Statistics is social work for science

"The short-term way to level the playing field is to update the New Deal so it includes and addresses the current workforce. We need to accept that many people don't work full-time for an employer and that "jobs" no longer mean just W-2 employees, as Douglas Rushkoff explained. Richard Cass, a self-employed technical and business consultant and Freelancers Union member, also puts it well: "Government programs that promote small business generally focus on companies with scores of employees and millions of dollars in annual revenue, which is short-sighted." That has immediate implications for our economic and job policies.

But to really bring a thriving middle class back to life, we need a dramatic shift in thinking, institutions, and assumptions. The role of policy should be to foster newer, more self-sustaining systems that follow this new mutualist paradigm. In the long run, our institutions need to move away from regarding the office as the center of a person's economic life, from business as the provider of benefits, and from government as the provider of social supports. The middle class does not have to be built by focusing on individual wealth. Instead, we can build stable markets and societies where people make a living, communities flourish, and businesses survive -- and not at the expense of others. It's not utopian -- it's a necessity if we want a successful middle class again."

"The conclusion is as unpleasant as it is inevitable. The copyright industry lobby is actively trying to hide egregious crimes against children, obviously not because they care about the children, but because the resulting censorship mechanism can be a benefit to their business if they manage to broaden the censorship in the next stage. All this in defense of their lucrative monopoly that starves the public of culture."

"Speculation: There’s a critique of the regulators and key decision makers during the crisis that invokes cultural capital and the idea that regulators are socialized with Wall Street in a way that it is difficult for them to exercise any type of power over them, to see their interests in conflict. I wonder if the same is true for the corporate sector. As the firm goes global, and as the white-collar workforce is broken by computerization and globalization, more and more elite corporate positions will be filled by those leaving Wall Street. (Has this already happened? Data/Studies?) If so, you’ll see an even more lucrative revolving door between corporate elites and financial elites. As such, any natural checks to financial sector power coming from the corporate market space is less likely to happen."

"The lesson here is that if we want serious regulation of banks, we can't trust it to be done by bank regulators. We've seen the Fed and the OCC time and time again bend over backwards to let the banks out of statutory requirements. We've seen this with inaction (HOEPA regs), with aggressive preemption (and OCC is back to its old tricks...).

And this isn't just in the realm of consumer finance. This is also in the safety and soundness area. I'm not talking about stretched interpretations of section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act. I'm talking about affiliate transaction rules and Prompt Corrective Action, cornerstones of the safety-and-soundness regime. Saule Omarova has a great paper that shows how the Fed granted affiliate transaction waivers like a drunken sailor during the financial crisis.  Those were rules that went back to 1932-33 as part of Glass-Steagal.  

And remember Prompt Corrective Action? That was a response to all of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board's screw ups during the S&L crisis (Who you say? There's a reason the FHLBB doesn't exist any more...). PCA is clear of a bunch of tripwires as you can get. The whole point was to make sure that the bank regulators regulated, not coddled. But Bernanke announced that he was suspending PCA for the banks during the financial crisis. Only after the stress tests cleared the big banks did PCA get applied to the small banks, and with a vengance. What a sorry state of the world we live in where the bank regulators are the last people we can trust to actually regulate the banks. "

"Granting broadcasters and cablecasters intellectual property rights that apply independently of copyright in the programs being broadcast, together with legally enforceable technological protection measures, raises concerns for access to public domain works. These measures would add complexity to copyright clearance regimes for creators of podcasts and documentary films, and interfere with consumers’ ability to make home recordings permitted under national copyright laws. Granting broadcasters and cablecasters exclusive rights to authorize retransmissions of broadcasts over the Internet will harm competition and innovation by allowing broadcasters and cablecasters to control the types of devices that can receive transmissions. It will also create new liability risks for Internet intermediaries that retransmit information on the Internet."

"According to recent research, it is not illegal copying that is threatening the livelihood of artists, as record companies tell us, but an inequality built into the existing copyright system itself. Leonhard Dobusch on why, in a winner-takes-all culture, stronger copyright protection only benefits the few."

"What to make of all this? First of all, it means that Michele Bachmann is a Keynesian. No, Michele, not a Kenyan: a Keynesian, an adherent to an economic theory loathed by conservatives but recognized as common sense by most others, and which supposes the need for government policy interventions in otherwise free markets. This very nearly makes Bachmann a Communist, according to her own party: luckily, Tea Party conservatives can count on the remarkable vapidity of their supporters in order to dodge such sticky political contradictions."

Mr Levin said: “It is past time for the president to nominate new leadership at the OCC to protect American families and businesses from the excesses of Wall Street.”

"The other key thing to pay attention to is who this marketing campaign was targeted at: key decisionmakers at providers and insurance companies. Those are the people who decide whether medical procedures get ordered. It’s not patients. Patients aren’t going to experience a loss of freedom or satisfaction because an expert reviewer at the Independant Payment Advisory Board makes the call as to whether a procedure is medically beneficial, rather than the corresponding bureaucrat at their insurance provider or at the for-profit clinic they’re attending."

"It is no surprise that Florida has the largest number of excess vacant units and that Nevada has the largest percentage of excess vacant units. What might be a surprise to some is that California is below the U.S. average."

"Future historians will look back at this, and marvel. Of course, it’s just part of the broader story of how bad economic ideas — the very ideas that were proved wrong by the crisis, and continue to be proved wrong by subsequent events — have come to dominate the discourse."

"…Florida’s legislature recently debated a bill to remove licensing requirements from 20 occupations, including hair-braiding, interior design and teaching ballroom-dancing. For a while it looked as if the bill would sail through: Florida has been a centre of tea-party agitation and both chambers have Republican majorities. But the people who care most about this issue—the cartels of incumbents—lobbied the loudest. One predicted that unlicensed designers would use fabrics that might spread disease and cause 88,000 deaths a year. Another suggested, even more alarmingly, that clashing colour schemes might adversely affect “salivation”. In the early hours of May 7th the bill was defeated. If Republican majorities cannot pluck up the courage to challenge a cartel of interior designers when Florida’s unemployment rate is more than 10%, what hope has America? The Licence Raj may be here to stay."

"Cryptocurrency is coming. It could be Bitcoin, it could be something else, it could be a new trading framework that incorporates many cryptocurrencies. The important thing is that in a decade’s time, governments will have lost the ability to look into their citizens’ wealth and income.

This, in turn, means that no taxation or welfare can be based on wealth or income.

I argue that the proper way to tackle this problem from an information policy perspective is to shift the taxation base entirely to consumption and therefore shift all income tax to VAT. To keep taxation progressive, and to keep welfare systems functional, you will also need to combine it with a basic unconditional income for every citizen that amounts to some level of minimum sustenance."