for doing what is necessary to keep Greece in the Euro? No. Is there enough goodwill to support a bridging effort to buy time for detailed discussion of how much money Greece needs and how much control the lender countries want to keep? Yes. Is it natural for the Greek side to use that bridging period to create ‘facts on the ground’? Yes. Are the institutions going to let them get away with that? No. That would be my capsule summary.

Because the guts of the political argument are that in the longer term, the lenders need to a) understand that they have to come up with enough budget financing to put Greece back on a sustainable economic path, and write off past debts, and b) to be given confidence that if they provide such financing, it will actually be used to put Greece back onto a sustainable path, rather than spent on propping up clients and passing a few more years in the pretence that the 2007 peak was ‘normality’. And in the short term, the best way of establishing whether b) is true is to find out if the Syriza government are capable of delivering on negotiated promises, or whether they are going to constantly talk about ‘red lines’. So between now and July, we need to find out what the democratic mandate Syriza keeps talking about actually means…

…In the past few weeks, I’ve seen a number of speeches and articles suggesting that the problem lies in the inadequacy of our economic models–that we need to rethink macroeconomic theory, which has failed to offer useful policy guidance in the crisis. But is this really the story?… It’s true that few economists predicted the crisis…. Since then, however… basic textbook models, reflecting an approach to recessions and recoveries that would have seemed familiar to students half a century ago, have performed very well. The trouble is that policy makers in Europe decided to reject those basic models in favor of alternative approaches that were innovative, exciting and completely wrong…. In America, the White House and the Federal Reserve mainly stayed faithful to standard Keynesian economics…. Meanwhile, the Fed ignored ominous warnings that it was ‘debasing the dollar,’ sticking with the view that its low-interest-rate policies wouldn’t cause inflation as long as unemployment remained high.

In Europe, by contrast, policy makers were ready and eager to throw textbook economics out the window in favor of new approaches. The European Commission, headquartered here in Brussels, eagerly seized upon supposed evidence for ‘expansionary austerity’…. But while European policy makers may have imagined that they were showing a praiseworthy openness to new economic ideas, the economists they chose to listen to were those telling them what they wanted to hear. They sought justifications for the harsh policies they were determined, for political and ideological reasons, to impose on debtor nations…. Theory provided excellent guidance, if only policy makers had been willing to listen. Unfortunately, they weren’t. And they still aren’t. If you want to feel really depressed about Europe’s future, read the Op-Ed article by Wolfgang Schäuble…

…Krugman’s latest offers an argument that is a version of Occam’s razor. I don’t agree, but… they are extremely clever, and both have lots of prior experience…. Blanchard makes the following point.  We should aspire to stabilising the economy.  [Surely one can’t argue with that.]  And if we succeed [we might not, but if], and assuming it’s not done perfectly, but just quite well, then the small movements left over will be described well enough with a linear model.  He’s not saying we definitely will be able to bring this about.  Just that we might be able to.  And, if we can, he states a result in words from function approximation, which again is unarguable.  [With the caveat that this small range should not cross over some crucial point of inflection/attraction/repulsion… ]

…Her sales figures are monitored…by the microsecond. By hidden cameras and mics. They listen to her every word; they capture her every movement; that track and stalk her as if she were an animal; or a prisoner; or both. She’s jacked into a headset that literally barks algorithmic, programmed ‘orders’ at her, parroting her own ‘performance’ back to her, telling her how she compares with quotas calculated…down to the second…for all the hundreds of items in the store…which recites ‘influence and manipulation techniques’ to her…to use on unsuspecting customers…that sound suspiciously like psychological warfare. It’s as if the NSA was following you around……and it was stuck in your head…telling you what an inadequate failure you were…psychologically waterboarding you…all day long…every day for the rest of your life.

Mara’s boss sits in the back. Monitoring all twelve, or fifteen, or twenty people that work in the store. On a set of screens. Half camera displays, half spreadsheets; numbers blinking in real-time. Glued to it like a zombie. Chewing slowly with her mouth open. Jacked into a headset. A drone-pilot… piloting a fleet of human drones…pressure-selling disposable mass-made shit…as if it were luxury yachts…through robo-programmed info-warfare…like zombies…to other zombies…who look stunned…like they just got laser blasted, cluster-bombed, shock-and-awed…

…[who] put his academic work on the Great Depression to the best possible use when he saved the financial system in 2008, and then went further than any other central banker to try to bring unemployment down. But now he’s putting that expertise to the best possible financial use by signing on to advise the $25 billion hedge fund Citadel…. If hedge funders are willing to pay him $200,000 just to dispense his wisdom over dinner, they’d be willing to pay him a lot more to do so on a regular basis. It’s yet another example of the revolving door between Wall Street and Washington…. Timothy Geithner has joined the private equity firm Warburg Pincus… Jeremy Stein… Peter Orszag… a metronomic quality to it….

It’s hard to blame him. All he’s going to be doing is telling Citadel what he thinks about the economy, and rubbing shoulders with their clients. So it’s even more about boosting Citadel’s prestige as it is about boosting their bottom line…. At the same time, though, it’s a little disappointing that everyone who goes into public service ends up trading in on that to Wall Street…

…fail us when we entered the Great Recession?… Paul Krugman writes that ranting about the need for new models is not helpful…. Tony Yates writes that the 2000 Benhabib and Schmitt-Grohe’s paper on the ‘perils of Taylor rules’ is one example of a paper [but there are hundreds] that embraced both nonlinearity and multiplicity…. Noah Smith writes that the favorite macro models didn’t have any finance in them, with the possible lone exception of the Bernanke-Gertler ‘financial accelerator’ models. That was a big mistake…. Olivier Blanchard writes that we all knew that there were ‘dark corners’—situations in which the economy could badly malfunction. But we thought we were far away from those corners…. Mark Thoma writes that all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models…. Noah Smith writes that if you have models for everything, you don’t actually have any models at all…. Paul Krugman writes that… theory provided excellent guidance, if only policy makers had been willing to listen…

…the practical implications of full repeal have made it a dead letter among all but the most reactionary conservatives in the Republican Party…. Bloomberg found that only 35 percent of American adults supports outright repeal…. [and] repeal and ‘repeal and replace’ are nearly coterminous…. Repeal is a fringe position… in that those who do support it reside disproportionately on the periphery of the law itself…. Dell Stone, quoted in the Bloomberg article, is a textbook case. Stone, 83, says she ‘certainly hopes’ the law gets repealed…. Stone’s antipathy to Obamacare stems from somewhere, but not from her interaction with the law itself. At 83, her frustrations with out-of-pocket health care costs are at best only tangentially related to Obamacare. She isn’t shopping for insurance on the federally facilitated Alabama exchange. She’s on Medicare. And she probably isn’t unhappy that the law increased her taxes because it almost certainly didn’t….

Among 18- to 64-year-olds—the people who pay for the law, or are eligible for the law’s benefits, or might become eligible for the law’s benefits at some point in the future—Obamacare is breakeven. Among… old people… 36 percent view the law favorably, while 46 percent view it unfavorably…. We shouldn’t give everyone’s views about Obamacare equal weight. The public sentiment animating the repeal movement is derived from people who have a negligible stake in the law, but who would like to throw millions of people off their new insurance plans…. Presumably we’d have no problem ignoring old people if they objected to child tax credits financed by working-age people. We should ignore them in this instance, too.

…encouraging innovation that increases the employability of workers, notably by emphasizing the human dimension of service provision. Public policy should aim to reduce market power in consumer markets, and to re-balance bargaining power between employers and workers…. Return to a more progressive rate structure for the personal income tax, with a top rate of 65 per cent…. The government should offer guaranteed employment at the living wage…. Employers should adopt ethical pay policies…. Increased taxation of investment income….

A fresh examination of the case for an annual wealth tax…. All receipts of inheritance and gifts inter vivos to be taxed…. National Savings… offering a guaranteed positive (and possibly subsidised) real rate of interest on savings…. Institutions to represent the interests of savers and to provide alternative outlets for saving not driven by shareholder interests…. A capital endowment for all, either at adulthood or at a later date…. An EU initiative for a participation income as a basis for social protection, starting with a universal basic income for children.

…declined over the first decade of the millennium widely across the industrialized world. ‘It’s puzzling that we can get away with paying so little for what are really terrible jobs,’ Professor Ashenfelter told me…. The job market–that most critical institution of capitalist societies, the principal vehicle to distribute the nation’s wealth among its people–is not working properly. This raises a fundamental question: If the job market cannot keep hardworking people out of poverty and spread prosperity more broadly, how will it be done? Is public assistance our future?… Something is not working right for a majority of Americans. Maybe it’s time to try something different.