We leverage on important findings in social psychology to build a behavioral theory of protest vote. An individual develops a feeling of resentment if she loses income over time while richer people do not, or if she does not gain as others do, i.e. when her relative deprivation increases. In line with the Intergroup Emotions Theory, this feeling is amplified if the individual identifies with a community experiencing the same feeling.

Fairtrade certification aims at transferring wealth from the consumer to the farmer; however, coffee passes through many hands before reaching final consumers. Bringing together retail, wholesale, and stock market data, this study estimates how much more consumers are paying for Fairtrade-certified coffee in US supermarkets and finds estimates around $1 per lb.

I’ll be giving a public lecture on The Future of Work at ANU on 6 March. It’s the Keith Hancock* lecture, sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, in honour of one our great labour economists. Details are here . An outline

Hugo Chávez presidiu a Venezuela entre 1999 e 2013, tornando-se provavelmente o líder latino-americano mais icônico desde Fidel Castro. Ao chegar ao poder, em 1999, Chávez prometia não só reverter o movimento de privatizações sugeridas pelo Consenso de Washington, mas instaurar o que chamava de “socialismo do século 21”. Não conseguiu.

Enjoy

This link is provided for easy access to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Release Advice. The ABS Release Advice is updated daily and contains details of upcoming ABS releases for the following week.

In the last federal House of Representatives election, the Coalition collectively got 42.04% of the first preference vote, Labor got 34.73% and the Greens got 10.23%. If we had proportional representation, that would equate to 63 seats for the Coalition, 52 for Labor and 15 for the Greens, instead of which we got 76 for…

Power imbalances are doing far more to change the way we work than are apps. Shutterstock

This is part of a major series called Advancing Australia, in which leading academics examine the key issues facing Australia in the lead-up to the 2019 federal election and beyond. Read the other pieces in the series here.

Let the games begin

by digby

One of Trump's dumbest accomplices openly threatens a witness:

from Lars Syll Almost a hundred years after John Maynard Keynes wrote his seminal A Treatise on Probability (1921), it is still very difficult to find statistics books that seriously try to incorporate his far-reaching and incisive analysis of induction and evidential weight. The standard view in statistics — and the axiomatic probability theory underlying it — […]

2019-02-26 00:00:00 | Report
Lindsay Hughes

Future Directions International

[field_teaser]

International relations

2019-02-27 00:00:00 | Discussion paper
Council of Attorneys-General

Department of Justice (NSW)

[field_teaser]

Communication, Justice

2017-03-02 00:00:00 | Strategy
Universities Australia

Universities Australia

[field_teaser]

Education, Indigenous

Speaking of hoaxes

by digby

www.patreon.com/keefknight

There’s a stack of recent-reads on the bookshelf in my bedroom. It’s tall and unsteady and I have to be careful not to knock it over when on summer nights I open the window. Over the next couple of weeks, these books will be distributed to other shelves in other rooms or to friends with an urgent nod—you must read this. My small suburban home has bookshelves in every room, this is my childhood dream come true: a house full of books. My parents were Sicilian migrants, they worked long hours in factories to pay the mortgage and put food […]

Hey @MichaelCohen212 - Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends? Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot...

— Matt Gaetz (@mattgaetz) February 26, 2019

Florida Man. Of course.

The media's behaviour is the second issue - the other the chaos at the Southern Border - that has considerably boosted Trump's chances of winning the 2020 elections.

The Federal Trade Commission is on the brink of approving an extraordinary merger, one that would link up Staples, the leading office retailer, with one of the nation’s leading office wholesalers, threatening to lock up the market. Central to the approval process has been a top Staples lawyer who spent five years overseeing the very division that is now contemplating approval of the merger.

If everyone in 48 states (the other two are complicated for obvious reasons) had a house on an individual equally sized plot, we'd all have about 6.5 acres.

I think it's easy to see how that wouldn't be very "green." And no that doesn't mean we all have to live in skyscrapers instead, but...

Children's engagement in the arts can vary by situation. And that can matter for outcomes.

It is Wednesday and despite being on the other side of the Planet than usual (in Helsinki at present) I am still not intending to write a detailed blog post today. I am quite busy here – teaching MMT to graduate students and other things. But I wanted to follow up on a few details I didn’t have time to write about yesterday concerning the role that NAIRU estimates play in maintaining the ideological dominance of neoliberalism. And some more details about the Textbook launch in London on Friday, and then some beautiful music, as is my practice (these days) on Wednesdays.

Today's Water Cooler: China trade, Trump and Hispanics, Warren and reparations, Sanders, Metro DC DSA, Virginia scandals, open borders, manufacturing, consumer confidence, housing, Elon Musk, value chains, Climate Youth Strike, Friends, loneliness, barbecue

Your deeply respectful president minutes before he heads to Asia

by digby

"Let's create a child rape center then adopt the kids out to good white Christian families" is pretty much the Occam's Razor explanation for all of this.

The second referendum announcement on Monday is exactly the kind of concession to the right that Jeremy Corbyn should not make, argues Vladimir Unkovski-Korica

Elizabeth Warren. Picture credit to: Vox   Childcare in America is amongst the highest in the world. For typical middle-class families (two working parents with two children), it sits at just about 30% of the family’s earnings, according to an OECD study which places it as the 5th more expensive in the world. For low-income single parents the result is even

This has just been published by the FT:

Income inequality increased in the UK in 2018 as benefits cuts hit the income of the country’s poorest households and higher wages helped the richest get richer.

The average income for the richest fifth in Britain increased by 4.7 per cent last year according to data released by the Office for National Statistics on Tuesday.

A compelling, vitally important new book lays out the controversies facing those in mental health and proposes how best to resolve them.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
Found while reading Augustus de Morgan's narcotic 'Budget of Paradoxes' Volume 1.

Today's News:

Collect cards. Play your hand. Throw burritos at your friends.

View on my website

At their annual celebration, the Zapatistas took aim at the Maya Train and tree farm megaprojects that trample the rights of Indigenous people.

In A Political Theory of Post-Truth, Ignas Kalpokas offers a nuanced and lucid description of the conditions and content of a post-truth world, drawing particularly on the work of the seventeen-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza with support from the twentieth-century post-structuralist Gilles Deleuze. Going beyond cliches and superficial diagnosis, this is a perceptive, yet alarming, vision of an ever-more embedded post-truth future, finds Roderick Howlett. 

In this week’s show, Prof. Wolff discusses the million-person Communist demonstration in India, subsidized “development” by Foxconn and Amazon and more.

The reverse of that was the slogan in some environmentalist circles for decades. Environmentalism is personal virtue. Buy the right products, recycle, minimize your carbon footprint in certain ways, etc. And, you know, I recycle. I pay for composting service that the city doesn't provide (I get a nice big bag of soil every year). I make certain other choices which are environmentally friendly but I mostly just make them because they're choices I would make anyway. I also fly on planes when I need to and do lots of "bad" things. None of it really matters.

A spy by any other name

by Tom Sullivan

Never tweet.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk lashed out at the Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, one day after the agency asked a judge to hold him in contempt for allegedly violating the terms of a deal made last year.

"Something is broken with SEC oversight," Musk said on Twitter Tuesday morning.

Dead humpback whale discovered in Brazil’s Amazon jungle puzzles researchers

(Thanks to Dave Roe, who says “The Oregon DOT's fingerprints are all over this.”)

Lucky Charms flavored beer to launch this weekend

(Thanks to Gary Schroeder, Matt Filar and Jay Brandeis)