A Universal Basic Income may not be much of a utopia in itself, but it points in surprisingly radical directions.

Star Trek meets anti-Star Trek in California District Court, as a science fiction-loving judge demolishes a gang of copyright trolls.

The development of rentism entails not just a change in the laws, but in the way the economy itself is measured and defined.

The policy wonk and “Charlie Rose disease.”

The basic vision of the post-work left is one of fewer jobs and shorter hours.

There’s been a bit of a discussion about affective labor going around. Paul Myerscough in the London Review of Books describes the elaborate code with which the Pret a Manger chain enforces an ersatz cheerfulness and dedication on the part of its employees, who are expected to be “smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged.

As everyone knows by now, Jacobin issue 9 is out (except for you print subscribers, sorry you lot, your issues aren’t being shipped until January 4). There’s lots of great stuff there to dig into.

The new issue of Jacobin will be out next week, just after Christmas, and it’s full of great stuff. You should subscribe if you haven’t already, or give someone else a gift subscription if you have.

People know my beat by now, so everyone has been directing my attention to Paul Krugman’s recent musings on the pace of automation in the economy. He moves away from his earlier preoccupation with worker skills, and toward the possibility of “‘capital-biased technological change,’ which tends to shift the distribution of income away from workers to the owners of capital.

Given the origins of my blog’s name, I’ve avoided posting on Mondays. But I don’t get paid for doing this, and so this was a misbegotten impulse for the reasons I explain below.
Yesterday I heard two interviews that helpfully recontextualize some common economic arguments about money and motivation, and provide another angle on the discussion of jobs in my last post.