The remarkable story behind the disciplining of a major charity shows how power really works. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th September 2023 Economic power seldom needs to discipline those who might challenge it. Most of the time, they do it to themselves. However extreme the ideologies promoted by corporations and oligarchs, organisational […]
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In the Sneak-a-nomics podcast series, educators explained how everything from Legos to lemonade sparked ideas for economics lessons.
Kevin Lewis points us to this recent paper, “Can invasive species lead to sedentary behavior? The time use and obesity impacts of a forest-attacking pest,” published in Elsevier’s Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, which has the following abstract: “Invasive species can significantly disrupt environmental quality and flows of ecosystem services and we are still […]
Álvaro Fernández-Gallardo, Simon Lloyd and Ed Manuel Since the 2007–09 Global Financial Crisis, central banks have developed a range of macroprudential policies (‘macropru’) to address fault lines in the financial system. A key aim of macropru is to reduce ‘left-tail risks‘ – ie, minimise the probability and severity of future economic crises. However, building this … Continue reading The transmission of macroprudential policy in the tails
The dominance of micro-founded macroeconomic models—models derived directly from the microeconomic concepts of utility-maximizing individuals and profit-maximizing firms, and based on the Ramsey Neoclassical growth model (Ramsey 1928)—did not go unchallenged prior to the Global Financial Crisis. But the critics were treated in the time-honoured Neoclassical way, of being both ignored and disparaged—if they were, … Continue reading "Soul-searching by a soulless discipline"
Two items this Wednesday before the music segment. First, we saw the stark ideology of the elites on full display in Sydney yesterday with a property developer demanding the government increase unemployment by 40-50 per cent to show the workers that the employer is boss and redistribute more national income back to profits. For anyone…
I really appreciate CEO developer Tim Gurney’s honesty here:
The Big Three car companies have authorized $5 billion in stock buybacks over the past year.
600 million years ago, the sea sponge had a dream.
The post Where Did the Brain Come From? appeared first on Nautilus.
UK higher education qualifications have been suspended from the European quality standards body because of the way the Office for Students was regulating universities.
The study suggests that those groups less likely to vote Conservative were more likely to be turned away
Josh Marshall has a smart column on the right’s attempt to jettison the phrase “pro-life” because it’s toxic.(As a twitter wag quipped, “when ‘pro-life’ is a losing slogan for you, you’ve got bigger problems.”) Marshall points out just how thoroughly the anti-abortion movement has been pushed back on its heels: It now seems clear that the only thing that will be at all memorable about the GOP’s first presidential debate of the 2024 cycle on August 23rd will be that brief speech from Mike Pence in which he staked his campaign on his bible-rooted, evangelical, pro-life record and endorsed a 15-week national ban. I remember finding it stunning in the moment. Kate Riga took it up the next day. The U.S. doesn’t keep perfect data on abortion care in the United States. The most readily available numbers look at the number of abortions on or before the 13th week (91.1%) and 21st week (98.7%). Even this anti-abortion rights group says that 6% of abortions take place on or after week 15, for instance.
You’ve probably already heard about the Ukraine/Russia controversy surrounding Walter Isaacson’s new book about Elon Musk. (If not, you can click this link.) But there’s a lot more in the book apparently, which is discussed here in this piece by Matt Pearce in the LA Times: Musk is already one of the most well-known and extensively covered leaders in American corporate life (and one of its most unavoidable figures on the service he has renamed X). Isaacson’s biography is a Musk agonistes: a portrait of a (largely) self-made, emotionally volatile entrepreneur from South Africa who has a tortured relationship with his father and an addiction to crises of the self-inflicted variety.
Some of them contain materials that are harmful to human health.
The post Should You Ditch Your Eco-Friendly Drinking Straw? appeared first on Nautilus.
“What kind of a man relies on his son to get impeached?” Trump said. “Joe Biden is a disgrace.”
Head of the Australian arm of the Republican party, Peter Dutton, has told reporters to start calling him Donald Dutton or The Donald for short. ”This is a great move by Peter, sorry, Donald Dutton,” said Republican party cheer leader... Read More ›
X and Reddit prevent users from sharing links to Distributed Denial of Secrets. Russia and Indonesia are also blocking access.
The post Tech Companies and Governments Are Censoring the Journalist Collective DDoSecrets appeared first on The Intercept.
Krugman discusses why people people believe things that just aren’t true: Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly from around 1990 to the mid-2010s: True, there was a crime surge after the pandemic, which now seems to be ebbing. But that lay in the future. Trump talked as if crime was running rampant as he spoke. Yet if Trump had false beliefs about trends in crime, he had plenty of company. Gallup polls Americans about crime every year, and all through the great decline in violent crime a majority of Americans said that crime was increasing: Were the crime statistics misleading? Homicide numbers are pretty solid. And people behaved as if crime were falling; notably, there was a wave of gentrification as affluent Americans moved into newly safe central cities. But all the same, people told pollsters that they believed crime was rising.