The Zero Room

Oy, this week… My life! 'Ere's all I can offer. For you and you only. Top quality schmutter. I'm cuttin' me own froat gaw blimey:

• The End of Cash; The End of Freedom — Ian Welsh: Every time someone talks about getting rid of cash, they are talking about getting rid of your freedom. Every time they actually limit cash, they are limiting your freedom. It does not matter if the people doing it are wonderful Scandinavians or Hindu supremacist Indians, they are people who want to know and control what you do to an unprecedentedly fine-grained scale. […] Cash isn’t completely anonymous. There’s a reason why old fashioned crooks with huge cash flows had to money-launder: Governments are actually pretty good at saying, “Where’d you get that from?” and getting an explanation. Still, it offers freedom, and the poorer you are, the more freedom it offers. It also is very hard to track specifically, i.e., who made what purchase.
• The economics of BBC pay — Chris Dillow: Take, for example, Peter Capaldi, who earned less than £250,000. This doesn’t seem much, given that the joint surplus is huge – Doctor Who is a worldwide hit – and Capaldi’s ability so great as to give him lots of outside options. But it’s more understandable, once we recognise two things. One is that the BBC’s fall-back position is strong: Doctors are replaceable and the format’s success doesn’t depend upon the actor – and that being the Doctor gives Capaldi a fantastic basis for negotiating his next job; it's worth being temporarily underpaid for that.

When you don't have a job, it's particularly annoying to see so many people who can't do theirs:

"The memorable songs kept on coming with the group delving back to its earliest days then playing the songs that made the Oils one of the biggest acts in the world.

"The end of each number leaving the crowd calling out for more.

"All except one that was.

"After half a dozen songs one crowd member was escorted out for drunken behaviour which led Garrett to make a speech about how they expect their fans to be courteous and have consideration for all.

"A message reiterated with a section of the UN convention in big letters draped above the stage reminding all that every human being is worthy of the same respect and rights.

[…]

"If the open air venue had a roof, when The Power And The Passion was performed it would've well and truly been blown off.

"The die-hard fans who raced to the front row when the gates opened four hours before the headline act hit the stage weren't disappointed when the memorable show came to an end."

As it turns out, I am practically eating from the palm of the reviewer's hand. The one sentence per-paragraph rule is, frankly, a relief when so often these days one has to deal with multiple ideas without a whitespace breather.

A string of random words also counts as a sentence.

A sentence of Hemingway-esque minimalist brilliance that is.

If this review had a roof, or an editor, it would have been well and truly blown off. I'm now going to delay reading the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights to read instead "the UN convention in big letters". I'm getting on a bit, so I can't ignore the fact that my eyes are the same age as the rest of me. I don't know why it's not common practice to publish large print editions of international agreements.

There is a lot to think about here. It's been memorable, but I wasn't disappointed to get to the end of it.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The Seven Deadly Sins of AI Predictions — Rodney Brooks in MIT Technology Review: I recently saw a story in ­MarketWatch that said robots will take half of today’s jobs in 10 to 20 years. It even had a graphic to prove the numbers. The claims are ludicrous. (I try to maintain professional language, but sometimes …) For instance, the story appears to say that we will go from one million grounds and maintenance workers in the U.S. to only 50,000 in 10 to 20 years, because robots will take over those jobs. How many robots are currently operational in those jobs? Zero. How many realistic demonstrations have there been of robots working in this arena? Zero.
• Socialism with a spine: the only 21st century alternative — John Quiggin in the Guardian: For most of the current political class whose ideas were formed in the last decades of the 20th century, the superiority of markets over governments is an assumption so deeply ingrained that it is not even recognised as an assumption. Rather, it is part of the “common sense” that “everyone knows”. Whatever the problem, their answer is the same: lower taxes, privatisation and market-oriented “reform”. Unsurprisingly, people are looking for an alternative, and many are looking back at the postwar decades of widely shared prosperity.
• Disrupt the Disrupters: Uber’s Comeuppance is the Moment for the U.S. to Finally Start Regulating the So-called Sharing Economy — Dean Baker in the New York Daily News: The company's effective motto, that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission, seemed to cry out for a swift slap to the face. Taxis are hardly new, but the Uber gang claimed that the whole set of regulations developed around the industry didn't apply to them because they were an app-based "ride hailing" platform, not a taxi company. This was, and is, garbage; as are most of the claims for the "newness" and "uniqueness" of the sharing economy companies. […] The only thing that was really new about Uber, Airbnb and the other sharing economy companies was the claim that they should be exempt from longstanding rules and regulations.
• The Skills Gap: Blaming Workers Rather than Policy — Dean Baker in the Hankyoreh: First and foremost we are not seeing the sort of rapid wage growth that would be expected if there were widespread skills shortage. This is a story where companies would like to expand their business but are prevented from doing so because they can’t find any workers with the skills they need. However there are always some workers somewhere who have the needed skills. Companies could offer higher wages to lure workers away from competitors. Or, they can make a point of recruiting in more distant areas and offering to pay travel and location expenses for workers. We don’t see this sort of bidding war for workers taking place in any major sector of the economy. While there may be a few occupations in a few areas where employers really are bidding up wages rapidly, this is not happening in most sectors of the labor market.
• Myths of Job-Killing Robots Obscure Real Causes of Inequality — Dean Baker, evidently a busy man, in Truthout: If we just considered the cost of physically producing robots, they should be cheap. We should all be able to buy a robot for a few hundred dollars that would cook our food, clean our house, mow our lawns, and do all sorts of other tasks that are time-consuming, unpleasant and often involve substantial expenses. In this case, robots should be leading to rapid increases in real wages and living standards. However, if robots are expensive and therefore redistributing large amounts of money from ordinary workers to the people who own robots, it is because of the patent and copyright monopolies associated with building robots.
• Universal basic services could work better than basic income to combat 'rise of the robots', say experts — Ben Chapman in the Independent: The Institute has put forward the set of ideas, which it calls ‘universal basic services”, as a more achievable and more desirable alternative to universal basic income (UBI). […] Instead of attempting to alleviate poverty through redistributive payments and minimum wages, the state should instead provide everyone with the services they need to feel secure in society, the report’s authors argue.
• Where is Australia's Jeremy Corbyn? — Martin Hirst, Independent Australia: The Labor Party has been deradicalised. The Left has not been strong inside the ALP for decades, the membership is in decline and it is ageing. The Labor "Left" is a faction tied together by two things: the first is ambition (lefties want that safe seat and pension too), the second is that they would be in the Right faction if the Right faction wasn’t quite so horrible to women and gays. In other words, the leftism of the Labor Left is "left" because it’s not "right". The ALP Left is about as left as your left arm when compared to your right. It is essentially the same thing. This is the real reason we don’t have a Jeremy Corbyn to cheer for.
• A Job-Killing Robot for Rich People — Dean Baker, this time at Jacobin: An FTT is usually seen as a way to raise large amounts of revenue (in the US, it could possibly generate as much as $190 billion a year, or 1 percent of GDP). Or it is viewed as a means to limit speculative trading in the financial sector, potentially making markets less volatile. The best argument for an FTT, however, is that it can sharply reduce some of the highest incomes in the economy by curtailing the trading that makes those incomes possible. As a result, it can play a large role in reversing the upward redistribution of income that we’ve seen over the last four decades.
• My own private basic income — Karl Widerquist, : Just because I benefit from the unfairness of our economic system doesn’t make its rules any fairer. Those rules are not some natural feature of the universe. People made them. People can change them. Why don’t we? […] Some people who read this story will probably accuse me of hypocrisy, saying something like, “If you’re an egalitarian, why are you rich?” If I wrote a similar description of the economy when I was poor, they’d accuse me of jealously, saying something like, “if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?” That’s the catch-22 for people who complain about the rules of our economic system. You’re either hypocritical or jealous. No one has the right amount of property to complain about the distribution of property.
• The 2017 general election marked the popping of the Blair-Clinton bubble — David Graeber in New Statesman: How did we get to the point where the candidate of a major party was judged not by his political vision, programme or sensibilities, but by an estimation of how different classes of imagined voters were likely to respond to him? How is it that this has become our basic standard for judging politicians? And by “we” I am referring not just to political junkies, professional or otherwise, but to the electorate as a whole. […] I remember looking through the comments sections of articles on Labour's prospects last year, and being startled that almost every single person emphasised not what Corbyn stood for – those who did mostly claimed approval – but rather “electability” issues. No one would vote for him. Therefore, there was no point in voting for him. The remarkable thing is that there were thousands of these commentators. Collectively, they were a substantial chunk of the electorate. And here they were saying they wouldn't vote for a candidate whose views they agreed with because they assumed no one else would.
• Why we need need more national debt — Richard Murphy: It’s a fact that the UK government does not need to issue debt. In the modern era of money the Bank of England can create any amount of money that the government requires without having to borrow or tax a penny of the sum in question. That is because all money is now, as a matter of fact, created out of thin air when banks lend money, including when (as might be legal again after Brexit) the Bank of England lends directly to the Treasury. This is because all money is debt: if in doubt read what it says on a UK bank note, and realise that these are just debt, a fact that is confirmed by this cash being included in the national debt in the UK’s government accounts. Moreover…
• The UK national debt is not 89% of GDP; it’s only 67% of GDP and it’s time the government and media stopped lying about this — Richard Murphy: Suppose you owe your mortgage to yourself. Would you worry about repaying it? Or come to that worry about the interest on it? And would you worry about when you repaid it? Of course you wouldn’t. And you’d be right not to do so. That’s because the idea of owing yourself money is meaningless, and makes the debt irrelevant. Which is precisely what this £435 billion of debt is: it is irrelevant. Indeed, as I have shown, it is actually shown as cancelled debt in the UK national accounts, which is precisely what it is. It literally no longer exists.
• Bafflersplainer: Win the Future — David Rees in the Baffler: Rather than spending their money supporting progressive local and state groups that could do the grinding organizational work of registering new voters, challenging racist voter ID laws, and pushing back against gerrymandering, Win the Future’s founders will do a bunch of high-profile stuff online. This will increase civic participation where it counts most: on the internet. Remember, Pincus’s shattering experience of exclusion came after the DNC refused to respond to the five paragraphs of suggestions he submitted to its website. As we all know, it’s the comment box, not the ballot box, where democracy lives or dies.
• “Money from nothing” – my newspaper article translated into English — Dirk Ehnts: Banks do not need savers to extend loans. They are not intermediaries, but create money by themselves. The Bundesbank says that unequivocally. The prose is a bit awkward, nevertheless it is worthwhile to read the main passage: „If a bank extends a loan, she books the credit to the customer connected to the loan as his deposit […] This refutes a widely held erroneous view in which the bank acts as an intermediary in the moment of lending, in which loans can only be funded by deposits that the bank has received from customers before.“ Harvard professor Gregory Mankiw with his theory of intermediation, so says Bundesbank, subscribes to „a widely held erroneous view“.
• Not even Paul Krugman is a real Keynesian — Jonathan Schlefer in the Boston Globe profiles Lance Taylor and Duncan Foley: Keynes’s insights have enormous practical importance, according to Lance Taylor and Duncan Foley of the New School. […] But isn’t Keynes now mainstream? No, say Foley and Taylor. The mainstream still sees economies as inherently moving to an optimal equilibrium, as Wicksell did. It still says demand causes short-run fluctuations, but only supply factors, such as the capital stock and technology, can affect long-run growth.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Australia's unreported poverty line — Gerry Georgatos in Independent Australia: If we can begin to be honest about the markers of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, in the least we would have to immediately double the numbers of the poor, unemployed and homeless. By this measure, there are at least six million Australians living in poverty and the proportion in poverty will continue to increase long into the foreseeable future. There are closer to two million Australian children living in poverty rather than the 740,000 children that we are officially told, or allowed to believe, are living in poverty.
• Universities hoover-up the great unwashed — Leith van Onselen, MacroBusiness: In addition to the lowering of university entrance scores, further evidence that Australia’s universities have turned into quantity-based ‘degree factories’ is also provided in the most recent Department of Employment skills shortages report, which showed there were a record 1 million domestic students enrolled with a higher education provider, 730,000 of which were enrolled in bachelor degrees – an extraordinary amount of higher education students in an economy of 24.5 million.
• FIRE sector vampire continues to bleed economy dry — Leith van Onselen, MacroBusiness:
  
• The Skills Gap that Always Explains Unemployment — Dean Baker: There is a substantial segment of elite types who are always happy to hear about the skills shortage as an explanation for unemployment. See, the problem is not the state of the economy and its poor management by economists, the problem is always the ill-trained workers. You don't need evidence for this one, just assert that the problem is workers don't have the right skills and furrow your brow in a concerned manner. Works every time.
• If Africa is rich – why is it so poor? — Bill Mitchell: Essentially, Gunder Frank argued that it is essential to understand the relationship between the “metropolis and its economic colonies” under capitalism. The underdeveloped countries were in that state because they were functionally essential to making the developed nations at the core richer. This was a very conception of the process of economic development that organisations such as the IMF and the World Bank hold out as they impose neo-liberal policy structures onto the underdeveloped world. What Gunder Frank argued was that these policy structures were not about developing the undeveloped nations but, rather, developing the richer nations further and holding the underdeveloped nations in a state where they could act as resource conduits for the richer nations.
• The U.S. Is Shocked Shocked Shocked! That Russia May Have Meddled With Our Election — Ted Rall:
  
• Behind the Media Surge Against Bernie Sanders — Norman Solomon: A few days earlier, the newspaper had front-paged another “news” story hostile to grassroots political forces aligned with Bernie -- a de facto editorial masquerading as news coverage, headlined: “Democrats in Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win.” In a bizarre disconnect from electoral reality, the article portrayed a party establishment that had lost election after election, including a cataclysmic loss to Trump, as being about winning. And the article portrayed the party’s activist base as interfering with the establishment’s winning ways.
• Theresa May can nail Brexit, she just needs to make sure everyone continues feeling sorry for her — Mark Steel in the Independent: I think I’ve worked out what’s happening here. It’s a mass psychological test – we’re all being monitored to see at what point we feel sorry for Theresa May. By November, she’ll be at a G8 summit crawling round the floor looking for her contact lens and get tangled in the Japanese Prime Minister’s wife’s kimono, which she’s allergic to so she turns purple, but the blotches on her neck will spell “I’m shit at Brexit” then she’ll get trodden on by a stray llama, and let out a series of growls that accidentally sound like “You can have Scotland for a fiver” in German to Angela Merkel.
• Kensington & Chelsea’s reserves prove people don’t want government to run surpluses — Richard Murphy: As a matter of fact local authorities need reserves. They are solely dependent upon revenues they can raise from local taxes, central government and the supply of services. They can borrow, but only with difficulty in most cases. And the reality is that they face unpredictable demand for their services and central government has a poor record of responding to their needs in times of crisis. So, they have reserves. These are, literally, a contingency fund for the unforeseen. Kensington and Chelsea has made this fact visible and it seems that people do not like it. What they resent is that they have paid tax without a purpose.
• "Bribing voters" and all that: neoliberal contempt for democracy? — John Weeks in the Prime Economics blog: Social provision rather than commercialization through markets is the underlying political economy of social democracy. Social democrats restrict markets; neoliberals enhance them. The social democratic commitment to universal provision directly contradicts the neoliberal vision of a market dominated economy. Over the last decade neoliberals have responded to the social democratic principle of universal provision by labelling it populism of the left. […] means testing by definition divides households into the “haves” and the “have-nots”; indeed, it reinforces and institutionalizes that division. This division fosters the shirker/striver and undeserving/deserving ideology of neoliberalism. Universal provision unites society rather than dividing it.
• Australia’s housing bubble obliterates all records — Leith van Onselen
  
• Exclusive: Steve Keen on the secret source of eternal Australian growth — in MacroBusiness: Australia avoided a recession in 2008 only by adding additional leverage to its already over-indebted household sector, and the only ways that Australia can keep its winning streak on GDP growth going (given that its government is obsessed with trying to run a surplus) is to either to achieve a huge trade surplus, or for the household sector to continue piling on debt faster than GDP itself grows. […] It may continue to [keep credit demand high] for a while, particularly if encouraged by government policies like a renewed First Home Vendors Grant, further interest rate cuts by the RBA, or some policy doozie like letting suckers—sorry, I meant first home buyers—use their superannuation for a house purchase. But it will reach a plateau, and before it does, credit-based demand will at best fall to zero. Far more likely is that it will turn negative, as it has done in every other country that has experienced a recession caused by falling credit, with both the business sector and the household sector deleveraging.
• There is a true oppositional Left forming and gaining political traction — Bill Mitchell: [The British and French parliamentary elections], particularly the British outcome confirms what we have been noticing for a few years now – there is finally what we might call a true oppositional Left forming and gaining political traction in these nations. This is a Left platform that concedes little to the neo-liberals. It is vilified by the conservatives and the so-called progressive commentariat (such as the Guardian writers) and politicians (New Labour in Britain) as being in “cloud cuckoo land” and predictions from all of sundry of electoral wipeouts have been daily. But the results demonstrated that the message (such as in the Labour Manifesto) resonates with millions of people (40 per cent of those who voted in Britain). It is now a mainstream Left message that has taken over the British Labour Party and the Blairites are hiding under rocks. There is hope. People will only tolerate being bashed over the head for so long. There is now retaliation going on.
• Cognitive dissonance helps old dogs with their new tricks — Suzanne Cope in Aeon: ‘We learned from the rapidly changing views on gay marriage that direct personal contact with gay family or friends had the greatest impact on challenging views,’ said Judith Beth Cohen, an adult learning expert at Lesley University in Massachusetts. ‘In this case, cognitive dissonance came from the human contact, which made an abstraction come alive. Given that most new media feeds people what they want to hear, we need ways to get beyond our bubbles and encounter the “other”, not just virtually but in the flesh.’