The Happiness Industry: How Government and Big Businesses Manipulate Your Moods For Profit
How efforts to motivate and instill loyalty among workers and citizens by trying to mass produce happiness have backfired.
Read more...Category Archives: Social values
“The Art of the Gouge”: NYU as a Model for Predatory Higher Education
A group of 400 NYU faculty members documents how the school fleeces students to pay for gold-plated administrator pay and perks.
Read more...Satyajit Das: The Power of Money
A new series of books on money gives an intriguing historical overview and winds up highlighting money as a implement of power relations.
Read more...William J. Astore: The American Military Uncontained, Chaos Spread, Casualties Inflicted, Missions Unaccomplished
An important, sobering description of how US military overreach became institutionalized.
Read more...Ilargi: Will Austerity Be the Straw that Breaks the EU AND the UK?
Cameron thinks he’s riding a major victory, and he will now be called upon to deliver on his election promises, which just so happen to include a deepening and acceleration of austerity measures.
Read more...Bill Black: The Economist Must Retract Its Racist Headline Immediately
The UK election results provoked the Economist to reveal its racist tendencies.
Read more...Gaius Publius: Sanders Raises $3 Million in Four Days; Will He Split the Party?
Why Bernie Sanders is a real contender, and how his campaign threatens Democratic party apparatchiks.
Read more...Resilience is The New Black
Why sustainability has failed and “resilience” is replacing it.
Read more...After Shocking Fundraising Totals, Bernie Sanders Defends European-Style Socialism
Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid is already creating more of a stir than expected. He is not just running against Clinton. He’s targeting an entire system.
Read more...Syriza Emulates Nixon Going to China in a Bad Way
It’s painful to watch the Greek ruling coalition unwittingly do the creditors’ work by wringing Greece dry of cash more aggressively than Pasok or New Democracy would have dared to.
Read more...Insurance in Extended Families
Yves here. Color me appalled by the premise of this post. It starts from the assumption that social safety nets are bad because they crowd out “informal institutions” namely family, as the insurer of the last resort. Note it may be unfair to single out this post, since the authors are addressing an apparently conventional […]
Read more...Satyajit Das: Two Views of Japan’s Setting Sun
Das discusses two recent books on Japan, and both provide windows on how Japan is coping with its now lost two decades. One of them is by Tag Murphy, who I met in my days in Japan and has long been a very insightful commentator. As I said at the Atlantic Economy conference, rather than trying to “jump start the economy,” which would take more radical restructuring than they are willing to engage in, the top wealthy might be better served to worry about managing low growth better. And for its many flaws, egalitarian Japan has muddled through a far more severe bubble and bust with more grace than we have.
Read more...Bill Black: Obama & TPP – Every One That Doeth Evil Hateth the Light
President Obama wants the world to know that he takes it personally that the Democratic Party’s base opposes his latest effort to sell out the people of the world to the worst corporations through the infamous Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) deal.
Read more...Gaius Publius: What’s Wrong with Wyden-Hatch-Ryan’s Fast Track Bill – The Specifics
Why the proposed “fast track” authorization for misnamed “trade” deals is even worse than you imagined.
Read more...The IMF’s Big Greek Mistake
Instead of demanding repayment and further austerity, the IMF should recognize its responsibility for Greece’s predicament and forgive much of the debt.
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