"Trolls be gone" | Stephen Kinsella at AEON

Anonymous users generate most toxic abuse and conspiracy theories online. The right to be anonymous should be curtailed 

Political Economy Books of 2021

A scholarly examination of market’s power toll on American workers, the collected works of a pioneering economic thinker, an ambitious narrative of US economic history, a first-hand account of how the American justice system is failing, and China’s antitrust exceptionalism: here are (in no particular order) some of the best books published during the past year. 

Viktor Orbán and the Fall of Democracy

 Der Spiegel: "Cronyism, control of the media, attacks on the EU: Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is transforming his country into an autocracy. This spring he will once again stand for re-election. Will Hungarians allow him to get away with it this time?"

Michael Ignatieff on Liberal Values in Politics

 Podcast with Yascha Mounk

The Power Atlas

 Power is now defined by control over flows of people, goods, money, and data, and via the connections they establish. Only states that see the new map of geopolitical power clearly will be able to control the modern world.

Junk Science of 2021: COVID-19 Edition

the most dangerous pandemic in a century spawned all sorts of junk science in 2021, running the gamut from pure quackery to ideology-fueled misinformation 

democracy faces collapse as polarization leads to loss of diversity

 Fifteen interdisciplinary teams of political scientists and complex systems theorists in the natural sciences and engineering explored how polarization is produced and influenced over time by the actions and interactions of individual voters, people in power, and various social networks.

via Steven Novella

Link to EurekAlert

add-note 

Link to PANS

Corruption Perceptions Index 2020 | Transparency International

Transparency International 

Open Source Macro TextBook (!)

 Advanced Macroeconomics An Easy Guide

Debating the f-word

 Is it accurate historically to apply the term ‘fascism’ to America under Trump? And is to do so strategically astute?

On the origin of minds | Pamela Lyon at AEON

 Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years

In Teachers We Trust: The Finnish Way to World-Class Schools by Pasi Sahlberg and Timothy D. Walker

 seven key principles from the Finnish education system that can help build inclusive and thriving school communities, positioning trust as the key ingredient for educational excellence.

‘Pandemic narratives’ are key to understanding the policy responses of European governments to Covid-19

political leaders formulate a storyline providing a convincing account of what is happening, why it is happening, what can/should be done about it, how and by whom. 

The Climate Change Time Bomb | NYT The Interpreter

 "A billion-acre ecological time bomb may be about to go off — if it hasn’t already — converting much of the world’s oxygen into climate-heating carbon dioxide."

"populist discourses in Spain" | José Javier Olivas Osuna & José Rama

The analysis of populist discourses during great events, such as the Covid-19 pandemic, can help us to understand how populist leaders adapt their communicative style to take advantage of changing circumstances. Populist movements often appear within a crisis context. 

Income inequality in the EU: Trends and policy implications | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

Income inequality in the EU: Trends and policy implications | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

The State of Denmark

 Denmark is often held up as an ideal society with a well-functioning welfare state, low levels of corruption, and high levels of social and political stability. But behind this perception, the country is facing up to a number of important challenges. Drawing on a new book, Rune Stubager, Kasper M. Hansen, Michael S. Lewis-Beck and Richard Nadeau explain how voters have responded to key macrosocial challenges since the 1970s and assess where this leaves the future of the Danish ideal.

How Greece became Europe’s unlikely model student

 THE ECONOMIST/Charlemagne

Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation 

 

ref: https://serval.unil.ch/resource/serval:BIB_9364CC4953B2.P001/REF.pdf

Η παραγωγή εμβολίων απαιτεί περισσότερα από μια πατέντα

Η πνευματική ιδιοκτησία είναι απλώς ένα κομμάτι μιας περίπλοκης διαδικασίας 

waiving patents might not boost global access to coronavirus vaccines | Politico

A controversial proposal for a waiver on intellectual property has pitted countries against one another. 

The patriot paradox | Jeremy Adelman at AEON

 Globalism is out. Nationalism is in. Progressives who think they can jump aboard are dangerously naive

political misperceptions | Brendan Nyhan

Why the backfire effect does not explain the durability of political misperceptions 

via NYT/ The Interpreter "The Era of Misinformation Is Here To Stay"

Reassessing the role of wages in the Eurozone

Ten years after the start of the Eurozone crisis, we still do not have a consensual account of what caused it. This limits our ability to learn from it and deploy the appropriate policy responses if a new crisis starts. 

How the EU can counter democratic backsliding in its member states

 Richard Bellamy and Sandra Kröger set out a framework for understanding and tackling the problem, built on the principle of ‘value differentiated integration’. Recent developments in Hungary and Poland have pushed the issue of democratic backsliding to the centre of political and academic debates about the nature and future of the European Union.

The Debunking Handbook 2020 | S.Lewandowsky et al (21)

 Misinformation is false information that is spread either by mistake or with intent to mislead. When there is intent to mislead, it is called disinformation. Misinformation has the potential to cause substantial harm to individuals and society

"Nature’s playbook" | Ruth DeFries at AEON

 From termite queens to the carbon cycle, nature knows how to avoid network collapse. Human designers should pay heed

The future of liberal democracies | Chatham House (video)

The Rt Hon Jeremy Hunt MP and The Honorable Henry A Kissinger 

“Power Is Evil in Itself”: The Ordoliberal Quest for a Privilege-Free Order | Stefan Kolev at PROMARKET

 

In the early 1930s, Eucken and the lawyer Franz Böhm had founded the Freiburg School of ordoliberalism as a research community in law and economics

The Threat to Academic Freedom: From Anecdotes to Data

 written by Eric Kaufmann  at quillette.com

via Jerry Coyne

Academia has become a closed system, a moral community defined by a set of sacred progressive values. The surge of no-platformings which took off in America in 2015 and hit Britain in 2018–19, or the fivefold jump in the rate of cancelling American academics which took place in 2019, present merely the tip of an iceberg of self-censorship ... (read on)

"Youth and Satisfaction with Democracy" (Report)

 This report was prepared at the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and forms part of the work of the Centre for the Future of Democracy.

The cognitive and perceptual correlates of ideological attitudes

 via The Guardian

Although human existence is enveloped by ideologies, remarkably little is understood about the relationships between ideological attitudes and psychological traits. Even less is known about how cognitive dispositions—individual differences in how information is perceived and processed— sculpt individuals’ ideological worldviews,

How Vaccines Are Made | THE ECONOMIST

 "...it is one thing to design and test vaccines. It is another to make them at sufficient scale to generate the billions of doses needed to vaccinate the world’s population, and to do so at such speed that the rate of inoculation can outpace the spread and possible mutation of the virus."

Turkey, Europe, and the Eastern Mediterranean | Brookings

Greco-Turkish maritime disputes, couched in competing narratives of national sovereignty, are nothing new. Their genesis dates as far back as the founding periods of the two states. These disputes have traditionally taken the form of a frozen conflict, with occasional flare-ups. Given this backdrop, what are the driving factors behind the current dispute, which is the longest-lasting crisis between the two countries since Turkey’s military intervention in Cyprus in 1974? 

David Runciman on the USA Democracy |The Guardian

 

Biden wants unity and democracy. But in the US these have always been in conflict