This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Density, sprawl, growth: how Australian cities have changed in the last 30 years — Neil Coffee, Emma Baker, and Jarrod Lange in the Conversation: Melbourne may well be the exemplar for inner-city rebirth. More than any other Australian city it demonstrates the 30-year turnaround from inner-city decline to densification. […] While the turnarounds in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth have been less marked than in Melbourne, they are all no longer “doughnut cities”. This means that where people live in these cities has changed. Australia’s cities are now more densely populated – and we are much more likely to live in inner areas than we were 30 years ago.
• Too old to work, too young to die — Warwick Smith in the Monthly: Age discrimination is already rife in Australia, with over a quarter of older job seekers reporting being affected by it. When you combine this with the push to lift the Age Pension access age to 70, the rise of contract and casual employment, and the current and projected impact of technology on the demand for skills, the situation for many older workers looks grim. If you’re an older woman, trying to return to the workforce after raising children, then things are going to be particularly hard for you.
• An optimistic view of worker power — Bill Mitchell: [A] past national Greens leader in Australia told me that it was too politically difficult to challenge the neo-liberal macroeconomic consensus (even if my criticisms of that consensus were valid), it just distracted voters from their main message, which was unambiguously progressive in both the social and environmental context. I pointed out to that leader that by accepting the austerity narrative as the norm for responsible fiscal conduct, even if his party gained office (which it will never do in our two-party system), they would be unable to initiate their progressive social and environmental agenda because they would have hamstrung themselves in a neo-liberal macroeconomics.
• The best lesson I ever taught — James Page in On Line Opinion: And so the discussion continued for 40 minutes. The issues included the role of religion within education, the nature of scientific fact, the nature of religion and faith, and the role of education itself. I continued to stand at the edge of the classroom, silent, and ready to intervene and perhaps commence the formal lesson. Yet that never happened. At the end of the 40 minutes I thanked the two discussants, and reminded the students of an upcoming assignment.
• Lack of Demand Is the Economy’s Problem, Not Automation — Dean Baker: From a worker’s standpoint it doesn’t matter if they lose their job because a robot can do it better and cheaper or because a new assembly line only needs half as many workers to produce the same number of cars. In both cases they have lost their job, the specific cause doesn’t affect their economic circumstances. […] We do have a problem of a weak labor market, with employment rates for prime age workers (ages 25-54) still well below their pre-recession levels, but this is a problem of inadequate demand in the economy. There is little reason to believe that if we generated more demand through larger government deficits or smaller trade deficits we would not have more jobs.
• An Undergraduate’s Question about Economic Policy — Thomas Palley: Neoliberals try to close down the space of political debate and social possibility by excluding all except neoliberal ideas. The tragedy of the past forty years is they have been succeeding. In the academy there is a neoclassical monopoly, and in politics Labor and Social Democratic parties have been captured by the Trojan horse of the Third Way, creating a neoliberal political monopoly.

This week, I have been feeling guilty about skipping a month, and mostly reading:

• Why Do Anything? A Meditation on Procrastination — Costica Bradatan in the New York Times: The drama of procrastination comes from its split nature. Just like the architect from Shiraz, the procrastinator is smitten by the perfect picture of that which is yet to be born; he falls under the spell of all that purity and splendor. What he is beholding is something whole, uncorrupted by time, untainted by the workings of a messed-up world. At the same time, though, the procrastinator is fully aware that all that has to go. No sooner does he get a glimpse of the perfection that precedes actualization than he is doomed to become part of the actualization process himself, to be the one who defaces the ideal and brings into the world a precarious copy, unlike the architect who saves it by burning the plans.
• China’s Army of Global Homebuyers Is Suddenly Short on Cash — Bloomberg News: Less than a month after China announced fresh curbs on overseas payments, anecdotal reports from realtors, homeowners and developers suggest the restrictions are already weighing on the world’s biggest real estate buying spree. […] “If it’s too difficult, I’m out,’’ said Mr. Zheng, 66, a retired civil servant in Shanghai who declined to give his first name to avoid attracting regulatory scrutiny. He may abandon a 2.4 million yuan ($348,903) home purchase in western Melbourne, even after shelling out a 300,000 yuan deposit last August. He’s due to make another big payment next month. [Tick… tick… tick…]
• Why Trump's Staff Is Lying — Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg View: By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration. That makes those individuals grow more dependent on the leader and less likely to mount independent rebellions against the structure of command. Promoting such chains of lies is a classic tactic when a leader distrusts his subordinates and expects to continue to distrust them in the future. Another reason for promoting lying is what economists sometimes call loyalty filters. If you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid. If they balk, then you know right away they aren’t fully with you.
• The Private Debt Crisis — Richard Vague: When too high, private debt becomes a drag on economic growth. It chips away at the margin of growth trends. Though different researchers cite different levels, a growing body of research suggests that when private debt enters the range of 100 to 150 percent of GDP, it impedes economic growth. When private debt is high, consumers and businesses have to divert an increased portion of their income to paying interest and principal on that debt—and they spend and invest less as a result. That’s a very real part of what’s weighing on economic growth. After private debt reaches these high levels, it suppresses demand.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Stand, Fight, Resist — Jason Griffey: Neutrality favors the powerful, and further marginalizes the marginalized. In the face of the current political climate, with the use of opinions as bludgeons and disinformation as the weapon of choice for manipulation and intellectual coercion, it is up to those who value fact and believe in the care of those in need to stand up and positively affirm that to do otherwise is evil.
• Going down the drain, putting this wondrous stock market at risk? — Wolf Richter: Companies in the S&P 500 spent about $3 trillion since 2011 to buy back their own shares, often with borrowed money. It’s part of a noble magic called financial engineering, the simplest way to goose the all-important metric of earnings per share (by lowering the number of shares outstanding). And it creates buying pressure in the stock market that drives up share prices. […] “Only” 362 of the S&P 500 companies bought back shares in Q3, the second lowest number in three years, with Q2 having been the lowest number (blue line in the chart below). [And, not unrelated:]
• Apple CEO Tim Cook Met With Trump to “Engage” on Gigantic Corporate Tax Cut — Jon Schwarz, the Intercept: Cook first described how it was critical for Apple to “engage” with governments on what he called “our key areas of focus.” According to Cook, these include “privacy and security, education,” “advocating for human rights for everyone,” “the environment and really combating climate change” and “creating jobs” — i.e., nothing as mundane as money. But in the third paragraph, Cook acknowledged, “We have other things that are more business-centric — like tax reform.” [And, tying it all together a few months ago:]
• Standing up to Apple — Robert Reich: Congress’s last tax amnesty occurred in 2004, when global U.S. corporations brought back about $300 billion from overseas, and paid just a tax rate of 5.25 percent rather than the regular 35 percent U.S. corporate rate. Corporate executives argued then – as they argue now – that the amnesty would allow them to reinvest those earnings in America. The argument was baloney then and it’s baloney now. A study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 92 percent of the repatriated cash was used to pay for dividends, share buybacks or executive bonuses.
• James Galbraith Tells Us What Everyone Needs to Know About Inequality — Polly Cleveland reviews - well, quotes from - Jamie's new book at the D&S Blog: Galbraith adds a new insight: not only did the postwar high-tax regime induce corporations to keep executive pay in check, it also induced them to retain profits and reinvest them in the corporation. With the 1980’s “greed is good” transformation, rates of reinvestment slowed as executives started taking more for themselves—surely helping slow the overall rate of growth. [i.e. for currency-issuing governments, the purpose of taxation isn't revenue-raising; it's about steering the economy toward desirable public policy ends.]
• A Chat (Avec Chat) — Wondermark, by David Malki !:

This last few weeks, I have been mostly going mad, and reading:

• Ageing out of drugs — Stacey McKenna in Aeon: So, what have we learned so far from those who age out of drug use? When people talk about the life cycle leading to natural recovery, numerous factors are at play. For many, it’s a simple case of ‘being sick and tired of being sick and tired’. […] Though this is the path that’s most common among people who have tried or even become addicted to drugs, it’s the one least discussed. But careful scrutiny of ageing out – both why people do and why they don’t – tells us a lot about drug dependence and what to do about it. […] The so-called unbreakable cycle of addiction appears to result from inequity – from poverty, from discrimination, from social and economic oppression.
• Did Money Eat Our Brains? — Steve Roth at Evonomics: After growing rapidly for a couple of million years, doubling from roughly 750 to 1,500 cubic centimeters, human brains have shrunk by about ten percent over just ten or twenty millennia. (So they’ve been getting smaller maybe twenty times faster than they got bigger.) Imagine taking an ice cream scoop out of your brain. That’s about the size of it.
• Why America’s MOOC pioneers have abandoned ship — Jonathan Rees: The most obvious reason why everyone from the founders of MOOC companies to students who sign up for such course are abandoning MOOCs is because these kinds of courses have not lived up to their initial hype. MOOCs were supposed to transform education as we know it, but traditional education with its inefficiency derived from the close proximity between professors and their students has proved more resilient than its wannabe disruptors ever imagined.
• S&P warns on NZ house prices. What about Oz? — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness provides your terminally ill economy chart porn of the week:
• Podcast Out — David A. Banks in the New Inquiry is onto something: The invisible forces that control human behavior, as it turns out, are not sociological or even cultural; the answers to life’s most important questions are invariably cognitive, biological, or evolutionarily determined. Topics that might have once been subject to political debate or rhetorical argument–work demands, exposure to toxins, surveillance, the limits of love, even Marxian alienation–become apolitical subjects for scientific testing. But the results only lead to greater and greater complexity, prompting introspective thought rather than action. Thus, liberal infotainment is full of statements that sound like facts–what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson calls “factiness”–that do nothing more than reinforce and rationalize the listeners’ already formed common sense, rather than transforming it: what you believed to be true before the show started was not wrong, it just lacked the veneer of factiness.