This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Euro MOA+MOE plus Drachma MOE - Nick Rowe, Worthwhile Canadian Initiative: "Suppose your country (call it 'Greece') is in recession, because there is an excess demand for money (call it 'Euros'). And suppose that the Euro is both Medium of Account (prices are quoted in Euros) and Medium of Exchange (all other goods are bought and sold for Euros). Now suppose your government introduces a new currency (call it 'Drachmas'). […]"
• Growth in the ‘Gig Economy’ Fuels Work Force Anxieties Noam Scheiber: "'In the past, firms overstaffed and offered workers stable hours,' said Susan N. Houseman, a labor economist at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 'All of these new staffing models mean shifting risk onto workers, making work less secure.'"
• IMF: Most misleading sentence ever? - Mean Squared Errors: "In summary, when the IMF writes about the the failure to implement the program as assumed, this is the sort of thing is has in mind: the "failure" of the Greek government to find anyone willing to pay €11.5 billion for a stake in banks that require daily injections of liquidity from the ECB simply to keep the cash machines full. "
• Killing the European Project - Paul Krugman, NYT: "In a way, the economics have almost become secondary. But still, let’s be clear: what we’ve learned these past couple of weeks is that being a member of the eurozone means that the creditors can destroy your economy if you step out of line."
• The problem of Greece is not only a tragedy. It is a lie. - John Pilger: "Like the Labour Party in Britain and its equivalents among former social democratic parties such as the Labor Party in Australia, still describing themselves as "liberal" or even "left", Syriza is the product of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, "schooled in postmodernism", as Alex Lantier wrote."
• The 9 charts that show the 'left-wing' policies of Jeremy Corbyn the public actually agrees with - Matt Dathan and Jon Stone at the Independent: "Tony Blair has described some of Mr Corbyn's policies as “old-fashioned" but it turns out the public agree with a lot of them."
• Tomgram: Tim Weiner, The Nixon Legacy - Tom Englehardt introduces an excerpt from Weiner's One Man Against the World: The Tragedy of Richard Nixon: "[…] Richard Nixon was never at peace. A darker spirit animated him -- malevolent and violent, driven by anger and an insatiable appetite for revenge. At his worst he stood on the brink of madness. He thought the world was against him. He saw enemies everywhere. His greatness became an arrogant grandeur."
• On the Euro Summit’s Statement on Greece: First thoughts - Yanis Varoufakis: "The recent Euro Summit is indeed nothing short of the culmination of a coup. In 1967 it was the tanks that foreign powers used to end Greek democracy. In my interview with Philip Adams, on ABC Radio National’s LNL, I claimed that in 2015 another coup was staged by foreign powers using, instead of tanks, Greece’s banks. Perhaps the main economic difference is that, whereas in 1967 Greece’s public property was not targeted, in 2015 the powers behind the coup demanded the handing over of all remaining public assets, so that they would be put into the servicing of our un-payble, unsustainable debt."
• Exclusive: Yanis Varoufakis opens up about his five month battle to save Greece - Harry Lambert - New Statesman: "By resigning and not signing a deal he abhorred, he has kept both his conscience free and his reputation intact. His country remains locked in a trap he spent years opposing and months fighting, but he has escaped."
• Roach Motel Economics - Paul Krugman at the New York Times: "So we have learned that the euro is a Roach Motel — once you go in, you can never get out. And once inside you are at the mercy of those who can pull your financing and crash your banking system unless you toe the line."
• [Australian Federal Police] using hacking software from group aiding human rights abusing nations - Murray Hunter at IA: Because it's there.
• Yanis Varoufakis Hits Australian Radio To Denounce Greek Bailout Deal As 'New Versailles' - Max Chalmers, New Matilda: "It’s got nothing to do with putting Greece back on the rails towards recovery. This is a new Versailles treaty which is haunting Europe again – and the Prime Minister knows it. The Prime Minister knows he’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t."
• In defence of welfare - Chris Dillow: "For one thing, welfare acts as a form of automatic stabilizer; higher welfare spending in bad times helps to support aggregate demand and so moderates recessions. […] And it protects us all. Benefits aren't so much a payment to claimants as a payment through claimants. They are spent at Primark and Lidl, and so support employment there. The distinction between welfare and work is therefore a false one; welfare helps to create jobs."
• Greece and Trust - Simon Wren-Lewis: "The narrative about failing to deliver is just an attempt to disguise the fact that the Troika has largely run the Greek economy for the last five years and is therefore responsible for the results."
• Perpetual war creates endless consequences - Norman Solomon at Al Jazeera America: "While the automation of Uncle Sam’s killing-at-a-distance has sharply reduced American casualties, it has increasingly rendered the U.S. war path as the main avenue for pursuing its goals. And the nation’s top leaders, as well as the military contractors that profit from this tendency, appear to like it that way."
• Kid Stuff - Molly Knefel, the New Inquiry: "The very important end-of-year test featured in the little girl’s play is used to hold other kids back, fire their teachers, and close their schools. The test is written not for them to succeed, but for them to fail."
• On Paleo and Faith in Government - Mike Konczal at the Roosevelt Institute: "What strikes me about this argument is that the Republicans have no less faith [than Democrats] in the power of government. They have faith that the government can privatize social insurance in a way that won’t involve weaker security and higher costs. They have faith that if the government gives employers wage subsidies for poorer workers, employers won’t simply pocket them in wage bargaining. They have faith, against evidence, that the government having no taxes on capital will cause a boom in private investment. They have faith that the government cutting taxes will more than make up the lost revenue. Their faith leads them to conflate building a robust civil society and economic security with laissez-faire economics."
• Neoliberal moralism and the fiction of Europe: a postcolonial perspective - Sadia Abbas, openDemocracy: "Sometimes the virulence of the German response seems to suggest that the Germans cannot forgive actually existing Greeks for being inconveniently and insistently who they are, given the importance of ancient Greece to the German intellectual imagination. At the risk of being florid, it's inconvenient for that imagination that Greeks are not just broken statues, stripped of paint, in the world's museums. "
• The true Greek tragedy - James Meadway at the NEF blog: "The euro’s flaws have been known from the start. In a stunningly prescient essay, written in 1992 as the Maastricht Treaty that paved the way for the single currency neared ratification, economist Wynn Godley predicted the outlines of the present crisis for Greece: “If a country or region has no power to devalue, and if it is not the beneficiary of a system of fiscal equalisation, then there is nothing to stop it suffering a process of cumulative and terminal decline leading, in the end, to emigration as the only alternative to poverty or starvation.” Without exit, this now looks like the future."
• Dr Schäuble’s Plan for Europe: Do Europeans approve? – English version of my article in Die Zeit: "The euro crisis has expanded this lacuna at the centre of Europe hideously. An informal body, the Eurogroup, that keeps no minutes, abides by no written rules, and is answerable to precisely no one, is running the world’s largest macro-economy, with a Central Bank struggling to stay within vague rules that it creates as it goes along, and no body politic to provide the necessary bedrock of political legitimacy on which fiscal and monetary decisions may rest."
• Are We Seeing the End of Homeopathy? - Steven Novella: "There is even a possibility that the FDA will decide to do their actual job – require testing of homeopathic products to demonstrate efficacy before allowing them on the market. If they do this simple and obvious thing, the homeopathic industry in the US will vanish over night, because there is no evidence to support any homeopathic product for any indication. They will have to endure the outrage of quacks, charlatans, and the deluded, but hey, that’s their job. Suck it up."
• Oprah Winfrey: one of the world's best neoliberal capitalist thinkers: "Nothing captures this ensemble of ideological practices better than O Magazine, whose aim is to 'help women see every experience and challenge as an opportunity to grow and discover their best self. To convince women that the real goal is becoming more of who they really are. To embrace their life.' O Magazine implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, identifies a range of problems in neoliberal capitalism and suggests ways for readers to adapt themselves to mitigate or overcome these problems. […] We are the perfect, depoliticized, complacent neoliberal subjects."
• Greece, Europe, and the United States - Jamie Galbraith in Harpers: "SYRIZA was not some Greek fluke; it was a direct consequence of European policy failure. A coalition of ex-Communists, unionists, Greens, and college professors does not rise to power anywhere except in desperate times. That SYRIZA did rise, overshadowing the Greek Nazis in the Golden Dawn party, was, in its way, a democratic miracle. SYRIZA’s destruction will now lead to a reassessment, everywhere on the continent, of the 'European project.'"
• The Beer IneQuality Index - Frances Wooley: Producers operating in high-regulation, high-unionisation environments must compete on quality rather than price. So laissez-faire means crappy beer.
• Dominique Strauss Kahn, addressing “German friends” - via Yanis Varoufakis: "We are expending all our energies on infighting and running the risk of triggering a break-up. This is where we are. A eurozone, in which you, my German friends, would lay down your law with a few Baltic and Nordic states in tow, is unacceptable for all the the rest."
• Between Free Speech and Bureaucracy: Anarchist Political Theory and a Way Forward for Reddit - David Banks at the Society Pages: "At the very least come up with some sort of aspirational progressive vision of what kind of community you want to have and persuade others that they should work to achieve it. This sort of move is the biggest departure that anarchist political theory takes from mainstream liberalism: that communities can agree on the features of a future utopia and govern in the present as if you are already free to live that future utopia. Organizing humans with blanket laws forces you to explain the obvious, namely that hateful people suck and should be persuaded to act otherwise if they wish to remain part of a community that is meaningful to them."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Niall Ferguson Fights Back Against Smear Campaign by Fact-checkers, Facts - Johnathan Chait at New York Magazine: "Committing the odd factual error is an occupational hazard in journalism. For Niall Ferguson, the commission of error is more than a hazard. It’s a cherished way of life."
• It's About The Bubble, Stupid: Tony Abbott's Magical Housing Growth Stimulus Strategy - Ian McAuley tries to teach the PM about housing bubbles: "Unless one is about to trade down or emigrate to Spain (where the bottom has fallen out of the housing market), the gain is illusory: it’s simply price inflation. If you have a portfolio of shares or a Brett Whitely painting on your wall, you may gain some value from a higher market value of such assets because you can sell them, but a higher value of your house is meaningless." Here's yer graph porn of the week:
  
• Academics attack George Osborne budget surplus proposal - Phillip Inman at the Grauniad: Atrios calls Osborne the Stupidest Fucking Person On The Face Of The Planet. I see your Osborne, and raise you a Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey (see above).
• Professors do far less teaching than the public imagines - Clay Shirky at Crooked Timber: I'm inclined to think this is less a matter of professors retreating into the ivory tower than retiring tenured academics being replaced by adjuncts. Clay Shirky is a smart guy, and I have a very small sample size to go on. Last I looked, there were three people with the title of professor at my local campus. In over two years at a nominal university, the only time I've ever been in the same room as anybody who's ever held the title of professor was at the Bellingen launch of Richard Hil's new book.
• What's Left After Higher Education Is Dismantled - Mike Konczal at Rolling Stone: "For-profit schools are turning out like Enron, or mortgage-backed securities designed to explode. They are yet another marvel of the financial world that turned out to be a fraudulent Ponzi scheme."
• What is Reform? The Strange Case of Greece and Europe - James Galbraith at the American Prospect: "Either the Greek government will concede too much, lose its support and collapse, in which case whether the end result is another receivership or Golden Dawn, democracy is dead in Europe. Or, in the end, the Greeks will be forced to take their fate—at enormous risk and cost—into their own hands, and to hope for help from wherever it might come."
• Our Meat Market for Workers: How Coles And Woolworths Benefit From Worker Exploitation - Godfrey Moase at New Matilda: "Labour hire contractors forcing workers to live with 29 other people in a regular suburban home is not the sort of behaviour we should accept in Australia. And by the International Labour Organisation’s measures, making workers live in particular housing, as a condition of employment, is an indicator of forced labour. What once was genuinely seasonal casual work is now a way of life for millions of workers in Australia – it is estimated that 40 per cent of all those in the workforce are currently employed on zero-hours contracts."
• Nicola Corbyn and the Myth of the Unelectable Left - Craig Murray: " I was saddened by readers’ comments [...] in which Labour supporter after Labour supporter posted comment to the effect “I would like to vote for Jeremy Corbyn because he believes in the same things I do, but we need a more right wing leader to have a chance of winning.” There are two answers to that. The first is no, you don’t need to be right wing to win. Look at the SNP. The second is what the bloody hell are you in politics for anyway? Do you just want your team to win like it was football? Is there any point at all in being elected just so you can carry out the same policies as your opponents?"
• Actually existing Europe - Yudit Kiss at openDemocracy: "How is it that Greek PM, Tsipras, who tries to relieve the suffering of his people, is a less acceptable EU negotiation partner than Viktor Orbán?"
• Buy a Joe Strummer Replica Guitar with Your Sex Pistols Credit Card Because Layers Upon Layers of Irony - Lisa Wade at the Society Pages:
  
• I'm a professor. My colleagues who let their students dictate what they teach are cowards. - Koritha Mitchell at Vox: "I don't have the luxury of simply changing my syllabus to make my students more comfortable. You see, I'm also black and a woman. There aren't a lot of other people like me — women of color hold just 7.5 percent of full-time faculty positions nationwide. My very presence makes some of my students uncomfortable because I do not fit any picture society has given them of an expert."
• Why I Defaulted on My Student Loans - Lee Seigel, NYT: "The reported consequences of having no credit are scare talk, to some extent. The reliably predatory nature of American life guarantees that there will always be somebody to help you, from credit card companies charging stratospheric interest rates to subprime loans for houses and cars. Our economic system ensures that so long as you are willing to sink deeper and deeper into debt, you will keep being enthusiastically invited to play the economic game."
• Who Said It, Henry Kissinger or…? - Greg Grandin at the Nation: "That, Kissinger said—trying to establish the domestic will to break the back of adversaries—was what he and Nixon tried to accomplish in Vietnam. “Whether we got it right or not,” Kissinger said, “is really secondary.” It’s not that remarkable a statement. At least it is honest: What matters is the effect that the will to bomb (or, if possible, actual bombing) has on us, providing a sense of purpose so we can bomb some more."
• Gawker’s Idealism Is Exactly What the Labor Movement Needs - Richard Yeselson, New Republic: "The best thing intellectuals can do for the labor movement is also the best thing they can do as individual workers: come together, form a union, and then shout it out to the world." Also related:
• If We Don’t Hang Together … - the ever-brilliant Jonathan Rees for Vitae: "What’s so maddening is that university administrators think professors will take on that extra burden without the quality of education suffering there. Cancel that. What’s so maddening is that the universities willing to employ that strategy simply don’t care if the quality of the education suffers there."
• Bernie Sanders on Obama's "Biggest Mistake" - Jon Schwarz at the Intercept: "I think it’s unlikely that Obama’s demobilization of his supporters was actually a “mistake.” As Ganz put it in 2010, Obama saw his supporters “like a tiger you can’t control”; Ganz speculated that the president’s real goal was simply to “keep the machine on for the next election.”"
• Bubble! - Paul Krugman at the New York Times: "So Jeb! is basically promising that as president, he can generate Florida-style bubbles, which bring disaster when they burst, to the rest of America!"
• A Heavy Price To (Kind Of) Stop The Boats - Ben Eltham at New Matilda: "Immigration is complex. But the Abbott government’s approach is alarmingly simple. It is a policy of ruthless Machiavellianism that subordinates everything to the vacuous metric of boat arrivals, with neo-fascist imagery and a savage apparatus of state sanction."
• A dance of destitution - psychology's clash over coercion - Carl Walker at openDemocracy: "Job centres are being turned into ghettos of deficit annihilation, with job centre staff, mental health practitioners and mental health service users corralled within them. Mental health practitioners cost the state, job centre staff cost the state, people not working cost the state and people receiving medical treatment cost the state. This policy initiative simply puts them in one space and compels them to eat each other up."
• The IMF “Defense” of it Actions against the Greeks is an Unintended Confession - Bill Black at NEP: "Blanchard and the IMF know that an economically-literate deal does not “require difficult decisions by all sides.” It requires, instead, the troika to cease its destructive demands that Greece “bleed the patient” to “heal” it. The troika’s austerity demands forced Greece into a Great Depression that is worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s in terms of sustained, obscene unemployment rates."
• Inside the mind of Bernie Sanders: unbowed, unchanged, and unafraid of a good fight - Paul Lewis for the Guardian: "‘I did win my last election with 71% of the vote. So it’s not just like someone walked in off the street and suddenly they’re Hillary Clinton’s main challenger. We’ve been doing this a few years.’"
• People Aren't Better Off Than Income Trends Show - Matt Bruenig at Demos (US): Young people want Candy Crush Saga, old people want Last Night of the Proms. Apples and oranges. Swings and roundabouts. Lets call the whole thing off.
• Bad Aunty: Seven Years On, How ABC Lateline Sparked The Racist NT Intervention - Chris Graham, New Matilda
• Greece, The Euro and Gunboat Diplomacy - Karl Whelan at Medium: a comprehensive timeline of the crisis Europe didn't have to have.
• Why Doesn’t the United States Have a European-Style Welfare State? - Alesina, Glaeser & Sacerdote 2001, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (via Krugman): "Since racial minorities are highly overrepresented among the poorest Americans, any income-based redistribution measures will redistribute disproportionately to these minorities. Opponents of redistribution in the United States have regularly used race-based rhetoric to resist left-wing policies. […] Within the United States, race is the single most important predictor of support for welfare. America’s troubled race relations are clearly a major reason for the absence of an American welfare state."
• Which Students Get to Have Privacy? - danah boyd: "The reason that I get grouchy is that I hate how the risks that we’re concerned about are shaped by the fears of privileged parents, not the risks of those who are already under constant surveillance, those who are economically disadvantaged, and those who are in the school-prison pipeline."

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Greece: The Unpicking Of Democracy, One Debt Repayment At A Time - David Tuckwell, New Matilda: "In an interview with the Financial Times [president of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi] said that Greece “should understand they have lost sovereignty a long time ago over their economic policies” - lost it, that is, to the market. In another interview with the Wall St Journal he said that Europe’s social contract had become obsolete and was being dismantled."
• Profit and public health - John Quiggin: "[…] selling medicine in the same shop as alcohol is unthinkable, but it’s entirely OK for a health professional to promote and sell water as a treatment for serious illness."
• Tourists and refugees: two worlds that aren’t supposed to collide - Roger Tyers in The Society Pages: "Offshoring poor people back to poor countries by bribing cash-strapped governments is an innovative, if highly morally-dubious strategy to keep the two worlds apart. But as we see with increased regularity, the global poor keep coming, driven by poverty and war. We don’t want to see them, we don’t want them to ruin our holidays, and we don’t want to be reminded of the underlying threat they pose to our privileged way of life. But can we stop them forever? Should we?"
• Thinking about open borders - Antoine Pécoud, openDemocracy: "Employers and companies benefit from the liberalisation of trade in a globalising economy; but workers do not enjoy the same mobility: is this merely a way to favor capital to the detriment of labor and, if so, should this be left uncontested? If all human beings were fortunate enough to live in reasonably wealthy countries, with acceptable living and working conditions, these questions would perhaps be irrelevant. But this is not the case, and the ugly realities of our world are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore." Also:
• The case for open borders - Joseph H. Carens, openDemocracy: "In many ways, citizenship in Western democracies is the modern equivalent of feudal class privilege—an inherited status that greatly enhances one’s life chances. To be born a citizen of a rich state in Europe or North America is like being born into the nobility (even though many of us belong to the lesser nobility)."
• American Exceptionalism - cartoon by Ted Rall
• Economic arguments as stalking horses - Noah Smith, and Paul Krugman responds in Why Am I A Keynesian?: i confess I don't understand the big government versus small government debate in the context of a country that spends more on their military than the rest of the world combined. How much bigger could you want the government to get? The fact that this rarely (if ever) rates a mention in this debate shows that in fact both sides agree that size doesn't matter—it's what you do with it. The debate can really only be about whether the government should help people who need it, or let them suffer unnecessarily.
• A Practical Vision of a More Equal Society - Thomas Piketty reviews Tony Atkinson's latest book: "With Atkinson, the dividing lines between history, economics, and politics have never been strict: he has always tried to reconcile the scholar with the citizen, often discreetly, occasionally in a more forthright manner. All the same, Inequality: What Can Be Done? goes much further in that direction than any of his earlier books. Atkinson takes risks and sets forth a genuine plan of action."
• Order effects in reading and citing academic papers - Daniel Feenberg, Ina Ganguli, Patrick Gaulé, Jonathan Gruber: "[…] our findings confirm that presentation order can be a powerful determinant of choice in a list-based environment – and that this can have strong downstream effects, such as through paper citations in our sample." I think you'll find that a very widely-cited article by Professor Aardvark of Algiers University disputes this.
• Open Access: A Collective Ecology for AAA Publishing in the Digital Age - Alberto Corsin Jimenez, Dominic Boyer, John Hartigan and Marisol de la Cadena mark one year of open access for the journal Cultural Anthropology: "“In 2011, the journal-publishing divisions of Elsevier, Springer, and Wiley reported profits equal to 36%, 33.9%, and 42%, respectively, of their sales revenue.” Exxon Mobil, comparatively, has a net profit margin of 7.31%, Rio Tinto’s is 13.69%, even JPMorgan Chase can only claim 24.57%. Volunteered academic labor, it turns out, is a far more lucrative platform for profit accumulation than fossil fuels, mineral resources, and international finance."
• I was a liberal adjunct professor. My liberal students didn’t scare me at all - Amanda Taub at Vox: "[…] if university faculty are feeling disempowered in their classrooms, that's because they do, in fact, have less power at work: the shrinking pool of tenure-track jobs and the corresponding rise in the numbers of poorly paid adjuncts means many university teachers are in a precarious position right now. […] The problem isn't the substance of student complaints — the problem is that university lecturers are so terrified of the effect student complaints could have. That's a problem to be solved by universities having faculty members' backs, not by somehow silencing the debate over identity politics."
• Inequality, Technology and Public Policy - Tony Atkinson speaking at the RSA (video): The most interesting point for me came out of the last question from the floor. When he left school in the early 1960s, Tony was hired as a systems analyst for IBM, with no training whatsoever, and trained on the job alng with others from all sorts of backgrounds, at great expense to IBM. He muses that perhaps high employment at the time created investment in training, rather than vice versa.

This week, I have been mostly reading:

• PPE for the people - Joel Lazarus and Neil Howard at openDemocracy: "Our alternative is called – wait for it – PPE, or “People’s Political Economy.” In the summer of 2012 we and two other Oxford-based academics/activists came together to set up their own response to this situation. We agreed to establish a political economy education project to enable Oxford communities to learn about and respond to the crisis. At its heart, our PPE is based on a simple but powerful democratic premise: that all people have the right and the ability to understand the world for themselves, individually and collectively."
• Resilience and ‘counter-resilience’ - Kevin Harris at the Neighbourhoods Blog: "if we use the term, there’s a risk of doing so in collusion with forces and ideologies that seek to embed ‘resilience’ within the status quo. This in turn […] effectively undermines other forms of resilience."
• Publisher pushback puts open access in peril - Virginia Barbour in the Conversation: "Elsevier’s new policy is a substantial tightening of its rules around Green OA. It states that, if no APC is paid, the author’s accepted version of the article cannot be made publicly available via their institution’s repository until after an embargo period, which ranges from six months to four years. In addition, the license required is the most restrictive possible, in that it prohibits commercial reuse, or use of excerpts of the work."
• Myth of the Garbage Patch - Maya Weeks, the New Enquiry: "According to Jeffrey Meikle, author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, after World War II resin makers “mounted a major educational effort to accommodate the consumer to new, previously unknown plastics. People neither naturally gravitated to the stuff, nor did they instinctively throw it away, so the industry also had to insulate consumers to plastic’s disposability.” It’s no coincidence that the escalation of the abovementioned effects–the rise in hungry whales, shark attacks, dying coral, anoxic zones and so on and so forth–have coincided with quadrupled plastics production since the massive neoliberal deregulation of the 1980s."
• Income Inequalities in Perspective - Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Vladimir Popov for the ILO: All the graphs you'll need for the rest of this year's arguments over Piketty.
• Trade and Trust - Paul Krugman, NYT: "Instead of addressing real concerns, however, the Obama administration has been dismissive, trying to portray skeptics as uninformed hacks who don’t understand the virtues of trade. But they’re not: the skeptics have on balance been more right than wrong about issues like dispute settlement, and the only really hackish economics I’ve seen in this debate is coming from supporters of the trade pact."
• Sharing information on student protests - Ingrid Robeyns at Crooked Timber: "Students and staff who are occupying and protesting: share information!"
• A Fascinating Minimum-Wage Experiment Is About to Unfold - John Cassidy at the New Yorker: "An important question, from a policy-analysis perspective, is how the new wage laws will affect employment levels in the cities that have introduced them. It is now almost twenty-five years since the labor economists David Card and Alan B. Krueger, who were then both at Princeton, published a famous study challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that raises in the minimum wage inevitably lead to declines in hiring, particularly among teen-agers."
• The University of the Spectacle - James Compton, The Public Intellectuals Project: "The University of the Spectacle inverts the academy’s core values. Students and researchers of social work, English literature or visual arts will not find themselves in these images. No sociology will be committed. Indeed, all traces of scholarship have been removed. The utilitarian managerialism at the heart of the University of the Spectacle has no time for such activities. After all, where is the value-added proposition?"
• Ten Ideas to Save the Economy #5. Reinvent Education: I like Robert Reich. He means well. But count the ocurrences of phrases like "a more competitive workforce" versus "better-informed and engaged citizens". It isn't the job of public education to save the economy.
• Austerity Bites: Fiscal Lessons from the British General Election - Jonathan Hopkin and Mark Blyth: "The economic crisis that hastened New Labour’s demise had nothing to do with overspending and everything to do with its uncritical acceptance of twenty-first-century financial innovation and its excesses. Before analysts conclude that Labour has no choice but to shift to the right, we need to remember the lessons of the global financial crisis: a balanced budget will not save a government from the failures of a banking sector that is too big to bail out, and mere economic facts seldom defeat ideologies."
• The Corporate Archipelago - Paul Krugman, NYT: "[…] I just participated in a panel on the future of capitalism. I know, why such a small topic? But what I found myself thinking and talking about is actually the present of capitalism — and in particular about the peculiar delusion that we live in a world of individual competition in freewheeling markets."
• Grexit and the Morning After - Yes, Krugman again; he's on top form: "[…] the bigger question is what happens a year or two after Grexit, where the real risk to the euro is not that Greece will fail but that it will succeed. Suppose that a greatly devalued new drachma brings a flood of British beer-drinkers to the Ionian Sea, and Greece starts to recover. This would greatly encourage challengers to austerity and internal devaluation elsewhere."
• The bad intelligence - This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow in Daily Kos: Now that we know what we know… y'know…?
• Our Mania for Hope Is a Curse - Chris Hedges plays Cassandra rather well at Truthdig: "The Dark Ages were marked by arbitrary rule, incessant wars, insecurity, anarchy and terror. And I see nothing to prevent the rise of a new Dark Age if we do not abolish the corporate state. Indeed, the longer the corporate state holds power the more likely a new Dark Age becomes. To trust in some mythical force called progress to save us is to become passive before corporate power. The people alone can defy these forces. And fate and history do not ensure our victory. "
• The Big Meh - Krugman keeps hitting them out of the park: "[…] writing and talking breathlessly about how technology changes everything might seem harmless, but, in practice, it acts as a distraction from more mundane issues — and an excuse for handling those issues badly. If you go back to the 1930s, you find many influential people saying the same kinds of things such people say nowadays […] And then, thanks to World War II, we finally got the demand boost we needed, and all those supposedly unqualified workers — not to mention Rosie the Riveter — turned out to be quite useful in the modern economy, if given a chance."
• Nash equilibrium - Tony Curzon Price at openDemocracy: "There is nothing intrinsic to game theory that says that preferences should be self-regarding or that players should not care about the pay-offs to others. That is a layer of psychology and sociology on top of Nash's mathematics and utterly separable from it. Nash's result will apply as much (or, perhaps, as little) in a den of thieves as in a paradise of saints."
• SourceForge commits reputational suicide - Simon Phipps, Infoworld: "Once the darling of open source, SourceForge has been eclipsed by GitHub and package managers, leaving it with a long, thin tail of (mostly consumer) software. It has used increasingly desperate measures to monetize the service through questionable advertising, SEO, and adware injectors."
• Reporter Who Wrote Sunday Times 'Snowden' Propaganda Admits That He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him - Mike Masnick at Techdirt: "In short: one government official told them this, and they asked other government officials, who all had a personal interest in having the answer be "yes" and after enough government officials all agreed on the same talking point, good boy Tom Harper wrote it all down and presented it as fact."