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.

It's been a weird week of extremes of relief and despair (in that order), so I have been mostly bookmarking rather than reading:

• Who Will Command The Robot Armies? — Maciej Cegłowski (via Tregeagle): Letting robots do more of the fighting makes it possible to engage in low-level wars for decades at a time, without creating political pressure for peace. As it becomes harder to inflict casualties on Western armies, their opponents turn to local civilian targets. These are the real victims of terrorism; people who rarely make the news but suffer immensely from the state of permanent warfare.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Surpluses & deficits are hotly debated – but what about the currency? — Emile Woolf, Renegade Inc: When a British importer buys German goods he must pay for them in euros. For that purpose he (or his agent) will acquire euros from a German bank, and after settling the bill the German exporter (or his bank) is now a holder of British pounds. What will he do them? He can use them to buy British goods, or even UK treasury bonds, or he can exchange them for a different currency – but if, instead, he just sits on them indefinitely he will, just like the retailer who never cashes your cheque, be handing the importer a free gift!
• John McDonnell is right: we do disagree on macroeconomic policy — Richard Murphy: I said he should not agree to a fiscal charter promising a balanced budget which is wholly economically unnecessary and even destructive. But he did. I also argued against the fundamentally neoliberal concept of an independent central bank that takes control of key aspects of economic management out of democratic control and which was Ed Balls idea. But John bought into it. And as a result he backed off from People’s QE : he was advised that a central bank cannot create money to help ordinary people, job creation or the building of social housing. Instead John accepted that central banks can only use that power for the sake of saving bankers.
• The macroeconomic challenge of the twenty first century — Richard Murphy: Petrodollars created the architecture of the economies of the world that are now creaking at potential massive cost to us all. Now wise management of the fiscally created dollars, euros, pounds, yen and more can provide the alternative, costless but ultimately liberating source of the lubricant for our future economies. As a result we no longer need to burn the planet to liberate the potential in all people. The fiscal dollar can instead build the foundations for prosperity and social harmony that we all crave.
• New Paper: Demand-Side Business Dynamism — Mike Konczal and Marshall Steinbaum in Roosevelt Forward: This paper argues that the decline in mobility, dynamism, and entrepreneurship is a result of declining labor demand since 2000. When it is hard to find another job, employed workers stay at the jobs they have, impairing their ascent up the job ladder and the accompanying wage growth over careers that historically led to the middle class. Declining entrepreneurship can also be explained by workers’ reluctance to leave large, stable incumbents to start their own firm or to work at a start-up when they cannot be assured that they will have a more stable job to return to. Thus, we find that the concentration of employment in old firms and in large firms mirrors the timing of declining labor mobility due to declining demand.
• Understanding Trump — George Lakoff: Private enterprise and private life utterly depend on public resources. Have you ever said this? Elizabeth Warren has. Almost no other public figures. And stop defending “the government.” Talk about the public, the people, Americans, the American people, public servants, and good government. And take back freedom. Public resources provide for freedom in private enterprise and private life. The conservatives are committed to privatizing just about everything and to eliminating funding for most public resources. The contribution of public resources to our freedoms cannot be overstated. Start saying it.
• How Did We Get Such a Terrible Nominee? — Ted Rall:
  
• The Bank of Japan needs to introduce Overt Monetary Financing next — Bill Mitchell: When economists talk of ‘printing money’ they are referring to the process whereby the central bank adds some numbers to the treasury’s bank account to match its spending plans and in return is given treasury bonds to an equivalent value. That is where the term ‘debt monetisation’ comes from. Instead of selling debt to the private sector, the treasury simply sells it to the central bank, which then creates new funds in return. This accounting smokescreen is, of course, unnecessary. The central bank doesn’t need the offsetting asset (government debt) given that it creates the currency ‘out of thin air’. So the swapping of public debt for account credits is just an accounting convention.
• Economic change will not happen until the left understands money — Ann Pettifor in openDemocracy: The fact is that as western economies try to recover, they are sunk again by a mountain of private debt whose repayment is made less likely by austerity policies. These are policies with the ideological aim of “shrinking the state” but which, in the process contract both public and private sector investment, employment and incomes. The consequence of weak demand built on a mountain of debt is deflation: a generalized fall in prices and wages. Most economists, especially those in thrall to the finance sector, have an obsession with, and an aversion to inflation. The reason is that inflation erodes the value of debt. Deflation does the very opposite: it inflates the value of debt. Creditors are not disturbed by deflation, as it effortlessly, and silently increases the value of their most valuable asset: debt.
• Education, The Enlightenment, and the 21st-Century — Fred van Leeuwen for the RSA: There is an inherent conflict between blind faith and critical thinking. That is true whether it is religious fanaticism or the imposition of political ideologies or nationalistic or ethnic dogmas in schools. Although I am not confounding barbaric terrorism with the “values” of the market, it is a danger if one grants markets and management thinking unexamined reverence. Placing education in such a straightjacket is having a major impact on development because it is affecting the way in which communities are conceived, justice is understood, and democracy is practised.
• The DNC Email Leaks: The Gift That Keeps On Feeding Distrust — John Kiriakou in Truthdig: As my friend the State Department whistleblower Peter Van Buren said recently, “People are claiming the Russian government risked something close to war to hack DNC emails to embarrass [Hillary] Clinton after her own email shenanigans and to help [Donald] Trump, who maybe would win in November and who maybe would make decisions favorable to Russia? You realize that’s what has to be true for this [Vladimir] Putin scenario to be true, right? We’re back to the 1950s, accusing politicians of being in league with the Russians.” […] The issue is that the DNC colluded and conspired to favor the Clinton campaign and deny Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination for president. The DNC’s actions were Nixonian, and they read like an account of that shamed president’s actions from a chapter of “All the President’s Men.”
• Overt Monetary Financing would flush out the ideological disdain for fiscal policy — Bill Mitchell: Monetary policy is really such a blunt and ineffective tool that it should be rendered redundant. The mainstream have never provided a convincing case that manipulating interest rates is somehow the preferable and effective option for stabilising the spending cycle. The GFC experience would suggest otherwise. All the monetary policy gymnastics have had very little impact. It would be much better to set the overnight rate at zero and leave it there and allow the longer term rates (which are impacted by inflation risk) settle as low as possible. Then, manage the spending cycle with fiscal initiatives that can be targetted, adjusted fairly quickly and which have direct impacts.
• Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit — Glenn Greenwald: Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.