This week, I have been mostly letting the reading slide, with some exceptions:

• To Weld, Perchance, to Dream — Simon Critchley in the New York Times: The pre-Socratic thinker Thales falls into a ditch because he’s too busy contemplating the heavens and their origins. A Thracian serving girl is said to have laughed heartily at Thales’ pratfall. And that’s how I like to think about philosophy: it doesn’t so much begin in the confined elegance of Oxbridge tutorials as in a ditch with a nasty bruise on one’s head and possibly some ligament damage.
• It's Too Late to Turn Off Trump — Matt Taibbi is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore, in Rolling Stone: This world of schlock stereotypes and EZ solutions is the one experience a pampered billionaire can share with all of those "paycheck-to-paycheck" voters the candidates are always trying to reach. TV is the ultimate leveling phenomenon. It makes everyone, rich and poor, equally incapable of dealing with reality.
• Do Not Ask Western Leadership to Fix Anything — Ian Welsh: If you want to fix any problem in the West, or have the West be helpful for fixing any global problem, you need to fix the Western leadership class. That means fixing Western media, education, corporations, etc, etc. The list is long, because they have deliberately broken virtually everything to turn it into an opportunity for a very few people to become richer. If you are British, you have a decent, honorable man who actually wants to do almost all the right things: Corbyn. Get to work supporting him, however you can. If he goes down, the political class will take it as a lesson that trying to help ordinary people is a really bad idea.
• One Night in Kunduz, One Morning in New York — Laura Gottesdiener, TomDispatch: At 2:56 a.m., on the morning of the attack, an MSF representative in Kabul again texted an official of the American-led mission, demanding an end to the strikes, which had lasted nearly an hour. By then, flames had overtaken the main building, with children still trapped inside. Abdul Manar, a caretaker at the hospital, recalled the sound of their cries. "I could hear them screaming for help inside the hospital while it was set ablaze by the bombing," he told Al Jazeera.
• Hysteresis and Monetary Policy — Bill Craighead: In macroeconomics, hysteresis occurs when an economic downturn has a lasting effect on economic capacity (i.e., reduced "potential output"); that is, lack of demand creates its own lack of supply. […] People with spells of long-term unemployment have a harder time finding jobs. But looking at the unemployed leaves out those who left the labor force entirely. The last several years have seen a significant drop in labor force participation rates, even among people aged 25-54. […] the unemployment (and presumably the depressed participation rate, too) is "structural" in nature, and not amenable to any improvement in aggregate demand that might be generated with expansionary monetary policy.

• Internet or Intifada? — Shlomo Ben-Ami, Project Syndicate: According to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the ongoing wave of knife attacks on Jews by young Palestinian “lone wolves” can be blamed entirely on incitement by Palestinian Authority and Islamist websites. Netanyahu evidently expects Israelis, and the world, to believe that if these sites were posting cat videos, the Palestinians would cease their agitation and submit quietly to occupation.
• What We Know About the Computer Formulas Making Decisions in Your Life — Lauren Kirchner, ProPublica: Sophisticated algorithms are now being used to make decisions in everything from criminal justice to education. But when big data uses bad data, discrimination can result. […] Here are a few good stories that have contributed to our understanding of this relatively new field.
• The Ever-Growing Ed-Tech Market — Angela Chen, The Atlantic: The testing and assessment market, which raked in $2.5 billion during the reported year, was the single largest category of any segment. The assessment market increased so quickly because of the growth of test-friendly Common Core standards a few years back when this data was being collected, Billings explained. She added that—given President Barack Obama’s recent push to limit testing in schools—the segment may soon see a testing pushback that will hurt revenue down the road.
• The Most Brazen Corporate Power Grab in American History — Chris Hedges in Truthdig: Wages will decline. Working conditions will deteriorate. Unemployment will rise. Our few remaining rights will be revoked. The assault on the ecosystem will be accelerated. Banks and global speculation will be beyond oversight or control. Food safety standards and regulations will be jettisoned. Public services ranging from Medicare and Medicaid to the post office and public education will be abolished or dramatically slashed and taken over by for-profit corporations. Prices for basic commodities, including pharmaceuticals, will skyrocket. Social assistance programs will be drastically scaled back or terminated. And countries that have public health care systems, such as Canada and Australia, that are in the agreement will probably see their public health systems collapse under corporate assault.
• Ongoing crises of capitalism — David F. Ruccio:
  This persistent crisis of capitalism, which was ignored by mainstream economists, also challenges the mainstream traditions of explaining business cycles by technology shocks and of separating long-term growth dynamics from short-run business cycles.
• Workers’ Control in Academia — Jonathan Rees in The Academe Blog: Faculty-centered online education can be both convenient for students and pedagogically innovative. Quite simply, professors can do extraordinary things using digital tools in online, hybrid and regular face-to-face classes. Unfortunately, that assumes that their administrators let them. If the online course universe is controlled by Associate Deans trying to make a name for themselves and populated entirely by adjunct faculty who cannot control their own courses, these minor technological miracles are unlikely to happen.
• Is economics a science? — Invisible hand-waving: For Lakatos, the hallmark of a ‘progressive’ scientific research programme is not whether it is falsifiable. […] Rather, the hallmark of a progressive scientific research programme is whether or not the theory makes successful novel predictions. In other words, is the theory is able to successfully predict new phenomena which it was not originally built to explain?
• Limits of the profit motive — Chris Dillow: My point here is not to decry the profit motive. It has a place. But that place must be circumscribed not only by the regulation of predatory capitalism but also by greater socialization of investment to exploit and develop new technologies and by a more widespread ownership of capital - via worker ownership, a sovereign wealth fund or more widespread participation in equity markets.
• Edward Snowden Explains How To Reclaim Your Privacy — Micah Lee at The Intercept: It's scary how few of these things I do, even though I know better.
• Beware of ads that use inaudible sound to link your phone, TV, tablet, and PC — Dan Goodin, Ars Technica: The ultrasonic pitches are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser. While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it. When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.
• I was held hostage by Isis. They fear our unity more than our airstrikes — Nicolas Hénin in the Guardian: Why France? For many reasons perhaps, but I think they identified my country as a weak link in Europe – as a place where divisions could be sown easily. That’s why, when I am asked how we should respond, I say that we must act responsibly. And yet more bombs will be our response.
• The Cannibalized Company — Karen Brettell, David Gaffen and David Rohde for Reuters: Share repurchases are part of what economists describe as the increasing “financialization” of the U.S. corporate sector, whereby investment in financial instruments increasingly crowds out other types of investment.
• Privatisations: why we need a fiscal watchdog — Simon Wren-Lewis: The key point with privatisations is that reducing current debt may harm the health of the public finances. Any normal investor would only sell an asset if they thought they could get a price that exceeded what the asset was really worth. Although selling the asset would reduce the government’s net borrowing today, it would increase their net borrowing in the future because the government would not get the dividends the shares paid out.
• 'Economic Policy Splits Democrats' — Mark Thoma at Economist's View: So, should I adopt a message I don't think is true because it sells with independents who have been swayed by Very Serious People, or should I say what I believe and try to convince people they are barking up the wrong tree? (For the most part anyway, I believe both the technological/globalization and institutional/unfairness explanations have validity -- but how do workers capture the gains Third Way wants to create through growth and wealth creation without the bargaining power they have lost over time with the decline in unionization, threats of offshoring, etc.? That's the bigger problem.)
• Reform Won’t Do It, Australian Universities Need Revolution — Kristen Lyons and Richard Hil in New Matilda: If, as community economy advocates argue, non-market (including household) activities represent an estimated 30 to 50 per cent of all work, then why do universities continually genuflect to market principles? And given that non-market work has a potentially greater impact on social wellbeing, why don’t we take more time to understand its value in education and other domains? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that such non-market practices – including the diverse activities that make up the informal and exchange economy – are not only basic to meeting human needs, but can (through a more civic orientation) contribute significantly to the “good life”, with educators and students playing their part as active change agents.
• The End of the Humanities? — Martha Nussbaum interviewed by James Garvey for The Philosophers' Magazine: “Philosophy is constitutive of good citizenship. It’s not just a means to it. It becomes part of what you are when you are a good citizen – a thoughtful person. Philosophy has many roles. It can be just fun, a game that you play. It can be a way you try to approach your own death or illness or that of a family member. It has a wide range of functions in human life. Some of them are connected to ethics, and some of them are not. Logic itself is beautiful. I’m just focusing on the place where I think I can win over people, and say ‘Look here, you do care about democracy don’t you? Then you’d better see that philosophy has a place.’”
• Reading The Making of Modern Finance as an Invitation to Critical Uses of History — Christine Desan, Progress in Political Economy: The modern monetary system depends, then, on a kind of cash that depends on public debt. But the value of public debt depends in turn on the value attributed to cash. In other words, there is an irreducibly political aspect to the most basic medium of the market. There is no working exchange without a governance decision (and constant re-decision) about the value of money.
• Private infrastructure finance and secular stagnation — John Quiggin at Crooked Timber: The financialization of the global economy has produced a hugely costly financial sector, extracting returns that must, in the end, be taken out of the returns to investment of all kinds. The costs were hidden during the pre-crisis bubble era, but are now evident to everyone, including potential investors. So, even massively expansionary monetary policy doesn’t produce much in the way of new private investment.
• Decoding the Design of Money — Christine Desan provides a précis of her new book, which sounds like a corker: Corrected for inflation, the modern money supply in England is more than 65-times larger than it was when the Bank was established. That abundance follows from the modern mode of money creation: rather than bringing bullion to the mint, an applicant brings a promise of productivity to a banker. If the industry now in charge of the money supply finds the pitch credible, money issues. […] Just as striking, the modern design for money creation renders the system susceptible to new fragilities, given its reliance on finance-based expansion. Rather than the harsh limits on liquidity that haunted the Middle Ages, we have the booms and busts, the bubbles and bank runs associated with a money supply based on fiat credit creation and cleared in a far smaller reserve comprised of the sovereign unit of account.
• First They Jailed the Bankers, Now Every Icelander to Get Paid in Bank Sale — Claire Bernish, Anti-Media: If Finance Minister Bjarni Benediktsson has his way — and he likely will — Icelanders will be paid kr 30,000 after the government takes over ownership of the bank. […] Because Icelanders took control of their government, they effectively own the banks. Benediktsson believes this will bring foreign capital into the country and ultimately fuel the economy — which, incidentally, remains the only European nation to recover fully from the 2008 crisis. Iceland even managed to pay its outstanding debt to the IMF in full — in advance of the due date.
• Despair, American Style — Paul Krugman, NYT: Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can cause. We’ve seen this kind of thing in other times and places – for example, in the plunging life expectancy that afflicted Russia after the fall of Communism. But it’s a shock to see it, even in an attenuated form, in America.
• A shift towards industry-relevant degrees isn’t helping students get jobs — Richard Hil and Kristen Lyons, the Conversation: Skills and knowledge “competencies”, “attributes” and other measures of performance have turned traditionally accepted pedagogical priorities like “critical thinking” into commodities marketed at prospective employers through e-portfolios and job-ready CVs. Although the humanities, arts and social sciences continue to make up two-thirds of the undergraduate intake, these areas have been subjected to deep cuts or, as in the case of La Trobe University, fine-tuned to meet industry needs, or abandoned altogether (as occurred at QUT) in favour of “creative industries”.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Faith in an Unregulated Free Market? Don’t Fall for It - Bob Shiller plugs his latest book in the New York Times: [T]he problem of market-incentivized professional manipulation and deception is fundamental, not an externality. In short, the superiority of untrammeled free markets — the fundamental theorem of welfare economics — has taken on the aura of a law from the heavens. Yet technology has advanced so that temptations are being manipulated ever more effectively. In fact, the real success of economies that embody free markets has much to do with the heroic efforts of campaigners for better values, both among private organizations and advocates of government regulation.
• Cynical workforce participation policy forces solo parents into ranks of unemployed - Warwick Smith: I call this “pushing on a piece of string” for good reason. Unemployment in Australia is at 6.2 per cent. There are many more people looking for work than there are jobs. So, I’d be very keen to hear how pushing more single parents and grandparents into the job market is going to be a positive thing for this country or for the individuals concerned. Taking away payments from everyone because of the actions of a tiny minority is the kind of collective punishment that society long ago abandoned in every other sphere of life.
• Grattan Institute advocates cutting university research funding - John Quiggin: Finally, lets come back to Norton’s rejection of the centuries-old scholar-teacher model in favor of a teaching-only approach. His defence of this position “the evidence that it improves teaching is less clear” is not exactly robust. Against this we can observe that worldwide, there are in fact plenty of examples of both teaching-only and research-intensive institutions. Nearly all are nominally funded on a per-student basis, whether through fees, government subsidies or both. So, what does the market test, which Norton ought to favor tell us. The answer is that students are beating down the doors of the research-intensive unis. Teaching-only schools are the second choice for nearly everyone. Certainly a large part of my motivation to enrol was the prospect of meeting people who are doing interesting work. Of course now I'd just settle for meeting people. Or a person, at some stage.
• Anthony Albanese Is Not Too Left Wing To Win Government. Indeed, He’s About Right - John Passant in New Matilda: A genuine left wing party of the working class in Australia has not yet developed. Until it does we will remain in the Sisyphean oscillations between neoliberal Labor and pro-austerity Liberal governments. Because Albanese is no Jeremy Corbyn. I have both Bernie Sanders' hair and Jeremy Corbyn's beard. Just saying that, if called upon to serve as PM, I would very carefully consider what is in the best interests of the country, and what would give me a lavish pension for the rest of my life.
• Aren't we all Guatemala? - Pedro Abramovay, openDemocracy: Guatemala is the radical expression of a crisis affecting almost every country in Latin America. The last decades have witnessed huge progress (depending on the country) in transparency policies, thanks to the strengthening of anti-corruption institutions and a new kind of citizen mobilization, highly demanding and autonomous, independent of the traditional parties and movements. The great promise was that this would alter, by itself, the political culture of corruption in our countries. This has not happened. Neither in Guatemala, nor in Chile, nor in Mexico, nor in Brazil.
• Own a Vizio Smart TV? It’s Watching You - Julia Angwin, ProPublica: Vizio’s technology works by analyzing snippets of the shows you’re watching, whether on traditional television or streaming Internet services such as Netflix. Vizio determines the date, time, channel of programs — as well as whether you watched them live or recorded. The viewing patterns are then connected your IP address - the Internet address that can be used to identify every device in a home, from your TV to a phone.
• The replication crisis has engulfed economics - Andreas Ortmann, The Conversation: The upshot is that even under the best of circumstances – one data set, what seems like a straightforward question to answer, and an exchange of ideas on the best method – arriving at consensus can be extraordinarily difficult. And it surely becomes even more difficult with multiple data sets and many teams.
• With idle labour equal to 14.5 per cent, the fiscal deficit is too low - Bill Mitchell: Taken together, this data tells me that the fiscal deficit in Australia is well below what a responsible government should aspire to provide the Australian economy. I say provide in the sense that a fiscal deficit provides spending support to Australian businesses which allows them to employ people. If the current spending patterns of the non-government sector is delivering the sort of outcomes articulated in the list above, then we know that the fiscal support to the economy is inadequate. After we acknowledge that point then we can have a discussion about what the composition of the fiscal deficit should look like – that is, how much government consumption and investment spending there should be.
• Another Money Is Possible, Part I: Will the ScotPound Succeed As A Parallel Currency? - Steve Rushton at Occupy.com: A neat little primer on a few tools in the heterodox economic kit. Part two is Avoid the Next Financial Crash with People's Q.E., and part three is Holland Leads Experiment In Basic Income.
• Why we should give free money to everyone - Rutger Bregman, De Correspondent, a nice, comprehensive look at UBI, cited by Rushton in the above: After decades of authorities’ fruitless pushing, pulling, fines and persecution, eleven notorious vagrants finally moved off the streets. Costs? 50,000 pounds a year, including the wages of the aid workers. In addition to giving eleven individuals another shot at life, the project had saved money by a factor of at least 7. Even The Economist concluded: ‘The most efficient way to spend money on the homeless might be to give it to them.’
• Why do we tax goods and services at the same rate, when goods are so much less sustainable? - Angie Silva and Talia Raphaely from Curtin, in The Conversation: It is not hard to see why the world is awash with trash. In the United States, for instance, 80% of all goods are non-reusable, and more than 90% become waste within six weeks. Australians, meanwhile, currently produce the second most waste per person in the world.
• In Defense of the Late Ahmad Chalabi - Jon Schwarz, The Intercept: Chalabi was also a source for much of the New York Times’ atrocious reporting on Iraq’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, and was mentioned by name when the Times was finally forced to apologize. Moreover, he couldn’t have been much more in your face about it afterward, charmingly explaining in 2004 that “We are heroes in error. As far as we’re concerned we’ve been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important.” But if Americans want to blame someone for the Iraq War, we should be looking closer to home — at Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and ourselves. As former CIA officer Robert Baer put it: “Chalabi was scamming the U.S. because the U.S. wanted to be scammed.”
• Intellectual property rights and artistic creativity - Petra Moser, VoxEU: [Data] suggests that extensions in the length of copyright beyond the duration of the author’s life create a negligible increase in income for the average author. Instead, copyright extensions only benefit the authors of an extremely small number of exceptionally long-lived works. To the extent that it is difficult to predict which types of works will continue to be popular 100 years after their original creation, copyright extensions are unlikely to encourage rational investments in creative work.
• Water Delivery - xkcd
  
• The Invention of Pad Thai - Alex Mayyasi, Priceonomics: Yet [Prime Minister] Phibun took each and every part of his cultural campaign seriously. The National Cultural Act listed penalties for violating its edicts. Even as World War II began, he used a radio address to tell Thais, “Our dear ladies must not think that it is not necessary to wear hats in times of war. Now more than ever is it essential to go on wearing hats.”

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Public R&D austerity spending cuts undermine our grandchildren’s future - Bill Mitchell: In this period of fiscal austerity with suppressed overall growth rates and labour market deregulation that undermines working conditions and reduces the incentives to invest in best-practice technology labour productivity is falling – as will living standards in the coming years. The world is locked into an idiotic race-to-the-bottom. It is a curious period really. The hypocrisy of governments, aided and abetted by the right-wing think tanks, who claim they are cutting into public spending to reduce the drain on living standards of our children and grandchildren, is clear to see. What they are really doing is undermining the future prosperity of the next several generations at the same time that they push millions into unemployment and poverty now. Why are we so stupid that we tolerate this nonsense?
• Higher Education: Capitalism At Its Most Despicable - Paul Buchheit at Common Dreams: The state of higher-ed teaching in America: Years of study by trusting young scholars who end up with academic positions that pay as much as entry-level fast food jobs. Adjuncts made up less than 1/4 of instructional staff in 1969, but now make up over 3/4 of instructors. They make a median wage of about $2,700 per course, with little or no benefits.
• Central bankers and their irrational fear - Simon Wren-Lewis: A key feature of deficit fetishism is a concern about deficits in the short term. Politicians seem happy to take measures that cut deficits in the short term even if debt becomes higher in the longer term. Indeed the analysis presented by DeLong and Summers argues that hysteresis forces would not have to be that large before austerity would raise long run debt to GDP levels. We also know that deficit fetishism is specific to increases in debt caused by recessions: over the longer run if anything deficit bias implies rising rather than falling levels of government debt. So any form of fiscal stimulus that avoided an increase in debt in the short run but not in the long run would avoid deficit fetishism. That is what a money financed fiscal stimulus aka helicopter money aka People’s QE could do.
• What Clinton Got Wrong About Snowden - John Kiriakou, who knows a thing or two about whistleblowing, at OtherWords: I’m disappointed, frankly, that somebody running for president of the United States doesn’t know that the Whistleblower Protection Act exempts national security whistleblowers. There are no protections for you if you work for the CIA, NSA, or other federal intelligence agencies — or serve them as a contractor. You take a grave personal risk if you decide to report wrongdoing, and there’s nobody who can protect you.
• Corbyn in the Media - Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books: The party members who voted for Corbyn hadn’t suddenly thrown their toys out of the pram just because Miliband lost. This is not a story of the last five years, but the last twenty, and their disillusionment with New Labour is about a great deal more than the Iraq War. For them, Miliband was not ‘too left-wing’; on the contrary, he was a final attempt at compromise. And when it failed, they realised they had had enough. It was too difficult to go on knocking on doors, summoning the necessary conviction, working towards the slim possibility of victory in the hope of implementing a platform of ever-weakening amelioration of the worst effects of neoliberalism. They looked at the candidates on offer, and saw that they had nothing left to lose.
• On Corbyn and our collapsing orthodoxies - Matthew Richmond, openDemocracy: George Osborne’s supposed “pitch to Labour voters” at the same time as slashing the tax credits of the hard-working families he claims to be so fond of, was “clever politics”. The message is clear: it doesn’t matter that Osborne is pushing through an extreme policy that will make millions of working people dramatically poorer, the simple fact that he declares himself to be on the centre ground automatically makes it so. Or to put it another way, if you brazenly lie you deserve to be taken seriously. Those are the rules. Like it or lump it.
• Attacks on Sanders, Progressives Falsely Depict Obama As Lefty Failure as Opposed to Neoliberal Success - Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: In other words, any time anyone tries to present Obama as having failed to implement a “liberal” agenda because the right was too powerful is either an apologist or ignorant. Obama has achieved precisely what he intended to achieve, which was to implement center-right economic policies with tepid social justice measures to divert attention from how he was serving the interests of the 1% and even more so, the 0.1%. And the fact that his allies in Congress have in large measure been voted out of office, that Sanders is going from strength to strength despite his lack of big corporate support, and that the neoliberal diehard Clinton is being forced to feint to the left are signs that the political tectonic plates are shifting. Much more is possible now than was six years ago.
• Neo-liberal myths constrain our understanding of poverty - Bill Mitchell: A currency-issuing government can always do that and should net spend so that all the idle resources (particularly labour) are productively employed. The solution to poverty is not complex. It is about a lack of income. That is often due to unemployment and insufficient wages (working poor). By ensuring there are enough jobs for all – and maintaining that continuity across the private spending cycle by introducing a – Job Guarantee – a national government can use its fiscal capacity (driven by the fact it issues its own currency) to reduce poverty and income inequality while sustaining economic growth.
• Free College vs. Cost-benefit Thinking - Elizabeth Popp Berman at orgtheory.net: So I support the free college movement. But I’d like to see its champions stop saying it’s because we need to be globally competitive, or because it’s got a huge ROI. Instead, say it’s because our society will be stronger when more of us are better educated. Say that knowing higher education is an option, and an option you don’t have to mortgage your future for, will improve our quality of life. Say that colleges themselves will be better when they return to seeing students as students, and not as revenue streams.
• Union power and inequality - Florence Jaumotte and Carolina Osorio Buitron of the Research Department, IMF in VOX. Captain Obvious is uncredited: If our findings are interpreted as causal, higher unionisation and minimum wages can help reduce inequality.
• Eurozone crosses Rubicon as Portugal's anti-euro Left banned from power - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in The F**king Telegraph, of all places: S**t is f**ked up and bulls**t. End of history, my arse. Europe’s socialists face a dilemma. They are at last waking up to the unpleasant truth that monetary union is an authoritarian Right-wing enterprise that has slipped its democratic leash, yet if they act on this insight in any way they risk being prevented from taking power.
• Original Sin and Global Stagnation - Paul Krugman, NYT: […] emerging markets still suffer to some extent from original sin — underdeveloped capital markets and a tendency to borrow in foreign currency. This sin isn’t nearly as strong as it was 15 years ago, when Barry Eichengreen and Ricardo Haussman coined the term, but corporate dollar-denominated borrowing after 2008 brought it partially back. […] Oh, and a US interest rate hike, which would not just hit the US economy but also, via a stronger dollar, hit the emerging markets via balance sheets, would do a lot to make things even worse.
• Central Banks Are Not Agricultural Marketing Boards: Depression Economics, Inflation Economics and the Unsustainability of Friedmanism - Brad DeLong, Washington Center for Equitable Growth: Milton Friedman was very clear that economies could either have too much money (Inflation Economics) or too little money (Depression Economics)–and that a central bank was needed to try to hit the sweet spot. He hoped that hitting the sweet spot could be made into a somewhat automatic rule-controlled process, but he was wrong.
• I get what you get in ten years, in two days - Noah Smith: The usual economist case for income redistribution is based on utilitarianism; the idea is that $1000 matters more to a poor person than to a rich person. [Greg] Mankiw wants to ditch this idea in favor of a value system based on "just deserts".
• We need to stop Australia’s genetic heritage from being taken overseas - Steve Wylie, The Conversation: Oh, so much wrong in such a small article. Australia’s scientists should be mining Australia’s gene bank, and all Australians should benefit from the rewards of this intellectual property (IP). International collaboration is the lifeblood of scientific advancement, but so is competition and protecting IP. When Australia’s genetic heritage is lodged in other countries, we have lost control of our IP.
• Obfuscation: how leaving a trail of confusion can beat online surveillance - Julia Powles at The Guardian reviews Obfuscation: A User’s Guide for Privacy and Protest by Finn Brunton and Helen Nissenbaum: More than 30 colourful examples – instructive vignettes in their own right – are used to build the case. Roughly a third are analogue, and the images stick. […] Iconic movie scenes, like the switching briefcases in The Thomas Crown Affair, or the powerful “I am Spartacus” moment in Kubrick’s 1960 epic. The authors bring in orb-making spiders, sim-card shuffles, loyalty-card swap meets, “babble tapes” (a digital file played in the background of a conversation in order to obscure it) – all examples where the individual merges with the tribe; where false signals muddy the genuine; where noise and quick feet offer “weapons of the weak”.
• Secret source code pronounces you guilty as charged - David Kravets at Ars Technica: The results from a Pennsylvania company's TrueAllele DNA testing software have been used in roughly 200 criminal cases, from California to Florida, helping put murderers and rapists in prison. Criminal defense lawyers, however, want to know whether it's junk science. Defense attorneys have routinely asked, and have been denied, access to examine the software's 170,000 lines of source code in a bid to challenge the authenticity of its conclusions. The courts generally have agreed with Cybergenetics, the company behind TrueAllele, that an independent examination of the code is unwarranted, that the code is a proprietary trade secret, and disclosing it could destroy the company financially.
• Why An Open-Access Publishing Cooperative Can Work: A Proposal for the AAA’s Journal Portfolio - Alberto Corsín Jiménez, John Willinsky, Dominic Boyer, Giovanni da Col and Alex Golub in Cultural Anthropology: Will [American Anthropological Association (AAA)] publications spend yet another decade locked within a publisher website where only research libraries can afford to purchase them? Or can our scholarly work join the growing body of research that is publicly available and accessible as a public good? In this piece we propose a concrete, practical, and financially sustainable way that the AAA can make its publishing program open-access: a cooperative model of scholarly publishing. This tailor-made design will cost the AAA nothing, while giving the organization a chance to be at the forefront of global innovation in scholarly communication.
• What is a knowledge city? - Nicholas Gruen: We have before us an astonishing new set of technologies which are transforming our lives. Thinking of how we convert them into jobs is a little like welcoming the invention of printing by asking “How many printing jobs can we attract to our city/country”. See also this on how the public are still being ripped off by publishers, it being "hard not to conclude that South Africans will in future be paying far more for knowledge – and will have even less access to it."
• Marx's relevance today - Chris Dillow: Marx asked, and answered, a fundamental question: what is the point of economic life? For him, it was to increase real freedom and self-realization. Capitalism, he said, doesn't do this but instead alienates us.
• The Rise and Fall of For-Profit Schools - James Surowiecki, The New Yorker: Students at for-profit schools are able to borrow huge sums of money because the government does not take creditworthiness into account when making most student loans. The goal is noble: everyone should be able to go to college. The result, though, is that too many people end up with debts they cannot repay. Seen this way, the students at for-profit schools look a lot like the homeowners during the housing bubble. In both cases, powerful ideological forces pushed people to borrow (“Homeownership is the path to wealth”; “Education is the key to the future”). In both cases, credit was cheap and easy to come by. And in both cases the people pushing the loans (mortgage brokers and for-profit schools) didn’t have to worry about whether those loans were reasonable, since they got paid regardless.
• The British Tax Credits system is a sign of New Labour failure - Bill Mitchell: I consider that no worker should be paid below what is considered the lowest tolerable material standard of living just because some low wage-low productivity operator wants to produce in a country and make ‘cheap’ profits. I don’t consider that the private ‘market’ is an arbiter of the values that a society should aspire to or maintain. That is where I differ significantly from my profession. The employers always want the wages system to be totally deregulated so that the ‘market can work’ without fetters. This will apparently tell us what workers are ‘worth’. The problem is that the so-called ‘market” in its pure conceptual form is an amoral, ahistorical construct and cannot project the societal values that bind communities and peoples to higher order considerations. The minimum wage is a values-based concept and should not be determined by a market.
• Avoiding the Financial Resource Curse - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: There is something unsettling about watching the financial sector become a bigger and bigger part of what people do for a living. After all, finance is all about allocation of resources -- pushing asset prices toward their correct value so businesses can know what projects to invest in. But when a huge percent of a country’s effort and capital are put into finance, there are less and less resources to reallocate. We can’t all get rich trading houses and bonds back and forth.