Mike Norman Economics

This is a good video of Michael Hudson which is a kind of autobiography. He says how he started out studying music but he needed to a make a living as well, and then one day a friend told how sunspots affected a certain U.S district's water table which would cause droughts and this would put a drain on the financial system leading a crash. Michael Hudson found this so interesting that he decided to study economics.After he got his economics degree, he starting working for an oil company as...

This is absolutely excellent. David Buik, who is a thoroughly decent fellow who comes on to defend the City of London, is humbled and incredibly open minded to what Richard Warner has to say. Superb!Richard Werner gives excellent account about why small, non profit, local private banks are so good for an economy. They tend to invest in local businesses to increase products and services, while the big banks prefer to give loans for purchases, whether it be for consumer goods, like say, cars,...

Remember those silhouettes in the newspapers, a black outline of a man with 'Success ' written underneath, where you can pay for a course to learn how to become successful? Hey, our society is all about becoming successful, and if you haven't become successful, then maybe you're a failure?I've certainly worked very hard in my life, at work, and at college, as I was a workaholic, but I cured myself and nowadays. I prefer Buddhist non-striving. [embedded content] Work hard, always hustle,...

Funny critique of economics as patent nonsense. The Radford Free PressThose Lumps MatterPeter Radford

The US knows that its public pretense of pulling out of the INF Treaty in order to compel other countries to join an expanded version of it is unbelievable because most other powers with these intermediate-range missile capabilities won’t ever accede to a new agreement, but America’s going forward with this narrative anyhow in order to turn South Korea and Japan into missile bases for countering China’s game-changing DF-26 “carrier-killers”.... China, meanwhile, counts the Dong Feng-26...

Short book review, with some useful links.  "Fascism" is claimed to be a rising phenomenon. The question is, what is it anyway?  Does "fascism" denote a well-bounded set, or is fascism like pornography, hard to define but easy to identify when encountered, to paraphrase US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart?Open CultureYale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies Three Essential Features of Fascism: Invoking a Mythic Past, Sowing Division & Attacking Truth Josh Jones

Good backgrounder on the current state of the snake pit. Khashoggi is hailed in the West as a liberal, favouring democratic reform, but in fact, he was a staunch supporter of the monarchical system (of which MbS is the effective head). He contended however, that all these monarchies were “reformable”. Only the secular republics, he suggested (such as Iraq, Syria and Libya) were unreformable, and required to be overthrown. Where he fell out with MbS therefore, was that he favoured not a turn...

Sanctions now form a key part of what is a strategic plan by the US to ruin the Venezuelan economy, says Tim Young.… It's not socialism that is sinking Venezuela but capitalism — neoliberalism, that is, whose corollaries are neo-imperialism and neocolonialism. Tim Young recounts now capitalist America is mounting an illegal hybrid war against socialist Venezuela, pure and simple, not only based on political ideology but mostly for, you guessed it, for capturing the oil.You see, Maduro is...

Medicine is to science (biology) as public policy is to economics, that is, an application. Medicine based on evidence-based science is relatively successful in diagnosis, etiology and treatment of disease. Public policy based on conventional macroeconomics is nothing like that in approach or outcomes. If there were an economic science that proves itself relative to public policy, there would not be opposing political factions offering economic arguments to rationalize their conflicting...

There's a problem here in this analysis. It ignores the informal economy, much of which is not monetized. The push of capitalism is to monetize it.  The problem arises in comparing quality of life before and after monetization. The people appear to be wealthier and to receive more income, but their quality of life may be much, much lower, since they no longer have access to the resources and processes they had previous to monetization and capitalization (privatization). It's like saying...