The rich get richer, while others ...

New: Pordoceo Education Corporation — the financial corporation that runs several shady, predatory for-profit colleges — is behind a "ghost student" scheme. They're knowingly allowing AI students to enroll so they can get federal government cash and boost shareholder value.

The private equity investment strategy of USS should be subjected to scrutiny. How USS became main shareholder in debt-laden zombie firms like Thames Water and G.Network is a scandal. Trustees should read research by USS members instead of advice from asset managers www.ft.com/content/2ca2...

Concentrated ownership and weakened public-interest institutions threaten democratic information systems, making reform a structural imperative. In December, we explored concentrated power in our media industry and its impacts #RI2025 https://bit.ly/4oTUrBz

Julia Hartley-Brewer: Why is colonialism bad? Me: “When Britain arrived in 1700s, India had 27% of global GDP. After 200 years of theft and millions starved to death, by 1947 India had 3% of global GDP, 90% living below the poverty line, a literacy rate of 17% and life expectancy of 27”

Extremely grateful to @thomaspiketty.bsky.social for his very generous endorsement of my forthcoming book, 𝘿𝙚𝙗𝙩 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙁𝙪𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙒𝙤𝙧𝙠𝙚𝙧𝙨. 🔜The book is out from @brisunipress.bsky.social on 𝗔𝗽𝗿𝗶𝗹 𝟮𝟯𝗿𝗱 in the UK & 𝗠𝗮𝘆 𝟮𝟲𝘁𝗵 in the US (link in the comments below)

The new debtors' prison: Conceptualising the relationship between prisoner debt, prison violence and prisoner crisis journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....

America's richest 10% now hold 60% of the nation's wealth. The bottom half of America? It holds just 6%. Wealth inequality is eating this country alive.

I’m hiring a postdoc! Flexible in terms of details, but I’m looking for someone to collaborate with on research about labor market inequality. I’ll review applications as they come in and the posting just went up here: apply.interfolio.com/178873

US-style student debt bondage coming soon to a UK campus near you...

Almost a third of your water bill pays for dividends for shareholders, and for private water companies to pay off their debt, according to research by @cmmonwealth.bsky.social Will Rachel Reeves end the rip-off and bring down water bills in this Budget? #Budget

"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

Seems like evidence for the neo-liberal university label - when the market triumphs over principle (academic freedom) - except that we are opposed. The reactions will be revealing China intimidated UK university to ditch human rights research, documents show www.bbc.com/news/article...

Happy to share the first empirical chapter of my PhD thesis accepted for publication - now in the proofs stage at the International Labour Review, the International Labour Organization’s flagship journal!

SNAP isn't about "people who don't work." It's about people who don't get paid enough to live. Of the 40 or so million people who rely on food stamps: * Two-thirds are children, seniors, or disabled * Most working-age adults who receive SNAP are employed—but in jobs that pay poverty wages

Will be at @redemmas.org with Ho-fung Hung this Wednesday. In Baltimore? Come on down!

🚨NEW PAPER🚨 We all know the 2022 energy price shock fueled the cost of living crisis. It also caused a profit bonanza for the very rich. We show the US reaped the largest profits ($377bn) of any country. 50% went to the richest 1%, only 1% to the bottom 50%. A🧵 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

What would it really take to build a green, democratic future? @sarahljaffe.bsky.social interviews the authors of “Radical Abundance: How to Win a Green Democratic Future,” who lay out a roadmap for transitioning out of capitalism through public-common partnerships and collective power.

Out now in Competition & Change @compchange.bsky.social “Dependent development in digital capitalism: The politics of startup policies in the new periphery” @journals.sagepub.com #polisky journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1... 1/n

If you're wondering whether academics have written on 'asylum hotels', I can point you in the direction of Martina Tazzioli's work on refugee carcerality & value extraction in the UK, Greece & Italy. See esp. section on financialised asylum accommodation in the UK. dx.doi.org/10.1177/0263...

📕My new book 'Debt and the Future of Workers' (@brisunipress.bsky.social) is now up for pre-order! If you are interested to learn why organizing around #debt is as crucial as organizing at #work, see more details below: 📰 25% off via BUP newsletter #Debt #Work #Financialization #Booksky

📕My new book 'Debt and the Future of Workers' (@brisunipress.bsky.social) is now up for pre-order! If you are interested to learn why organizing around #debt is as crucial as organizing at #work, see more details below: 📰 25% off via BUP newsletter #Debt #Work #Financialization #Booksky

support independent leftist music journalism by signing up for my antifascist heavy metal newsletter, Salvo (pretty please) salvo.ghost.io

Spoke with Matt Myers for Jacobin about his new book The Halted March of the European Left, asking why the left’s surge stalled and what lessons it offers for today jacobin.com/2025/08/euro...

We need to draw attention to a new, exploding type of household debt that only recently emerged: it's called rent debt—or "back rent debt," and it didn't really exist before COVID at all. It's getting little attention in housing discourse and media coverage. We'll explain it.

How do federal and state governments drive innovation in the US? My new paper @cjres.bsky.social shows how the 'Polycentric Innovation State' with multi-level, place-based policies is reshaping regional growth in places like Michigan and Maine academic.oup.com/cjres/advanc...

Official release date for Debt's Grip: Risk and Consumer Bankruptcy, from University of California Press!! In it, @boblawless.bsky.social, Deborah Thorne, and I draw on 11 years of court records and surveys from bankruptcy filers to describe what it means to live in financial precarity in the US.

🔶Issue 32 of Futures of Work is out now! This issue explores how continuity and change shape caring relationships, revealing a gap between the ideal of consistent care and the often fragmented realities faced by care providers and recipients.

Discussed the new Left party led by Corbyn and Sultana. 230,000 people signed up in 24hrs. Millions want to tax the rich, end the wars, redistribute wealth, and build a country that serves people, not billionaires. They can smear, they can panic, but they can’t stop a movement whose time has come:

I adore the politicians out there that trying to fight the right. But I can’t imagine ever actually winning without the formation of new multi-racial deliberative and participatory working-class institutions in and outside of the state. Processes are as important as policies.

Our Transnational Socioeconomic Protest Database is now available open access:   Erne R and Nowak J (2024). Transnational Socioeconomic Protest Database. ERC Project ‘European Unions’, UCD, Dublin. Version March 2024. hdl.handle.net/10197/26247

A new water "super regulator" should have to secure profit for shareholders and banks, just like Ofwat, says the government appointed Cunliffe Review. This isn't the change British people want: (1) clean water, (2) fair bills, (3) water in the public interest, not for private greed. Me on SkyNews👇

📕 My new book 𝘋𝘦𝘣𝘵 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘍𝘶𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘧 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘦𝘳𝘴 has a cover! If you're wondering how financialization has been reshaping the world of work and how we can defend democracy in workplaces and beyond, watch this space. Pre-orders soon. 🇬🇧 UK Publication: April 2026 | 🇺🇸 US Publication: May 2026

Our Local Projections Difference-in-Differences (LP-DiD) paper is out in the Journal of Applied Econometrics. LP-DiD is a convenient, flexible and computationally fast framework for estimating DiD using simple well-specified regressions.... [1/4]

Can we have a chat about what causes the disruption in Canada & Australia, not ruled by Trump? That volatility of hypermarketised & underfunded HE is also happening here, and the government may want to think about the need to stabilise in order to remain attractive. www.ft.com/content/c074...

Clickable links on The List: qmucu.org/qmul-transfo... @yusufimaadkhan.com has been creating some insightful graphs with that HESA data on loans: observablehq.com/d/9b353c476c.... That's A WHOLE LOT OF NONSECURED LOANS. 👀 @uniofnottingham.bsky.social 5 times in a row over £150 million

"The UK’s Critical National Infrastructure (CNI) forms the backbone of national security, economic stability and public welfare. Yet, decades of privatisation have left many of these vital assets in the hands of private companies, often with significant foreign ownership."

Trump's Big Ugly Bill is going to make it harder for people to go to college. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

The @pghguild.com workers of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have officially been on strike for 1,000 days (!) today. That’s almost THREE YEARS of trying to force their employers to play fair. Show them a little love if you can: www.unionprogress.com/donate/

🚨 ‼️‼️‼️New piece in @jacobinmag.bsky.social with @hollyjeanbuck.bsky.social. This one is Part 2 of 2 of our series on AI and labor covering 'What is to be done?' It draws from previous work with @fredstaffordcs.bsky.social on public utilities and calls for a New Deal-like public jobs program.

anyone remember skill-biased technical change?

If you're living the stressful life of doing virtually nothing all day other than collecting unearned income from multiple homeownership, don't get too depressed! Apparently, there are solutions for you too...

We don’t refer to people as "consumers." We say debtors or households. Why? When you put rent on a credit card or go into medical debt for cancer treatments, you aren’t "consuming" healthcare or housing. It's not an Xbox purchase. You're meeting your needs and those goods should have been public.

Really enjoyed this recent podcast episode about the four-day work week (with guest @julietschor.bsky.social) incorruptible-mass.buzzsprout.com/606004/episo...

Medical debt is a symptom of our broken health & insurance system. A Trump-appointed judge has deepened the harm it causes by blocking a rule to erase it from credit reports. A gentle reminder: Medical debt is the result of bad policy choices. apnews.com/article/cfpb...

If you get a 3% wage increase at work, and the annual cost of your healthcare, housing and your kids’ college tuition goes up 9%, then you didn’t really get a raise at work. We need to organize for reparative public goods so your wage means something.

As ever, the only path forward is to get organized. Join the Debt Collective at www.debtcollective.org and follow @debtcollective.bsky.social here.

Thames Water lost £1.6bn last year. It bans watering gardens, yet it leaked 200bn litres. Since 1989 it gave £13.6bn to banks, £10bn to shareholders, and left £23bn in repairs. TW should lose its licence + moved to public ownership - no more bank bail-outs. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

If you missed this fascinating talk organized by @davidgraeberinst.bsky.social, tune in at your convenience👇 Featuring our very own Associate Faculty Director Hannah Appel, this brilliant trio explore how the legacies of imperialism & debt continue to shape the world order.

An estimated 47.4 million Americans suffered from hunger last year. 13.8 million were children. Now this country is set to strip SNAP benefits from *two million* more people—while allocating over $100 billion to "help squads of men in masks" terrorize immigrants. A searing essay by Tracy Kidder: