I think I put the Economics Explained video about how the Netherlands had the highest wealth inequality in the world, although its income enequality was one of the lowest. It didn’t seem to make sense, but when I thought about it I saw that it was possible how the gap in wages between the top and lowest earners could be small, say between CEOs and waiters, but company owners could still earn terrific wealth, like the way rock stars could, or authors of some of the world’s biggest selling books. Anyway, Economic Explained actually got out all completely wrong.Economics Explained started out good, but seemed to go more and more neoliberal. [embedded content]Money and Macro – REALLY!? The Dutch Economy is the Most Unequal? – a Response to Economics Explained

Isreal covid rates explained.Why the vaccines are effective, and still are effective. You need to take age and the amount of people vaccinated into consideration. Anti-Vaxxers on social media are trying to say the vaccines don’t work, or worst still, may even be a leading cause of death. As usual, these people don’t care for science or research, just the headlines will do. There is 90% vaccination rate in Israel among older people. The vaccines are 90% to 95 % effective, but there are still breakthrough cases: 1 in 15 maybe approximately, and more in older people. This can mean that still a lot of old people getting hospitalised, even if they  have been vaccinated, but the vaccines would have held back many more serious infections. With so many old people vaccinated (90%), they can

Why don’t they put the bus driver jobs in a job guarantee and then people will just show up to do that?  Or just include munnie for the school bus driving in the $3.5T infrastructure bill then people will magically show up?  Massachusetts’ governor has activated the state’s National Guard to help bus students to school. Districts across the U.S. are struggling to hire enough bus drivers, complicating a school year already beset by the ongoing pandemic. https://t.co/bAwnekrySc— The Associated Press (@AP) September 14, 2021

Bannon REALLY trying to fire up the MAGA base for a govt shutdown then eventually a default on debt ceiling….

The universal human need for mental control disrupts our quality of life.Mankind needs an off switch because this could promote healing, but our minds evolved to be constantly aware of danger, so the harder you try to banish negative thoughts, the more they come back, and in chronic situations, it can kill you. The system can go wrong, but the way to healing is through hobbies and things to do. The inability to escape from unpleasant thoughts has a major impact on many people’s quality of life. Much energy is spent in attempting to control or suppress them. It turns out that they arise from the unconscious brain as a reflex, and they are much more powerful than your conscious brain. Rational interventions cannot and do not work.  David Hanscom MD – The Curse of Consciousness: Trapped By

Credits to Weiwei Dia – Twitter

No comedy this week but we do have the Mad Drummer.[embedded content]The Mad Drummer

In principle, a currency’s command over any category of real input or output can be considered in terms of a suitably defined price index. The present focus is on the aggregate level and, in particular, a currency’s command over real final output. Earlier posts explore the topic in greater depth (links below). This is a crib notes version….heteconomistA Currency’s Command over Real Output in a NutshellPeter Cooper

I started a piece and then scrapped it, so I will just make a short comment on what I am seeing. Putting aside the questions of how the pandemic will evolve (I am not the person to ask), inflation and/or supply chain issues are obviously the main concern, with a secondary helping of politics.Supply chain disruptions were something that always came up in brainstorming about potential macro surprises — what if the “just in time” inventory system and outsourcing broke down? Well, the often-predicted bad outcome has showed up, and the sky is black with chickens coming home to roost.This is an environment that is unfriendly to aggregated macro theory. Saying that prices went up “because there was a supply shock” is a good way of saying that the theory is mainly useful for explaining what

MMT proponent Steve Keen is running for the Senate in Australia’s upcoming election. In these unstable times this could be an interesting event. We wish him the best of luck….Brave New EuropeSteve Keen – Australia: MMT Runs for OfficeCross-posted from Steve’s website

This isn’t the post I sat down to write, but I wanted to lay this foundation before tackling the next set of questions. Here’s where we’ll go next…If MMT (and Keynes and Tooze) are correct that anything we can actually do, we can afford, then how do we operate in a world where that truth is revealed to the broader public? Are MMT economists too cavalier about the risks of inviting everyone in on the secret? Is honesty really the best policy, or do we need deficit myths and old-time budgetary religion to protect us in a world of uncertainty? Can we trust the MMT framework to guard against excesses? The LensYes, We Can!But should we tell the masses?Stephanie Kelton | Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, formerly Democrats’ chief economist on the staff of the

States with lots of antivaxxers will feel it in their pockets as their economies dive. Fox News mandates vaccines, but this is never mentioned in its broadcasts, or that Rupert Murdoch got vaccinated. Vaccinations have become politicized: The AntiVaxxers of the past few decades were founded on a debunked belief linking Vaccines and Autism.Thanks to Q-Anon, Fox News, OANN, NewsMax (and others), large swaths of the population now believe that Vaccines are problematic.What was once a bizarre and self-destructive movement has become during the pandemic a full-blown public health threat.Even worse, every unvaccinated person is a chance for the virus to mutate again. The unvaccinated are “variant factories.” They do more than risk their own health and safety — they put the lives of everyone in

Jonathan Cook put out an article today about how covid vaccines are leaky, which could promote dangerous mutations. He tweeted research that was done by Professor Andrew F. Read and his colleagues. I replied straight away debunking Cook when there were only a few comments, so he must have seen my tweet. I got only one like, but my tweet completely demolished his article. There are only 37 replies to Jonathan Cook’s tweet, and he replied to a number of people, but completely ignored mine up to this point. I decided not to push it in case I get blocked When Joe Rogan quoted the same research Professor Andrew F. Read got very angry about it. Joe Rogan Is Getting This Completely Wrong,’ Says The Scientist Who Conducted The Vaccine StudyMore transmission increases the likelihood of mutation.

Shelton on with Bannon this week to discuss the current economic situation under the Biden people… A lot wrong here … they think abstractions are real… banks have a choice to possess regulatory reserves… banks lend out the reserves… much more… And she was nominated to Fed so she is typical of the type of people there and going there..,  MMT complete failure of pedagogy… we’re still in big trouble…

The CPC will soon tame the Evergrande collapse without much problem, says Ed Yardeni. Also, he says how the central bankers learnt a lot in 2008, so were able to keep the economy going during this pandemic.Ed Yardeni, Research President and Chief Investment Strategist, talks the implications of China Evergrande’s potential collapse[embedded content]https://youtu.be/Edbd3db_uDY

1Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA2De Vinci Finance Lab, École Supérieure d’Ingénieurs Léonard de Vinci, Paris, FranceWe will subsequently discuss why we argue that neoclassical economic and finance theory is not an empirical science as presently formulated—nor can it become one. In physics, observables are processes obtained through the theory itself, using complex instruments. Physical theory responds to empirical tests in toto; individual statements have little empirical content. In economics, given the lack of a comprehensive theory, observations are elementary observations, such as prices, and theoretical terms are related to observables in a direct way, without cross validation. This weakens the empirical content of

But GOP Sen. McConnell is loudly declaring no GOP will support raising it, and has threatened a filibuster, although reconciliation can get around that if all Dems agree. However, even as he is loudly declaring not GOP support for raising the debt ceiling, he is also demanding that it be raised so that government bills get paid. I really have no comment on this further, aside from noting that this is just further evidence on why this silly thing needs to be done away with once and for all.…Angry Bear Debt Ceiling Nonsense Yet Again – A Catch 22?J. Barkley Rosser | Professor of Economics and Business Administration James Madison University

McConnell not bluffing…. This weeks tax haul pretty high though and TGA + EMs now back up to 490B … and leading spending rate is falling we probably can last into November before “out of money!”….Mitch McConnell warns that Republicans won’t back down from vow to force Democrats to raise debt ceiling alone: ‘Do you guys think I’m bluffing?’ https://t.co/qexPJ3BERz— Metro_TV (@Headlinenews_) September 17, 2021

The US, UK, Canada, and Australia are circling the wagons and everyone else is outside the circle. In addition, Australia just pained a big target on itself for China’s missiles. Strategic brilliance.Magpie’s Asymmetric WarfareAustralia’s Back-Stabbing Diplomacy.Magpie

These debates are in part about economic questions — both what the constraints on issuing new public-sector liabilities (“borrowing”) are in principle, and of how close we are to those constraints in practice. But a second and arguably more important dimension of the debate is political: In a public or legislative debate, what are the advantages and disadvantages of linking proposals for public spending with proposals for increased taxes?I think it’s useful to think of this second question in terms of the grid of possibilities below….JW Mason says he is dealing with the political implications rather than the economic ones, but he fails to mention the key political dynamics involved, which have to do with class struggle within capitalism, political agendas of parties and factions, media

There’s something wrong with these people. [embedded content]Medical staff can be heard in the video warning the patient about the risks of leaving the hospital, stating they were worried about his condition. File photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times Medical staff can be heard in the video warning the patient about the risks of leaving the hospital, stating they were worried about his condition. File photograph: Alan Betson/The Irish Times. Saolta Healthcare Group has said it is “gravely concerned” by a number of recent incidents in which groups of activists have attempted to spread disinformation about Covid-19 at hospitals.In recent days a Covid-19 patient was encouraged to leave Letterkenny General Hospital by an activist, who filmed the interaction in the hospital, with the video

Oh well, so much for the metric system, it looks like we are going to go back to the silly imperial system. Boris Johnson’s government has promised it will pass legislation to allow British traders to sell their wares in pounds and ounces, rather than grams and kilograms, as it revealed plans to seek a liberalization dividend from Brexit.The restoration of old imperial weights, long demanded by Brexit supporters who resented the imposition of metric measures by Brussels, was among the top potential benefits of the UK leaving the European Union listed on Thursday by Lord David Frost, the minister responsible for implementing Brexit. from the European Union.UK pledges to restore pounds and ounces as Brexit benefit

Professor Jayati Ghosh says if more women economists had been successful in getting to the top of the profession economics would have been very different. Present neoclassical economies is very wealthy white male dominated, and so tends to emphasise competition over cooperation, and exploitation of the environment rather than trying to conserve and preserve it for the longer and common good. In this fifth and final lecture in the Institute for New Economic Thinking’s “Feminist Economics” series, Professor Jayati Ghosh explores some of the shortcomings of mainstream economics. Heavily reliant on unrealistic assumptions and stylized models, mainstream economics has a narrow approach which often descends into trivial pursuits. Mainstream models tend to propose policies which are are not

In the 1980s, then-owner A. Alfred Taubman launched the "Third is the Word" campaign to promote A&W’s new third-pound burgers to compete with  McDonald’s quarter-pounder for the exactly the same price, but it bombed! Why? Americans thought they were getting a bad deal because three is a SMALLER number than four. Math education is important! It also shows you why the metric system is better than imperial. A&W RestaurantsThe Truth About A&W’s Third-Pound Burger and the Major Math Mix-Up

Responsible Statecraft (China thought so)Were the US and China really on the brink of war last October?Reminiscence of the FutureUnderstanding Is Good.Andrei Martyanov, expert on Russian military and naval issues. Martyanov was born in Baku, USSR in 1963. He graduated from the Kirov Naval Red Banner Academy and served as an officer on the ships and staff position of Soviet Coast Guard through 1990. He took part in the events in the Caucasus which led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. In mid-1990s he moved to the United States where he currently works as Laboratory Director in a commercial aerospace group. He is a frequent blogger on the US Naval Institute Blog. He is author of Losing Military Supremacy, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs, and Disintegration: Indicators of the

Summary of a paper.Economics from the Top DownThe Long, Slow Death of the Free MarketBlair Fix

More on Chinese governance, in addition to polling public opinion and experimenting with pilot projects.China’s governance system may not be "democratic" in the Western liberal sense, but it is attuned to the people because therein lies "the mandate of heaven."Sixth ToneChina’s ‘Mass Line’ Moves OnlineCai Tianji

Being of German nationality, I am proud of our Chancellor, Mrs Angela Merkel.  The first female chancellor of Germany and has been variously described as the “de facto” leader of the European Union and the most powerful woman in the world.Angela Merkel was chosen by Germans to be their Chancellor in 2005. For over 16 years she showed a great example of leadership with skill, dedication and sincerity.In those sixteen years of power, there were no rebellions in her country. She did not appoint any of her relatives to a state position. She did not claim to be a creator of glory. Germany will say goodbye to its leader, physicist and quantum chemist, who was not tempted by fashion or lights and did not buy real estate, cars, yachts and private jets. She will leave her post after leaving

I have nothing against Elon Musk, who, on the whole, seems to be a fairly amicable person, but is there a problem with the system? The maga rich don’t really do this for the money, they do it for the prestige and because they enjoy it, which wouldn’t be any different if the tax system was changed. Elon Musk is currently the second richest person in the world. Between April 2020 and April 2021 Elon Musk made $383m per day on average. We took those numbers and compared them to everything from McDonald’s to Kazakhstan in order to put his obscene wealth into context. So to get a better understanding of this graph it really helps to know what this worth actually is. Musk’s wealth is made up mostly of the stocks he owns, the majority of them in Tesla. In fact if you draw a graph of Tesla’s

Jim O’Neil treats the political dynamic and geopolitics as irrelevant to global economics, which includes ignoring the key role that the US and UK are playing in this dynamic, precluding the economic cooperation he recommends, as the US and UK intend in order to maintain and extend Anglo-American hegemony.Project SyndicateWill the BRICS Ever Grow Up?Jim O’Neill, a former chairman of Goldman Sachs Asset Management and a former UK treasury minister, is a mem