Alright. I've got that out of my system. Happy Thanksgiving and back to work here with a Early Black Friday pallet cleansing mega thread with a Cornucopia of thoughts on 2021. First, precious metals aren't dead. Yes, Bitcoin is stealing gold's thunder as a... /1

THREAD on how economically Muslims maybe poorer (the state is overall also not as rich) in #Bengal but have relatively got socio-political empowerment (part of Threads I am writing for the understanding of Bengal politics in the context of upcoming assembly election):

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The socio-economic status of Muslims in the state is far behind other communities as the Sachar Committee Report (2006) and Pratichi-SNAP’s “Living Reality of Muslims in West Bengal” (2016) attest.

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But it has not witnessed the rule of the BJP yet although the founder of the predecessor of the saffron party, Bharatiya Jan-Sangh, Shyama Prasad Mukherjee was himself a Bengali.

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During both the Congress and the Left Front rule earlier, and now under TMC Muslims did get some leverage although political marginalization even at block level had continued.

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Across India, the last two general elections, and even the recent Bihar assembly elections, have resulted in the further marginalization of Muslims.

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I’m beginning to think that the left has been too obsessed with GDP as a broken economic metric governing the global shitshow, when inflation is more insidious. Deflation may be a more radical demand than degrowth. Burst bubbles. Deflate the price of fossil fuel infrastructure.

It’s amazing just how much political economy is still determined by the threat of stagflation. This has created a weird metonymy in which as long as you’re fight inflation (preserving the interests of (older) savers) you’re also fighting stagnation (supporting (younger) earners).

To some extent the residual fear of deflationary spirals lies behind this, waiting in the wings for any suggestion that stagnation must be fought with deflation. This is entirely understandable, as uncontrolled deflation hits the poorest hardest.

The assumption that conjoins these fears into an engine of unbridled economic stagnation is that there’s a unitary market effectively mediating between the markets in different sectors, be this unity micro-economic or macro-economic in flavour. But this just isn’t how it works.

There is so much more logistic friction in the price system than the popular story of just in time production suggests, not least in the concrete details of differentiated trade between economic actors from local businesses to nation states.

🧵THREAD 🧵As it's the start of a new year, there seems to be a lot more calls for freelance pitches about. If you're thinking of pitching for the first time, or wanted a refresher, here are some of the things I find useful. /1

First up, finding work – here's what I use to find calls for pitches each week. But you can easily search these yourself or set them up as columns in your TweetDeck. Use quote marks so it searches for the exact phrasing. /2

I also try to keep a note of places making call outs that I don't immediately have ideas for – they're probably going to be swamped fairly quickly, but now you know they have budget – and they'll be less swamped if you come back to them in a month with a belter of an idea. /3

In weird Covid times, this is also a really helpful spreadsheet from @studyhallxyz on who is and isn't accepting pitches atm. This kind of stuff is often just useful to give you ideas of places you didn't realise you could pitch. /4

If you can't find an editor's email address, my favourite tool is @EmailHunter which shows you the format of an email address at any organisation, so you can take a best guess. 50 free searches a month. /5

1. Ok, so most people have a vague sense of frustration that the last Dem administration didn't do enough on the economy. But it's still just a vague sense. So my org wrote a report showing in detail, industry sector-by-sector, what policymakers did wrong.

2. We also wrote one pager descriptions of every sector. For instance, in media and telecommunications, there were multiple massive mergers (Comcast-NBC, Disney's roll-up, Charter-Time Warner).

3. Consequences were bad. The median weekly compensation of writer-producers on television and online series declined 23 percent between 2014 and 2016 despite record profits in the industry and peak demand for programming.

4. Health care, consolidation was bad. "From 2010 to 2015, Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, and Eli Lilly raised their insulin prices by 168 percent, 169 percent, and 325 percent, respectively; the three are essentially the only manufacturers of insulin in the U.S."


5. Newspapers, same story. Since 2005, America has lost 2,100 newspapers, one fourth of its total, leaving 1,800 communities without any local news coverage whatsoever.