tell us. The answer is that students are beating down the doors of the research-intensive unis. Teaching-only schools are the second choice for nearly everyone. Certainly a large part of my motivation to enrol was the prospect of meeting people who are doing interesting work. Of course now I'd just settle for meeting people. Or a person, at some stage.
• Anthony Albanese Is Not Too Left Wing To Win Government. Indeed, He’s About Right - John Passant in New Matilda: A genuine left wing party of the working class in Australia has not yet developed. Until it does we will remain in the Sisyphean oscillations between neoliberal Labor and pro-austerity Liberal governments. Because Albanese is no Jeremy Corbyn. I have both Bernie Sanders' hair and Jeremy Corbyn's beard. Just saying that, if called upon to serve as PM, I would very carefully consider what is in the best interests of the country, and what would give me a lavish pension for the rest of my life.
• Aren't we all Guatemala? - Pedro Abramovay, openDemocracy: Guatemala is the radical expression of a crisis affecting almost every country in Latin America. The last decades have witnessed huge progress (depending on the country) in transparency policies, thanks to the strengthening of anti-corruption institutions and a new kind of citizen mobilization, highly demanding and autonomous, independent of the traditional parties and movements. The great promise was that this would alter, by itself, the political culture of corruption in our countries. This has not happened. Neither in Guatemala, nor in Chile, nor in Mexico, nor in Brazil.
• Own a Vizio Smart TV? It’s Watching You - Julia Angwin, ProPublica: Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched them live or recorded. The viewing patterns are then connected your IP address - the Internet address that can be used to identify every device in a home, from your TV to a phone.
• The replication crisis has engulfed economics - Andreas Ortmann, The Conversation: The upshot is that even under the best of circumstances – one data set, what seems like a straightforward question to answer, and an exchange of ideas on the best method – arriving at consensus can be extraordinarily difficult. And it surely becomes even more difficult with multiple data sets and many teams.
• With idle labour equal to 14.5 per cent, the fiscal deficit is too low - Bill Mitchell: Taken together, this data tells me that the fiscal deficit in Australia is well below what a responsible government should aspire to provide the Australian economy. I say provide in the sense that a fiscal deficit provides spending support to Australian businesses which allows them to employ people. If the current spending patterns of the non-government sector is delivering the sort of outcomes articulated in the list above, then we know that the fiscal support to the economy is inadequate. After we acknowledge that point then we can have a discussion about what the composition of the fiscal deficit should look like – that is, how much government consumption and investment spending there should be.
• Another Money Is Possible, Part I: Will the ScotPound Succeed As A Parallel Currency? - Steve Rushton at Occupy.com: A neat little primer on a few tools in the heterodox economic kit. Part two is Avoid the Next Financial Crash with People's Q.E., and part three is Holland Leads Experiment In Basic Income.
• Why we should give free money to everyone - Rutger Bregman, De Correspondent, a nice, comprehensive look at UBI, cited by Rushton in the above: After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, eleven notorious vagrants finally moved off the streets. Costs? 50,000 pounds a year, including the wages of the aid workers. In addition to giving eleven individuals another shot at life, the project had saved money by a factor of at least 7. Even The Economist concluded: ‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’
• Why do we tax goods and services at the same rate, when goods are so much less sustainable? - Angie Silva and Talia Raphaely from Curtin, in The Conversation: It is not hard to see why the world is awash with trash. In the United States, for instance, 80% of all goods are non-reusable, and more than 90% become waste within six weeks. Australians, meanwhile, currently produce the second most waste per person in the world.
• In Defense of the Late Ahmad Chalabi - Jon Schwarz, The Intercept: Chalabi was also a source for much of the New York Times’ atrocious reporting on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and was mentioned by name when the Times was finally forced to apologize. Moreover, he couldn’t have been much more in your face about it afterward, charmingly explaining in 2004 that “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.” But if Americans want to blame someone for the Iraq War, we should be looking closer to home — at Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and ourselves. As former CIA officer Robert Baer put it: “Chalabi was scamming the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to be scammed.”
• Intellectual property rights and artistic creativity - Petra Moser, VoxEU: [Data] suggests that extensions in the length of copyright beyond the duration of the author’s life create a negligible increase in income for the average author. Instead, copyright extensions only benefit the authors of an extremely small number of exceptionally long-lived works. To the extent that it is difficult to predict which types of works will continue to be popular 100 years after their original creation, copyright extensions are unlikely to encourage rational investments in creative work.
• Water Delivery - xkcd
  
• The Invention of Pad Thai - Alex Mayyasi, Priceonomics: Yet [Prime Minister] Phibun took each and every part of his cultural campaign seriously. The National Cultural Act listed penalties for violating its edicts. Even as World War II began, he used a radio address to tell Thais, “Our dear ladies must not think that it is not necessary to wear hats in times of war. Now more than ever is it essential to go on wearing hats.”