I have had the most beastly week, and in rare moments when I've managed to gather up some scraps of dignity and hope, I have been mostly reading:

• Want to Kill Your Economy? Have MBA Programs Churn out Takers Not Makers. — Rana Foroohar, in Evonomics, adapted from part of her book "Makers & Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business": With very few exceptions, MBA education today is basically an education in finance, not business—a major distinction. So it’s no wonder that business leaders make many of the finance-friendly decisions. MBA programs don’t churn out innovators well prepared to cope with a fast-changing world, or leaders who can stand up to the Street and put the long-term health of their company (not to mention their customers) first; they churn out followers who learn how to run firms by the numbers. Despite the financial crisis of 2008, most top MBA programs in the United States still teach standard “markets know best” efficiency theory and preach that share price is the best representation of a firm’s underlying value, glossing over the fact that the markets tend to brutalize firms for long-term investment and reward them for short-term paybacks to investors.
• Why we need to teach political philosophy in schools — Jonathan Floyd in the Conversation: What is the spectre haunting Europe today? It’s simple. The thing that truly dogs us, that really drags at our heels, is ignorance. Ignorance of the fundamental ideas at the heart of politics. Ignorance of the key terms of political argument: liberty, equality, power, justice, and so on. Ignorance of the subject matter of political philosophy. […] We are ignorant of our ignorance of it, as well as what that ignorance costs us. It is, to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld, an unknown unknown, when it could be something else: the thing that liberates the minds of our citizens; a weapon of mass deduction.
• How housing bubbles destroy productivity — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness: The Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) has released a new report exploring “the nature and magnitude of the relationship between house prices, household debt and the labour market decisions of Australian households”, which paints a sobering picture for the economy and financial stability. The key conclusion from the report is that “households accumulate debt as house prices increase, leaving them vulnerable to housing and labour market shocks. House price increases also potentially promote or dampen labour supply and labour force productivity”. In other words, Australia’s housing bubble is distorting the economy.
• Advertising — Flea Snobbery:
  
• These charts show why some experts fear an apartment glut — Clancy Yeates in the Age provides your chart porn for the week:
  
• How the two major parties shape up on debate around student loan reform — in the Conversation, Andrew Norton (higher education policy's evil incarnate) discovers that students paying the post hoc education tax often pool their resources by sharing their accommodation with others. Like animals. This barbarous custom is unheard of among employees of the Grattan Institute, and means the income-contingent payment threshold must be lowered to make graduates pay for their disgusting habits: Because HELP debtors often live with other people, their personal income is not always a reliable guide to their living standards. They share expenses and sometimes income with others. Grattan’s analysis found that half the debtors who would be affected by a $42,000 threshold live with a partner.