Mike Norman Economics

"Compounding factors." For weeks, British Prime Minister Theresa May and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson have insisted that there is “no alternative explanation” to Russian government responsibility for the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury last month. But in fact the British government is well aware that such an alternative explanation does exist. It is based on the well-documented fact that the “Novichok” nerve agent synthesized by...

Knight’s uncertainty concept has an epistemological founding and Keynes’ definitely an ontological founding. Of course, this also has repercussions on the issue of ergodicity in a strict methodological and mathematical-statistical sense. I think Keynes’ view is the most warranted of the two. The most interesting and far-reaching difference between the epistemological and the ontological view is that if one subscribes to the former, Knightian view – as Taleb, Haldane & Nelson and “black...

Some Republican policymakers continue to propose basing eligibility for assistance programs on participants’ ability to meet strict work requirements — most recently with House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway’s proposal to reauthorize SNAP (formerly food stamps)[1] — despite a lack of credible evidence that the requirements would work as intended.[2]To build support for work requirements that take away assistance from adults who cannot work a set number of hours per month,...

When most people think about macroeconomics, what they want is the ability to forecast economic outcomes. However, economists' (of all stripes) reputation as forecasters is not particularly high. My view is that this is not too surprising: what we want forecasters to accomplish is probably impossible. (I am hardly the first person to note this, as variants of this idea go back at least to Keynes; I could not hope to offer a history of this idea.) However, I think if we want to approach...

There is a growing understanding of US regime change strategies and tactics. It used to be that the CIA would work covertly to build opposition movements that would remove governments that did not cooperate with the United States and its corporate interests. This still occurs but many of those functions have been buttressed by the US Agency for International Development and the National Endowment for Democracy. Countries are catching on to this. The article below describes how Vietnam is...

Sputnik spoke to Dr. Binoy Kampmark, a Senior Lecturer at RMIT University, Melbourne and former Commonwealth Scholar at Selywn College, Cambridge University; who is also a contributing editor to CounterPunch to find out more about the France's role in Syrian conflict as well as about the recent Emmanuel Macron's statements on the topic. Nails it here. Macron is playing what has been termed a more ‘reserved’ game to his predecessors Sarkozy and Hollande, who both felt that French power...

Dueling stories. Doctors say those who treated patients after attack have been told they and their families will be targeted if they speak out, You knew this would happen. There are no facts anymore, not that facts matter in ideological disputes anyway. Today, it's all gaslighting. Note that the reporters of this story are not on the ground in Syria but rather relying on "sources." The GuardianSyrian medics 'subjected to extreme intimidation' after Douma attack Martin Chulov in Beirut...

Long-time pundit of Chinese politics, Bill Bishop, whose newsletter is well-read among Washington China policy circles, wrote on Tuesday: “The ability of the US government to decimate a major Chinese tech firm by cutting off access to US components is another reminder to China, as the Snowden revelations were, that China cannot ensure information security until it completely de-Americanizes its information technology infrastructure and replaces it with indigenous products.” Asia TimesNew...

Trump suggested he was responsible not only for the negotiations on a formal peace treaty ending the war but also the success of this year’s winter Olympics in South Korea. “They’ve been very generous that without us and without me in particular, I guess, they wouldn’t be discussing anything and the Olympics would have been a failure,” Trump said. “As you know North Korea participated in the Olympics and it was really quite an Olympics. It was quite a success. That would not have...

Here’s how you know that people are really ideologues that don’t know what they’re talking about.