Mike Norman Economics

Two books on President Xi Jinping's shelf drew public attention from both home and abroad immediately after they were seen in the video of Xi's New Year speech. The two books were about artificial intelligence－The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos and Brett King's Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane. The Master Algorithm, published in 2015, describes how machine learning is remaking business, politics, science and war....

This article concludes a three-part series: Bitcoin Valuation I: The Wrong Answers Bitcoin Valuation II(1): What Might Work Bond Economics Bitcoin Valuation Part II(b): What Might Work Brian Romanchuk

More ethnic tribalism. (Of course, this is one person's opinion, and he is an American, not an Israeli.)MONDOWEISS — News & Opinion About Palestine, Israel & the United States Israeli Jews will never accept Palestinians as equals — Klutznick, chair of Americans for Peace Now Philip Weiss | Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.

Former Polish President Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the influential leader of the country’s ruling Law and Justice Party, has some frank advice for Kiev, telling Ukrainian officials that the country would never join Europe if it continued to try to build its national identity on the glorification of notorious Nazi-allied war criminals like Stepan Bandera. In an interview for the news weekly magazine Do Rzeczy, excerpts from which were published by other Polish outlets on Monday, Kaczynski...

One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European...

Scary times. I use to think it might be a good idea for Europe to jettison the US, but what if Trump wants a world where every country on its own and winner takes all. And what if Trump is not an anomaly but represents the will and desires of  a large percentage of the American people.  “The fact that the U.S. is reducing its role in world affairs cannot be tied to the policies of a single president,” Germany’s Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said last month in a stunning speech. “There...

An enduring myth among mainstream economists is that so-called ‘structural’ impediments in the labour market prevent aggregate spending initiatives from government being an effective solution to mass unemployment. According to this view, if the government attempts to reduce the unemployment rate below some ‘natural rate’ then accelerating inflation will be the only outcome. The ‘natural rate’ can, in turn, only be reduced by structural policies – attacks on trade unions, welfare state...

Putin is correct in this observation, although the West refuses to recognize it. Deputy Chairman of the State Duma Ivan Melnikov … said that “communists and all the leftist patriotic forces [in Russia] understand that communism is [as] close to Christianity as much as the form of capitalism that exists in our country and our economy today is far from Christianity.”... It's likely no accident that the candidate in the coming presidential election who is regarded as Putin's chief...

Say again which countries are "shit-hole" countries. Seriously, there are reasons that hell hole countries are the way they are. That is overlooked in the push to emphasis that the developed world cannot accommodate immigrating from the undeveloped world. Regarding undeveloped countries, the pressing questions involve 1) development economics, and 2) historical reasons and current policy of developed countries that contribute to the problems. However, there is no good reason for...

In-depth analysis of the Trump dossier. Much ado about nothing, but it's the ado that's interesting and relevant, as Andrew McCarthy shows. Maybe on a conspiracy against a presidential candidate and then president in the legal sense, but close and likely some would call it a conspiracy in the colloquial sense.  It certainly was collusion among people determined to undercut Trump owing to their own biases and affiliations. This appears to be the real threat to American democracy...