Linkage

Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced a 12-year plan for the building industry when peace came.

The Ministry of Works had come up with Emergency Factory Made Houses, or EFMs.

They devised an ideal floor plan of a one-storey bungalow with two bedrooms, inside toilets, a fitted kitchen, a bathroom and a living room.

The homes would be detached and surrounded by a garden to encourage householders to grow fruit and vegetables, and would have a coal shed.

Soon better known as prefabs than EFMs, the homes were cheap to produce and, for many, an improvement on their previous living conditions.

[…]

In the first decade after the war, nearly 500,000 homes were built using some form of prefabrication.

Originally intended as an interim solution until the country could return to building permanent homes with traditional materials, 156,623 prefab bungalows were built between 1945 and 1949.

Each was expected to last for a decade. About 8,000 remain today.

From the ABC's summary:

The Albanese government's Economic Inclusion Advisory Committee released its second report recently. […]

The committee made 22 recommendations to the federal government on ways to best improve economic inclusion and create a more equal and prosperous nation.

It said its recommendations had been made with regard to their fiscal impact, their effect on workforce participation, and the long-term sustainability of the social security system.

But the committee said its five priority recommendations were to:

• "Substantially increase JobSeeker" and related working-age payments, and immediately improve the indexation arrangements of the payments.
• Increase the rate of Commonwealth Rent Assistance to better reflect the high rents actually charged in the private rental market.
• Commit to a "full-scale redesign" of Australia's employment services system to underpin the government's goal of full employment, and to replace the current system, which "worsens economic exclusion" with one that "promotes economic inclusion".
• Implement a national early childhood development system that is available to every child, beginning with abolishing the activity test for the child care subsidy to guarantee access to a minimum three days of high-quality care.
• Renew the culture and practice of Australia's social security system to support economic inclusion and wellbeing.

The committee's experts said that last point was really important.

When it comes to our sustainability problems, striving for greater resource efficiency seems like an obvious solution. For example, if you buy a new car that’s twice as efficient as your old one, it should cut your gasoline use in half. And if your new computer is four times more efficient than your last one, it should cut your computer’s electric bill fourfold.

In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.

Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.

The sociologist Stanley Cohen, who articulated the first theory of “moral panics” in the late 1960s, summarized their main elements in the introduction to the 2002 third edition of Folk Devils and Moral Panics:

"They are new (lying dormant perhaps, but hard to recognize; deceptively ordinary and routine, but invisibly creeping up the moral horizon)—but also old (camouflaged versions of traditional and well-known evils). They are damaging in themselves—but also merely warning signs of the real, much deeper and more prevalent condition. They are transparent (anyone can see what’s happening)—but also opaque: accredited experts must explain the perils hidden behind the superficially harmless (decode a rock song’s lyrics to see how they led to a school massacre)."

The discourse around the “new antisemitism” shares this three-part structure. First, the theory’s proponents acknowledge that antisemitism has a long history as a mode of hatred and discrimination. Yet there is an explicit attempt to present it as new, modifying its meaning so it can be specifically marshaled to support the Israeli state. Secondly, this “new antisemitism,” the argument goes, is bad in itself, but it is also a warning sign of other social ills—most of all, of the dangerous radicalization of the left, and of the impending rise of other forms of hate. And, finally, the rise of antisemitism is posited as self-evident, clear for anyone to understand; yet the source of antisemitism is presented as opaque, such that expert analysts of the “new antisemitism” are required to reveal the purported threats of left-wing movements.

This script recurs again and again in moments when Israel faces increased international criticism for its violence against Palestinian people. Like other moral panics, this one is a sign of a crisis—in this case, the crisis of Zionism, but also US imperialism more broadly.

In "you can't fight geometry" news:

• In short: A NSW parliamentary inquiry into the Rozelle Interchange heard from a number of experts on Friday.
• One expert warned the creation of two new motorways will compound traffic issues across Sydney. 
  What's next? The parliamentary committee is due to report its findings in June.
• A former senior transport official has warned Sydney's Western Harbour Tunnel and Warringah Freeway projects will be a "bloody disaster" for traffic.

Civil engineer Les Wielinga, a former CEO at the now-defunct Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA), made the fiery comments at a NSW parliamentary inquiry into the bungled Rozelle Interchange.

The Western Harbour Tunnel, which is under construction, will allow drivers travelling between the inner west and the North Shore to bypass the CBD.

Entries and exits to the tunnel will lie at the Ernest Street interchange in Cammeray and near the Falcon Street interchange at North Sydney.

"It's going to be a bloody disaster," Mr Wielinga told the upper house committee on Friday.

When used to generate power or move vehicles, fossil fuels kill people. Particulates and ozone resulting from fossil fuel burning cause direct health impacts, while climate change will act indirectly. Regardless of the immediacy, premature deaths and illness prior to death are felt through lost productivity and the cost of treatments.

Typically, you see the financial impacts quantified when the EPA issues new regulations, as the health benefits of limiting pollution typically dwarf the costs of meeting new standards. But some researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have now done similar calculations—but focusing on the impact of renewable energy. Wind and solar, by displacing fossil fuel use, are acting as a form of pollution control and so should produce similar economic benefits.

Do they ever. The researchers find that, in the US, wind and solar have health and climate benefits of over $100 for every Megawatt-hour produced, for a total of a quarter-trillion dollars in just the last four years. This dwarfs the cost of the electricity they generate and the total of the subsidies they received.

When trying to understand systems, one really eye-opening and fundamental insight is to realize that the machine is never broken. What I mean by this is, when observing the outcomes of a particular system or institution, it’s very useful to start from the assumption that the outputs or impacts of that system are precisely what it was designed to do — whether we find those results to be good, bad or mixed.

The most effective and broadly-understand articulation of this idea is the phrase, “the purpose of a system is what it does”, often abbreviated as POSIWID. The term comes to us from the field of cybernetics, and the work of Stafford Beer, but this is one of those wonderful areas where you really don’t have to read a lot of theory or study a lot of the literature to immediately get value out of the concept. (Though if you have time, do dig into the decades of research here; you'll enjoy it!)

A potential negative aspect of understanding that the purpose of a system is what it does, is that we are then burdened with the horrible but hopefully galvanizing knowledge of this reality. For example, when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly.

Sit with it for a minute. If this makes you angry or uncomfortable, or repulses you, then you are understanding the concept correctly.

The Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH) has both empirical and theoretical aspects that challenge the classic precepts of Smith and Walras, who implied that the economy can be best understood by assuming that it is constantly an equilibrium-seeking and sustaining system. The theoretical argument of the FIH emerges from the characterization of the economy as a capitalist economy with extensive capital assets and a sophisticated financial system.

In spite of the complexity of financial relations, the key determinant of system behavior remains the level of profits: the FIH incorporates a view in which aggregate demand determines profits. Hence, aggregate profits equal aggregate investment plus the government deficit. The FIH, therefore, considers the impact of debt on system behavior and also includes the manner in which debt is validated.

Minsky identifies hedge, speculative, and Ponzi finance as distinct income-debt relations for economic units. He asserts that if hedge financing dominates, then the economy may well be an equilibrium-seeking and containing system: conversely, the greater the weight of speculative and Ponzi finance, the greater the likelihood that the economy is a "deviation-amplifying" system. Thus, the FIH suggests that over periods of prolonged prosperity, capitalist economies tend to move from a financial structure dominated by hedge finance (stable) to a structure that increasingly emphasizes speculative and Ponzi finance (unstable). The FIH is a model of a capitalist economy that does not rely on exogenous shocks to generate business cycles of varying severity: business cycles of history are compounded out of (i) the internal dynamics of capitalist economies, and (ii) the system of interventions and regulations that are designed to keep the economy operating within reasonable bounds.

This Article works to debunk the myth of finance as intermediated scarce private capital and offers an alternative, more up-to-date theoretical framework for understanding the structure and operation of our financial system. We argue that, contrary to contemporary orthodoxy, modern finance is not primarily scarce, privately provided, and intermediated, but is, in its most consequential respects, indefinitely extensible, publicly supplied, and publicly disseminated. At its core, the modern financial system is effectively a public-private partnership that is most accurately, if unavoidably metaphorically, interpreted as a franchise arrangement. Pursuant to this arrangement, the sovereign public, as franchisor, effectively licenses private financial institutions, as franchisees, to dispense a vital and indefinitely extensible public resource: the sovereign’s full faith and credit.

Job providers are being paid millions of dollars in public money for work that jobseekers are finding themselves, with advocates saying there is “simply no reason” for the payments.

The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations has paid providers more than $3.6m in the past five years for pre-existing employment, where someone on jobseeker found a job prior to starting with a provider, according to data provided to Guardian Australia by the department.

The data shows there has been an uptick in pre-existing employment payments, with providers receiving $1.1m in the 2023-2024 financial year, more than double the $464,200 paid in 2019-2020.