This week, I have been mostly reading:

• In defence of the annoying mature-age student - Stephen Owen in The Guardian (via @tregeagle): Almost all of them are amazed at the world of ideas into which they have arrived, and in which they are receiving the sort of intellectual nourishment that they thought was strictly for people other than themselves. This was also my experience; it turns out that mature-age study is transformative and can make you feel more at home with the world and with yourself, even if it can lead to risky behaviours (like postmodernism).
• Seumas Milne and His Swivel-Eyed Detractors - John Wight in CounterPunch: Now the reason it is important to establish these salient ‘facts’ about Seumas Milne and his career is that his recent appointment by Jeremy Corbyn as his press and strategy chief has unleashed such a chorus of condemnation and calumniation – by a constituency of right wing hacks, former Trotskyists turned right wing bloggers, and embittered failed Labour candidates, among others – you could be forgiven for thinking we are talking about Charles Manson rather than one of the most esteemed journalists this country has every produced.
• Australian education fails one in four young people – but not the wealthy ones - Stephen Lamb in The Conversation: The results show that while Australia’s highest-achieving students – who are more likely to be drawn from wealthier families – may be among the best in the world, there are vast differences in educational outcomes across social groups, challenging Australia’s claim of a fair education system.
• Could a new ‘basic income’ protect Australia’s most vulnerable? - Ben Spies-Butcher in The Conversation: Bernie Sanders is promoting "single payer" as "Medicare for all". Could UBI be Australia's "means-tested pension for all"?
• Martin, A Quick Word - Dan Hind skewers Martin Amis: For all their faults, Corbyn and his contemporaries on the left of the Labour party – the Bennities, let’s call them – were campaigning for equality at home and abroad. What a laugh, I know! But the things they marched for – anti-racism, gay rights, democracy in Africa and Latin America – they were right about those things, weren’t they, at a time when a lot of people were for various reasons wrong? The monosyllabic bigots were wrong, of course. But those who eloquently insisted that these things were distractions from the purity of class struggle were wrong, too.
• Causes and consequences of persistently low interest rates - Sir Charles Bean at VoxEU: This downward trend in the underlying world real interest rate had attracted the attention of policymakers even before the Crisis, with Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan describing it as a “conundrum”, while Fed Chairman-to-be Ben Bernanke subsequently attributed it to a “savings glut”, most notably in China (Bernanke 2005). Other authors, such as Larry Summers (2014), have focused on the other side of the market for loanable funds, suggesting that a decline in the propensity to invest is to blame, linking it also to the slowdown in output growth.
• The Islamic State meets the laws of economics - Felix Imonti in On Line Opinion: The solution chosen by the caliphate is to turn to the gold Dinar that has as much symbolic value as is does as a means of financing the society. While gold speaks of wealth and security in the minds of most people, there is a hazard in adopting a gold currency. The value of the gold coins comes from the quality of gold metal and not from the quality of the issuer. Anyone doubting the longevity of the caliphate will be inclined to horde the coins under a rock somewhere or smuggle the coins outside. The loss of money from the economy will translate into an overall deflation as the scarcity of money raises its value; and that is likely to depress the economy even further.
• Heat Too Hot to Survive - Ian Welsh: People rag on about how bad Communism was, how many deaths it caused, but they never properly add up capitalism’s deaths. The deaths resulting from the environmental crisis, however, will make capitalism anathema to our children.
• Postal Banks Are People’s Banks: 6 Things You Need To Know About Postal Banking - Matt Stannard at Occupy.com: It’s being called “Bernie’s Brilliant Idea,”, and Bernie Sanders’s embrace of postal banking is indeed brilliant, both in timing and substance. But while his insurgent presidential campaign may give a credible boost to USPS financial services, Sanders’s endorsement is far from sufficient. To make postal banking happen requires a broad, mass coalition willing to keep pushing the issue regardless of the outcome of the 2016 elections.
• The Despotic Temptation - Ana Palacio, Project Syndicate: Unfortunately, Western leaders have repeatedly shown that they lack the patience and dedication needed to engage consistently and humbly with communities in crisis-stricken countries or to provide the reliable, incremental, and prolonged governance assistance needed to prevent state collapse. With their short attention spans and heightened sense of their own importance, they prefer the option of simply installing a despot to deal with it. They need to get over themselves – for everyone’s sake.
• Britain is heading for another 2008 crash: here’s why - David Graeber:
  Notice how the pattern is symmetrical? The top is an exact mirror of the bottom. This is what’s called an “accounting identity”. One goes up, the other must, necessarily, go down. What this means is that if the government declares “we must act responsibly and pay back the national debt” and runs a budget surplus, then it (the public sector) is taking more money in taxes out of the private sector than it’s paying back in. That money has to come from somewhere. So if the government runs a surplus, the private sector goes into deficit. If the government reduces its debt, everyone else has to go into debt in exactly that proportion in order to balance their own budgets.
• Why Are We Hearing So Much about Those Damn Danes? - Josh Hoxie, OtherWords: While I doubt Americans will embrace the Danes’ love for pickled fish, I’m hopeful we might connect the dots between their successful social outcomes and their progressive public policies. Also, in Scandinavia there are so many programs, on radio and television, about the fish.
• The Okinawa missiles of October - Aaron Tovish, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists via The Intercept: By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead. Only caution and the common sense and decisive action of the line personnel receiving those orders prevented the launches—and averted the nuclear war that most likely would have ensued.
• Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and the wider fallout from the Iraq invasion - David Morrison: Baroness Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Chilcot inquiry that the government was warned in advance that there was likely to be a heightened threat from al-Qaeda as a result of British participation in the invasion of Iraq. She agreed that her judgment prior to the invasion was that “a war in Iraq would aggravate the [terrorist] threat from whatever source to the United Kingdom” (p31) and that “there wasn't any particular controversy amongst the intelligence agencies about that judgment” (p32).
• Malnutrition and 'Victorian' diseases soaring in England 'due to food poverty and cuts' - Dean Kirby, The Independent And…
• Starving Irish people pleading for food from soup kitchen as last resort - Sasha Brady, Independent.ie
• Check Out Our Low, Low (Natural) Rates - Paul Krugman, NYT: [Laubach and Williams] attribute the decline in the natural rate largely to the slowing of potential output, which in turn reflects demography and what looks like a slowdown in technological progress. That’s more speculative. But the low natural rate is as solid a result as anything in real time can be. This in turn tells you several things. It says that all the complaints that the Fed is artificially keeping rates low are nonsense; rates are low because that’s what the real economy wants, and the Fed’s only alternative would be to create a depression.
• The Pain in Spain - Simon Tilford at Project Syndicate: Spain’s recovery is not quite what it seems, and there is scant evidence that what progress the country has made is the result of austerity and reforms. In fact, far from adhering to the usual austerity narrative – according to which fiscal consolidation revives business confidence and thus investment and job creation – Spain’s return to growth partly reflects the easing of austerity since early 2014. The country has sensibly resisted pressure from the European Commission to take more aggressive steps to reduce its deficit, which, at 5.9% of GDP, was the European Union’s third highest last year.
• The Tragedy of Ben Bernanke - Brad DeLong at Project Syndicate: “It seems unlikely that the influence of [monetary] policy on the rate of interest will be sufficient by itself,” Keynes wrote in 1936. “I conceive, therefore, that a somewhat comprehensive socialization of investment will prove the only means of securing an approximation to full employment.” Those are words worth considering the next time we find ourselves needing the courage to act.
• When Does Technological Advancement Actually Lead to Prosperity? - Ian Welsh: Productivity in America rose 80.4 percent from 1973 to 2011, but median real wages rose only 10.2 percent and median male wages rose 0.1 percent. (4) This was not the case from 1948 to 1973, when wages rose as fast as productivity did. Increases in productivity, in our ability to make more stuff, only lead to prosperity and affluence if we are making the right stuff, and we are actually distributing that stuff widely.
• GOP and the Rise of Anti-Knowledge - Mike Lofgren, Consortiumnews: Thanks to these overlapping and mutually reinforcing segments of the right-wing media-entertainment-“educational” complex, it is now possible for the true believer to sail on an ocean of political, historical, and scientific disinformation without ever sighting the dry land of empirical fact. This effect is fortified by the substantial overlap between conservative Republicans and fundamentalist Christians. The latter group begins with the core belief that truth is revealed in a subjective process involving the will to believe (“faith”) rather than discovered by objectively corroberable means.
• For-profit education: plenty of blame to go around - John Quiggin: The real problem is that no one is willing to admit the obvious lesson, already evident from the US; for-profit education, funded by public subsidies, is a recipe for disaster.
• What the Steve Jobs Movie Won’t Tell You About Apple’s Success - Lynn Parramore at INET interviews Mariana Mazzucato: The economic crisis that followed from the financial crisis is still being felt strongly across the world. […] It’s not about lack of opportunities. It’s because businesses are choosing to hoard profits or to use them to simply prop up stock options (and hence executive pay). That is bad for innovation and there is nothing inevitable about it. At the same time, governments are being asked to cut back with the austerity craze that continues to plague many nations. So we have a crisis of investment on both the private and public side.
• Failing conventionally - Chris Dillow: The Overton Window doesn't just exist in politics, but in finance, economics and management too. Some things are inside the window and acceptable - such as mergers, "professional judgment" and orthodox QE - whilst others, such as worker management, simple investment heuristics or helicopter money, are outside it.
• The disappearing middle class is threatening American mega brands - Hayley Peterson, who is a Business Insider, apparently: The sinister euphemism of the week is "consumer bifurcation". Upper-income consumers are buying more premium treats, while lower-income individuals are purchasing discounted chocolates, [Hershey CEO John Bilbrey] said. Hershey’s has been losing market share, as a result.
• People's Deepest, Darkest Google Searches Are Being Used Against Them - Adrienne LaFrance in The Atlantic: Consider, for example, a person who googles “need rent money fast” or “can’t pay rent.” Among the search results that Google returns, there may be ads that promise to help provide payday loans—ads designed to circumvent Google’s policies against predatory financial advertising. They’re placed by companies called lead generators, and they work by collecting and distributing personal information about consumers online. So while Google says it bans ads that guarantee foreclosure prevention or promise short-term loans without conveying accurate loan terms, lead generators may direct consumers to a landing page where they’re asked to input sensitive identifiable information. Then, payday lenders buy that information from the lead generators and, in some cases, target those consumers—online, via phone, and by mail—for the very sorts of short-term loans that Google prohibits.
• The digital revolution in higher education has already happened. No one noticed. - Clay Shirky at Medium (via @tregeagle): Outside a relative handful of selective residential institutions, the principal function of college is to train and credential people for work. An Associate’s or Bachelor’s is no longer one way of getting a good job. It is just about the only way of avoiding low wages or unemployment. The earnings premium for having a college degree has stagnated, but the punishment for not having one continues to grow. The digital revolution is happening because a high school degree is a ticket to not very much, while the traditional form of college no longer works for the people who need a certificate of employability.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Crossed wires: ISPs are already struggling to retain our metadata - Philip Branch in the Conversation: Today we learnt that 84% of internet service providers (ISPs) in Australia have not met the deadline set by the federal government for them to start collecting metadata. And 61% are asking for some exemption or variation in the requirements specified in the legislation. Wait. We're doing what now? Clearly I have not been paying enough attention.
• Snowden and Allies Issue Warnings as Australia Unleashes Mass Spying - Nadia Prupis, Common Dreams. Oh. Okay, it's this:

  Beginning today, if you are Australian, everything you do online is being tracked, stored, and retained for 2 years. https://t.co/g8etUYgHGr

  — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 12, 2015

• Unpaid Care Work, Women, and GDP - Tim Taylor: In a broader sense, of course, the issue is not to chase GDP, but to focus on the extent to which people around the world are having the opportunity to fulfill their capabilities and to make choices about their lives. Countries where women have more autonomy also tend to be countries where the female-to-male ratios of time spent on unpaid care are not as high. The share of unpaid care provided by women highly correlated with women's ability to participate in the paid workforce, as well as to acquire skills and experience that lead to better-paying jobs, as well as participating in other activities like political leadership.
• Former U.S. Detainees Sue Psychologists Responsible For CIA Torture Program - Jenna McLaughlin at the Intercept: “There’s much talk about interrogation” when it comes to Mitchell and Jessen, [ACLU attorney Steven Watt] says. “But it wasn’t about gathering information for them. It was about breaking [the inmates] down, it was about torturing them. That was their true intent.”
• On Building Armies (and Watching Them Fail): Why Washington Can’t “Stand Up” Foreign Militaries - Andrew Bacevich, TomDispatch: Based on their performance, the security forces on which the Pentagon has lavished years of attention remain visibly not up to the job. Meanwhile, ISIS warriors, without the benefit of expensive third-party mentoring, appear plenty willing to fight and die for their cause. Ditto Taliban fighters in Afghanistan. The beneficiaries of U.S. assistance? Not so much. Based on partial but considerable returns, Vietnamization 2.0 seems to be following an eerily familiar trajectory that should remind anyone of Vietnamization 1.0. Meanwhile, the questions that ought to have been addressed back when our South Vietnamese ally went down to defeat have returned with a vengeance.
• 
• TPP is “Worst Trade Agreement” for Medicine Access, Says Doctors Without Borders - Tharanga Yakupitiyage, Inter Press Service: MSF treats almost 300,000 people with HIV/AIDS in 21 countries with generic drugs. These drugs have reduced the organization's cost of treatment from US$10,000 per patient per year to US$140 per patient per year. […] As part of the TPP negotiations, the U.S. sought to include the 12-year protection rule. Trade ministers went back and forth on the rule, finally settling on a mandatory minimum of five to eight years of data protection. […] MSF predicts that at least half a billion people will be unable to access medicines once the TPP takes effect.
• EasyJet and Gap Yahs - Richard Seymour: The left critique of the EU says that it's a Europe of the neoliberal bourgeoisie, a Europe of spivs, business mercenaries and yuppies. Meanwhile, the major campaign for the EU defends it on the grounds that it's a Europe of the neoliberal bourgeoisie, a Europe of spivs, business mercenaries and yuppies.
• Weak States, Poor Countries - This week's Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton in an article from 2013 republished by Project Syndicate: The absence of state capacity – that is, of the services and protections that people in rich countries take for granted – is one of the major causes of poverty and deprivation around the world. Without effective states working with active and involved citizens, there is little chance for the growth that is needed to abolish global poverty. (My emphasis.)
• Structural Reform Beyond Glass-Steagall - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute. Worth reading for this quote: One of the brilliant insights from the neoliberal political project is that if you want to do something brutal that politics won’t sustain, you have “the market” do it. Can’t destroy Medicare? Turn it over to the market it and give people coupons for it that slowly die out. Then it is seen as a natural outcome, even if “the market” here is just the continuation of politics by other means.
• A stimulus junkie's lament - Simon Wren-Lewis: [I]mportantly, in the years preceding [2009, Germany] built up a huge competitive advantage by undercutting its Eurozone neighbours via low wage increases. This is little different in effect from beggar my neighbour devaluation. It is a demand stimulus, but (unlike fiscal stimulus) one that steals demand from other countries. This may or may not have been intended, but it should make German officials think twice before they laud their own performance to their Eurozone neighbours. If these neighbours start getting decent macro advice and some political courage, they might start replying that Germany’s current prosperity is a result of theft.
• Thanks to Sanders, Democratic Party Just Debated Merits of Capitalism - Sarah Lazare, Common Dreams: I prefer to think of it as "Thanks to growing popular opposition to neoliberalism, an avowed socialist can be a potential US president". Either way it's significant.
• Life plus 70: who really benefits from copyright’s long life? - Catherine Bond in the Conversation provides your summary of copyright state of play for this week: According to data generated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a woman in Australia aged 30 in 2012 will likely live for another 54.90 years. If this figure is correct in my case, then copyright will protect this article for nearly 125 years. It will officially enter the public domain on 1 January, 2141. Is what I say in this article so significant that I, and many generations of Bonds to come, should enjoy a right to control who copies this piece for the course of the next century and beyond?
• Three Years Ago, These Chicago Workers Took Over a Window Factory. Today, They're Thriving - Sarah van Gelder, YES! Magazine: This is what local power looks like: companies like New Era Windows and Doors creating the stability that comes with locally rooted employment, insulated from the speculative finance that, in the case of publicly traded companies, requires many jobs be moved to low-wage regions. These worker-owners focus on values, including the possibility for others to also be worker-owners, and the importance of producing ecologically smart products.
• The fiscal charter media fiasco - Simon Wren-Lewis: Even the ‘highbrow’ news programmes like Channel 4 news and Newsnight chose to spend most of its time talking about U-turns on either side. No mention of the complete lack of economic support for this charter. On an issue with such important consequences, is that fulfilling a duty to inform? We have millions of hardworking but poor families who will be made substantially worse off as a result of a fiscal rule which no academic economist has supported? Will these families ever find that out? What does that tell us about our media, and our democracy?
• Brazil´s Sudden Neoliberal U-Turn - Franklin Serrano, North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA): President Rousseff and her party […] decided — in an attempt to reduce the rising criticism from firms, banks, part of the Congress, and the media — that the government was intervening “too much” in the economy. They shifted the government’s economic role to providing incentives (generous, unconditional tax cuts to firms) for private investment so as that the business sector would lead (instead of follow) economic growth. This policy failed completely.
• Thinking the unthinkable - John Quiggin: There is now overwhelming evidence that for-profit education has been a disastrous failure wherever it has been tried, and particularly where for-profit firms can gain access to public funds through policies designed to enhance “consumer choice”.
• This new $5 service will endure the hassle of canceling Comcast for you - Ashley Rodriguez, Quartz: Capitalism: Delivering innovative solutions to the problems it creates. And the problems created by those solutions. And so on.
• AUSTERITY 101: The Three Reasons Republican Deficit Hawks Are Wrong - Robert Reich explains Keynesian countercyclical stimulus:
• Conning the working-class - Chris Dillow: [S]ocial comparison theory tells us that people compare themselves to those who are like them. […] It's tempting for lefties to believe that people vote Tory because of "neoliberal" ideology and the right-wing media. But there might be more to it than this. Even without such propaganda, there are cognitive biases at work which undermine class solidarity.
• What Do We Really Know About Osama bin Laden’s Death? - Jonathan Mahler: A mere six months late, the US newspaper of record concedes that Sy Hersh may be right and Hollywood may be wrong. The system works, America!
• Populism and Patrimonialism - John Quiggin at Crooked Timber: There’s nothing inherently ludicrous in the suggestion that the very rich should pay most or all of the costs of sustaining a system that benefits them so greatly. […] Teenagers from high-income families are increasingly less likely to work, particularly in minimum wage jobs that do nothing for a resume. More importantly, as the real value of the minimum wage has fallen, the number of “working poor” or near-poor households has risen. […] So, it’s time for populism. A program based on taxing the rich much more heavily and raising the minimum wage is not only politically saleable but economically sensible.
• While Sanders Scores Small Donors, Clinton and Bush Buoyed by Wall Street - Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams: Wall Street's support for its former champion in the U.S. Senate, Clinton, is not surprising, despite her recent pledges to get tough on corporate malfeasance and Wall Street greed. "She’s doing that because of Bernie," Camden Fine, the head of the Independent Community Bankers of America, said in an interview with Morning Consult this week. "She’s gonna all of a sudden become Mrs. Wall Street if she’s elected. So it’s all Bernie theatrics right now. She’s a Clinton, for God’s sake. What do you expect?"
• Big Win For Fair Use In Google Books Lawsuit - Corynne McSherry: Court fails to crumble in the face of the evil incantation "intellectual property".
• How television fails in its duty to inform - Simon Wren-Lewis makes a pithy observation: Take for example the clip where the Prime Minister lied about cuts to tax credits. There David Dimbleby asks him by saying “some people” have suggested tax credits would be cut, rather than “every non-partisan expert”. This may seem small, but this kind of detailed textual analysis is critical (and it is what many journalists have been trained to do).
• Everything You Need to Know about Laissez-Faire Economics - David S. Wilson interviews Alan Kirman: [Gary] Becker had the economics of everything—divorce, whatever. You’d have these simple arguments, but not necessarily selection arguments, often some sort of justification in terms of a superior arrangement. The marginal utility of the woman getting divorced just has to equal the marginal utility of not getting divorced and that would be the price of getting divorced, and that sort of stuff. Adam Smith would have rolled over in this grave because he believed emotions played a strong role in all of this and the emotions that you have during divorce don’t tie into these strict calculations.
• Technical change as collective action problem - Chris Dillow: We can imagine a society in which super-machines do indeed allow us all to live in luxurious leisure. But the decentralized decisions of capitalists might not get us there.
• The Hi-Tech Mess of Higher Education - David Bromwich in the New York Review of Books reviews the film Ivory Tower: [H]owever fanciful the conceit may be, the MOOC movement has a clear economic motive. Many universities today want to cut back drastically on the payment of classroom teachers. It is important therefore to convince us that teachers have never been the focus of real learning.
• Why the Fiscal Charter makes no economic sense - James Meadway at New Economics Foundation: A surplus on the government budget means the government is getting more in taxes than it is spending. Those taxes have to come from somewhere – us! If those tax receipts are not spent, this is simply sucking money out of the economy, rather than doing something useful with it. This is particularly acute when the economy enters a recession. Since a recession means households and firms are spending less, the government needs to spend more to compensate. A rule to always deliver a surplus would prevent that.
• Bernie Sanders has morphed into a serious contender - Bob Rigg, openDemocracy. Bernie hasn't morphed; the commentariat have, slowly and reluctantly: What is really fascinating about the debate is that all three focus groups set up by CNN, Fox News and Fusion strongly endorsed Bernie Sanders. In the case of the CNN group, although more than half had supported Clinton when the debate began, a clear majority actively supported Sanders at the end. In the case of Fox News, an overwhelming majority enthusiastically supported Bernie Sanders, to the ill-concealed consternation of some resident talking heads.
• “Arabian Street Artists” Bomb Homeland: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series - Heba Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl a.k.a Stone. Absolute genius: At the beginning of June 2015, we received a phone call from a friend who […] had been contacted by “Homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a Syrian refugee camp on the Lebanese/Syrian border for their new season. Given the series’ reputation we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.
• Hillary vs. Bernie Will Decide the Future of the American Left - Elizabeth Bruenig in the New Republic: In November of 2014, Sweden’s prime minister Stefan Löfven explained the logic of universal benefits in a conversation at NYU Law School, saying the main focus of such programs is to build “a welfare system for everybody, for all, rich and poor—because universal solutions have lower transaction costs, and it also [has] the advantage that you mobilize everybody to support the institutions that brings this welfare system.”
• Scores of Scores: How Companies Are Reducing Consumers to Single Numbers - Frank Pasquale, The Atlantic: Though consumers have not been able to glimpse the actual algorithms for setting scores, some basic contours of credit scoring are intelligible: Don’t run up too much debt, and don’t be late on payments. But by 2009, financiers were scrutinizing more data, in ways completely opaque to scored consumers. Buy “little felt pads that stop chair legs from scratching the floor”? You might be rewarded with a higher credit line, or lower interest-rate offers. Purchase a beer at a billiards bar? Expect the opposite.
• China's latest building binge: the education factory - Alexandra Harney at Reuters: Cities around China are carving out tracts of land for school parks - dubbed "education factories" - designed to train hundreds of thousands of students.[…] But the expansion comes even as many existing vocational schools are struggling to live up to their promise. Sounds oddly familiar.
• Slow Burn: Bernie Sanders Ignites a Populist Movement - Rick Perlstein, The Washington Spectator: The crowd’s response is so ecstatic it overdrives my tape recorder. It continues into a chant: “BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE! BERNIE!” And when the show ends, a crowd in a nearly post-coital mood of sated exhilaration doesn’t want to leave, doesn’t leave, until Bernie returns to to the podium for something I’ve never witnessed at a political event, an encore, and announces that the crowd numbered 6,000.
• Consequences of the Canadian Liberal Majority - Ian Welsh: Justin Trudeau is going to feel good, for a while, compared to Harper. He will be better. He will repeal some of Harper’s worst policies. He will also not be an offensive creep, and that matters. But he is, at the end of the day, a believer in the neo-liberal consensus. He will run a kinder neoliberalism, but it will still be neoliberalism.
• Guest post: Dirty Rant About The Human Brain Project - Anonymous Neuroscientist that Cathy O'Neil knows: So, the next time you see a pretty 3D picture of many neurons being simulated, think “cargo cult brain”. That simulation isn’t gonna think any more than the cargo cult planes are gonna fly. The reason is the same in both cases: We have no clue about what principles allow the real machine to operate. We can only create pretty things that are superficially similar in the ways that we currently understand, which an enlightened being (who has some vague idea how the thing actually works) would just laugh at.

This week, I have been mostly reading the Internet. All of it:

• People's QE: no big deal - Chris Dillow: "In fact, it could be that the problem with PQE is that - if undertaken at a time of recession - it would not be radical enough."
• Welfare's last stand - Jennifer Mittelstadt in Aeon: "Military leaders embarked on a new and more ambitious social welfare programme after 1973. That year, President Richard Nixon and Congress ended the draft and mandated an all-volunteer force. Military leaders could no longer force citizens to join – they had to convince them. And one of their most vital tools was social welfare benefits."
• Japan Dumbs Down Its Universities - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "Essentially, Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law. The order, issued in the form of a letter from Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, is non-binding. The country’s two top public universities have refused to comply. But dozens of public schools are doing as the government has urged."
• Economic policy often seems to have little to do with economists. Why? - Simon Wren-Lewis in the Independent: "The problem is that City economists are not the best source for advice on major macroeconomic policy issues, like what to do with the deficit. This does require a knowledge of “proper research”, the academics’ area of expertise. What we often get reported instead is what “the market” thinks about policy. This is code for the speculation of City economists who have little policy expertise and a set of biases that come from the financial sector (deficits are bad, low taxes are good)."
• A Handy Guide for Using the Oxford Comma - Akira Okrent and Mike Rogalski
• The (near) inevitability, and who and when, of Helicopter Money - Nick Rowe at A Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: Struggling to get my head around the details on helicopters, easings (quantitative), where monetary ends and fiscal begins, and have a lurking suspicion that the details don't matter.
• If You See a Little Piketty in This Tax-Haven Book, That's Fine - Jesse Drucker reviews Gabriel Zucman in Bloomberg Businessweek: "During his research, Zucman had a eureka moment. For years, economists have puzzled over a mystery in obscure economic data: financial liabilities around the world consistently outstrip the reported financial assets held by investors –- by trillions of dollars. […] Those trillions were missing because they were showing up as shares of mutual funds incorporated in tax havens, primarily in Luxembourg, Grand Cayman and Ireland. His theory: wealthy investors around the world have used the investments, often made through Swiss bank accounts, to hide their wealth." And…
• Why is so much wealth hidden? Failed democracy. - Marshall Steinbaum at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "Subverting democratic control of economic policy is a big reason why inequality has gotten so high across the developed world. Zucman’s book carefully documents the result in the case of tax havens, but the lesson is far more general: Inequality is high because of past inegalitarian choices that policymakers have made, and we must revisit those choices if we’re to address inequality going forward."
• It’s not a lack of self-control that keeps people poor - Elliot Berkman in the Conversation: "The very definition of self-control is choosing behaviors that favor long-term outcomes over short-term rewards, but poverty can force people to live in a permanent now. Worrying about tomorrow can be a luxury if you don’t know how you’ll survive today. […] People who grow up in poverty quickly learn that it doesn’t pay off to save for an uncertain future if the reward they are waiting for sometimes isn’t there after the wait."
• Why Is College So Expensive if Professors Are Paid So Little? - Michelle Chen in the Nation: "SEIU's adjunct-organizing project estimates that as of 2013, "22 percent of part-time faculty live below the poverty line," significantly higher than the overall poverty rate nationwide. But the hyperinflated price tag of college has funneled toward another aspect of the higher education system: driving funds into administrative offices - a pattern "reflected in increases in the numbers of administrative positions, increases in those salaries, and increases in the percentage of college budgets going to these functions.""
• NIB: good economics, bad politics - Chris DIllow: "Even the best private equity investors back a lot of duds: Marc Andreesen has estimated that 15 of 200 tech startups a year generate around 95% of the total returns. […] And here's my problem. Our biased press will focus upon the latter. "Corbyn's bank costs taxpayers" millions would be a regular story. […] For this reason, I welcome Corbyn's refusal to kowtow to the media. It is only by refusing to play their silly games that we have any hope of a rational economic policy."
• Imagining the BBC as new - John Sheil, openDemocracy: "We find ourselves in the same position as many of those who protested and campaigned against austerity in defence of higher education: what are we in fact defending? A top-down structure, supporting a super-white curricula, with privilege-generation written in its mechanic code, run by disillusioned professors of geography whose job – it sometimes feels – is to campaign for students to pay more tuition fees for much redacted and reduced resources. What would it be to imagine a free university? What would it be to imagine a BBC free to engage confidently in rigorous debate of ideas and values?"
• So Much in Common - Ted Rall
  
• Piggate: the behavioural economics - Chris Dillow: "Initiation rites thus act as a bonding device […] This is very similar to the endowment effect - our tendency to value something merely because we have sacrificed effort or money to get it. Dan Ariely calls this the Ikea effect: having suffered the eighth circle of hell in going to Ikea and then the pain of assembling their furniture, you will value it all the more." Personally, assembling flat pack furniture just makes me want to drag it out onto the front lawn and disassemble it with a sledgehammer.
• People love Bernie Sanders policies even when they've never heard of him - VL Baker at Daily Kos
• The path from deficit concern to deficit deceit - Simon Wren-Lewis: "What a strange world we are now in. The government goes for rapid deficit reduction as a smokescreen for reducing the size of the state. No less than a former cabinet secretary accuses the Chancellor of this deceit. Yet when a Labour leadership contender adopts an anti-austerity policy he is told it is extreme and committing electoral suicide."
• Corbyn public ownership push reflects what is happening all round the world - Andrew Cumbers, the Conversation: "Cash-strapped cities and regions are rediscovering that public utilities can provide profitable and sustainable revenue streams to cross-subsidise other services in times of austerity and budget cutbacks by national governments. In Frankfurt, as in many other German cities, the local stadtwerke finances local swimming pools, parks, libraries and other public services."
• Pope Decries “Shameful and Culpable Silence” on Arms Sales “Drenched in Innocent Blood” - Dan Froomkin, the Intercept: "Thursday’s speech was not the first time the Pope has spoken out about the arms trade. He referred to it as “the industry of death” in a talk with Italian schoolchildren in May. “Why do so many powerful people not want peace? Because they live off war,” he said."
• EPA opposed DMCA exemptions that could have revealed Volkswagen fraud - Donald Robertson at the Free Software Foundation: "As Eben Moglen, founder of the Software Freedom Law Center noted "If Volkswagen knew that every customer who buys a vehicle would have a right to read the source code of all the software in the vehicle, they would never even consider the cheat, because the certainty of getting caught would terrify them.”"
• Does the deficit matter? - Richard Murphy: "So, why the obsession with the deficit? This is short term politics: Goerge Osborne has spun a line that denies both the above facts and he has (undeniably) sold it well. The UK public believe, almost alone in the world now, that deficits are in some way a threat to well being. Actually they are not. As I have already noted today, government deficits are both the foundation of private wealth and money itself. To suggest otherwise is factually incorrect."
• It's The Economists, Stupid - Ideas, CBC Radio: Good mediamacro-debunking interviews with Julie Nelson and Richard Denniss
• Of clowns and treasurers - Richard Denniss in the Monthly, a long read (from a few months ago) worth every minute: "It was a choice to throw a trillion dollars at the bankers. And it is a choice not to throw a trillion at tackling climate change. Our politicians pretend that it is a choice made by “the markets”. It’s not. It’s a choice made by our politicians."
• The unspun Jeremy Corbyn - Alex Nunns, Le Monde diplomatique: "That this movement took the form of a Jeremy Corbyn leadership campaign is doubly surprising because the man himself is the antithesis of the stereotypical leftwing firebrand. Without the rousing oratorical skills of his mentor, the late Tony Benn, and with none of the raw charisma of Alexis Tsipras, Corbyn was not perceived as a threat by his fellow MPs. Remarkably, Corbyn’s straightforward, unspun style became an asset, marking him out as a total contrast from the media-trained salesmen of the British political class."
• Samsung TVs appear less energy efficient in real life than in tests - Arthur Neslen, The Guardian: The Defective by Design floodgates open.
• Not exactly SF, but pretty fucking Orwellian just the same - Peter Watts: "[W]hat about the poor assholes with three kids, up to their eyeballs in debt, who’ve just watched their retirement saving evaporate because [Toronto Dominion Bank's] American buddies played fast and loose with the global game of AD&D we call “the economy”? What about those people who simply can’t afford to walk away, no matter how badly they’re treated? […] These are the people the bank knows it can shit all over, because they have a high Vulnerability Index."
• The Truth About Chávez: Bernie Sanders is wrong — Hugo Chávez was no dictator - Gabriel Hetland in Jacobin
• 'Cashless’ Welfare Card Slammed - Xavier Smerdon, Pro Bono Australia: Quite apart from the inconvenience and indignity of this, the plan ignores the important role of welfare payments as "automatic stabilisers", boosting local demand when unemployment is high, which in principle should create more jobs. One can't imagine every corner shop, greengrocer, butcher, etc. in the country being whitelisted under this scheme, so it's mainly a gift to the supermarket duopoly.
• I suppose I brought it all upon myself - Matthew Yglesias: "This is why thoughtful opponents of the welfare state have generally avoided making the argument that capitalism is good because it promotes human well-being. Since capitalism does promote human well-being, "capitalism promotes human well-being" sounds like a good argument in its favor. But it turns out that capitalism plus a large welfare state promotes human well-being even more. So you either need to embrace the welfare state (the correct answer) or come up with another justification of capitalism."
• Exciting New Waterfront Development Planned For Mars - The Shovel: "Mars’s waterfront will be transformed into a world-class lifestyle, cultural, retail and commercial precinct. Announcing the new development today, the Mars City Council said the 25-hectare space would include a vibrant cultural hub, exciting mixed-use public spaces, and 45,000 apartments."
• Seven everyday things poor people worry about that rich people never do - Carmen Rios, Everyday Feminism (who excel at clickbait titles): "Being poor means that every worry is secondary to money. It means that every experience is centered around money. It makes money, which is ironically something you possess little of in contrast to other people, more central to your everyday life than theirs."
• Bombs Kill Shock - Craig Murray: "The spluttering fury by the establishment […] is revealing the existence of the moral dilemma to people from whom it has been effectively hidden as a topic of legitimate and serious debate. People will start to think. That is why Corbyn is so dangerous to the establishment. He has opened a Pandora’s box of ideas."
• Corbyn's victory is the new political reality - beautifully written piece by Geoffrey Heptonstall at openDemocracy: "This century has proved to be a nightmare. Public discourse is trivialized. Culture is vulgarized. Social welfare is marketized. Education is reduced to training schemes. There is popular resistance, but in England [and I do mean England] it has only now come close to serious political realization."
• Some post-school education bodies we could do without - John Quiggin: "But the real problem is the one I identified in the deregulation debacle. The VC groups claim to speak for universities, but exclude all but 40-odd of the people who work and study in them. In the present case, wouldn’t the perspectives of research students and the academics who supervise them be more useful than those of VCs and administrators? To repeat, we need to replace UA with a body that represents students and staff as well as top management."
• Q&A: Can Corbyn revolutionise the financial sector and the Bank of England? - Anastasia Nesvetailova, openDemocracy: "During the crisis of 2007-09, the central banks on both sides of the Atlantic stepped in and played a role that they were not meant to. We are lucky that they did so. Against many economic dogmas, they were not simply lenders of last resort, they made the markets, as my colleague Perry Mehrling argues in his book New Lombard Street. They made the markets when liquidity vanished and when private participants, buyers and sellers, simply would not pick up the phone." TL;DR: Central bank independence has always been a fantasy, and banks that are too big to fail are too big to be privately-owned.
• U.S. Bombs Somehow Keep Falling in the Places Where Obama “Ended Two Wars” - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: "How do you know when you’re an out-of-control empire? When you keep bombing and deploying soldiers in places where you boast that you’ve ended wars. How do you know you have a hackish propagandist for a president? When you celebrate him for “ending two wars” in the very same places that he keeps bombing." I wonder if "hackish" is a typo for "hawkish". Valid either way, though.

This week, I have been mostly sleeping, and reading:

• What Bernie Sanders Has Already Won - Dave Johnson at Campaign for America's Future: "Nobody expected to be actually talking about him being the nominee and all that. But whether he is or not, the discussion Sanders wanted HAS been triggered, and an amazing list of supporters now exists. Now there is the hope that he and we can build a movement out of it that lasts past this election."
• Fuck Nuance - Keiran Healy: See also the interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education. I freely admit that I'm struggling with identifying any consistent body of practices that distinguishes sociology from, say, social psychology, or history. I'm also not entirely sure it needs one. But there's certainly a rich and inexhaustible seam of discourse on the theme of UR DOIN' IT WRONG!
• NYT Claims U.S. Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: "For the NYT to tell its readers that the U.S. — one of the leading cluster bomb states on the planet — is actually one of the countries that “have not yet joined the treaty but have abided by its provisions” is nationalistic propaganda of the most extreme kind."
• The Great Wealth Transfer to the London Elite - Craig Murray: "Now the brilliance of the trick is that, as it is labeled a benefit, the left fight to keep housing benefit as though it benefited poor people. In fact this is a great illusion. It does nothing of the sort. What would truly benefit poor people is lower rent or affordable homes. Housing benefit goes straight into the pockets of the landlord class." Welfare recipients aren't. Austudy, Newstart, whatever: all but a handful of change ends up with landlords.
• Other People’s Dollars, and Their Place in Global Economics - Paul Krugman, NYT: "The Aussie dollar plays no special role in the world monetary system, yet Australia has consistently attracted bigger inflows of capital relative to the size of its economy — and run proportionately bigger trade deficits — than the United States. What’s important for both capital and trade, it turns out, is whether your economy offers good investment opportunities under an umbrella of legal and political stability. Whether you control an international currency is a trivial concern by comparison."
• Some Rules for Teachers - Anne Boyer at The New Enquiry: Rule 12 applies to any public speaking, in my experience. "12. thoroughly prepare class, including making preparations to abandon your preparations entirely"
• Quantitative Easing for People: The UK Labour Frontrunner’s Controversial Proposal - Ellen Brown: New rule. Nobody is allowed to cry "ZOMG! Zimbabwe!" while there is a single unemployed person, or a scintilla of unmet demand.
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• Why franchises care more about their coffee than their people - Ashlea Kellner et al. from Griffith University, in the Conversation: As Humphrey McQueen points out, the whole point of franchising is to finance expansion using other people's money. Just as the franchisor outsources cost and risk to the franchisee, so the franchisee offloads this burden on to their workers.
• Joe Hockey’s unscripted moments of truth reveal what the Government really thinks - Warwick Smith for The Age: "When Hockey tells Sydneysiders to get a good, well-paying and secure job if they want to enter the property market, he is telling us what this government really thinks. If you don’t have a job that pays much better than the average wage then you don’t deserve to own your own home. If the best you can do with your life is be a teacher in a public school or a nurse or a waiter then you’re not worthy of his concern or interest. Get a better job, then come talk about your problems."
• The Art of Capital Flight - Ken Rogoff at Project Syndicate: "Just five months ago, Larry Fink, Chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, told an audience in Singapore that contemporary art has become one of the two most important stores of wealth internationally, along with apartments in major cities such as New York, London, and Vancouver. Forget gold as an inflation hedge; buy paintings." I used to know a Coffs-old-money scumbag who would boast about his Norman Lindsay prints. The money value of them, that is; not any intrinsic virtues. The sad empty lives some people lead…
• 99 percent Utopia and money - Branko Milanovic and insomnia give us an interesting thought experiment: "So, there is, I think, already now a limited, but growing, number of goods and services whose marginal cost of production is so low that they are practically free. (The average cost of production is not zero, but to an individual consumer these goods appear as free.) Consider now the behavior of people. Do they go to Starbucks stores and fill their pockets with free paper napkins or grab free ice cubes? No. Do they go to free open-air concerts day after day and fight for the spots? No. Once you know that such goods will be plentiful and free, you do not keep an unreasonable stock of them, nor do you fight to get them. You know they will be around when you need them."
• Range of reactions to realism about the social world - Daniel Little: "And what about the concept of a market itself? Can we understand this concept realistically? Do markets really exist? Maybe the most we can say is something like this: there are many social settings where stuff is produced and exchanged. When exchange is solely or primarily governed by the individual self-interest of the buyers and sellers, we can say that a market exists. But we must also be careful to add that there are many different institutional and social settings where this condition is satisfied, so there is great variation across the particular "market settings" of different societies and communities. As a result, we need to be careful not to reify the concept of a market across all settings."
• Why Bernie Sanders Should Add a Job Guarantee to His Policy Agenda - Pavlina Tchernerva at NEP: I can't remember if I saw this a month ago when it first came out. It deserves multiple mentions anyway, as it's a terrific summary of the arguments for government as employer of last resort. "The private sector is simply not in the business of satisfying unmet basic needs or providing employment for everyone. But once most basic needs are met, will there be enough work for the JG participants to do? I’m convinced, yes. As Warren Mosler says, “There is no limit to the ways we can serve one another”. My worry is that even if we mobilized everyone who wanted to work in a private and public initiative, there would still not be enough manpower to do all the things that we sorely need—especially concerning the environment."
• And the Winner is (should be)…. Fiscal Policy! - Francesco Saraceno: "In a liquidity trap the propensity to hoard of the private sector becomes virtually unlimited, so that monetary policy (be it conventional or unconventional) loses traction. It is true that the age of great moderation, and three decades of almighty central bankers had made the concept fade into oblivion. But, since 2008 we were forced to reconsider the effectiveness of monetary policy at the so-called zero lower bound.Or at least we should have…"
• Economics in Two Lessons: Income Distribution - John Quiggin: "For a very poor person, an additional hundred dollars could mean the difference between eating and not eating. For someone slightly better off, it may mean the difference between paying the rent and being evicted. For a middle class family, it might allow an unexpected luxury purchase. For someone on a million dollars a year, it would barely be noticed." And Rawlsian fiscal policy has an unlikely champion:
• Trump Is Right on Economics - Paul Krugman: "Mr. Bush has chosen to attack Mr. Trump as a false conservative, a proposition that is supposedly demonstrated by his deviations from current Republican economic orthodoxy: his willingness to raise taxes on the rich, his positive words about universal health care. And that tells you a lot about the dire state of the G.O.P. For the issues the Bush campaign is using to attack its unexpected nemesis are precisely the issues on which Mr. Trump happens to be right, and the Republican establishment has been proved utterly wrong."
• The Usual Warmongers - Craig Murray: "Bombs are entirely agnostic over who they kill, and have not made life notably better for the population. Yet the news media are now insistently beating the drum for British bombing in Syria. Who should be bombed exactly – ISIL or Assad – appears unimportant, so long as there is bombing. Indeed, the Murdoch Sky News, the Mail and the Blairites are contriving to build a narrative that Jeremy Corbyn, the SNP and bleeding hearts like myself are responsible for the death of little Aylan and hundreds like him, by unreasonable and inhuman opposition to a bit more bombing."
• Fed Up with the Fed - Joe Stiglitz at Project Syndicate: "The “jobs gap” – the difference between today’s employment and what it should be – is some three million. With so many people out of work, downward pressure on wages is showing up in official statistics as well. So far this year, real wages for non-supervisory workers fell by nearly 0.5%. This is part of a long-term trend that explains why household incomes in the middle of the distribution are lower than they were a quarter-century ago. "
• Taking Corbynomics Seriously - Robert Skidelsky at Project Syndicate: "Under conventional quantitative easing (QE), the central bank buys government securities from banks or corporations and relies on the extra cash that it “prints” to stimulate private spending. But studies suggest that much of this money goes into speculative activity, risking asset bubbles, rather than being channeled into productive investment. An alternative would be to distribute the central bank’s newly issued money directly to housing associations, local councils, or national or regional investment banks – any organization that could carry out infrastructure projects. This is what Corbyn proposes. "
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• The Syrian Refugee Crisis and the ‘Do Something’ Lie - Adam Johnson at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting: "While there’s no doubt many of the refugees are escaping Assad’s bombing of cities, the boy in question, Aylan Kurdi, wasn’t: He was escaping ISIS and the US bombing of his hometown of Kobani, far from anything the Assad government is doing. A no-fly zone would not have saved his hometown. An absence of fueling jihadists by the United States and the subsequent bombing of said jihadists by the United States? Perhaps."
• Kickstarter Focuses Its Mission on Altruism Over Profit - Mike Isaac and David Gelles, NYT: "Public benefit corporations are a relatively new designation that has been signed into law by a number of states. Delaware, where Kickstarter is reincorporating, began allowing public benefit corporations in 2013. Under the designation, companies must aim to do something that would aid the public (such as Kickstarter’s mission to “help bring creative projects to life”) and include that goal in their corporate charter. Board members must also take that public benefit into account when making decisions, and the company has to report on its social impact."
• School questioned Muslim pupil about Isis after discussion on eco-activism - Vikram Dodd in the Guardian: "In a response to the legal action, Central Foundation school said it should be dismissed. According to legal documents related to the case it added: “It is unarguable that at the relevant time (May 2015) the school was required as part of its safeguarding responsibilities to be aware of the dangers of radicalisation. […] The school added: “This safeguarding step can not be criticised, as the school had due regard to its overarching duty to safeguard pupils and the need to prevent them being drawn into terrorism.”"
• Volkswagen’s Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet - Jim Dwyer, NYT: "“Proprietary software is an unsafe building material,” Mr. Moglen had said. “You can’t inspect it.” That was five years ago. On Tuesday, Volkswagen admitted it had rigged the proprietary software on 11 million of its diesel cars around the world so that they would pass emissions tests when they were actually spreading smog."
• How Much of Your Audience is Fake? Marketers thought the Web would allow perfectly targeted ads. Hasn’t worked out that way. - Ben Elgin, Michael Riley, David Kocieniewski, and Joshua Brustein at Bloomberg: Nothing we didn't already know, and to be honest I didn't even read more than half of it, but a useful link to send the next entrepreneur you meet who talks about "clicks", "landing pages", and "conversion rates".