This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Niall Ferguson Fights Back Against Smear Campaign by Fact-checkers, Facts - Johnathan Chait at New York Magazine: "Committing the odd factual error is an occupational hazard in journalism. For Niall Ferguson, the commission of error is more than a hazard. It’s a cherished way of life."
• It's About The Bubble, Stupid: Tony Abbott's Magical Housing Growth Stimulus Strategy - Ian McAuley tries to teach the PM about housing bubbles: "Unless one is about to trade down or emigrate to Spain (where the bottom has fallen out of the housing market), the gain is illusory: it’s simply price inflation. If you have a portfolio of shares or a Brett Whitely painting on your wall, you may gain some value from a higher market value of such assets because you can sell them, but a higher value of your house is meaningless." Here's yer graph porn of the week:
  
• Academics attack George Osborne budget surplus proposal - Phillip Inman at the Grauniad: Atrios calls Osborne the Stupidest Fucking Person On The Face Of The Planet. I see your Osborne, and raise you a Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey (see above).
• Professors do far less teaching than the public imagines - Clay Shirky at Crooked Timber: I'm inclined to think this is less a matter of professors retreating into the ivory tower than retiring tenured academics being replaced by adjuncts. Clay Shirky is a smart guy, and I have a very small sample size to go on. Last I looked, there were three people with the title of professor at my local campus. In over two years at a nominal university, the only time I've ever been in the same room as anybody who's ever held the title of professor was at the Bellingen launch of Richard Hil's new book.
• What's Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled - Mike Konczal at Rolling Stone: "For-profit schools are turning out like Enron, or mortgage-backed securities designed to explode. They are yet another marvel of the financial world that turned out to be a fraudulent Ponzi scheme."
• What is Reform? The Strange Case of Greece and Europe - James Galbraith at the American Prospect: "Either the Greek government will concede too much, lose its support and collapse, in which case whether the end result is another receivership or Golden Dawn, democracy is dead in Europe. Or, in the end, the Greeks will be forced to take their fate—at enormous risk and cost—into their own hands, and to hope for help from wherever it might come."
• Our Meat Market for Workers: How Coles And Woolworths Benefit From Worker Exploitation - Godfrey Moase at New Matilda: "Labour hire contractors forcing workers to live with 29 other people in a regular suburban home is not the sort of behaviour we should accept in Australia. And by the International Labour Organisation’s measures, making workers live in particular housing, as a condition of employment, is an indicator of forced labour. What once was genuinely seasonal casual work is now a way of life for millions of workers in Australia – it is estimated that 40 per cent of all those in the workforce are currently employed on zero-hours contracts."
• Nicola Corbyn and the Myth of the Unelectable Left - Craig Murray: " I was saddened by readers’ comments [...] in which Labour supporter after Labour supporter posted comment to the effect “I would like to vote for Jeremy Corbyn because he believes in the same things I do, but we need a more right wing leader to have a chance of winning.” There are two answers to that. The first is no, you don’t need to be right wing to win. Look at the SNP. The second is what the bloody hell are you in politics for anyway? Do you just want your team to win like it was football? Is there any point at all in being elected just so you can carry out the same policies as your opponents?"
• Actually existing Europe - Yudit Kiss at openDemocracy: "How is it that Greek PM, Tsipras, who tries to relieve the suffering of his people, is a less acceptable EU negotiation partner than Viktor Orbán?"
• Buy a Joe Strummer Replica Guitar with Your Sex Pistols Credit Card Because Layers Upon Layers of Irony - Lisa Wade at the Society Pages:
  
• I'm a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards. - Koritha Mitchell at Vox: "I don't have the luxury of simply changing my syllabus to make my students more comfortable. You see, I'm also black and a woman. There aren't a lot of other people like me — women of color hold just 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions nationwide. My very presence makes some of my students uncomfortable because I do not fit any picture society has given them of an expert."
• Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans - Lee Seigel, NYT: "The reported consequences of having no credit are scare talk, to some extent. The reliably predatory nature of American life guarantees that there will always be somebody to help you, from credit card companies charging stratospheric interest rates to subprime loans for houses and cars. Our economic system ensures that so long as you are willing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, you will keep being enthusiastically invited to play the economic game."
• Who Said It, Henry Kissinger or…? - Greg Grandin at the Nation: "That, Kissinger said—trying to establish the domestic will to break the back of adversaries—was what he and Nixon tried to accomplish in Vietnam. “Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger said, “is really secondary.” It’s not that remarkable a statement. At least it is honest: What matters is the effect that the will to bomb (or, if possible, actual bombing) has on us, providing a sense of purpose so we can bomb some more."
• Gawker’s Idealism Is Exactly What the Labor Movement Needs - Richard Yeselson, New Republic: "The best thing intellectuals can do for the labor movement is also the best thing they can do as individual workers: come together, form a union, and then shout it out to the world." Also related:
• If We Don’t Hang Together … - the ever-brilliant Jonathan Rees for Vitae: "What’s so maddening is that university administrators think professors will take on that extra burden without the quality of education suffering there. Cancel that. What’s so maddening is that the universities willing to employ that strategy simply don’t care if the quality of the education suffers there."
• Bernie Sanders on Obama's "Biggest Mistake" - Jon Schwarz at the Intercept: "I think it’s unlikely that Obama’s demobilization of his supporters was actually a “mistake.” As Ganz put it in 2010, Obama saw his supporters “like a tiger you can’t control”; Ganz speculated that the president’s real goal was simply to “keep the machine on for the next election.”"
• Bubble! - Paul Krugman at the New York Times: "So Jeb! is basically promising that as president, he can generate Florida-style bubbles, which bring disaster when they burst, to the rest of America!"
• A Heavy Price To (Kind Of) Stop The Boats - Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "Immigration is complex. But the Abbott government’s approach is alarmingly simple. It is a policy of ruthless Machiavellianism that subordinates everything to the vacuous metric of boat arrivals, with neo-fascist imagery and a savage apparatus of state sanction."
• A dance of destitution - psychology's clash over coercion - Carl Walker at openDemocracy: "Job centres are being turned into ghettos of deficit annihilation, with job centre staff, mental health practitioners and mental health service users corralled within them. Mental health practitioners cost the state, job centre staff cost the state, people not working cost the state and people receiving medical treatment cost the state. This policy initiative simply puts them in one space and compels them to eat each other up."
• The IMF “Defense” of it Actions against the Greeks is an Unintended Confession - Bill Black at NEP: "Blanchard and the IMF know that an economically-literate deal does not “require difficult decisions by all sides.” It requires, instead, the troika to cease its destructive demands that Greece “bleed the patient” to “heal” it. The troika’s austerity demands forced Greece into a Great Depression that is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s in terms of sustained, obscene unemployment rates."
• Inside the mind of Bernie Sanders: unbowed, unchanged, and unafraid of a good fight - Paul Lewis for the Guardian: "‘I did win my last election with 71% of the vote. So it’s not just like someone walked in off the street and suddenly they’re Hillary Clinton’s main challenger. We’ve been doing this a few years.’"
• People Aren't Better Off Than Income Trends Show - Matt Bruenig at Demos (US): Young people want Candy Crush Saga, old people want Last Night of the Proms. Apples and oranges. Swings and roundabouts. Lets call the whole thing off.
• Bad Aunty: Seven Years On, How ABC Lateline Sparked The Racist NT Intervention - Chris Graham, New Matilda
• Greece, The Euro and Gunboat Diplomacy - Karl Whelan at Medium: a comprehensive timeline of the crisis Europe didn't have to have.
• Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? - Alesina, Glaeser & Sacerdote 2001, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (via Krugman): "Since racial minorities are highly overrepresented among the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute disproportionately to these minorities. Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. […] Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state."
• Which Students Get to Have Privacy? - danah boyd: "The reason that I get grouchy is that I hate how the risks that we’re concerned about are shaped by the fears of privileged parents, not the risks of those who are already under constant surveillance, those who are economically disadvantaged, and those who are in the school-prison pipeline."