Mike Norman Economics

Understanding what we mean by the most important word in economics. The meaning of ordinary language terms is relative to use in context. Conversely, technical terms are defined operationally. The same sign can be used for different technical terms, although such use is discouraged as confusing, but not in the same context, where only one operational definition applies.Unfortunately, economics often employs ordinary language terminology with specifying the meaning operationally. Confusion...

Longish and detailed, but it explains a lot. Short summary: The war was chiefly about sectarianism, and fueled by foreign supporters of the Sunni factions. It was not about installing liberal democracy in place of the "brutal" Assad regime, which in reality had been enforcing liberal secularism. This is the reason it was opposed by traditionalists, including Sunni Islamists.Consortium NewsThe Mystery Fixer Who is Negotiating an End to the Syrian War Rania Khalek, independent journalist...

The Guardian is still bashing Russia and in today's edition Jeremy Corbyn says  that there is no place for antisemitism within the Labour Party, but the Guardian has no CiF under these articles so readers can't leave a comment. Is being against the Israel's policies towards the Palestinians antisemitic?   I put out the video below in the Guardian  CiF once which is called, An Israeli Soldier's Story, by Eran Efrati, but the Guardian took it down. Was that video antisemitic, and is that...

FTR  Concept of a 'complement': If A is the area colored red in this image... ... then the complement of A is everything else.   In set theory, the complement of a set A refers to elements not in A.  When all sets under consideration are considered to be subsets of a given set U, the absolute complement of A is the set of elements in U but not in A.  The relative complement of A with respect to a set B, also termed the difference of sets A and B, written B ∖ A, is the set of...

I don't know much about Martin Armstrong, but Tom put a link out to his site which contained the film, The Magnitsky Act : Behind the Scenes, so I had a poke around the site and Martin Armstrong said in one of his posts that Putin probably murdered Yeltsin's blackmailer, Safara, for exchange for the presidency. So I looked into it further and found another post by Armstrong going more into  it.I don't know if this is just hearsay and gossip, but it does give a glimpse of what can happens at...

Basic macroeconomic theory says that a negative shock to GDP, caused for example by falling exports, can be completely offset by a monetary and fiscal stimulus. China is a good example of that idea in action. What about all the naysayers who predicted financial disaster if this was done? Well there was a mini-crisis in China half a dozen years later, but it is hard to connect it back to stimulus spending and it had little impact on Chinese growth. What about the huge burden on future...

Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spoken about the primary objectives during the first 100 days of his new administration. Speaking of western financial speculation against the Turkish Lira, Erdogan reiterated that the country is “facing an economic war, but we will win it”. As part of his strategy to win the western war against Turkey’s monetary policies and existing economic growth model, Erdogan announced that for the first time in history Ankara will issue state bonds in...

Young people are turning to socialism, and Democratic Party politicians are adopting the term. But what is socialism? My own summary answer is that socialism is the socio-economic system that favors people and the environment as a whole over other factors and and political theory that prioritizes human rights.  This is in contrast to capitalism, which favors capital over other factors and accords highest priority to property rights. Doug Greene presents his view of a Marxist-Leninist...

Stephanie Kelton and I have been trying hard to keep Democrats from, again, rushing into the trap of denouncing Republicans for running federal deficits. Yes, Republicans are hypocrites about debt and deficits. That does not mean that Democrats should repeat Clinton and Obama’s embrace of the Republican’s economically illiterate, harmful, and fake hysteria about debt and deficits.... In general, good government is good politics. The Democrats should focus on adopting and supporting...

Moves today raise the same questions