This week, I have been mostly half-heartedly finishing another academic term, while reading:

• Joseph Stiglitz: “Deep-seatedly wrong” economic thinking is killing Greece - Lynn Parramore, Institute for New Economic Thinking: The common observation that the problem with Europe is economic union without political union is not strictly true. It's that economic union has been used to impose a kind of political union that would never have been accepted through a democratic process.
• The ‘flipped classroom’ is professional suicide - The never less than brilliant Jonathan Rees at the Daily Dot: "As Leslie Madsen-Brooks of Boise State University concluded after her school began capturing classroom lectures and posting them to iTunes: “In an age where people seem to think that education is just a matter of ‘delivering content’ that translates into mad workplace skillz, I’m uneasy about providing the university with any multimedia content that could be aggregated into a enormous-enrollment course taught by a grossly underpaid and underinsured Ph.D.”"
• The MOOC revolution that wasn’t - The Daily Dot have also snaffled the always-brilliant Audrey Watters: "Rather than education for all, MOOCs now merely promise education for employability. This new narrative, according to George Siemens, one of the originators of the MOOC concept, casts education as simply skills training—a far cry from President Lyndon Johnson’s description, 40 years ago, of higher education as “a way to deeper personal fulfillment, greater personal productivity, and increased personal reward.”"
• Two real-life accounts of the effect of benefits sanctions - Peter Dwyer at the Conversation: Irritable Duncan Syndrome is caught out making up qualitative evidence in favour of punitive anti-welfare. Meanwhile non-fictional people suffer.
• Email from a Married, Female Ashley Madison User - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept points out that it's complicated: "The private lives and sexual choices of fully formed adults are usually very complicated and thus impossible to understand — and certainly impossible to judge — without wallowing around in the most intimate details, none of which are any of your business. That’s a very good reason not to try to sit in judgment and condemn from afar."
• DIY Tractor Repair Runs Afoul Of Copyright Law - Laura Sydell, NPR's All Things Considered: "[…] the little computer screen lets him know when something is wrong. Unfortunately, Alford isn't allowed to fix it. John Deere has a digital lock on the software that runs his tractor. And it won't give him the key. If something goes wrong with one of his tractors Alford has to take it to an authorized John Deere dealer — the closest one is about 40 miles away — or a John Deere rep has to come visit him."
• Data is not an asset, it’s a liability - Marko Karppinen at something called Richie that makes "app components": "If you work in software development, sooner or later you learn that code is a liability — all things being equal, the less code you have, the better off you are." Yup. "You can’t expect the value of data to just appear out of thin air. Data isn’t fissile material. It doesn’t spontaneously reach critical mass and start producing insights." But it produces graphs. Stupid people love graphs. Stupid people in positions of authority really love graphs. I don't think you fully understand the app maker's job. It's not your business to produce the emperor's new clothes; it's your job to praise them.
• Writing, Typing, and Economics - JK Galbraith the Elder, writing in 1978 for the Atlantic: "[…] because the real world is so funny, there is almost nothing you can do, short of labeling a joke a joke, to keep people from taking it seriously. A few years ago in Harper's I invented the theory that socialism in our time was the result of our dangerous addiction to team sports. The ethic of the team is all wrong for free enterprise. The code words are cooperation; team spirit; accept leadership; the coach is always right. Authoritarianism is sanctified; the individualist is a poor team player, a menace. All this our vulnerable adolescents learn. I announced the formation of an Organization to combat this deadly trend and to promote boxing and track instead. I called it the C.I.A. — Congress for Individualist Athletics. Hundreds wrote in to Harper's asking to join."
• The UK Hits Moral Rock Bottom - Craig Murray: "On the day that it is revealed that 2,380 people in three years died within 14 days of being declared fit to work by an ATOS assessment and having benefit stopped, we also have 45 of the most appalling members of the political class elevated to trough it for life in the House of Lords, at a possible cost to the taxpayer of 67,500 pounds per week in attendance allowances alone."
• The Way GCHQ Obliterated The Guardian’s Laptops May Have Revealed More Than It Intended - Jenna McLaughlin at the Intercept: "The track pad controller, they said, can hold up to 2 megabits of memory. All the different “chips” in your computer — from the part that controls the device’s power to the chips in the keyboard — also have the capacity to store information, like passwords and keys to other data, which can be uploaded through firmware updates. According to the public documents from other members of Five Eyes, it is incredibly difficult to completely sanitize a device of all its content."
• Tortured in Guantánamo, Uncharged Prisoner Details a US-Created Hell - excerpt from Guantanamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi: '"What terrorist organizations are you part of?" "None!" I replied. He put back the bag on my head and started a long discourse of humiliation, cursing, lies, and threats. I don't really remember it all, nor am I ready to sift in my memory for such bullshit. I was so tired and hurt, and tried to sit but he forced me back. I cried from the pain. Yes, a man my age cried silently. I just couldn't bear the agony.'
• I don’t teach critical thinking, I teach the material - Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net: "Obtaining truth is hard and there is no magical form of thinking called “critical thinking” that can be separated from specific domains. Aside from a very simple general rules of thumb, such as “don’t be emotional in arguing” or “show my your evidence,” the best way to be improve your thinking is to learn from those who have spent a lifetime actually trying to figure out specific problems." An ontological excision long overdue.
• Homes for the homeless - Suzie Cagle in Aeon: "The Housing First philosophy was first piloted in Los Angeles in 1988 by the social worker Tanya Tull, and later tested and codified by the psychiatrist Sam Tsemberis of New York University. It is predicated on a radical and deeply un-American notion that housing is a right. Instead of first demanding that they get jobs and enroll in treatment programmes, or that they live in a shelter before they can apply for their own apartments, government and aid groups simply give the homeless homes."
• All our needs are social - Branko Milanovic: " We are social beings. It was stated by Adam Smith very nicely that our needs vary in function of what we consider to be socially acceptable. In a much quoted passage, Smith contrasts a man living in a relatively poor society who is content with a roughly-hewn shirt and another one, living in a richer society, who would be ashamed to be seen in public without a linen shirt. Smith was drawing on his own experience, having observed how what is socially acceptable, i.e., what are our “needs”, has changed in his own lifetime as England and Scotland had become richer. "
• The case for realism in the social realm - Daniel Little: "In short, the social sciences do not possess the remarkable coherence and predictive accuracy of physics, so confidence in realism is not grounded in the high level of success of the enterprise. Sociology is not like physics. But equally, the concepts of the social sciences are not "hypothetical constructs" that depend upon their role in a developed theoretical system for application. It is therefore possible to be piecemeal realists. Again, sociology is not like physics." But: …
• Live from Yellowstone Lake Lodge: WTF!? - Brad DeLong: "But if you ask physicists whether the entities of Einstein's theory are really there, they will say: "Of course not: Those entities do not satisfy the quantum principle.[…]" There is something there. But just because your theory is good does not mean that the entities in your theory are "really there", whatever that might mean..." Which gets back to Chomsky's point that no scientist since Aristotle has tried to "explain" anything. We've been modeling things, with varying degrees of fidelity.
• 
  - Clay Bennett in Truthdig
• Whitewashing the IMF’s Destructive Role in Greece - Michael Hudson in CounterPunch: "The tragic Greek experience should stand as a warning of the need to withdraw from the rules that have turned the eurozone into an economic dead zone, and the IMF and Troika into brutal debt collectors for European, U.S. and British banks and bondholders. This is not a story that the mainstream press is happy to popularize."
• SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF THE BODY: The nipple - Todd Beer: "The social construction of the body may be hard for some students to understand because so much of the body seems to be tied to biology. How we treat nipples depending on who’s body they are attached to demonstrates the power of society." Listen to Beer. Free the nipple; it rhymes with tipple.

This week, I have been alternately scrambling about in a mad panic and hiding under a rock in a state of denial. While there, I was mostly reading:

• Ambiguity aversion in politics - Chris Dillow: "There's a link between David Cameron's holiday snaps and the moral panic about migrants. The link is ambiguity aversion."
• The Philosopher of Surveillance. What Happens When a Failed Writer Becomes a Loyal Spy? - Peter Maass at The Intercept: "It is rare for mid-level experts — the ones conducting the actual surveillance — to frankly explain what they do and why. And in this case, the candid confessions come from the NSA’s own surveillance philosopher. The columns answer a sociological curiosity: How does working at an intelligence agency turn a privacy hawk into a prophet of eavesdropping?"
• The distribution of pay and the willingness to quit among U.S. workers - Nick Bunker, at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth: "Specifically, the authors show that the probability of a worker quitting is quite sensitive to changes in the average wages of their peer coworkers. In fact, workers seem to be much more sensitive to peer wages inside the firm than outside the firm. And more specifically, workers who end up earning less than their peers are more likely to quit."
• Strategic Quantitative Easing – public money for public benefit - Josh Ryan-Collins, New Economics Foundation: "Debate was sparked last week by Labour Party leadership candidate Jeremy Corbyn’s proposals for a ‘people’s quantitative easing’, where the Bank of England would create money to invest in large scale infrastructure and public projects like housing, energy, and transport." So outrageously sensible it just might work.
• The forgotten grassroots voices of Greece - Carl Packman, openDemocracy: "[The Syriza] government was formed promising a programme of household debt restructuring that would have, in turn, allowed normal Greek workers and families a decent standard of living which didn’t include large chunks of their eroding wage packet spent on debt repayments. This move would create the grounds on which more Greeks become solvent, which in turn brings more consumer spending, creating jobs, bringing in more tax revenue which can be used to invest in the kind of skilled jobs the recovery relies on – and not a continuation of the low-skilled employment that reverses this recovery, as shown by the [General Confederation of Greek Workers] representatives."
• Locking the Web Open: A Call for a Distributed Web - Brewster Kahle: Nobody could accuse Brewster of thinking small. I have one quibble: It's not at all clear that people need a money incentive to publish online. Indeed the majority currently pay for the privilege of doing so with their privacy. It's leaving commercialisation out of the platform that made the Web capable of beating proprietary online networks.
• Competitiveness and Class Warfare - Paul Krugman, NYT: "International competition is a mostly bogus notion; class warfare is very, very real."
• What Happens When You Leave Nazi Quotes On Tabloid News Stories? The Readers Love it - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "In an experiment that bodes poorly for the future of the Australian media, a pair of satirists teamed up to see what would happen if they posted actual quotes from Nazi leaders in the comments section of the Daily Mail Online, the British news outlet which recently launched in Australia."
• The Future of Work: Why Wages Aren't Keeping Up - Robert Solow at Pacific Standard: "It is essential to understand that what we measure as wages and profits both contain an element of rent. The purpose of the Treaty of Detroit was to freeze that allocation. What happens to it now is not so much a matter of economic law. It depends on bargaining power, business attitudes and practices, social norms and public opinion."
• Why I Support Corbyn For UK Labour Leader - Steve Keen in Forbes: "Critical observers like Corbyn have seen that [mainstream economic] advice doesn’t work: the economy has grown more slowly and been less stable because of these policies. So he expresses skepticism about them, which is justified by experience. But the general public and politicians, who have fallen for the extreme version of the mainstream, think this makes him “economically illiterate”. This is the invidious situation in which Corbyn finds himself. I don’t know whether Corbyn supports the alternative positive view of government deficits put forward by non-mainstream economists like myself, Bill Mitchell and Bernie Sanders’s advisor Stephanie Kelton. But I know that he rejects the mainstream view in favor of government surpluses. That’s enough for me to support him as leader over any of the other candidates."
• China’s Long Minsky Moment - John Cassidy, The New Yorker: "[…] what we are observing in China is the unusually elongated aftermath of a “Minsky moment”—that dreaded moment, named after the late post-Keynesian economist, when euphoria is replaced by pessimism, asset prices start to plummet, lenders discover that their creditors can’t replay their loans, and an economic downturn begins. Or, as Deng Xioping might have put it, we have a Minsky moment with Chinese characteristics."
• As Anti-Austerity Candidate Surges, 'Corbynomics' Catches Fire in UK - Deidre Fulton, CommonDreams: Nothing new in this article; I'm just reveling in it.
• 
• Will you commit class suicide with me? - Rolf Straubhaar, openDemocracy:
  
• The Dutch “basic income” experiment is expanding across multiple cities - Maria Sanchez Diez, Quartz: "Detractors say that such schemes are expensive and harmful to the economy, since they don’t stimulate people’s initiative to work. And some complain that these programs just feel unfair." To which one should respond, define "work"; and sorry, but negative solidarity (my life is miserable and pointless, so yours should be, too) isn't a valid argument.
• Facebook Is Diving Into the Presidential Race. Yes, You Should Be Worried - Thor Benson, Truthdig: "This is a concern, Calabrese said, because it could completely change the playing field in the political arena. If Facebook knows you’re a liberal woman in Oregon who wants to protect the environment, it can tailor ads to make a politician appear to be in line with your ideals, even if that isn’t entirely the case. […] Say, for example, that good ol’ Donald Trump has said he’s interested in protecting a certain wildlife refuge (for whatever reason), but overall he’s not a huge fan of maintaining environmental standards and regulations. Facebook could just focus on the one time he said something you might agree with and show you that information."
• R-E-S-P-E-C-T - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Rand Paul is decrying the irresponsibility of U.S. fiscal management; why, we haven’t been debt-free since 1835. Clearly, disaster looms, and has been looming for 180 years. But that’s nothing: Britain hasn’t been debt-free since at least 1692."
• With hundreds of thousands of new supporters, Labour is on the verge of something big – what a complete disaster! - Mark Steel at the Independent: "The fervour around Jeremy Corbyn is extraordinary, but it wouldn’t be fair to suggest he’s the only Labour politician who can bring large crowds on to the streets to greet him. Tony Blair is just as capable. In his case the crowds are there to scream that he should be arrested for war crimes and to throw things at him, but that’s being pernickety; he can certainly draw an audience."
• Guest Contribution: “Recent Experience with Monetary Sovereignty” - Helen Popper of SCU (Santa Clara, not Southern Cross) at Econbrowser: "Economists aside, heated political controversy in many countries – including Argentina, Greece, Iceland, and the United Kingdom – suggest that people on the street believe monetary sovereignty is real and that it’s relevant. Are they wrong?" tl;dr: No.
• Inverting the rhetoric of inequality - Chris Dillow: "In fact the biggest risk-bearers are often not bosses at all, but workers. It is they who invest all or most of their biggest asset (their human capital) into a single venture. […] Inequalities are legitimated in part by an ideology which presents bosses as heroic, forward-looking wealth-creators and their opponents as dreamers and ideologues. This turns the truth on its head." Faith (magical and misguided) in human capital theory is not necessary to extract the salient point: real risk falls on the powerless. Senior managers with golden parachutes and the members of multiple boards can hedge their bets.
• Even if the police don’t kill me, a lifetime of preparing for them to just might - Ezekiel Kweku, Pacific Standard: "You are not like the other children. You can’t get into the same juvenile mischief your white friends get into. You represent something more than yourself and your family when you are outside this house. You will have to be twice as good as other people to be as successful as them. Remember that the wind is against you, remember that you will never be allowed to be ordinary, and so you can never allow yourself to be ordinary."
• Most Evil Op-Ed Ever? Writer Wishes For Katrina-like Storm to Hit Chicago - Adam Johnson, AlterNet: "These op-eds aren't just whimsical thought experiments. They're trial balloons that lay the groundwork for later radicalism. They not only normalize the exploitation of tragedy as a virtue, they dehumanize those disenfranchised by these attempts to do so. If they seem intuitively vulgar it's because they are. They attempt to condition us to this type of sociopathic corporate thinking and to begin seeing our fellow citizens not as individuals, not as human beings, but as speed bumps getting in the way of 'progress.'"
• What Jeremy Corbyn supporters can learn from Margaret Thatcher - Ian Sinclair, openDemocracy: "There is, in short, no unchanging historical or political forces, or logical reason, why Corbyn couldn’t be prime minister." Apart from the clear fact that he's an extremist because he's not in favour of nuking people, a stance that Polly Toynbee criticises as recklessly favouring reality over symbolism: "I imagine, but I don’t know, that the potential leaders would not choose to spend tens of billions on these four submarines. But Labour is pledged to them, because any hint of unilateralism brands the party as unelectably reckless. I can argue against Trident, but Labour in opposition dare not." Clearly, unilateralism is electoral suicide. Having the courage to say "You might as well vote for the other fellow", which worked so well for Milliband, is the mark of a serious politician.
• Algorithms are producing profiles of you. What do they say? You probably don’t have the right to know - Frank Pasquale, Aeon: "Limits on data collection will frustrate big-data mavens. The CEO of ZestFinance has proudly stated that ‘all data is credit data’ – that is, predictive analytics can take virtually any scrap of information about a person, analyse whether it corresponds to a characteristic of known-to-be-creditworthy people, and extrapolate accordingly. Such data might include sexual orientation or political views."
• For sale in Spanish 'paradise': entire villages. Cheap. - Sara Miller Llana at CSMonitor.com: "“This is as near as paradise as I can think of,” says Mark Adkinson, who founded the Galician Country Homes real estate firm and has recently begun marketing abandoned villages. It would be the stuff of dreams were it not also the symptom of a problem clouding Galicia's future: The area is essentially dying. The Galician statistics institute warned recently that this region of northwest Spain could lose 1 million residents in the next 35 years, or roughly a third of its population."
• Why Bernie Sanders Should Add a Job Guarantee to His Policy Agenda - Pavlina R. Tcherneva at NEP: I think we (meaning the US and every other country, too) need both a Job Guarantee and Universal Basic Income, the latter functioning as a flat-rate (and therefore progressive) tax credit that puts an admittedly very approximate value on non-labour-market work. Though JG is the low-hanging fruit, politically ("What? You would prefer to see people collecting the dole and not working?").
• Sensible is the new extreme: Jeremy Corbyn, And The Terrifying Prospect Of Policies The Punters Actually Like - Jeff Sparrow in New Matilda and Why Republicans Vote for Bernie - Thom Hartmann at Truthout
• Why Shouldn't Copyright Be Infinite? - Eric Crampton, guestblogging at the EFF: "Australia National University’s Dr. George Barker suggested that New Zealand could do well by strengthening its copyright legislation. He warned against the fair dealing exceptions that have crept into the law and asked, “Why not have copyright law like property law—i.e. it lasts forever?”"

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Open the Music Industry’s Black Box - (That) David Byrne, in the New York Times: I'm a dirty hippie who believes that paywalling art is, all else being equal, a bad idea. Byrne doesn't seem to agree with me on that, but is rightly perturbed that the kind of people who used to justify their income by the production and movement of plastic discs, still appear to be making way more money than the artists who no longer need the plastic discs.
• Say goodbye to the weirdest border dispute in the world - Sam Taylor at WaPo: I still maintain that "border protection" is a meaningless occupation—you can neither protect nor damage an imaginary line—but this example verges on the justifiable. Which only adds to the argument that if your borders happen also to be oceans, you should STFU.
• This Hacker’s Tiny Device Unlocks Cars And Opens Garages - Andy Greenberg, Wired: "'My own car is fully susceptible to this attack. I don’t think that’s right when we know this is solvable.'"
• Oracle security chief to customers: Stop checking our code for vulnerabilities - Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica: And we'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for you meddling hackers!
• That’s Not Funny! Today’s college students can’t seem to take a joke - Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic: "I saw ample evidence of the repressive atmosphere that Rock and Seinfeld described, as well as another, not unrelated factor: the infantilization of the American undergraduate, and this character’s evolving status in the world of higher learning—less a student than a consumer, someone whose whims and affectations (political, sexual, pseudo-intellectual) must be constantly supported and championed. To understand this change, it helps to think of college not as an institution of scholarly pursuit but as the all-inclusive resort that it has in recent years become—and then to think of the undergraduate who drops out or transfers as an early checkout. Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex."
• Supervenience, isomers, and social isomers - Daniel Little: "Significantly, this example appears to have direct implications for the relation between social facts and individual actors. If we consider the possibility of "social isomers" -- social structures consisting of exactly similar actors but different histories and different configurations and causal properties in the present -- then we also have a refutation of the idea that social facts supervene upon the actors of which they are constituted."
• Why Economists Have Trouble With Bubbles - Noah Smith at Bloomberg View: "But there has always been one big problem with rational expectations -- it might just not be right. People really might make systematic mistakes in the way they predict the workings of the economy. If economists insist on using an incorrect assumption as the core of their models, it will force them into ever more Byzantine theoretical contortions, as the models repeatedly fail to fit the facts."
• In the Age of Trump, Will Democrats Sell Out More, Or Less? - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: "[…] framing every single decision solely in terms of its utility in beating the Republicans leads to absurdities. Not every situation is a ballot with Ralph Nader on it. The Democrats insisted they had to support the Iraq War in order to compete with Bush, but they ended up not competing with Bush anyway and supporting a crappy war that no sane person believed in. All it won Democratic voters in the end was a faster trip into Iraq, and the honor of having supported the war at the ballot box."
• Third Bailout and the Third Punic War - John Weeks, guestblogging at TripleCrisis: "In pursuit of setting “the EU’s political agenda,” [president of the European Council, Donald] Tusk cemented his right-wing credentials by stating publicly that “I am really afraid of this ideological or political contagion, not financial contagion, of this Greek crisis.” Lest anyone miss his point, the former Polish prime minister went on to say that his concern was caused by the “radical leftist illusion that you can build some alternative” to the EU’s neoliberal economic model."
• The Down Under book and film remind us our copyright law’s still unfair for artists - Nicolas Suzor and Rachel Choi from QUT in The Conversation: "Greg Ham’s flute riff is exactly the kind of tribute that imposes no costs on the original creator. Both the documentary and the book point out that, in fact, this is not just harmless copying of copyright expression – it’s exactly the kind of creativity that Australian copyright law should encourage."
• The Politics of Economics and ‘Very Serious People’ - Mark Thoma in the Fiscal Times: Mark reflects on Henry's article. I find his conclusion that "when the economics and politics are at odds, as they often are on issues such as free trade and immigration, the economics must prevail" unsatisfyingly utilitarian. Moral, and consequently political, considerations must precede any determination of desirable economic outcomes.
• 12 Good and Bad Parts of Online Education - Mark Thoma again: I agree that internal v. online education is an apples and oranges comparison. Which is why the latter shouldn't be used as a blanket cut-price alternative to the former. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with online education, provided the delivery mode suits the subject matter.
• Neoliberal realpolitik: choking others in our name - Markha Valenta, openDemocracy: "In this way, the deaths of the 20,000 migrants who have perished on Europe’s iron doorstep in the face of ever more stringent surveillance, policing, and legislation – barbed wire fences slicing feet, hands, grazing any bit of brown skin, border guards beating those they catch; whole seas and generations of fish fed on their drowned bodies; roads stained by their truck-crushed carcasses – all these dead are said to have only themselves to blame."
• New Labour is 'unelectable' - Amit Singh at openDemocracy: "It is Jeremy Corbyn, not the other candidates, who is targeting the majority of voters who shunned the Tories (and also shunned Labour). This is why he is becoming so popular, because an anti-austerity, social justice message does have scope. […] Just look at the shadow cabinet who all look so quintessentially Blair, and so similar to their Tory opponents. They went to the same sort of schools, the same sort of universities and worked the same sort of corporate jobs before becoming politicians. People don't want New Labour, that's abundantly clear. The only people who want New Labour are Labour."
• Yanis Varoufakis is being pilloried for doing what had to be done - Philippe Legrain at the Guardian: I have two observations: a) In what way was Varoufakis "outspoken" during his tenure as finance minister? This is a man who presumably had to pack his tongue in ice every evening after a long day biting it. And b) Tax(/council rate) credits also seem to be a jolly sensible solution to less extreme forms of fiscal imbalance, such as that suffered by municipal councils, as well as encouraging local economic development.
• We took a tour of the abandoned college campuses of Second Life - Patrick Hogan in some sort of clickbaity thing called Fusion: I daresay I could find you a clutch of administrators (yes, that is the collective noun) at Aussie Swazi University still prepared to put money (not their own, of course) on our inevitable Second Life future. Some of them have even caught on to this up and coming thing called MOOCs. What if you could do a MOOC in Second Life? Just imagine yourself in this compellingly immersive virtual environment that's almost exactly like sitting alone at home in front of the computer, in your underpants, doing an online multiple choice quiz!
• Dentists and Skin in the Game - Paul Krugman, NYT: "As it turns out, many fewer people have dental insurance than have general medical insurance; even where there is insurance, it typically leaves a lot of skin in the game. But dental costs have risen just as fast as overall health spending, and it may be that the reduced role of insurers actually raises those costs."
• A Most Peculiar Friendship - Yanis Varoufakis: "Tories like Lord Lamont and lefties of my sort may disagree strongly on society’s ends. But we agree that rules and markets are means to social ends that can only be determined by a sovereign people through a Parliament in which that sovereignty is vested."
• The Defeat of Europe – my piece in Le Monde Diplomatique - Yanis Varoufakis: "No European people should ever again be put in a position of negotiating in fear. For that to happen, Europeans must not fear to negotiate a European New Deal that restores the dream of shared prosperity within a democratic polity. If we fail, barbarism will rise up from within. For a continent that has generated the best and the worst humans are capable of, this ought to be a sobering thought."
• The socialist objective - John Quiggin: "So, it’s pretty clear that removing the socialist objective is not a matter of moving away from a dogmatic commitment to public ownership. Rather, it means abandoning any notion that Labor aspires to change society for the better, or that it has any fundamental disagreement with market liberals."
• Bailout Money Goes to Greece, Only to Flow Out Again - Jack Ewing and Liz Alderman: "Since 2010, Greece has received €227 billion from other eurozone countries and the I.M.F. Of that, €48.2 billion went to replenish the capital of Greek banks, according to MacroPolis, an analytics firm based in Athens. More than €120 billion went to pay debt and interest, and around €35 billion went to commercial banks that had taken losses on Greek debt."
• Every club should be like Labour – you can’t join as a new member unless you’re already a member - Mark Steel at the Independent (via Simon Wren-Lewis): "Because the most important job for any political leader, as we’re told every day, is to 'stay in the centre ground'. You could argue a true leader tries to change the centre ground, but that’s romantic nonsense. So a sensible Labour leader in the year 1500 would have said: 'It’s all very well Jeremy Corbyn promising to stop burning witches, but that will lose us the election by abandoning the centre ground.'"
• In conversation with El Pais (Claudi Pérez), the complete (long) transcript - Yanis Varoufakis: Q: "I think that is a uncontroversial: your ideas about austerity and debt relief, everybody says you are right." A: "If you were talking to me in January it would not have been so. The only reason why now this is not controversial anymore is because we struggled for six months. For those who say to me we failed, these six months were in vain, I say “No we did not fail”. Now we have a debate in Europe which it’s not just about Greece, it’s about the continent. A debate we would have not had otherwise."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Euro MOA+MOE plus Drachma MOE - Nick Rowe, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "Suppose your country (call it 'Greece') is in recession, because there is an excess demand for money (call it 'Euros'). And suppose that the Euro is both Medium of Account (prices are quoted in Euros) and Medium of Exchange (all other goods are bought and sold for Euros). Now suppose your government introduces a new currency (call it 'Drachmas'). […]"
• Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties Noam Scheiber: "'In the past, firms overstaffed and offered workers stable hours,' said Susan N. Houseman, a labor economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 'All of these new staffing models mean shifting risk onto workers, making work less secure.'"
• IMF: Most misleading sentence ever? - Mean Squared Errors: "In summary, when the IMF writes about the the failure to implement the program as assumed, this is the sort of thing is has in mind: the "failure" of the Greek government to find anyone willing to pay €11.5 billion for a stake in banks that require daily injections of liquidity from the ECB simply to keep the cash machines full. "
• Killing the European Project - Paul Krugman, NYT: "In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line."
• The problem of Greece is not only a tragedy. It is a lie. - John Pilger: "Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as "liberal" or even "left", Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, "schooled in postmodernism", as Alex Lantier wrote."
• The 9 charts that show the 'left-wing' policies of Jeremy Corbyn the public actually agrees with - Matt Dathan and Jon Stone at the Independent: "Tony Blair has described some of Mr Corbyn's policies as “old-fashioned" but it turns out the public agree with a lot of them."
• Tomgram: Tim Weiner, The Nixon Legacy - Tom Englehardt introduces an excerpt from Weiner's One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon: "[…] Richard Nixon was never at peace. A darker spirit animated him -- malevolent and violent, driven by anger and an insatiable appetite for revenge. At his worst he stood on the brink of madness. He thought the world was against him. He saw enemies everywhere. His greatness became an arrogant grandeur."
• On the Euro Summit’s Statement on Greece: First thoughts - Yanis Varoufakis: "The recent Euro Summit is indeed nothing short of the culmination of a coup. In 1967 it was the tanks that foreign powers used to end Greek democracy. In my interview with Philip Adams, on ABC Radio National’s LNL, I claimed that in 2015 another coup was staged by foreign powers using, instead of tanks, Greece’s banks. Perhaps the main economic difference is that, whereas in 1967 Greece’s public property was not targeted, in 2015 the powers behind the coup demanded the handing over of all remaining public assets, so that they would be put into the servicing of our un-payble, unsustainable debt."
• Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece - Harry Lambert - New Statesman: "By resigning and not signing a deal he abhorred, he has kept both his conscience free and his reputation intact. His country remains locked in a trap he spent years opposing and months fighting, but he has escaped."
• Roach Motel Economics - Paul Krugman at the New York Times: "So we have learned that the euro is a Roach Motel — once you go in, you can never get out. And once inside you are at the mercy of those who can pull your financing and crash your banking system unless you toe the line."
• [Australian Federal Police] using hacking software from group aiding human rights abusing nations - Murray Hunter at IA: Because it's there.
• Yanis Varoufakis Hits Australian Radio To Denounce Greek Bailout Deal As 'New Versailles' - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "It’s got nothing to do with putting Greece back on the rails towards recovery. This is a new Versailles treaty which is haunting Europe again – and the Prime Minister knows it. The Prime Minister knows he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t."
• In defence of welfare - Chris Dillow: "For one thing, welfare acts as a form of automatic stabilizer; higher welfare spending in bad times helps to support aggregate demand and so moderates recessions. […] And it protects us all. Benefits aren't so much a payment to claimants as a payment through claimants. They are spent at Primark and Lidl, and so support employment there. The distinction between welfare and work is therefore a false one; welfare helps to create jobs."
• Greece and Trust - Simon Wren-Lewis: "The narrative about failing to deliver is just an attempt to disguise the fact that the Troika has largely run the Greek economy for the last five years and is therefore responsible for the results."
• Perpetual war creates endless consequences - Norman Solomon at Al Jazeera America: "While the automation of Uncle Sam’s killing-at-a-distance has sharply reduced American casualties, it has increasingly rendered the U.S. war path as the main avenue for pursuing its goals. And the nation’s top leaders, as well as the military contractors that profit from this tendency, appear to like it that way."
• Kid Stuff - Molly Knefel, the New Inquiry: "The very important end-of-year test featured in the little girl’s play is used to hold other kids back, fire their teachers, and close their schools. The test is written not for them to succeed, but for them to fail."
• On Paleo and Faith in Government - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute: "What strikes me about this argument is that the Republicans have no less faith [than Democrats] in the power of government. They have faith that the government can privatize social insurance in a way that won’t involve weaker security and higher costs. They have faith that if the government gives employers wage subsidies for poorer workers, employers won’t simply pocket them in wage bargaining. They have faith, against evidence, that the government having no taxes on capital will cause a boom in private investment. They have faith that the government cutting taxes will more than make up the lost revenue. Their faith leads them to conflate building a robust civil society and economic security with laissez-faire economics."
• Neoliberal moralism and the fiction of Europe: a postcolonial perspective - Sadia Abbas, openDemocracy: "Sometimes the virulence of the German response seems to suggest that the Germans cannot forgive actually existing Greeks for being inconveniently and insistently who they are, given the importance of ancient Greece to the German intellectual imagination. At the risk of being florid, it's inconvenient for that imagination that Greeks are not just broken statues, stripped of paint, in the world's museums. "
• The true Greek tragedy - James Meadway at the NEF blog: "The euro’s flaws have been known from the start. In a stunningly prescient essay, written in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty that paved the way for the single currency neared ratification, economist Wynn Godley predicted the outlines of the present crisis for Greece: “If a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation.” Without exit, this now looks like the future."
• Dr Schäuble’s Plan for Europe: Do Europeans approve? – English version of my article in Die Zeit: "The euro crisis has expanded this lacuna at the centre of Europe hideously. An informal body, the Eurogroup, that keeps no minutes, abides by no written rules, and is answerable to precisely no one, is running the world’s largest macro-economy, with a Central Bank struggling to stay within vague rules that it creates as it goes along, and no body politic to provide the necessary bedrock of political legitimacy on which fiscal and monetary decisions may rest."
• Are We Seeing the End of Homeopathy? - Steven Novella: "There is even a possibility that the FDA will decide to do their actual job – require testing of homeopathic products to demonstrate efficacy before allowing them on the market. If they do this simple and obvious thing, the homeopathic industry in the US will vanish over night, because there is no evidence to support any homeopathic product for any indication. They will have to endure the outrage of quacks, charlatans, and the deluded, but hey, that’s their job. Suck it up."
• Oprah Winfrey: one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers: "Nothing captures this ensemble of ideological practices better than O Magazine, whose aim is to 'help women see every experience and challenge as an opportunity to grow and discover their best self. To convince women that the real goal is becoming more of who they really are. To embrace their life.' O Magazine implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, identifies a range of problems in neoliberal capitalism and suggests ways for readers to adapt themselves to mitigate or overcome these problems. […] We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects."
• Greece, Europe, and the United States - Jamie Galbraith in Harpers: "SYRIZA was not some Greek fluke; it was a direct consequence of European policy failure. A coalition of ex-Communists, unionists, Greens, and college professors does not rise to power anywhere except in desperate times. That SYRIZA did rise, overshadowing the Greek Nazis in the Golden Dawn party, was, in its way, a democratic miracle. SYRIZA’s destruction will now lead to a reassessment, everywhere on the continent, of the 'European project.'"
• The Beer IneQuality Index - Frances Wooley: Producers operating in high-regulation, high-unionisation environments must compete on quality rather than price. So laissez-faire means crappy beer.
• Dominique Strauss Kahn, addressing “German friends” - via Yanis Varoufakis: "We are expending all our energies on infighting and running the risk of triggering a break-up. This is where we are. A eurozone, in which you, my German friends, would lay down your law with a few Baltic and Nordic states in tow, is unacceptable for all the the rest."
• Between Free Speech and Bureaucracy: Anarchist Political Theory and a Way Forward for Reddit - David Banks at the Society Pages: "At the very least come up with some sort of aspirational progressive vision of what kind of community you want to have and persuade others that they should work to achieve it. This sort of move is the biggest departure that anarchist political theory takes from mainstream liberalism: that communities can agree on the features of a future utopia and govern in the present as if you are already free to live that future utopia. Organizing humans with blanket laws forces you to explain the obvious, namely that hateful people suck and should be persuaded to act otherwise if they wish to remain part of a community that is meaningful to them."