This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Greece: The Unpicking Of Democracy, One Debt Repayment At A Time - David Tuckwell, New Matilda: "In an interview with the Financial Times [president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi] said that Greece “should understand they have lost sovereignty a long time ago over their economic policies” - lost it, that is, to the market. In another interview with the Wall St Journal he said that Europe’s social contract had become obsolete and was being dismantled."
• Profit and public health - John Quiggin: "[…] selling medicine in the same shop as alcohol is unthinkable, but it’s entirely OK for a health professional to promote and sell water as a treatment for serious illness."
• Tourists and refugees: two worlds that aren’t supposed to collide - Roger Tyers in The Society Pages: "Offshoring poor people back to poor countries by bribing cash-strapped governments is an innovative, if highly morally-dubious strategy to keep the two worlds apart. But as we see with increased regularity, the global poor keep coming, driven by poverty and war. We don’t want to see them, we don’t want them to ruin our holidays, and we don’t want to be reminded of the underlying threat they pose to our privileged way of life. But can we stop them forever? Should we?"
• Thinking about open borders - Antoine Pécoud, openDemocracy: "Employers and companies benefit from the liberalisation of trade in a globalising economy; but workers do not enjoy the same mobility: is this merely a way to favor capital to the detriment of labor and, if so, should this be left uncontested? If all human beings were fortunate enough to live in reasonably wealthy countries, with acceptable living and working conditions, these questions would perhaps be irrelevant. But this is not the case, and the ugly realities of our world are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore." Also:
• The case for open borders - Joseph H. Carens, openDemocracy: "In many ways, citizenship in Western democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal class privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. To be born a citizen of a rich state in Europe or North America is like being born into the nobility (even though many of us belong to the lesser nobility)."
• American Exceptionalism - cartoon by Ted Rall
• Economic arguments as stalking horses - Noah Smith, and Paul Krugman responds in Why Am I A Keynesian?: i confess I don't understand the big government versus small government debate in the context of a country that spends more on their military than the rest of the world combined. How much bigger could you want the government to get? The fact that this rarely (if ever) rates a mention in this debate shows that in fact both sides agree that size doesn't matter—it's what you do with it. The debate can really only be about whether the government should help people who need it, or let them suffer unnecessarily.
• A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society - Thomas Piketty reviews Tony Atkinson's latest book: "With Atkinson, the dividing lines between history, economics, and politics have never been strict: he has always tried to reconcile the scholar with the citizen, often discreetly, occasionally in a more forthright manner. All the same, Inequality: What Can Be Done? goes much further in that direction than any of his earlier books. Atkinson takes risks and sets forth a genuine plan of action."
• Order effects in reading and citing academic papers - Daniel Feenberg, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaulé, Jonathan Gruber: "[…] our findings confirm that presentation order can be a powerful determinant of choice in a list-based environment – and that this can have strong downstream effects, such as through paper citations in our sample." I think you'll find that a very widely-cited article by Professor Aardvark of Algiers University disputes this.
• Open Access: A Collective Ecology for AAA Publishing in the Digital Age - Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Dominic Boyer, John Hartigan and Marisol de la Cadena mark one year of open access for the journal Cultural Anthropology: "“In 2011, the journal-publishing divisions of Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley reported profits equal to 36%, 33.9%, and 42%, respectively, of their sales revenue.” Exxon Mobil, comparatively, has a net profit margin of 7.31%, Rio Tinto’s is 13.69%, even JPMorgan Chase can only claim 24.57%. Volunteered academic labor, it turns out, is a far more lucrative platform for profit accumulation than fossil fuels, mineral resources, and international finance."
• I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all - Amanda Taub at Vox: "[…] if university faculty are feeling disempowered in their classrooms, that's because they do, in fact, have less power at work: the shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs and the corresponding rise in the numbers of poorly paid adjuncts means many university teachers are in a precarious position right now. […] The problem isn't the substance of student complaints — the problem is that university lecturers are so terrified of the effect student complaints could have. That's a problem to be solved by universities having faculty members' backs, not by somehow silencing the debate over identity politics."
• Inequality, Technology and Public Policy - Tony Atkinson speaking at the RSA (video): The most interesting point for me came out of the last question from the floor. When he left school in the early 1960s, Tony was hired as a systems analyst for IBM, with no training whatsoever, and trained on the job alng with others from all sorts of backgrounds, at great expense to IBM. He muses that perhaps high employment at the time created investment in training, rather than vice versa.