The Zero Room

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• The New Democrats’ Addiction to Austerity Will Not Die — Bill Black in New Economic Perspectives with the "If you read only one article about the madness of austerity this year…" article: Michael Meeropol, an economist whose work I respect greatly, has rightly chastised me for failing to explain that fiscal austerity produces enormous winners, not just losers, and that this fact helps explain why the economic malpractice of austerity is so common. Austerity is a policy that aids the wealthy and harms the non-wealthy. One of the greatest triumphs of the wealthy is to get vast numbers of the non-wealthy to fail to understand this point. The New Democrats’ passionate support for austerity reflects the interests of its primary donors – Wall Street elites. Austerity produces higher unemployment rates. It can cause deflation. It leads to cuts in public employment and funding for social programs. High unemployment allows CEOs to force lower wages and creates a political climate in which CEOs are able to get legislation and rule changes embracing “labor flexibility.” That phrase is a euphemism for making it easier for firms to fire workers without. CEOs use high unemployment to induce an international race to the bottom on worker protections and wages under the pretext that doing so is essential for U.S. firms to maintain “global competitiveness.” Deflation is a superb situation for (net) creditors. They get repaid in a currency that is gaining value. Deflation reduces interest rates, so the market value of existing long-term fixed rate debt instruments (bonds) can increase substantially.
• Getting Money out of Politics — Alexander Douglas at Medium: When politicians talk money and numbers, they conjure up an enchanting ballet of bloodless abstractions. Money is an abstraction — a ledger, an accounting record, a “set of positions on an abstract ratio scale”, as one article puts it. But however the abstractions might dance about on their unearthly stage, here in the concrete world if there are resources then those resources can be put to use for a public purpose. No abstract object can rush in to interrupt the work. To think otherwise is to literally worship money
• The Land Belongs to God — Michael Hudson and his startling erudition: Now when they ran up debts in Sumer and Babylonia, and even in in Judea in Jesus’ time, they didn’t borrow money from money lenders. People owed debts because they were in arrears: They couldn’t pay the fees owed to the palace. We might call them taxes, but they actually were fees for public services. And for beer, for instance. The palace would supply beer and you would run up a tab over the year, to be paid at harvest time on the threshing floor. You also would pay for the boatmen, if you needed to get your harvest delivered by boat. You would pay for draught cattle if you needed them. You’d pay for water. Cornelia Wunsch did one study and found that 75% of the debts, even in neo-Babylonian times around the 5th or 4th century BC, were arrears. Sometimes the harvest failed. And when the harvest failed, obviously they couldn’t pay their fees and other debts. Hammurabi canceled debts four or five times during his reign. He did this because either the harvest failed or there was a war and people couldn’t pay.
• The Public’s Viewpoint: Regulations are Protections — George Lakoff: Minority President Trump has said that he intends to get rid of 75% of government regulations. What is a “regulation”? The term “regulation” is framed from the viewpoint of corporations and other businesses. From their viewpoint, “regulations” are limitations on their freedom to do whatever they want no matter who it harms. But from the public’s viewpoint, a regulation is a protection against harm done by unscrupulous corporations seeking to maximize profit at the cost of harm to the public. Imagine our minority President saying out loud that he intends to get rid of 75% of public protections. Imagine the press reporting that. Imagine the NY Times, or even the USA Today headline: Trump to Eliminate 75% of Public Protections. Imagine the media listing, day after day, the protections to be eliminated and the harms to be faced by the public.
• Somebody’s Watching. Now What? — James T Stone Ph.D. [sic] in Psychology Today: The Audience Effect: People tend to perform differently in front of an audience than when alone. Specifically, they tend to perform better in front of an audience when the task is simple or has been mastered, and worse when the task is complex or new.
• Does Saving Cause Lending Cause Investment? (No.) — Steve Roth at Evonomics: Put aside that the basic bookkeeping of this idea — that personal saving creates “savings” that “fund” lending and investment — doesn’t make any sense. (It’s an error of composition; you have more savings if you save, but the economy doesn’t.) Let’s look at history: when households save more, is there more lending and (business) investment — either immediately or a few quarters/years down the road? Mostly: no.
• Explainer: what is modern monetary theory? — Steven Hail in the Conversation: By the 1980s, most people saw Keynes as an advocate of budget deficits only during periods of high unemployment. Lerner, as early as 1943, in a paper entitled Functional Finance and the Federal Debt, had argued that Keynesian economics involved running whatever government deficit was necessary to maintain full employment, and that deficits should be seen as the norm. Keynes, in a letter to fellow economist James Meade written in April 1943, said of Lerner, “His argument is impeccable. But heaven help anyone who tries to put it across”.
• Make housing affordable and cut road congestion all at once? Here’s a way — Martin Payne in the Conversation: Two of the most pressing problems for Australian cities are housing affordability and traffic congestion. But there is an approach to both problems that could lead to significant improvements at low cost and relatively quickly. It involves developing transit-oriented centres in conjunction with inclusionary zoning. This form of development gives priority to housing affordability and low car use. It does so by requiring a certain proportion of permanently affordable housing and dwellings without car parking, but with strong access to local facilities. Travel is mainly by walking and public transport.
• Debt bubble returns millions to days of 2008 crash — Shane Hickey in the Guardian: Charities and financial advisers are calling on the government to use the Queen’s speech to address the “bubble” of unmanageable debt that households are rapidly accumulating. Unsecured consumer credit – including credit cards, car loans and payday loans – is this year expected to hit levels not seen since the 2008 financial crash. There has been concern in the Bank of England that consumer spending is being underpinned by debt, amid comparisons to the run-up to the financial crash.
• Block adverts, delete Flash, kill Java: ASD — Stilgherrian at ZDNet: Most of the ASD's top recommendations continue to focus on basic network hygiene, and most of that can be achieved by the IT department simply doing its job properly. But cybersecurity vendors want to sell fancy and expensive techniques, some of which do very little to improve security. The ASD's recommendation that every organisation install ad blockers will also be controversial, given that it declares as hostile a key part of online business models. But... Given all the warnings about cyber threats and cyber war, we do want a secure internet, don't we? Well this is how you do it.

ALMOST 2000 children on the NSW north coast have not been fully immunised, with the district's vaccination rate trailing every other part of the nation.

It's easy to dismiss this as natural selection at work, weeding out the inbred progeny of the small-town airheaded bourgeoisie. Unfortunately immunisation works at the population level, rather than the individual level. Your little Typhoid Myron is both your personal choice and our collective problem.

I therefore propose a compromise. If you cretins agree to immunise your child like a sane person, I will personally arrange - for free - an exhaustive spiritual cleansing process involving auras, crystals, chakras, and mantras; the whole kit and caboodle. All chemicals and toxins will thus be purged, and it will be as though your child has never been exposed to anything unnatural and artificial, and can go back to playing Minecraft without a care in the world.

If, after this process, you are still convinced that your child has become feckless, withdrawn, dysfunctional, and completely detached from the real world, I will give you - at no extra cost - a mirror.

This week, I have given up on education and resumed reading. Yay!:

• The reporting of market ups and downs is not really a joke — Simon Wren-Lewis: Companies pay market researchers tons of money to find out why people do or do not buy their products, so the idea that an individual can know why the market moves within hours of it moving is just nonsense. Yet day after day we see City economists telling us just this. They hardly ever express any doubt or uncertainty. They know if they did the media would regard that as boring, and choose someone else next time.
• Victoria’s poor quality houses could become solar ovens ‘cooking’ people inside — Kirsten Robb in Domain on the kind of crappy housing I've been living in for the last twenty years: The problem is the industry is geared towards a developer’s bottom line, experts such as RMIT planning professor Michael Buxton and the Alternative Technology Association’s Damien Moyse say. Many new builds did not consider sun orientation, eaves or shading, and featured large amounts of glass and energy-guzzling appliances. Basic insulation, a concrete slab and double glazing had been enough to get most designs over the line, RMIT adjunct professor Alan Pears said. “You get a situation where a house with unshaded glass, facing a silly directions can qualify for six stars … but when the sun shines in, the insulation traps the heat,” Professor Pears said. “Over a series of hot days, it builds up. What you create is a solar oven, with people cooking inside.”
• FIRE sector vampire continues to suck economy dry — Leith van Onselen at MacroBusiness provides your chart porn for the week: Since financial markets were first deregulated in the mid-1980s, the FIRE sector has grown at roughly twice the pace of the rest of the economy, sucking the life out of the productive sector:
  
• Advocating for CC BY — David Wiley: No one knows what the NC license condition means, including Creative Commons. The license language is so vague that the only way to determine definitively whether a use is commercial or not is to go to court and have a judge decide. For would-be users of NC content, this means never knowing what you can and can’t do. Example – I want to use some NC-licensed content in my course, but students can only attend my course if they pay tuition. Is that a commercial use? Some people think it is. Who knows?
• Austerity is the enemy of our grandchildren as public infrastructure degrades — Bill Mitchell: The cuts in growth of public investment will resonate for generations to come and be realised in lower material standards of living and lower productivity growth. We really are a stupid people for tolerating this idiocy. And before I stop – I don’t want to ever hear the argument again – that governments should borrow now because “debt is also still very cheap” or that “the credit ratings agencies may not downgrade the government’s rating if the extra debt is being used for productive infrastructure, as opposed to recurrent spending on social welfare or public sector wages.” Please. On both counts. What the credit rating agencies do is irrelevant to the Australian government. In fact, I would just outlaw their operations within our national borders and clear up office space for more useful activities. What is not irrelevant is the growth in public infrastructure. It is our legacy to our grandchildren.

This fortnight, I have been mostly reading:

• An economy without growth is far from our biggest worry — Ross Gittins for Fairfax: Most economists I know never doubt that a growing economy is what keeps us happy and, should the economy stop growing, it would make us all inconsolable. They can't prove that, of course, but they're as convinced of it as anyone else selling something.
• Minimum Alcohol Pricing: The Middle Class Sneer at the Unworthy Under-Privileged (Again) — Craig Murray: I cannot find words to express for you my depth of contempt for a measure which – by design – only affects the price of drinks drunk overwhelmingly by the lower socio-economic classes and – horror of horrors – the young! I drank a great deal more at university than I do now, and I consider the pleasures of that time a great boon to my life.
• The Deep History Behind Trump’s Rise — George Monbiot: Trump, who has no coherent politics, is not a classic neoliberal. But he is the perfect representation of Hayek’s “independent”; the beneficiary of inherited wealth, unconstrained by common morality, whose gross predilections strike a new path that others may follow. The neoliberal think tankers are now swarming round this hollow man, this empty vessel waiting to be filled by those who know what they want.
• How the village feast paved the way to empires and economics — Brian Hayden, Aeon: Feasts are often very expensive events, sometimes requiring up to 10 years of work and saving. Those who are paying for them expect to obtain some benefit from all their efforts and expenditures. And this is the important part about traditional feasts: those who are invited, and who often receive gifts, are considered obligated to reciprocate the invitation and gifts within a reasonable amount of time. By accepting invitations to feasts, individuals enter into relationships of alliance with the host. Each of them supports the other in political or social conflicts as well as in economic matters. Such support is critical because social and political conflicts are rife in tribal villages, with many accusations of infidelity, theft, sorcery, inheritance irregularities, unpaid bills, ritual transgressions and crop damage from other people’s domestic animals. In order to defend oneself from such accusations and threats of punishment, individuals need strong allies within the community. Feasts are a way to get them.
• Keynes and Brexit — Robert Skidelsky: [Keynes] would certainly have wanted to keep Britain out of the eurozone. Because, above all, he would have wanted to retain the commitment to full employment. If this was not possible at the European level, and he would have doubted if there was enough theoretical and institutional support for this, then national policy must be free to secure it.
• It’s the Private Debt, Stupid! — T. Sabri Öncü, Prime Economics Blog: At $152 trillion or 225% of the world gross domestic product, the global debt of the non-financial sector has reached an all-time high in 2015 and two-thirds of this debt, amounting to about $100 trillion, consists of liabilities of the private sector, as the IMF indicated. As I mentioned in my July 2016 EPW article (Öncü 2016), since the Deng–Volcker–Thatcher– Reagan Revolution of 1978–80, the economies polarised between creditors and debtors, the debt burden shifted from the public sector to the private sector through austerity programmes and much of this accumulated private sector debt in almost everywhere around the globe is currently unpayable. […] A global Jubilee is in order.
• Mandatory De-education Classes — Scarfolk Council:
• Reinventing work for the future — Frances Coppola: When income is uncertain, but outgoings are certain, constant worry about where the money will come from to pay the bills eats away at the mind, destroying creativity and turning the intellect to porridge. It undermines relationships and erodes happiness. Ultimately, it wrecks physical and mental health. And yet we seem intent upon increasing income insecurity in the name of "efficiency". […] By implementing a universal basic income, we can end the necessity of human drudgery and the wasteful mismatching of people to jobs. We can restore security to the millions who live with uncertainty.