The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• How Colonies Can Liberate Themselves by Taxing Real Estate — Polly Cleveland in the D&S Blog: A reform government can heavily tax the value of real estate, possibly with exemptions for small resident property owners. Better yet, and much easier to implement, tax only the land component of real estate. Such a tax would force absentee owners to send euros or dollars back to the colonies. The government could then begin to provide services and repair infrastructure. But why tax real estate? Why not tax income or imports? Because absentees and foreign based corporations can easily avoid income taxes by funny accounting. Taxes on most imports are regressive and a drain on the economy. The real money is in real estate.
• America is one of the Few Cultures with Insults for Smart People — Ted Rall: Languages tend to evolve to reflect the cultural and practical priorities of the societies that speak them. This linguistic truism came to mind recently when, as part of research for one of my cartoons, I turned to Google Translate in search of a French translation for the English word “geek.” There wasn’t one. Nor in Spanish. All the Romance languages came up short; Google suggested “disadattato” in Italian, but that’s different — it means “misfit,” or “a person who is poorly adapted to a situation or environment.” A “geek” — “a person often of an intellectual bent who is disliked,” according to Merriam-Webster — is decidedly distinct from a misfit. You can tell a lot about a culture from its language. I had stumbled across a revealing peculiarity about American English: we insult people for being intelligent.
• How Bill Cosby, Obama and Mega-preachers Sold Economic Snake Oil to Black America — Lester K. Spence interviewed by Lynn Parramore at INET: I begin the book by juxtaposing Nat Adderley and Oscar Brown’s “Work Song” that’s about a certain type of labor in the 1960s against Ace Hood’s, “Hustle Hard.” He does more than just describe a condition in which he’s consistently having to work to make ends meet for himself and his family. The video features Ace Hood in a regular East Coast neighborhood, and all around him, people engage in different hustles to get by. The seasons change, and although the things that people sell change, like in the summer they’re hustling water and in the winter they’re hustling coats and gloves, the hustle itself doesn’t change. He doesn’t give a critique of that situation, but actually makes a normative argument for it, suggesting that it is a good thing. If you want to work in the world, this is what you’re supposed to do. If you don’t do it, your value as a human being is significantly reduced.
• Education – a faux crisis, an erroneous ‘solution’ and capital wins again — Bill Mitchell: One of the ways in which the neoliberal era has entrenched itself and, in this case, will perpetuate its negative legacy for years to come is to infiltrate the educational system. This has occurred in various ways over the decades as the corporate sector has sought to have more influence over what is taught and researched in universities. The benefits of this influence to capital are obvious. They create a stream of compliant recruits who have learned to jump through hoops to get delayed rewards. In the period after full employment was abandoned firms also realised they no longer had to offer training to their staff in the same way they did when vacancies outstripped available workers. As a result they have increasingly sought to impose their ‘job specific’ training requirements onto universities, who under pressure from government funding constraints have, erroneously, seen this as a way to stay afloat. So traditional liberal arts programs have come under attack – they don’t have a ‘product’ to sell – as the market paradigm has become increasingly entrenched. There has also been an attack on ‘basic’ research as the corporate sector demands universities innovate more. That is code for doing the privatising public research to advance profit. But capital still can see more rewards coming if they can further dictate curriculum and research agendas. So how to proceed. Invent a crisis. If you can claim that universities will become irrelevant in the next decade unless they do what capital desires of them then the policy debate becomes further skewed away from where it should be. That ‘crisis invention’ happened this week in Australia.
• Google and Facebook won’t rule the world – if we don’t buy their fantasies about big data — Alexander Taylor in the Conversation: Claims that big data and targeting will determine the next US president, and fears that data analytics allow politicians to exploit our psychological vulnerabilities have at their root a deterministic view, which sees social media users as completely passive and open to manipulation. But this view ignores how users actively process information, with differing perspectives, interests and forms of engagement. Paradoxically, while the data-driven advertising industry increasingly recognises the diversity of internet users’ psychological profiles and behavioural patterns, it seems to assume that they are all equally suggestible when it comes to social media advertising.
• Your Automobile and You - Road accident causes — Phil Are Go!:
  
• Are You in a BS Job? In Academe, You’re Hardly Alone — David Graeber in the Chronicle of Higher Education: Support staff no longer mainly exist to support the faculty. In fact, not only are many of these newly created jobs in academic administration classic bullshit jobs, but it is the proliferation of these pointless jobs that is responsible for the bullshitization of real work — real work, here, defined not only as teaching and scholarship but also as actually useful administrative work in support of either. What’s more, it seems to me this is a direct effect of the death of the university, at least in its original medieval conception as a guild of self-organized scholars. Gayatri Spivak, a literary critic and university professor at Columbia, has observed that, in her student days, when people spoke of "the university," it was assumed they were referring to the faculty. Nowadays it’s assumed they are referring to the administration. And this administration is increasingly modeling itself on corporate management.
• Donald Trump has shown himself to be the American version of Gaddafi in his behaviour towards Iran and the nuclear deal — Robert Fisk: Gaddafi’s handshake was legendary – so was his kiss from Tony Blair, who was as obsequious to Gaddafi in Libya as Theresa May was to Trump in Washington. Much good did it do Blair or May. Gaddafi ran his business dealings through his family – now there’s a thought – and even maintained good relations with Russia. His speeches were interminable – he liked the sound of his own voice – and although he constantly lied, his audience was forced to listen and to fear his wrath. Above all, Gaddafi was completely divorced from reality. If he lied, he believed his own lies. He believed that he kept his promises. He believed in the world he wanted to believe in, even if this was non-existent. His Great Man Made River Project was supposed to Make Libya Great Again.
• The Philip Cross Affair — Craig Murray: 133,612 edits to Wikpedia have been made in the name of “Philip Cross” over 14 years. That’s over 30 edits per day, seven days a week. And I do not use that figuratively: Wikipedia edits are timed, and if you plot them, the timecard for “Philip Cross’s” Wikipedia activity is astonishing is astonishing if it is one individual […] There are three options here. “Philip Cross” is either a very strange person indeed, or is a false persona disguising a paid operation to control wikipedia content, or is a real front person for such an operation in his name. Why does this – to take the official explanation – sad obsessive no friends nutter, matter? Because the purpose of the “Philip Cross” operation is systematically to attack and undermine the reputations of those who are prominent in challenging the dominant corporate and state media narrative. particularly in foreign affairs. “Philip Cross” also systematically seeks to burnish the reputations of mainstream media journalists and other figures who are particularly prominent in pushing neo-con propaganda and in promoting the interests of Israel.
• Driving Cars — xkcd:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading comics, because reality has been very disappointing:

• How long after this week's Gaza massacre are we going to continue pretending that the Palestinians are non-people? — Robert Fisk, the Independent: Monstrous. Frightful. Wicked. It’s strange how the words just run out in the Middle East today. Sixty Palestinians dead. In one day. Two-thousand-four-hundred wounded, more than half by live fire. In one day. The figures are an outrage, a turning away from morality, a disgrace for any army to create. And we are supposed to believe that the Israeli army is one of “purity of arms”? And we have to ask another question. If it’s 60 Palestinians dead in a day this week, what if it’s 600 next week? Or 6,000 next month? Israel’s bleak excuses – and America’s crude response – raise this very question. If we can now accept a massacre on this scale, how far can our immune system go in the days and weeks and months to come?
• Excelsior! — Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal:
  
• A Travesty of Protectionism — Michael Hudson: The idea of industrial protectionism, from British free trade in the 19th century to U.S. trade strategy in the 20th century, was to obtain raw materials in the cheapest places – by making other countries compete to supply them – and protect your high-technology manufactures where the major capital investment, profits and monopoly rents are. Trump is doing the reverse: He’s increasing the cost of steel and aluminum raw materials inputs. This will squeeze the profits of industrial companies using steel and aluminum – without protecting their markets.
• Not Available — xkcd:
  
• The Victorians portrayed paedophiles as strangers – and the myth persists today — Ailise Bulfin in the Conversation: The Victorians portrayed paedophiles as scary strangers and social outsiders. By portraying them in this way, it was possible to avoid the unthinkable reality that children could be abused in respectable middle-class homes. This myth of the stranger paedophile is still persistent today. And even though the evidence shows that most child sexual abuse is perpetrated by close family members, the stranger myth continues to distract our attention from the most common type of abuse.
• There’s electricity in the air! But it’s not for sale — The FRED® Blog:
  The graph above shows that electricity production in the United States has steadily grown; and, about 10 years ago, it plateaued. Electricity sales, however, have barely increased in the past decades. What’s happening? The divergence between the two measures is, to a large extent, due to more and more electricity production never hitting the market. Many firms and even households produce their own energy for their own use. This could be energy extraction from byproducts of production such as biogas or burning waste or running one’s own wind or solar farm. The recent flattening of electricity production reflects the fact that electricity demand is not increasing as it has in the past, thanks to improved energy efficiency all around.
• I Win — Jake Likes Onions:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Australian universities must eschew narrow fixation on jobs — Lee Duffield in Independent Australia: If you accept that education is education at any level and might be about more than the immediate jobs drive, consider also liberal thought — which works around cultivation and self-cultivation of the individual, free person. Liberal thought supports the idea that if you have properly studied something, you have a good chance of being able to do anything. If you are well read and empowered by other deep studies, you can competently take charge of your own vocational search and become a useful thinker in society across a whole range of human activities. It is the idea that universities putting resources into best academic standards will be bound to produce good outcomes for the professions, research, society in general.
• The next cryptocurrencies — Jen Sorensen:
  
• Answers from the MMTers — Stephanie Kelton and Randall Wray at the New Economic Perspectives blog: A few days ago, Jared Bernstein posed some Questions for the MMTers in order to gain a “better understanding [of our] arguments.” We appreciate his interest in our ideas and, especially, his direct appeal for clarification of our views.  He raised four big questions, which our Australian counterpart, Bill Mitchell, has already answered in his own three-part series.  What follows is a response from two North American MMTers.
• CES Shows That the Future Will Not Work — Yves Smith, Naked Capitalism: A new article by Taylor Lorenz in the Daily Beast, CES Was Full of Useless Robots and Machines That Don’t Work, by virtue of doing what tech writers are never supposed to do, namely report as opposed to cheerlead, is being buried despite its importance. Lorenz went to the what is the biggest, most important consumer tech trade show in the US, and arguably the world, and found that tons of the great new gotta-have-them wares in the pipeline don’t work. As in unabashedly, obviously don’t work or are so ludicrously not fit for purpose as to be the functional equivalent of not work. This inability to even credibly fake next gen products, and worse, not even be embarrassed that they aren’t performing, is proof that the tech industry has gone past an event horizon into a state of obvious collective impotence and not one cares or even seems to regard it as unusual.
• Economist James K. Galbraith isn’t celebrating Dow 25,000 — interview by Greg Robb of MarketWatch: The Dow is not a serious indicator of the condition of the economy. What we’ve had is a long but fairly slow expansion and a lot of reduction in the effective size of the labor force. Employment ratios have risen a little, but they are still way below where they were 10 or, for that matter, 20 years ago. I think there are really major changes in the structure of the economy going forward. The share of business investment has been quite low, share of construction has been very low, and that means the economy is being driven increasingly by the consumer. The consumer is dependent upon the access to debt, auto loans, consumer loans and student loans. Those things will build up over time until such time as there is a crack and households decide that they no longer wish to access the credit — at which point this phase of the expansion will end.
• #1370; The Avian Informant, Part 2 — Wondermark, by David Malki !:
  

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?' — Tae Kim for CNBC: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."
• The citation graph is one of humankind's most important intellectual achievements — Dario Taraborelli in Boing Boing: When researchers write, we don't just describe new findings -- we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know. Today, citations are also a primary source of data. Funders and evaluation bodies use them to appraise scientific impact and decide which ideas are worth funding to support scientific progress. Because of this, data that forms the citation graph should belong to the public. The Initiative for Open Citations was created to achieve this goal.
• How the American economy conspires to keep wages down — Gabriel Winant in the Guardian: We tend to think of employment as a market interaction: supply and demand meet to set a price, and that’s the wage you get paid. But work is much more than this. When you buy bread, there’s no other connection between you and the baker. You take your loaf and go home. But when you sell labor in the labor market, you’re entering into an ongoing power relationship. In return for your wages, you’re supposed to submit – not once but every day. It’s not just economic. Work is intrinsically political. […] The political power typically enjoyed by employers is generally experienced by workers as fear: fear of harassment, favoritism and wage theft, fear of joining a union or speaking out, fear of the consequences of injury or sickness, fear of the risks of asking for a raise, and beneath these, the fundamental workplace fear – of losing your job. The current of fear running through the workplace is one of the best ways to tell there’s something more than a market transaction happening there. But fear can go both ways. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, the irreplaceable teachers terrified Republican officials. With unemployment down, more of us are becoming irreplaceable every day. There’s leverage for workers there, but you have to be willing to scare your boss to use it.
• Against citizen science — Philip Mirowski in Aeon: What’s really behind the rise of citizen science? There are a few distinct trends and agendas at work. One is the obvious groundswell of hostility to experts spreading throughout the Western world. It rears its head in revanchist nationalism, the anti-vaccination movement, and global-warming denial. Citizen science seems to be an attempt to co-opt and transform that hostility into something else, something useful. Governments are appealing to the megalomania of the average individual, with the (probably vain) expectation that these people will naturally temper their hostility to scientific expertise, and accept a modicum of regimentation. But it’s hard to see how citizen science can really reverse the post-truth trend. Such a hope flies in the face of sociological research indicating that greater levels of education, combined with Right-of-centre political leanings, exacerbate suspicion towards orthodox science, rather than diminishing it. Secondly, the majority of existing citizen science consists of the public donating its unpaid work and data to privately owned, online entities that subsequently digest it as ‘big data’. In other words, there’s a forest of for-profit networks and startups out there seeking to attract, harvest and capitalise upon the labour they’ve enlisted – a phenomenon that Nick Srnicek, a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, has dubbed ‘platform capitalism’. The insertion of such companies into the scientific process creates the risk that they will eventually exert more influence over larger research agendas than they already do.
• 81 Wrongs — TedRall:
  
• Booked: The Ideology of Cheap Stuff — Sarah Jaffe in Dissent Magazine: You wouldn’t be able to have this chicken without cheap feed for the chicken. That means $1.25 billion of subsidy every year to the chicken industry, just in the United States. But also, workers don’t survive on cheap wages without cheap food. You need cheap energy to keep the henhouse going. You need cheap money to be able to bankroll the franchises. And finally, you need cheap lives. You need a regime that makes certain kinds of lives and bodies cheaper. That means, in the chicken industry, it’s women and people of color who are most likely to be injured on the line, most likely to be mangled in the chicken processing. So these are the seven cheap things embodied in the nugget: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. These things explain the trillions of chicken bones in the fossil record. The reason we wrote the book is because we want to move away from the idea that this is the Anthropocene—you know, humans being humans, in the way that boys will be boys, or sharks will be sharks. It’s not the Anthropocene—it’s the Capitalocene.
• Merit — Flea Snobbery: