Mike Norman Economics

Cheat sheet on the MMT JG. Useful reference.Pavlina TchernevaFrequently Asked Questions About the Job GuaranteePavlina Tcherneva | Associate Professor of Economics at Bard College, Research Scholar at The Levy Economics Institute, and Senior Research Associate at the Center for Full Employment and Price Stability

More neoliberalism gone bad.Overall, the main takeaway is that decentralization is not a silver bullet that occurs in an abstract environment. As in other contexts, decentralisation can worsen problems when pursued within insecure environments, where people are already marginalised and/or elite capture is rife, as in Ukraine. Despite promises that decentralization in Ukraine would reduce oligarchic power and empower marginalised groups, it seems these aims have not been met and may now,...

Farmers in low-income countries have multiple channels through which they respond to climate change. Some switch to growing more heat-resilient crops or crops that require less water. Others migrate or leave agriculture altogether. In new research, Amrit Amirapu, Irma Clots-Figueras, and Juan Pablo Rud find that temperature shocks to agricultural production in India increase voter turnout in rural areas and push rural voters to elect candidates who are on average poorer, less tainted by...

A new cold war is upon us, but only China is in a position to push it beyond the point of no return. That moment will come when China’s policymakers cross the Rubicon and decide to wean Chinese economic growth off the US trade deficit.Interesting article about the symbiotic relationship and the changing conditions that threaten it. One of these factors is the development of the Chinese economy beyond the point that the Americans that entered into the deal foresaw.Yanis Varoufakis points out,...

Blair Fix caused a bit of a stir last week on economics Twitter with a cleaned up version of the above chart taken from his article on interest rates and inflation. My chart is a scatter plot of the U.S. annual CPI inflation rate versus the effective funds rate, from 1954-2022. The blue line is the best linear fit of the two variables. The “linear model” suggests that inflation is an increasing function of the nominal interest rate.Blair was met with a predictable howl of indignation on...

It’s killing them that the market is not crashing.

This is Part 6 of a series on Deep Adaptation, Degrowth and MMT that I am steadily writing. I have previously written in this series that there will need to be a major change in the composition of output and the patterns of consumption if we are to progress towards a sustainable future. It will take more than cutting material production and consumption. We have to make some fundamental shifts in the way we think about materiality. The topic today is about consumption but a specific form –...

Unlike the federal government, individual states really do need to “find the money” to pay for their spending. And since more than 60 percent of the nation’s wealth resides in these states, it’s easy to see why lawmakers have focused on their high net worth residents.The LensEight States Have Joined Forces to Raise Taxes on America's Wealthiest Stephanie Kelton | Professor of Public Policy and Economics at Stony Brook University, formerly Democrats' chief economist on the staff of the U.S....

I guessed that most people would think that industrialists like Ford and Edison were opposed to fiat money, and in favour of "sound money"—money backed by gold or some other commodity. As this post will show, that is a false belief. These two industrialists were outright fans of fiat money—money created by the government—and critics of both the gold standard and, to some degree, private bank-created money as well./.…Building a New EconomicsFord and Edison, the anti gold bugsSteve Keen

Ambitious social security and health care reforms aim to coax the masses into saving less and consuming more   This could be big. Saving preference is inversely proportional to consumption preference. Saving reduces consumption spending, that is, demand. Low consumption to investment and low domestic to external are a major factors holding the Chinese economy back from expansion. Even the IMF is recommending a version of this — from the neoliberal perspective, of course. But China has its...