Tuesday, September 05, 2017

Monopoly Power, Cyber and Feminist EcoNomists

YES MEdia Dragon!

Everything you need to know about the Azerbaijani Laundromat

UK at centre of secret $3bn Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme

UK at centre of secret $3bn Azerbaijani money laundering and lobbying scheme Guardian
A NOVEL MEDIA DRAGON APPROACH: ‘You Have to Know (COLD WAR) History to Actually Teach It.’ I will note, though, that people have been inveighing against “rote memorization” of facts in favor of big-picture learning since before I was born, and the result seems to be people who are ignorant of facts and don’t grasp the big picture either.



'People who mix up Australia and Austria': Putin's veiled attack on Trump over North Korea

RUSSIAN President Vladimir Putin says the US asking for his help with North Korea was a silly request, from those who “mix up Australia and Austria”.

DESPITE HIS 85-YEAR LEAD, Feminist economist, SHE, STILL SCOOPED WALTER DURANTY: Stalin’s starved millions: Anne Applebaum uncovers full horror of Ukraine famine



I suspect most of you have followed (to varying degrees) the recent controversies over gender hostility in economics.  What I find striking is that hardly anyone has mentioned the movement known as “Feminist economics.”  And yes that is a formal thing, here is Wikipedia on “Feminist economics”:

Feminist economics is the critical study of economics including its methodologyepistemologyhistory and empirical research, attempting to overcome androcentric (male and patriarchal) biases. It focuses on topics of particular relevance to women, such as care work oroccupational segregation (exclusion of women and minorities from certain fields); deficiencies of economic models, such as disregardingintra-household bargaining; new forms of data collection and measurement such as the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM), and more gender-aware theories such as the capabilities approach.[1] Feminist economics ultimately seeks to produce a more gender inclusive economics.

There is much more to a very long, thoughtful, and well-documented entry, and feminist economics has been a recognized field or subfield since at least the early 1990s.  There is an entire refereed journal called…Feminist Economics.  There is a significant International Association for Feminist Economics.

Obviously “feminist economics” is a diverse area, but frequently I have seen the claim made that the very nature of economics keeps out women.  It is claimed there is too much emphasis on male modes of production, and sometimes also “male ways of thinking,” and thus economics must itself first reform before it has any chance at achieving gender parity.  There is also a common tendency to criticize Becker’s and other neoclassical theories of the family for reflecting so many implicit, underlying “male” assumptions about how families work or are supposed to work.

So yes, there is plenty awareness of overt discrimination, but writers coming from this approach see a lot of the problems as quite structural, andembedded in how economics is done.  It’s not only the attitudes of some of the male jerks.

Now you may or may not agree, or also you might feel uncomfortable with some of the levels of generalization you find in talk of “male ways of [xxxx].”  Still, many of those in Feminist economics see the structural point as very important.

It is striking to me that most of the major contributors to Feminist economics are women.  And from what I can tell, virtually all of you are ignoring them, even though we have been debating their main issue for weeks now, and they have been at this for decades.
Perhaps you are unaware of them.  The only very recent coverage I have seen is this Edwin Hadas piece, but still it doesn’t mention “Feminist economics” by name.  Here is a short, good Economist piece by S.K. (Soumaya Keynes?)  from March 2016.
The biases run deeper than you think, and they’re not just about gender discrimination.  We’ve set up a profession with super-high entry barriers for clearing the “this deserves my attention” hurdle (“top journals,” “top schools,” you can go on down the list), and then we’re befuddled when there is so much other collateral damage along the way.

How to Educate Yourself on Monopoly Power Matt Stoller. “A list of books and articles on the history of monopoly power and its effects.”
A Serf on Google’s Farm Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo
 The Spread of Mass Surveillance, 1995 to Present Center for Political Studies


 Poverty, illness, homelessness – no wonder McDonald’s UK workers are going on strike Guardian


The Case for a Millionaire Tax The Atlantic







Banks are increasingly turning to insurance to protect their capital from "operational risks" like cyber attacks and rogue traders, and insurers say they can help safeguard lenders by providing an extra layer of expertise. After a spate of expensive court cases and IT outages, banks including Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Lloyds are looking for ways to mitigate the costs of such episodes by taking out insurance. Most such insurance contracts are arranged privately and the details never publicised.






After a data breach exposes sensitive information, agencies usually offer victims credit monitoring as a catch-all solution to prevent fraud. But a group of lawmakers isn't convinced that strategy always gets the job done. “We are concerned that the popular response may reflect factors unrelated to the actual protection of breach victims,” House Energy and Finance Committee Reps. Frank Pallone, Jr., D-N.J., Diana DeGette, D-Colo., and Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., wrote in a letter to the Government Accountability Office Thursday.




Only 1 of the UK’s top 100 law firms has sufficient measures in place to protect against basic forms of email fraud, a study has revealed. The research by cloud data intelligence firm OnDmarc follows reports that UK law firms saw an unprecedented 45 cases of cyber theft in the first quarter of 2017. With law firms under a duty to replace any lost client funds, OnDmarc warns that the financial burden of future email fraud attacks could be crippling. With the threat of phishing attacks increasing by 65% in 2016, the company said the study’s findings are a stark warning to law firms in the possession of the strictest of confidential client information.










Everybody talks about cybersecurity, but does anybody spend $28 billion to do something about it? Well, yes, the U.S. government spends about that much, according to budget watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.





In November of 2015, Will Caput worked for a security firm assigned to a penetration test of a major Mexican restaurant chain, scouring its websites for hackable vulnerabilities.