This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The political aftermath of financial crises: Going to extremes — Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick, Christoph Trebesch at VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal: The bottom line is that financial crises stand out. They are followed by significantly more political instability than other types of economic crises. This raises the question – why are financial crises different? One explanation is that financial crises may be perceived as endogenous, ‘inexcusable’ problems resulting from policy failures, moral hazard and favouritism. In contrast, non-financial crises could be seen as ‘excusable’ events, triggered by exogenous shocks (e.g. oil prices, wars). A second potential explanation is that financial crises may have social repercussions that are not observable after non-financial recessions. For example, it is possible that the disputes between creditors and debtors are uglier or that inequality rises more strongly. Lastly, financial crises typically involve bailouts for the financial sector and these are highly unpopular, which may result in greater political dissatisfaction. [Also:]
• Right-wing political extremism in the Great Depression — Alan de Bromhead, Barry Eichengreen, Kevin Hjortshøj O’Rourke at VOX, CEPR’s Policy Portal: Our statistical results […] show that that the Depression was good for fascists. It was especially good for fascists in countries that had not enjoyed democracy before 1914; where fascist parties already had a parliamentary base; in countries on the losing side in WWI; and in countries that experienced boundary changes after 1918. […] Importantly, it shows that what mattered was not the current growth of the economy but cumulative growth or, more to the point, the depth of the cumulative recession. One year of contraction was not enough to significantly boost extremism, in other words, but a depression that persisted for years was.
• Can philosophy survive in an academy driven by impact and employability? — Simon Blackburn (et al.) in the Times Higher Education: One of the most potent causes of mistrust of philosophy is that it provides no answers, only questions, so that to many it does not seem to have progressed since its very beginnings in Plato, or even in pre-Socratic Greece (or China or India). Of course, one might similarly ask whether other human pursuits, such as music, literature, drama, architecture, painting or politics, have “improved” (and by what measure this judgement is supposed to be made), and if the answer is at best indeterminate we might query whether this reflects badly on those practices, or whether perhaps it indicates a problem with the question.
• Changing private investment activity requires higher fiscal deficits — Bill Mitchell: So if non-financial corporations are themselves increasingly becoming net lenders to the rest of the economy then the idea that household saving provides the investment funds for firms has to be questioned. Further, this shift in behaviour implies a serious new leakage to aggregate demand has developed, which if left unchecked would bias the economy to recession. The mainstream alternative is that growth is maintained by rising consumer spending by households driven by increased credit. In other words, the lenders and the borrowers have swapped seats. Of course, such a growth scenario is unsustainable because households cannot cope with ever-increasing levels of debt, as we learned in 2008.
• IMF forgives Ukraine’s Debt to Russia — Michael Hudson: [O]n Tuesday, the IMF joined the New Cold War. It has been lending money to Ukraine despite the Fund’s rules blocking it from lending to countries with no visible chance of paying (the “No More Argentinas” rule from 2001). When IMF head Christine Lagarde made the last IMF loan to Ukraine in the spring, she expressed the hope that there would be peace. But President Porochenko immediately announced that he would use the proceeds to step up his nation’s civil war with the Russian-speaking population in the East – the Donbass. […] By doing so, it announced its new policy: “We only enforce debts owed in US dollars to US allies.”
• House Prices and Job Losses — Emma Lyonette and Gabor Pinter, Bank Underground: This blog summarises the findings of recent research by Pinter (2015) that emphasises the role of real estate as an important determinant of firms’ borrowing capacity. This is because real estate is widely used by corporates as collateral when trying to obtain external financing. Fluctuations in real estate prices may therefore cause fluctuations in firms’ borrowing capacity, which then affects firms’ decisions to undertake new investment, to create new jobs and to destroy existing jobs. The paper shows that this so-called collateral channel is important in understanding not only the recent Great Recession but historical UK business cycles in general.
• Simpson, PL, Guthrie, J, Lovell, M, Doyle, M and Butler, T 2015, 'Assessing the Public’s Views on Prison and Prison Alternatives: Findings from Public Deliberation Research in Three Australian Cities', Journal of Public Deliberation, Vol. 11, No. 2: Despite decreasing crime victimisation rates in Australia, incarceration rates have doubled over the last thirty years. Australia’s use of imprisonment has major economic and social equity costs, especially given the over-representation of Indigenous Australians and other socially disadvantaged groups in prison. Evidence increasingly points to the limitation of incarceration as a tool for effective offender rehabilitation suggesting that a new policy agenda on responses to offending is warranted. Yet, public opinion is generally assessed and perceived to hold punitive views towards offenders.
• Sorry, but Your Favorite Company Can’t Be Your Friend — Josh Barro in the New York Times: As social psychologists describe it, there are two broad categories of human relationships: exchange relationships, in which we trade for mutual benefit; and communal relationships, which are based on mutual caring and support. Normally, you are supposed to have the former with people you do business with and the latter with your friends and relatives. But sometimes, companies try to blur the lines, insinuating themselves into your friend zone.
• Working Until It’s Time for Your Grave — Tiffany Williams, Common Dreams: My [Institute for Policy Studies] colleagues recently released a report on the retirement gap between CEOs and workers. They found that nearly half of working age Americans have no access to retirement plans through their jobs. When I asked my mom about her own retirement savings, I learned she had nothing at all.
• The Potential of Debtors’ Unions — the Debt Collective in ROAR Magazine: Experienced alone, debt is isolating, frightening and morally laden with shame and guilt. Indebtedness is being afraid to open the mail or pick up the phone. But as a platform for collective action, debt can be powerful. Consider oil tycoon JP Getty’s adage: “If you owe the bank $100 that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.” Student debt alone stands today at $1.3 trillion. Together, we can be the banks’ problem.
• Humans vs Houses: Australia's perverse tax system — Cameron K. Murray: It is certainly now time for the government to end these tax concessions for investment property. Raising the GST, the current government’s preferred tax policy, is probably the worst choice in terms of both equity and efficiency compared to the low-hating fruit of removing these property tax advantages which currently cost the budget about $11billion a year. Obviously removing them would change incentives, reduce prices, and so forth, meaning that actual budget gains from their removal will be lower. But even so, the shift of incentives across the economy would be hugely advantageous in terms of both efficiency, and equity, as these tax incentives primarily benefit the wealthy.
• How George Osborne exploited our psychological biases to secure his cuts — Ben Chu in the Independent: Mr Osborne’s July Budget proposed to save £4bn a year by 2020 by freezing all working age benefits in cash terms for the next four years, meaning a deep cut after inflation for recipients. And that was actually a bigger saving than the one generated from the cuts to tax credits. But unlike the tax credit cuts, the benefit freeze prompted no outcry. Why? Because the immediate cash losses loomed far larger than the forgone gains of benefits rising in line with inflation.
• Education and Equality in the 21st Century — Danielle Allen, Crooked Timber: The preparation of citizens, through education, for civic and political engagement supports the pursuit of political equality, but political equality, in turn, may well engender more egalitarian approaches to the economy. An education that prepares students for civic and political engagement brings into play the prospect of political contestation around issues of economic fairness. In other words, education can affect income inequality not merely by spreading technical skills and compressing the income distribution. It can even have an effect on income inequality by increasing a society’s political competitiveness and thereby impacting “how technology evolves, how markets function, and how the gains from various different economic arrangements are distributed.”
• Nobody's home: Housing boom leaves swathe of empty properties — Angus Whitley in the Age on a new report from the Henry Georgists at Prosper Australia: Sudden property price declines or an economic slowdown risk unmasking the vacant supply. Owners would start to sell up or look for rental income to cushion the blow from falling prices, [Catherine Cashmore, author of the Prosper report] said. "Suddenly, you find there's no one there to buy it or nobody to rent it. That's a common pattern in a housing crash," Cashmore said. "What we're trying to do is it to make it visible before it happens."
• Corbyn – after Oldham — Geoffrey Heptonstall, openDemocracy: The headlines should have read: ‘Big Swing to Labour Boosts Corbyn at Critical Time.’ The fact is that the phrase ‘swing to Labour’ was suspiciously absent. The affirmation of Jeremy Corbyn’s position was conceded with something close to a snarl.
• In support of a Universal Basic Income – introducing the RSA Basic Income Model — Anthony Painter, RSA: A couple of years ago, I was told of two young mothers who were studying for a qualification in nursing care. Towards the end of their studies a local Job Centre Plus insisted that they make themselves available for work or face sanction. They left their course and failed to qualify. They lost out and their time had been wasted. They were locked in the same oscillation between benefits and poor quality work. And society lost too - we need nursing care workers.
• Donald Trump and the ugliness in Las Vegas — Michael A. Cohen, Boston Globe: But there is another side to Trump that merits greater attention — fear. This is not the fear of “others” — immigrants, Muslims, etc. There is plenty of that, but in talking to Trump’s supporters, a different kind of fear emerges — a sense that the country is falling apart, that the nation’s safety and security are at risk, and that America needs someone who is strong, decisive, and unafraid to say what he thinks must be done to fix things.
• This week, the US government will take action to slow the economy and prevent wage growth — Matt Yglesias at Vox: The Federal Reserve is structured as an independent agency precisely on the theory that for the long-term good of the economy we sometimes want the central bank to slow the pace of job creation in order to avoid inflation, even though standing in front of a podium and saying, "I want to slow the pace of job creation" sounds terrible. But the weird thing about this week's push for higher interest rates is that there's no inflation problem to solve.
• Australian government fiscal outlook – irresponsible and will fail — Bill Mitchell: Basically, the Outlook shows that the federal fiscal deficit is larger than previously estimated (in the May 2015 Fiscal Statement aka ‘The Budget’) and this demonstrates the automatic stabilisers in operation to put a floor under the slowing economy. This counter-cyclical movement is something that we should be comforted by because as private spending contracts and the economy slows the expansion of the deficit limits, to some extent, the job losses and the number of businesses that might become insolvent. However, the mainstream reaction has been hysterical (as in hysteria) with all sorts of predictions about national insolvency, credit rating agencies downgrading us, and “deficits for as long as you can see”. The problem is that the so-called average Australian believes all this nonsense and doesn’t understand that the rising deficit is a good thing in the context of poor developments in private spending. […] A career of reading this junk leads me to wish I’d become an anthropologist or something else like that.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Beyond neoliberalism: Universities and the public good — Ravinder Sidhu in the Australian Review of Public Affairs reviews Learning under Neoliberalism: Ethnographies of Governance in Higher Education: Writing almost twenty years ago, Clare O’Farrell made the prescient observation that: ‘the State has become educationally out of date. [It] must necessarily fall behind those institutions whose job it is to keep abreast with and create new developments in specialised fields [such as] universities’ (1996, p. 8). O’Farrell highlighted the need for academics to find alternative ways of self-governing. Her compelling argument, in favour of winding back the intrusion and displacement wrought by various accountability audits to restore ‘the scholarly balance’, retains its urgency. A small step towards this end is by attending to professional and democratic accountability in university governance. Such changes are necessary if universities are to continue to be relevant to public life.
• Iceland, Ireland, and Devaluation Denial — Paul Krugman, New York Times: When big adjustments in a country’s wages and prices relative to trading partners are necessary, it’s much easier to achieve these adjustments via currency depreciation than via relative deflation — which is one main reason there have been such big costs to the euro.
• Review: Another “Minsky moment” may be on the way — Edward Chancellor for Reuters reviews Randy Wray's new book on the work of his late mentor: Prudent financial arrangements give way to what he called “Ponzi finance,” which describes the situation when borrowers are unable to service their debts or repay principal from their current income. Ponzi borrowers depend on refinancing against the collateral of rising asset prices to maintain solvency. Long before former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and other economists hailed the “Great Moderation” of low inflation and stable growth, Minsky elaborated the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” This is expressed in his trademark comment – “stability is destabilizing” – since, as Minsky argued, people respond to good times by changing their risk preferences.
• Who’s the most efficient of them all: income tax or GST? — Peter Davidson Holy cow, this is comprehensive — and worth memorising in order to quote from it at length at the next high-society soiree you attend, assuming you don't want to be invited to any more: In short, the equity impacts of a change in the tax mix from personal income to consumption are quantifiable and negative, while any economic efficiency gains are uncertain and hard to quantify. Alternative tax reform options, such as broadening the income tax base by removing inefficient tax shelters, would improve equity and efficiency at the same time.
• Jeremy Corbyn 'Systematically' Attacked By British Press The Moment He Became Leader, Research Claims — Louise Ridley, the Huffington Post: News articles, in which the media ostensibly do not editorialise, were actually the most critical of Corbyn, the report says. Out of 292 news pieces, 181 were judged negative, while 92 were 'neutral' and just 19 'positive', the report found. 'One might expect news items, as opposed to comment and editorial pieces, to take a more balanced approach but in fact the opposite is true.' It's more a tally than a report, but the appendix on themes ("Them and Us - Extremism Vs. Moderation", "What will happen to Labour and the Left?", "Personal Character") is bang-on.
• Challenging the Oligarchy — Paul Krugman in the New York Review of Books ah, reviews a book, in New York. A finer fulfillment of a publication's mandate you will search for in vain. Specifically, he reviews Robert Reich's new one.: Modern technology, or so it was claimed, reduced the need for routine manual labor while increasing the demand for conceptual work. And while the average education level was rising, it wasn’t rising fast enough to keep up with this technological shift. Hence the rise of the earnings of the college-educated and the relative, and perhaps absolute, decline in earnings for those without the right skills. […] But while one still encounters people invoking skill-biased technological change as an explanation of rising inequality and lagging wages—it’s especially popular among moderate Republicans in denial about what’s happened to their party and among “third way” types lamenting the rise of Democratic populism—the truth is that SBTC has fared very badly over the past quarter-century, to the point where it no longer deserves to be taken seriously as an account of what ails us.
• Hungover Bear and Friends: Flying Solo — Ali Fitzgerald in McSweeney's Internet Tendency:
  
• 'Poor internet for poor people': India's activists fight Facebook connection plan — Cory Doctorow in The Guardian: Since the spring of 2015, Indian activists have built ferocious momentum against Facebook’s bid to take charge of the nation’s internet through a program called Free Basics. […] Free Basics’s pitch has been: we’ll get “the next billion internet users” (that is, poor people in developing nations) connected by cutting deals with local phone companies. Under these deals, there will be no charge for accessing the services we hand-pick. We will define the internet experience for these technologically unsophisticated people, with our products at the centre and no competition. It’s philanthropy!
• Against School — the late lamented Aaron Swartz in New Republic: A group of bold entrepreneurs find they can make cloth more efficiently by building large mills. The girls who staff them keep causing strikes and other trouble, so they require their employees go to school from a young age and learn to behave themselves. But obviously most people won’t be thrilled to go to school so that they can learn to accept lower wages without complaint. So the bosses develop a cover story: schools are about teaching people the things they need to know to survive in the world of business. It’s not true, of course—there’s no connection between the facts memorized in school and the skills needed on the job—but the story is convincing enough.
• Are luxury condo purchases hiding dirty money? — Husna Haq at the Christian Science Monitor: An investigation conducted by The New York Times in 2015 revealed that nearly half of homes that sold for more than $5 million across the country were purchased by shell companies. That figure would probably be higher in high-end real estate markets like New York and Miami. In fact, using shell companies, or limited liability companies, to hide a buyer's identity is actually relatively common, and legal. But the practice could drive up real estate prices in some markets, and contribute to real estate booms. Federal authorities are also concerned that the practice enables foreign buyers to easily find a safe haven for illicit money in American real estate.
• Six Responses to Bernie Skeptics — Robert Reich practically endorses Bernie. This is huge, because Reich is very influential and used to work for… ah… Clinton… Bill Clinton, the president who… I'll get me coat.
• In Late 2007, Obama Trailed Clinton By 26 Points. Bernie Sanders Is 2016's Barack Obama — H.A. Goodman, Huffington Post: [I]t's difficult to generate enthusiasm when you're a Democratic nominee who voted for Iraq and is funded by prison lobbyists, but alas, Clinton supporters base their vote upon the perception of political power. This viewpoint ignores the fact that Democrats lose elections when voter turnout is low, and only Bernie Sanders can ensure a high voter turnout in 2016. Between an expanding FBI investigation, Clinton's negative favorability ratings, and her longstanding ties to Donald Trump, Republicans would win the White House with a Clinton nomination.
• 'Australia headed for recession': Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek finance minister — Mark Mulligan, Australian Financial Review: He said after nearly 25 years without recession, Australia was caught up in the same global pattern of weak aggregate demand and excessive corporate savings, which are being handed back to shareholders via buybacks and dividends instead of being re-invested in additional capacity or productivity enhancement. Taking issue with Varoufakis is:
• Recessions are always a problem and can always be avoided — Bill Mitchell: Recessions are incredibly costly and totally unnecessary. The claims that they offer a bush-fire type “cleansing” to drive higher productivity in the future and increased material living standards are often made but not very strongly evidenced in the research literature. Governments can always maintain full employment if they choose and should do so given the highly damaging effects that recessions have on individuals, which span many generations as a consequence of the inheritance of disadvantage by children in jobless households. I am surprised that a progressive economist (so-called) is buying into the mainstream myth that recessions are not a problem.
• IMF continues with its wage-cutting line — Bill Mitchell: Now if we took the [IMF's logic] one could easily argue that with inflation so low in the Eurozone, these results would suggest that an across-the-board wage increase in the Eurozone would have strong positive impacts on growth without undermining any relative competitiveness for any particular nation. The IMF, of course, doesn’t take the reader down that interpretation of their results because the paper is really designed to justify the existing policy of wage cutting and so-called ‘structural reforms’, which are really about undermining working conditions, job security, Occupational Health & Safety regulations, and other things that make work more tolerable.
• German wage moderation and the EZ Crisis — Peter Bofinger at VOX, CEPR's Policy Portal: An EZ Crisis narrative that does not that does not account for the effects of the German wage moderation is incomplete. Germany is by far the largest EZ economy and it is a very open economy with strong trade links to all other EZ member states. It would be difficult to explain why such a strong internal devaluation, which is regarded as a key determinant of Germany’s success story in the 2000s (Dustmann et al. 2014), did not have significant repercussions for the rest of the EZ.
• Secular stagnation and the financial sector — John Quiggin: [T]he financial sector benefits from an evolutionary strategy similar to that of an Australian eucalypt forest. Eucalypts are both highly flammable (they generate lots of combustible oil) and highly fire resistant. So eucalypt forests are subject to frequent fires which kill competing species, and allow the eucalypts to extend their range.
• This might be the most controversial theory for what’s behind the rise of ISIS — Jim Tankersley, The Washington Post: Piketty is particularly scathing when he blames the inequality of the region, and the persistence of oil monarchies that perpetuate it, on the West: "These are the regimes that are militarily and politically supported by Western powers, all too happy to get some crumbs to fund their [soccer] clubs or sell some weapons. No wonder our lessons in social justice and democracy find little welcome among Middle Eastern youth." Terrorism that is rooted in inequality, Piketty continues, is best combated economically.
• Corbyn - what's a leader really for? — Jeremy Gilbert: One perspective basically thinks that politics is about selling your party to consumers; the other thinks that it’s mainly about building up a coalition of social groups with common interests. Spoiler alert: it’s the second one that’s right, mostly.
• The New Supply-Side Economics — Mark Thoma in The Fiscal Times: During the period of mild fluctuations in output and employment from 1982 through 2007 known as the Great Moderation monetary policy could do the job by itself, and to a large extent we forgot about fiscal policy as a stabilization tool. But the Great Recession made it clear that monetary policy can only do so much, and fiscal policy has an important role to play in deep economic downturns. We didn’t fully exploit the potential of fiscal policy during the Great Recession, and the turn to austerity in 2010 was a mistake that worked against the recovery, but the lesson is there to be learned for those willing to take off their ideological blinders and see it.
• Chart of the day — David F. Ruccio:
  
  Consumer spending isn’t growing because, face it, most people’s incomes (whether measured in terms of real wages or median incomes) are stagnant. Whatever spending they are doing (e.g., on cars and higher education) is fueled by taking on more and more debt. What about investment? While profits (especially from domestic sources) continue to grow, corporations are using those profits not for investment, but for other uses, including stock buybacks, mergers and acquisitions, and CEO salaries.
• Going down the same old road: driverless cars aren’t a fix for our transport woes — Curtin's peter Newman in The Conversation: Autonomous trains have been around for 30 years and have a very good track record. That’s because they don’t require humans suddenly being able to intervene. Nor do they have a chance of harming others as they are completely isolated on separate tracks. But autonomous cars present both these problems.
• Jeremy Corbyn and the Syrian Bombing Vote — Ian Welsh: Corbyn has always said he would bring more democracy to Labour, and this is in line with that promise. This is a case of one principle “no war” going against another principle “more democracy.” Also, letting Labour MPs vote against bombing Syria, when the majority of Labour party members are for it, may be very smart politics. Smoke the pro-war MPs out, let them run up their flags, and when the time comes for candidate selection, well, everyone will know who is for war. The majority of voters selecting candidates are free to use the next election to ensure that Corbyn has a party of MPs who are anti-war.
• Woody Guthrie, ‘Old Man Trump’ and a real estate empire’s racist foundations — Will Kaufman, The Conversation: For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens.

This week, I have been mostly writing an essay I should have started a month earlier, but also reading:

• Thinking About the Trumpthinkable — Alan Abramowitz via Paul Krugman in the NYT: If none of the totally crazy things he’s said up until now have hurt him among Republican voters, why would any crazy things he says in the next few months hurt him?
• How Labour will secure the high-wage, hi-tech economy of the future — Chancellor-in-waiting John McDonnell in the Guardian: The OECD thinks a developed country such as Britain should be spending a minimum of 3.5% of GDP on infrastructure. A Labour government would exceed that commitment. At present companies are sitting on a £400bn cash pile. So we will also look to change the corporate tax system and work constructively with companies to give them incentives to invest wisely. But yes, he did really end with the punchline "It’s time to look to the future: socialism with an iPad." Urgh.
• To Understand Climbing Death Rates Among Whites, Look To Women Of Childbearing Age — Laudan Aron, Lisa Dubay, Elaine Waxman, and Steven Martin at Health Affairs Blog say it's complicated: The causes and consequences of the US health disadvantage, especially among women, are much more complex and serious than this analysis suggests. […] Improving the conditions of life that shape the health of women and their families and social networks and that are contributing to the “epidemic of pain” is critical. Many systemic and environmental factors are likely at work behind these mortality trends, including unstable and low-paying jobs, a fraying social safety net, and other stressors. When life conditions undermine health or one’s ability to make healthy choices, we all suffer.
• Donald Trump and the “F-Word” — Rick Perlstein at The Washington Spectator: My main interest, though, is that moment of symbiosis between man and mob. They feed off each other. The way his people eat up Trump’s unalloyed joy in bullying: the way a purse of his lips and a glance offstage summoned the security guard who ejected Univision’s Jorge Ramos from a press conference, like a casino pit boss with a whale who gets too handsy with the cocktail waitresses. Trump’s not-quite-veiled threat to Megyn Kelly: “I’ve been very nice to you, although I could probably maybe not be. But I wouldn’t do that.” The body language he uses to intimidate a hapless and plaintive Jeb Bush during the second Republican debate. If he’s just giving the people what they want, consider the people. Consider what they want.

Good grief! Is that all? Isn't there a danger the Internet will cease to exist if I'm not there?

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Islamic State’s Goal: “Eliminating the Grayzone” of Coexistence Between Muslims and the West — Murtaza Hussain, The Intercept: The [Charlie Hebdo] attack had “further [brought] division to the world,” the group said, boasting that it had polarized society and “eliminated the grayzone,” representing coexistence between religious groups. As a result, it said, Muslims living in the West would soon no longer be welcome in their own societies. Treated with increasing suspicion, distrust and hostility by their fellow citizens as a result of the deadly shooting, Western Muslims would soon be forced to “either apostatize … or they [migrate] to the Islamic State, and thereby escape persecution from the crusader governments and citizens,” the group stated, while threatening of more attacks to come.
• From Pol Pot to ISIS: the blood never dried — John Pilger, On Line Opinion: The Americans dropped the equivalent of five Hiroshimas on rural Cambodia during 1969-73. They leveled village after village, returning to bomb the rubble and corpses. The craters left giant necklaces of carnage, still visible from the air. The terror was unimaginable. A former Khmer Rouge official described how the survivors "froze up and they would wander around mute for three or four days. Terrified and half-crazy, the people were ready to believe what they were told... That was what made it so easy for the Khmer Rouge to win the people over." A Finnish Government Commission of Inquiry estimated that 600,000 Cambodians died in the ensuing civil war and described the bombing as the "first stage in a decade of genocide". What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot, their beneficiary, completed.
• Thrashing Not Swimming — Craig Murray: Indeed one of the many extraordinary features of this fervid political period is that the neo-cons (be they Tory or Blairite) who are so actively beating the drum for war, are the ones who absolutely refuse to acknowledge that the source of the poison is Saudi Arabia. Cameron today told Westminster that the head of the snake is in Raqqa. That is plainly untrue. The head of the snake is in Riyadh. But if your God is Mammon, that is blasphemy.
• My Carpet Liquidation Center Really is Going Out of Business This Time — Patrick McKay at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: I’d always wanted to be a carpet liquidator. Way back when I first opened this place, I said, “Man, this is it. I’ve joined a community. I’m staying here forever.” The calendar pages dropped away as I made my home, waved to my neighbors, and swept the shattered glass below my driver’s side window every Monday morning. Then, it happened. Completely out of the blue, my carpet liquidation center that’d been going out of business for 11 straight years, was suddenly going out of business! And I never saw it coming!
• Accumulate, accumulate! Or not — David F. Ruccio: What are U.S. corporations doing with all the surplus they’re managing to rake in? Well, they’re not investing it. Instead, they’re paying it out to shareholders and upper-management, buying back their stock and expanding their portfolios of financial assets, and hoarding the rest in cash. The net effect is to dampen the rate of economic growth and the creation of new jobs.
• ‘On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me’ … a bunch of econ charts! — Jared Bernstein and Ben Spielberg. Including my favourites, US GDP hysteresis:
  
  … and the post-oil-shock pay/productivity gap:
  
• First, second, and third order bias corrections — Andrew Gelman re-analyses the death rate data on middle-aged non-hispanic white Americans, which had provoked much scratching of heads (including mine). Apparently, apart from a small shift from 1998-2003, it's in line with what you'd expect as the baby boomers leave this cohort:
  
  Sadly, despite my successful completion of the third-year "Advanced Social Research" unit at SCU (where the definition of "advanced", and for that matter "university", departs from common usage), I still have had no instruction in elementary statistics, so I can't comment on the validity of these corrections.
• The Dangers of the Gates Foundation: Displacing Seeds and Farmers — From a presentation by Mariam Mayet, Other Worlds: Monsanto and Pioneer Hi Bred, both US multinational companies, control most of the hybrid maize market in southern Africa. Through the acquisition of South Africa’s maize company, Panaar Seed, by Pioneer HiBred, hybrid pioneer [seeds] will make a lot of incursions [elsewhere] into Africa. We see and fear a great deal of social dislocation, of collapse of our farming systems – and it’s already happened. In industrialized-agriculture countries like South Africa, farmers have become completely deskilled and divorced from production decisions, which are made in laboratories or in far-away board rooms. The Gates Foundation is a crony capitalist scam, not a charity.
• The problem with self-driving cars: who controls the code? — Cory Doctorow in The Guardian: A car is a high-speed, heavy object with the power to kill its users and the people around it. A compromise in the software that allowed an attacker to take over the brakes, accelerator and steering (such as last summer’s exploit against Chrysler’s Jeeps, which triggered a 1.4m vehicle recall) is a nightmare scenario. The only thing worse would be such an exploit against a car designed to have no user-override – designed, in fact, to treat any attempt from the vehicle’s user to redirect its programming as a selfish attempt to avoid the Trolley Problem’s cold equations. Whatever problems we will have with self-driving cars, they will be worsened by designing them to treat their passengers as adversaries.
• Pirate Bay Founder Builds The Ultimate Piracy Machine — Ernesto Van der Sar at TorrentFreak: One of Peter [Sunde]’s major frustrations is how the entertainment industries handles the idea of copying. When calculating the losses piracy costs, they often put too much value on pirated copies. […] The “Kopimashin” makes 100 copies of the Gnarls Barkely track “Crazy” every second. This translates to more than eight million copies per day and roughly $10 million in ‘losses.’ […] The Kopimashin does make real copies of the track, but they are sent to /dev/null, which means that they are not permanently stored. The most important message, however, is that the millions of dollars in losses the industry claims from him and the other TPB founders are just as fictitious as the number displayed on the Kopimashin.
• Australia – wages growth at record low as redistribution to profits continues — Bill Mitchell: What is clear is that since the September-quarter 1997, real wages have grown by only 11.4 per cent (so just over 0.6 per cent on average per year), whereas hourly labour productivity has grown by 28.9 per cent (or 1.7 per cent on average per year). This is a massive redistribution of national income to profits and away from wage-earners and the gap is widening each quarter.