Paul Krugman: Money: The Brave New Uncertainty of Mervyn King

The Bank of England, founded in 1694, isn’t the oldest central bank in the world, an honor that belongs to Sweden’s Riksbank, founded a quarter-century earlier. But the “Old Lady of Threadneedle Street” arguably invented the art of central banking—the visible hand, operating through the money supply, lending policies, and more—that all modern economies, no matter how much they may talk about free markets, rely on to provide monetary and financial stability.

These days, of course, the pound sterling is much less widely used than the dollar, the euro, or even the yen or the yuan, and the Bank of England is correspondingly overshadowed in many ways by its much younger counterparts abroad. Yet the bank still punches above its weight in troubled times. In part that’s because London remains a great financial center. But it’s also thanks to the Bank of England’s intellectual adventurousness.

Dean Baker: Paul Ryan's Calls for Eliminating Almost the Entire Federal Government

No, that is not some new concession that the Speaker made to appease Donald Trump, this is his budget wonkiness. According to the analysis of Ryan's budget by the Congressional Budget Office, he would reduce the non-Social Security, non-Medicare portion of the federal budget, shrinking it to 3.5 percent of GDP by 2050 (page 16).

This number is roughly equal to current spending on the military. Ryan has indicated that he does not want to see the military budget cut to any substantial degree. That leaves no money for the Food and Drug Administration, the National Institutes of Health, The Justice Department, infrastructure spending or anything else. Following Ryan's plan, in 35 years we would have nothing left over after paying for the military.

Proposed Bill Would Prevent Your Employer From Accessing Your Birth Control Schedule

Employers are using third-party companies to mine data about their workers' personal health issues.

By Michael Arria

Congresswoman Suzan DelBene is proposing legislation that would prevent companies from accessing their employees' birth control details.

The Birth Control Privacy Act (H.R. 5746), which was introduced with over 40 cosponsors, takes aim at workplace wellness programs that might access private information regarding women's contraception decisions. The legislation would prohibit such programs from sharing personally identifiable information with employers about their workers' birth-control use.

Why Google DeepMind wants your medical records

Google's DeepMind has moved on from playing Go to more serious matters - attempting to solve some of the world's biggest health problems.

Google's DeepMind has moved on from playing Go to more serious matters - attempting to solve some of the world's biggest health problems.

Google's DeepMind has moved on from playing Go to more serious matters - attempting to solve some of the world's biggest health problems.

But less so by privacy groups and some patients, who have been surprised and concerned that their data - in some cases not anonymised - can be shared with the tech giant's AI division.

Paul Krugman: The GOP’s Original Sin

Norm Ornstein has a piece in Vox laying out, once again, his (and Mann’s) thesis that the GOP went off the rails, becoming a radical party with little regard for truth, a long time ago. He’s right, of course; I’ve been saying much the same thing since the early 2000s, notably in the introduction to my book The Great Unraveling.

My reward, by the way, was to be labeled “shrill”; and at the risk — actually not the risk, the certainty — of sounding whiny, I’m still generally treated as having overstepped the boundaries even though everything I said back then is now becoming more or less conventional wisdom.

Here's Why Viking Economics Are Superior

The Nordic model assumes a rested worker is a productive worker.

By George Lakey

A few years ago, I sat in a living room in the Norwegian town of Skien, surrounded by relatives. As a young man I’d married an international student from Norway, and her family had adopted me. Whenever I was back in Norway, we’d get together for pastries and coffee. I’d lived in Oslo more than half a century ago, but I’d come back many times. Gathered in the living room that day were relatives of a variety of ages and occupations: teacher, industrial worker, owner of a garden center, social worker, organic farmer, middle manager in a business.

As we talked about this and that, one of the cousins mentioned that she’d just heard about the results of an experiment for shortening the workweek. She told us with some excitement that the study measured people’s productivity when their workweek was shortened from forty to thirty hours. The researchers found that the workers got more work done.

Five Conspirators in the Eradication of the Middle Class

PAUL BUCHHEIT FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Their unspoken goal is a two-class nation, with a heavily armed security force to quell resistance from the more outspoken members of the lower class. It may be somewhat of an unwitting goal, since narcissistic wealth-takers, as they build their fortunes, tend to lose their ability to empathize with others.

Barack Obama said, "We are not as divided as we seem." But those are just feel-good words. A middle class still exists, but in weakened form, as many families from the once-dominant mainstream of society continue to move up or down, mostly down. The conspirators in the breakdown of the middle class have complementary roles that allow them to divide the country as they perpetuate the myth of prosperity for all.

What Really Happened in Syria

Exclusive: The U.S. government blames the Syrian civil war almost entirely on Bashar al-Assad – and some progressives have bought into that propaganda narrative – but there is another side of the story, as Daniel Lazare describes.

By Daniel Lazare

How did Syria get so ugly so fast? This is a question that could just as well be asked of Libya, Egypt or Yemen, all of which saw stirring democratic revolts during the so-called Arab Spring only to descend into religious bigotry, civil war or military dictatorship.

But it is especially urgent with regard to Syria, a great bleeding wound on the edge of Europe that, over the last five years, has seen as many as 470,000 deaths, generated some 4.8 million refugees, and sent out waves of terrorism that are destabilizing politics from Eastern Europe to the U.S. Not since Yugoslavia has a country collapsed more completely or calamitously.