Opportunity for faculty and graduate students whose work engages with capitalism as an analytic concept and/or as an object of social, political, or historical inquiry and critique
Opportunity for PhDs whose work engages meaningfully with financial history in any time period or region of the world and who earned a doctorate within 5 years of the application deadline. Applications due March 1
The Columbia Center for Political Economy is seeking a full-time Postdoctoral Research Scholar for its Money and Finance Idea Lab. The position is anticipated to start on July 1, 2024.
Just Us Journal brings together personal stories, interviews, written material, artworks and resources from a diverse range of community members. Despite their varied perspectives or interests, each contribution relates to the concepts of action, transformation or change, and seeks to support the reader in their own journey.
This journal is compiled and designed by Kelly Nefer (she/her) who is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in lutruwita/Tasmania. Within her practice she explores concepts related to empowerment, perception and justice.
The ACCC launching legal action against Coles and Woolworths today for misleading consumers reinforces the findings of Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work research, that showed inflation is higher because of big businesses price gouging.
Key Points:
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has launched legal action against Coles and Woolworths for misleading consumers through discount pricing claims at a time when inflation was at its highest.
The ACCC alleges the misconduct involved 266 products for Woolworths at different times across 20 months, and 245 products for Coles at different times across 15 months.
This covers the period when inflation rose to a peak of 7.8% at the end of December 2022 and led to the Reserve Bank raising interest rates 13 times in 19 months.
“Today’s announcement reinforces our research that has shown the inflation that led to the Reserve Bank raising interest rates was caused overwhelmingly by companies abusing market power to raise prices,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at the Australia Institute.
“The ACCC does the best they can, but the drop in competition over recent decades has shown that the current system is failing us.
“The ACCC clearly needs stronger powers, including a competition and prices commission and divestiture powers to break up uncompetitive industries.
“Australia is dominated by uncompetitive markets. The threat of divestiture would lower prices, better service and more innovation and growth in productivity.”
Human rights must be at the centre of Australia’s approach to tech policy
Protecting, enhancing and upholding human rights is essential to ensuring Australia’s technology policy is robust, fit for purpose, and meaningfully contributes to the improvement of individuals and community wellbeing both online and off.
Digital Rights Watch actively participates in public consultations regarding the development of legislation and policy in relation to technology and human rights. We have consistently contributed to the public debate regarding many of the inquiry’s terms of reference, in particular in relation to age verification and the news media bargaining code.
Our recent submissions relevant to this inquiry include:
We’ve all seen the provocations by Israel, says Chris Hedges. The consequences of this latest one on people’s pagers and electronic devices could be catastrophic. Middle East war looms.
The Chris Hedges Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Tomorrow the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is discussing his plans to introduce nuclear power with anti-renewable energy commentator, Chris Uhlmann. No doubt we will hear the same claims about renewable energy causing electricity prices to be high and the need for nuclear power to keep prices down that both men have said in the past.
And just as was the case in the past, such claims will again be wrong.
The increased use of renewables in supplying electricity is not the cause of higher retail electricity prices – and it is clear that more renewables will lead to lower prices.
Research and data from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) and the CSIRO all make it abundantly clear that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, and that the high cost of energy is driven by the cost of gas and coal produced electricity.
It is not surprising that people can be misled about the cause of electricity prices. Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) is a complex market stretching to 1,925 pages of rules and regulations such that any explanation of price determination will be greatly simplified.
So let us set out the two key issues to understanding retail electricity prices:
1. The cost of generating electricity (the wholesale price) is a surprisingly small component of the many costs that contribute to household electricity prices.
Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps one of the few things growing more quickly than the size of new AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Central to this boom is “compute” — the processing power, memory, and resources needed to perform the computations underlying AI systems. The world’s compute is mostly concentrated within three American giants — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, while in China, Tencent and Alibaba are formidable players.
The Public Sector Capabilities Index explores if and how dynamic capabilities can be measured in a city government context. While the concept of dynamic capabilities has some history in private organizations, it is relatively nascent in the public sector, particularly at the urban level. Consequently, few individuals within city governments are familiar with the concept of dynamic capabilities. This unfamiliarity presents a dual challenge: it complicates the identification and measurement of dynamic capabilities in city government and makes it difficult to translate these findings into actionable insights for officials and practitioners.
The Problem
We know that some public sector activities are difficult to measure, or as Mintzberg put it:
The Public Sector Capabilities Index is focused on identifying where city governments are strong and where certain capabilities need to be built up. Although it has a city government focus, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical examples. Following our recent interview with Shaun Hazeldine, Head of the IFRC Solferino Academy, in this blog we explore lessons from its work to enable humanitarians to find creative solutions to complex challenges.
Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) is an emerging term that describes a number of foundational capabilities that enable individuals to participate in society and markets as a citizen, entrepreneur, and consumer in a digital era. At the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), we define DPI as including digital payment systems, digital ID, and data exchange system(s) (DES). Each component plays a distinct role: digital payment systems facilitate financial transactions, digital IDs verify personal identity, and data exchange systems manage the secure flow of information across multiple platforms.
A central dilemma for anyone interested in government is the dual nature of the state. On the one hand, the state can be a powerful force for good — harnessing and collectivising resources to create, or enforcing rules and norms that support, public goods. In this role, states have created miraculous outcomes — sewage systems, public health and education, courts… public goods that have radically improved people’s lives. On the other hand, the same Leviathan-like power that can make the state critical to creating public value also make it terrifying. The world is sadly filled with examples of states power used to displace, punish and terrorize marginalized communities, pursue wars of aggression, or simply eliminate dissent.
The UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP) and Bloomberg Philanthropies are developing a Public Sector Capabilities Index. The aspiration is to measure where city government capabilities are strong and where skills must be built up. It will focus on city governments, but as part of its development, we are keen to learn from parallel sectors and historical attempts at capability building. This blog explores the public sector reforms and restructuring of government carried out by New Labour in the UK.
What happened?
Civil service reform was a core component of “New Labour” during Tony Blair’s leadership from 1997 to 2007. During this time there were various initiatives, including the 1999 Modernising Government white paper, which aspired to create a ‘joined up’ government and ‘learning labs’ to promote public service innovation.
At IIPP’s 2024 Rethinking the State Forum in June, many of our external guests from policy and academia commented on the dynamism of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and its deep commitment to putting public value, how it is imagined and practiced, at the center of government and democratic discourse.
Last month (June of 2024), we launched the DPI Map — the first comprehensive view of the state of digital identity, digital payments and data exchanges across the world.
This work started — in part — because there was little understanding of how many countries had adopted Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) around the world. Given the growing interest by policymakers, multilateral funders, public officials and public interests advocates, we hypothesized that a “map” of DPI could help create a baseline understanding of what is happening, and more importantly, help serve as a foundation for both future research and community on this topic.
And while early successes suggest that that hypothesis has been validated we’ve been so busy with outreach that we’ve not had much chance to share any emerging insights from the initial DPI map we’ve published. This blog post seeks to change that!
Caveats
Before we begin sharing the exciting insights we’ve gleaned so far, there are two important pieces of information to share.
The G20 Digital Economy Working Group and New Delhi declaration have drawn significant attention to the concept of Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) and made it a critical topic of discussion in international fora. Here at University College London’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP), David Eaves and Jordan Sandman defined DPI as a set of digital capabilities that are essential for participation in modern society. Prominent examples of DPI include the Central Bank of Brazil’s Pix (instant payments), India’s Aadhaar (digital ID), and the Estonia-led X-Road (data exchange layer). Others, such as the UNDP, have adopted similar or even broader definitions, often grounded in Brett Frischmann’s view of infrastructure as a “shared means to many ends.”
A lesbian woman in Cambridgeshire has own an arbitration between her and the county council because she was banned from her local LGBTQ group over… a gender-fluid dog? What?!
