Mike Norman Economics

In a recent Financial Times article, Martin Sandbu identifies three major economic failures of competitive capitalism in the West: growing inequality; the disproportionate effects of The Great Recession on young people; and the threat of displacement in labor markets brought by improving technology and the presumed ubiquity of artificial intelligence. Sandbu connects these failures to recent victories of populist “extremist” parties in the EU, UK, and US, and asserts that if liberalism and...

The zombies keep doing the same wrong things over and over.

A shocking survey of 2,000 UK adults revealed 43 per cent are short of the cash they need to pay the bills an average of seven months each year. But one quarter said money is an uphill battle for them every single month.The average adult is forced to turn to their credit cards or overdraft to get them through to payday four out of every 12 months, with one in 10 saying this is the case each month.Six in 10 even went as far as to say they feel they are never going to make ends meet on their...

China will step up efforts to develop a group of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) with international dominance and influence, the chief of China's top SOE watchdog said Saturday. The goal includes having a group of leading SOEs that are dominant in international resources allocation, Xiao Yaqing, chairman of the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, said at a forum on the reform and development of Chinese enterprises. China also aims to have a number of SOEs with...

Germans will be Germans, it seems — fiscally conservative.Bill Mitchell – billy blogForget European reform – the Germans have anywayBill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

The Trump administration may have had not expected that its human rights report about the rest of the world would backfire so badly after it was released last Friday. That was especially true when U.S. Acting Secretary of State John Sullivan called the governments of China, Russia, Iran and DPRK a "forces of instability" as a result of their human rights issues. Pointing out China's problems in human rights is one thing and should be welcomed. China, as a developing nation, has much to...

Macron: I’m Here to Make France Great Again Macron States – “I Am Putin’s Equal”French President Wants America To Go To War In Syria How Emmanuel Macron Became the New Leader of the Free World Macron to Trump: "You need allies, we are the ally" French president to call for American ‘militarism’ How the UK's special relationship with the US was replaced by Macron's 'relation spéciale'Macron: US, France and allies should not leave, must build 'new Syria after war'Macron to advocate...

Samuel Bowles and Wendy Carlin.I would say that CORE is an update rather than a new version.Lars P. Syll’s BlogA new paradigm for teaching economicsLars P. Syll | Professor, Malmo University

Although it might be possible to find dissenters, the apparent consensus among financial market practitioners is that mathematical economic models provide terrible forecasts. One response is to keep searching through the set of all possible models, hoping to find something that works. The author's suggested response is to accept that forecasting is an inherently impossible task. However, in order to advance beyond nihilism, we need to quantify why mathematical models are terrible. My...

Well if you moved the mouth of the funnel to the left edge, then the distribution would be skewed to the left so what?... more stochastic idiocy in action....The Galton Machine shows order from randomness. Each ball bounces left or right at random, 12 times, but together where they fall can be predicted - the normal distribution. This one made by: https://t.co/oI9wOGq7nG pic.twitter.com/VQtVu66OSE— Tom Stafford (@tomstafford) April 19, 2018