Mike Norman Economics

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...

It is essential to understand the pathologies of the uber-rich. They have seized total political power.… The uber-rich live in an artificial bubble, a land called Richistan, a place of Frankenmansions and private jets, cut off from our reality....  Political theorists, from Aristotle and Karl Marx to Sheldon Wolin, have warned against the rule of the uber-rich. Once the uber-rich take over, Aristotle writes, the only options are tyranny and revolution.… Corporate capitalism, which has...

In this blog post, I want to clarify a few things about the rule that inform my previous assessments.... Important if you are a British voter, but also instructive concerning the MMT point of view on progressive policy. Bill Mitchell – billy blogThe British Labour Fiscal Credibility rule – some further final commentsBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

Gets huge cheers from the crowd...President Trump: "I'm a nationalist." pic.twitter.com/3lxCrtSkrN— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 23, 2018

Executive summary The high point of global governance was reached in the mid-1990s around the creationof the World Trade Organisation. It was hoped that globalisation would be buttressed by a system of global rules and a network of specialised global institutions. Two decades later these hopes have been dashed by a series of global governance setbacks, the rise of economic nationalism and the dramatic change of attitude of the United States administration. From trade to the environment, a...

#MAGA successes becoming attractive and bringing workers in droves...Wow great question https://t.co/xs9k6DOK62— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) October 23, 2018

Last month, Philip Alston, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights (whose important work I have written about before), issued a tweet about the new poverty and healthcare numbers in the United States along with a challenge to the administration of Donald Trump (which in June decided to voluntarily remove itself from membership in the United Nations Human Rights Council after Alston issued a report on his 2017 mission to the United States). The numbers for...

Nice summary of MMT in relation to public finance and public policy. MMT now has its own rock-star economist.Stony Brook University NewsCutting-Edge Economist Stephanie Kelton Delivers Presidential Lecture Liza N. Burby