> “Debt is a social construction, fundamentally malleable, and what’s unmanageable must eventually be seen as immoral” — Olivia Schwob discusses the long history of debt cancellation and calls to consider taking this path, reflecting on excellent books on debt and credit: Bruce Mann’s Neighbors and Strangers: Law and Community in Early Connecticut and Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence, Philip Gura’s Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of Civil War, Louis Hyman Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red Ink, David Graeber’s  Debt: The First 5,000 Years, and Strike Debt! movement’s Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual 

> Since the 1980s, the enemies of equal employment and upward mobility for blacks have been the corporate governance and maximizing Shareholder Value ideologies that smashed unionized jobs — by William Lazonick, Philip Moss, Joshua Weitz

> How does the class inequalities persists in education from the transition to secondary school up to university. Natasha Codiroli Mcmaster reviews and Diane Reay’s book that displays the personalisation of everyday working-class experiences and statistics on inequality —  Miseducation: Inequality, Education and the Working Classes

> Do you want to attend the most interesting and promising online talks and webinars on various topics in economic sociology and political economy from all over the world? So follow the ES/PE’s Facebook page and Twitter to have information about these events that are publicized only on our social media several days before each conference.

> How do new forms of digital and mobile money impact people’s everyday financial lives?  How do these technologies intersect with other financial repertoires as well as other socio-cultural institutions? How do they shape the global politics and geographies of  inequality? Smoki Musaraj and Ivan Small present their book (co-edited also by Bill Maurer) Money at the Margins: Global Perspectives on Technology, Financial Inclusion, and Design

> Neoliberal quantification at work: When in 2010 universities incorporated citations in promotion decisions, scholars’ self-citation rates went up by 81-179%, reveals a paper “Self-citations as strategic response to the use of metrics for career decisions” by Marco Seeber, MattiaCattaneo, MicheleMeoli, and Paolo Malighetti (open access)

> Arjun Appadurai contends that one of problems of The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy is Krastev and Holmes’ inattention to the US and West’s promotion of their economic interests in the Eastern Europe in the 1990s, making aid and trade conditional on accepting the “free market” ideas

> 740 Park Avenue, Manhattan, is home to the 1% of the 1%. Ten minutes to the north, half the population need food stamps. Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream is an excellent documentary (especially for teaching) about rocketing inequality in the US in the last 30 years (open access on Youtube)

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