This week, I have been mostly reading:

• PPE for the people - Joel Lazarus and Neil Howard at openDemocracy: "Our alternative is called – wait for it – PPE, or “People’s Political Economy.” In the summer of 2012 we and two other Oxford-based academics/activists came together to set up their own response to this situation. We agreed to establish a political economy education project to enable Oxford communities to learn about and respond to the crisis. At its heart, our PPE is based on a simple but powerful democratic premise: that all people have the right and the ability to understand the world for themselves, individually and collectively."
• Resilience and ‘counter-resilience’ - Kevin Harris at the Neighbourhoods Blog: "if we use the term, there’s a risk of doing so in collusion with forces and ideologies that seek to embed ‘resilience’ within the status quo. This in turn […] effectively undermines other forms of resilience."
• Publisher pushback puts open access in peril - Virginia Barbour in the Conversation: "Elsevier’s new policy is a substantial tightening of its rules around Green OA. It states that, if no APC is paid, the author’s accepted version of the article cannot be made publicly available via their institution’s repository until after an embargo period, which ranges from six months to four years. In addition, the license required is the most restrictive possible, in that it prohibits commercial reuse, or use of excerpts of the work."
• Myth of the Garbage Patch - Maya Weeks, the New Enquiry: "According to Jeffrey Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, after World War II resin makers “mounted a major educational effort to accommodate the consumer to new, previously unknown plastics. People neither naturally gravitated to the stuff, nor did they instinctively throw it away, so the industry also had to insulate consumers to plastic’s disposability.” It’s no coincidence that the escalation of the abovementioned effects–the rise in hungry whales, shark attacks, dying coral, anoxic zones and so on and so forth–have coincided with quadrupled plastics production since the massive neoliberal deregulation of the 1980s."
• Income Inequalities in Perspective - Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Vladimir Popov for the ILO: All the graphs you'll need for the rest of this year's arguments over Piketty.
• Trade and Trust - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Instead of addressing real concerns, however, the Obama administration has been dismissive, trying to portray skeptics as uninformed hacks who don’t understand the virtues of trade. But they’re not: the skeptics have on balance been more right than wrong about issues like dispute settlement, and the only really hackish economics I’ve seen in this debate is coming from supporters of the trade pact."
• Sharing information on student protests - Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber: "Students and staff who are occupying and protesting: share information!"
• A Fascinating Minimum-Wage Experiment Is About to Unfold - John Cassidy at the New Yorker: "An important question, from a policy-analysis perspective, is how the new wage laws will affect employment levels in the cities that have introduced them. It is now almost twenty-five years since the labor economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger, who were then both at Princeton, published a famous study challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that raises in the minimum wage inevitably lead to declines in hiring, particularly among teen-agers."
• The University of the Spectacle - James Compton, The Public Intellectuals Project: "The University of the Spectacle inverts the academy’s core values. Students and researchers of social work, English literature or visual arts will not find themselves in these images. No sociology will be committed. Indeed, all traces of scholarship have been removed. The utilitarian managerialism at the heart of the University of the Spectacle has no time for such activities. After all, where is the value-added proposition?"
• Ten Ideas to Save the Economy #5. Reinvent Education: I like Robert Reich. He means well. But count the ocurrences of phrases like "a more competitive workforce" versus "better-informed and engaged citizens". It isn't the job of public education to save the economy.
• Austerity Bites: Fiscal Lessons from the British General Election - Jonathan Hopkin and Mark Blyth: "The economic crisis that hastened New Labour’s demise had nothing to do with overspending and everything to do with its uncritical acceptance of twenty-first-century financial innovation and its excesses. Before analysts conclude that Labour has no choice but to shift to the right, we need to remember the lessons of the global financial crisis: a balanced budget will not save a government from the failures of a banking sector that is too big to bail out, and mere economic facts seldom defeat ideologies."
• The Corporate Archipelago - Paul Krugman, NYT: "[…] I just participated in a panel on the future of capitalism. I know, why such a small topic? But what I found myself thinking and talking about is actually the present of capitalism — and in particular about the peculiar delusion that we live in a world of individual competition in freewheeling markets."
• Grexit and the Morning After - Yes, Krugman again; he's on top form: "[…] the bigger question is what happens a year or two after Grexit, where the real risk to the euro is not that Greece will fail but that it will succeed. Suppose that a greatly devalued new drachma brings a flood of British beer-drinkers to the Ionian Sea, and Greece starts to recover. This would greatly encourage challengers to austerity and internal devaluation elsewhere."
• The bad intelligence - This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow in Daily Kos: Now that we know what we know… y'know…?
• Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse - Chris Hedges plays Cassandra rather well at Truthdig: "The Dark Ages were marked by arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror. And I see nothing to prevent the rise of a new Dark Age if we do not abolish the corporate state. Indeed, the longer the corporate state holds power the more likely a new Dark Age becomes. To trust in some mythical force called progress to save us is to become passive before corporate power. The people alone can defy these forces. And fate and history do not ensure our victory. "
• The Big Meh - Krugman keeps hitting them out of the park: "[…] writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues — and an excuse for handling those issues badly. If you go back to the 1930s, you find many influential people saying the same kinds of things such people say nowadays […] And then, thanks to World War II, we finally got the demand boost we needed, and all those supposedly unqualified workers — not to mention Rosie the Riveter — turned out to be quite useful in the modern economy, if given a chance."
• Nash equilibrium - Tony Curzon Price at openDemocracy: "There is nothing intrinsic to game theory that says that preferences should be self-regarding or that players should not care about the pay-offs to others. That is a layer of psychology and sociology on top of Nash's mathematics and utterly separable from it. Nash's result will apply as much (or, perhaps, as little) in a den of thieves as in a paradise of saints."
• SourceForge commits reputational suicide - Simon Phipps, Infoworld: "Once the darling of open source, SourceForge has been eclipsed by GitHub and package managers, leaving it with a long, thin tail of (mostly consumer) software. It has used increasingly desperate measures to monetize the service through questionable advertising, SEO, and adware injectors."
• Reporter Who Wrote Sunday Times 'Snowden' Propaganda Admits That He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him - Mike Masnick at Techdirt: "In short: one government official told them this, and they asked other government officials, who all had a personal interest in having the answer be "yes" and after enough government officials all agreed on the same talking point, good boy Tom Harper wrote it all down and presented it as fact."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Tie Day: R.I.P. Professor Gusfield - Doug Hartmann at the Society Pages: 'His primary accomplishment is to show how our usual focus on drinking-driving as the moral failing of individual citizens distracts from  the institutional and structural problems of traffic and transportation, leisure-time use, urban design, ambiguities in the law, the power of corporate marketing, and the inherent dangers of driving itself are so very much a part of the “problem” as well.'
• What’s the Point of a Professor? - Mark Bauerlein in the New York Times: "You can’t become a moral authority if you rarely challenge students in class and engage them beyond it. If we professors do not do that, the course is not an induction of eager minds into an enlarging vision. It is a requirement to fulfill. Only our assistance with assignments matters"
• Australia's Own Version Of Islamic State Destruction Of Sacred Objects And People - William Scates Frances at New Matilda: "According to the New South Wales office of the Environment and Heritage, in a single year between June of 2012 and June 2013, over 99 applications for destruction of sites of Aboriginal heritage were considered. All were approved."
• The University after Conservative Victory - Chris Newfield at Remaking the University: "Trivializing society has of course been a highly successful core project of the political Right. That doesn't change the possibility of showing  that most of the total value of education is collective, based on network effects (I'm smarter because my neighbor is smarter and also because an unknown Scottish villager became smarter 30 years ago, with endless ripples outward and everywhere). All these spillovers, externalities and indirect effects through multiple variables, though they seem beyond the grasp of current political rationality, are the deep sources of real progress." Or, as Brendan Behan would say, "I never went to school, but I met the scholars coming back."
• For-Profit Colleges Face a Loan Revolt by Thousands Claiming Trickery - Tamar Lewin, NYT: "'So the department first makes the loans that lets students go to these fraudulent for-profit colleges […] and then when the students can’t pay back the loans, the department goes after them.'"
• Life in the Accelerated Academy: anxiety thrives, demands intensify and metrics hold the tangled web together - Mark Carrigan at the LSE: "As David Cameron put it recently, “if you’re not good or outstanding, you have to change … if you can’t do it yourself, you have to let experts come in and help you”. He was talking about secondary education rather than higher education but I’ve yet to encounter a more succinct statement of what the political theorist Will Davies memorably describes as heating up the floor to see who can keep hopping the longest."
• What Tony Abbott talks about when he talks about ‘welfare’ - Gabrielle Meagher and David P. Wilkins in the Australian Review of Public Affairs: "The most significant way that Mr Abbott’s talk expresses his politics is through the direction of the relationship between ‘having a go’ and ‘a fair go’. As we showed above, a fair go is dependent on having a go in Mr Abbott’s framing. The Prime Minister presents this as a causal argument: generous social support (‘welfare’) can come only after the economy produces the necessary resources. The point has a certain (trivial) force—it is desirable to fund social security from a surplus in total economic output in any particular period. However, the causal relationship between the extent of economic success and the level social support has been much debated. And there is at least some good evidence that the direction of causation goes the other way—from generous social supports to economic prosperity . In day-to-day party politics, debate about the direction of causation is played out in an ideological conflict, in which Mr Abbott comes down on the side of economic growth before social support."
• The New York Times’ Secret Rule Forbidding Its EU Writers from Reading Krugman - Bill Black at NEP carries out an autopsy on New Labour and finds death by mediamacro: 'New Labour has had “no clear guiding philosophy” from the beginning because its strategy of becoming Red Tories and joining the Conservative Party’s assaults on the working class and regulation and its championing of the most corrupt elite bank officers in the world is not a “philosophy.” At best, it is a craven political tactic that depends for its (temporary) electoral success on spectacularly unpopular Tory leadership.'
• Cameron rebooted: five more years of a shiny computerised toe in a prime-ministerial suit - Charlie Brooker playing Charlie Brooker at the Guardian: "The glaring disparity between the weeks of pre-election polling and the actual result is surely useful scientific data: perhaps the most comprehensive investigation into the difference between what people claim to think and what they actually think ever undertaken. Clearly, voting Tory is a guilty pleasure some people won’t readily admit to – like masturbating or listening to Gary Barlow. Or masturbating while listening to Gary Barlow. In the voting booth. Using your free hand to vote Conservative. Cameron’s Britain."
• The last gasp of (US) neoliberalism - John Quiggin
• The Secret Corporate Takeover - Joe Stiglitz provides Project Syndicate with the if-you-only-read-one-article-on-the-TPP article

This week, I have been riddled with angst, hopelessness, and despair, and have been mostly reading:

• The early bird gets the worm - Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal by Zach Weiner
• Anzacs behaving badly: Scott McIntyre and contested history - Philip Dwyer at The Conversation: "There is an obvious disconnect between what historians know and what the popular perception of our past is. It is this disconnect that has jarred with some in the public and led to McIntyre’s sacking. […] It is difficult if not impossible for historians to overturn popular myths. Myths are popular because they represent stories we want to hear; they feed into the collective psyche. Anzacs behaving badly is not something we want to acknowledge."
• Give 'Em Hell, Bernie - Matt Taibbi at Rolling Stone: "Sanders genuinely, sincerely, does not care about optics. He is the rarest of Washington animals, a completely honest person. If he's motivated by anything other than a desire to use his influence to protect people who can't protect themselves, I've never seen it."
• Hillary Clinton Condemns Criminal Justice System Her Husband Helped Build - Andrew Jerrell Jones at The Intercept: "During Bill Clinton’s eight years in the White House, the number of people imprisoned by the federal government nearly doubled, from 85,565 in 1993 to 156,572 in 2001."
• “I could be a father, but I could never be a mother”: Research on Childfree Women in Canada - Interview with Gillian Ayers: "For many of the women, if they couldn’t mother the “right” way, they weren’t going to do it at all. This belief became apparent to me when, for example, 20 of the 21 women I spoke with cited financial reasons for remaining voluntarily childless." That's the showstopper for our stereotypically cat-centric household. Precarity is incompatible with parenthood.
• Cowardly Firing of Australian State-Funded TV Journalist Highlights the West’s Real Religion - Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept: '“SBS supports our Anzacs” — and apparently bars any questioning or criticism of them. That mentality sounds like it came right from North Korea, which is to be expected when a media outlet is prohibited from saying anything that offends high government officials. Any society in which it’s a firing offense for journalists to criticize the military is a sickly and undemocratic one.'
• Signaling theory and credentialing theory in sociology - Fabio Rojas at orgtheory.net: "The theory asserts that the main reason that education correlates with income is that is a signal of intelligence and work ethic, not learned skills. I.e., employers like college graduates because they are good workers, not because they have useful skills."
• The problem with wanting 'peace' in Baltimore - Kazu Haga at openDemocracy: "[C]alls for people to be “peaceful” in the face of the most recent police killing infuriate me. The calls for “peace” that act as a euphemism for “stop protesting” sickens me. When law enforcement and politicians tell people to protest “peacefully” as a way of saying “stop being so mad,” it repulses me. The gross and dangerous misunderstanding that people have of the concept of “peace” disgusts me." (see also)
• The Treasury View of HE: Variable Human Capital Investment - Andrew McGettigan, who is so much smarter than me that reading him gives me vertigo, writing for Goldsmiths, which you're not allowed to call Goldsmiths' College any more, for very serious branding-related reasons: "I have no glib solution to which you might sign up. But when hard times find us, criticism must strike for the root: the root is undergraduate study as a stratified, unequal, positional good dominating future opportunities and outcomes. What might find broader public support is a vision of higher education institutions that are civic and open to lifelong participation, instead of places beholden to the three-year, full-time degree leveraged on loans and aiming to cream off ‘talent’."
• Survey Finds Only One House In Capital Cities Affordable For Single Person On Newstart - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "A new survey by a top charity has revealed that during one weekend last month, just 10 homes in the entire country were available for lease at rates that wouldn’t create ‘rental stress’ for a single person living on the Newstart allowance while they look for work. Only one of those homes was in a capital city – the rest were in regional areas."
• How to Talk to Your Kids About Bernie Sanders - Kimberly Harrington nails it at Medium: "We’re used to being lied to. We like it. It’s soothing. So this situation is uncomfortable for us too. Just know this: you are not alone. We will get through Truthmageddon-Honestypocalypse-2016 together."

Things have been more grim than ever (and that's saying something) in our little Colorbond-clad corner of sunny Sawtell. Fortunately, I can always escape reality via the Internet. This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Lesser-Known Trolley Problem Variations - Kyle York at McSweeney's Internet Tendency: "The Time Traveller: There’s an out of control trolley speeding towards a worker. You have the ability to pull a lever and change the trolley’s path so it hits a different worker. The different worker is actually the first worker ten minutes from now."
• Do you ever really own a computerized device? - Toronto Globe and Mail interviews Cory Doctorow: "So this creates this really weird regime where effectively you get to make up your own laws: You put a lock on, you prevent something from happening and suddenly it becomes illegal to do that. Even if Parliament or Congress never sat down to do that. Can that law really pass constitutional muster?"
• The History of the Future of the Push-Button School - Audrey Watters: "'The high school becomes partially transformed into a center run by administrators and clerks, with a minimum of the routine assigned to the teaching staff. […] The creation of educational material moves partially out into industry, which goes into the education business in partnership with educators.'"
• ‘They,’ the Singular Pronoun, Gets Popular - Ben Zimmer, WSJ: People like me have strong feelings about issues like this.
• Government inquiry takes aim at green charities that ‘get political’ - Peter Burdon on the Conversation: "While conceding that the Hawke review may be interpreted as an “attack on [environmental organisations'] efforts to protect the environment”, [Gary] Johns also argued that governments “should be reticent” about supporting organisations that “promote viewpoints on issues where there is reasonable disagreement in the electorate”. It is difficult to see what organisations would satisfy such a test. Certainly not the Institute of Public Affairs, the Chifley Research Centre or Menzies House, which also enjoy tax deductibility but seem unlikely to face the same scrutiny advocated by Hawke."
• The triple crisis of sociology -  Ivan Szelenyi at Contexts: "Sociology is indeed in a triple crisis. It responds the wrong way to “scientific” challenge coming from neo-classical economics and rational choice political science. It either imitates them or moves into trendy interdisciplinary fields just to regain its lost constituency." Also check out Ivan's Foundations of Modern Social Theory lectures. I didn't know he taught at Flinders University in the 70s. My, that Hungarian accent seems hard to shake off.
• Shorter - Cory Doctorow at Locus Online: "My experience contrasts with the moral panic over the decline in writ­ing standards due to the Internet. Those who wring their hands at the informality and vernacular of instant messaging and social media prose have missed the point: when we practice writing short, for an audience, as a kind of performance, it makes us better writers"