Mike Norman Economics

The Vineyard of the SakerThe US State Department Openly Outlined Its Plans to Guarantee America’s Global Primacy Sergey Latyshev Translated by Ollie Richardson and Angelina Siard Russia ObserverObama Marries The Liberals To The Neocons Patrick Armstrong Sic Semper TyrannisHarper: Neocons Keep Marching Through the InstitutionsGlobal InequalityOn the Threshold of the Third Globalization: why Liberal Capitalism might Fail? The Americas, armed trade and cheap energy: review of Kenneth...

A big news story the corporate media will ignore, or will say the evidence is fabricated. What will the OPCW do, cover it up? The video embedded can't be found on YouTube.According to Dr Ali Kadri, war is big businesses. I guess the vultures don't want the Syrian war to end because there is so much money to be made it of it. And they want to get those gas pipelines from Saudi Arabia to Europe because that's when the big bucks start. If only people in the West knew what's going on?Now how...

John McCain was really horrible, that's for sure. In this episode, The Real News say there is not much difference between the policies of Trump and McCain except on Russia.  Trump and Steve Bannon see Russia as a European, Christian country they can be allies with against China.Look at the crazed Steve Bannon call up militant evangelical Christians for the fight against 'amorphous' China. Jesus said love your neighbour and forgive your enemies, but I don't see much of that in Steve Bannon...

Weekend reading for those of wide-ranging interests. It's on Daniel Dennett's contribution to the study of consciousness and his synthetic approach that blends many fields, biology and evolutionary theory in particular. Digressions&ImpressionsDennett as Synthetic PhilosopherEric Schliesser | Professor of Political Science, University of Amsterdam’s (UvA) Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences

I present four claims about Marx's Capital. I strive for topics more general than, for example, squabbles about the transformation problem. I suggest that some of these claims present a useful focus for reading Marx's book, even if part of your focus is arguing why the claim is wrong. If this were more than a blog post, I would need to cite various Marxists and scholars that inspired me. Short. Not wonkish. Worth thinking about, e.g, relative to "normalizing Marx." Implies Marx was a...

Again, follow the money, here the conversion of the Reichsmark to the DM. Very interesting from the monetary point of view — who controls the money, and all that. I think some of you may have heard on more than one occasion about how that bloodthirsty tyrant Stalin set up a blockade of West Berlin in 1948 and how the freedom-loving nations organized the Berlin airlift to circumvent it. But today we’ll let you in on what really happened.... Russia InsiderWho Really Put up the Berlin Wall?...

This is worth watching just for the clip of  Bill Maher and Micheal Moore attacking Col. Larry Wilkerson. Now Col. Larry Wilkerson is a republican and a military man and yet here is talking about making peace with Putin because the US and Russia have too many nuclear weapons aimed at each other and tensions are high. But Bill Maher and Michael Moore are vehemently anti-Russia and are full of it. Clip starts at 29 seconds. It's appalling to see liberals being so hawkish. I used to like...

This article combines tax, survey, and national accounts data to estimate the distribution of national income in the United States since 1913. Our distributional national accounts capture 100% of national income, allowing us to compute growth rates for each quantile of the income distribution consistent with macroeconomic growth. We estimate the distribution of both pretax and posttax income, making it possible to provide a comprehensive view of how government redistribution affects...

Ok, the title is clickbait. But, uncharacteristically of clickbait the article is about much more and it is important. The point is that gender is a complicated concept that does fit simple models like biological appearance. This is a point that Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to elucidate by applying logical analysis. The meaning of many words in ordinary language are more like family resemblances than essences. For example, many words have several entires differentiating the different...

Everyone got QE wrong. They’re getting tariffs and sanctions wrong now too.