Mike Norman Economics

It has been amusing to watch the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets express their dismay over the rise and spread of “fake news.” These publications take it as an obvious truth that what they provide is straightforward, unbiased, fact-based reporting. They do offer such news, but they also provide a steady flow of their own varied forms of fake news, often by disseminating false or misleading information supplied to them by the national security state, other branches of...

As it turns out, Nature (unfortunately behind a paywall) has just published a study in which the authors attempt to estimate the degree of wealth inequality in ancient societies for which we do not have written records.* What they did is collect data from 63 archaeological sites or groups of sites, used the distribution of house sizes as a proxy for wealth, and assigned Gini coefficients to each society. What they are able to show is that wealth disparities generally increased with the...

Guy Standing’s The Corruption of Capitalism (Biteback Publishing 2017) is a powerful attack on rentier capitalism and, very explicitly, a call to revolt. It is very informative and the detailed factual descriptions that Standing puts before his readers are intended to make them angry. He succeeded with me and probably will with most readers. Standing is at his best describing the features of crony capitalism that are totally different from the neo-liberal story of free markets that...

A response to the Nov 17 thoughts of Simon Wren-Lewis Simon Wren-Lewis has put up a very considered post on the Job Guarantee which deserves an appropriate response. I have been calling for Simon to write about the Job Guarantee for a very long time, and I’m grateful he has done so. It is a very good piece from an alternative point of view and I hope I can do it justice in this reply. Modern Money MattersThoughts about the Job Guarantee: A Reply Neil Wilson

Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with him afterwards, and we followed up with a few emails. The quotation in the title of this post is condensed from the final line of one of his emails — a line that made me laugh out loud: “So I guess we start from that — in the beginning was the...

Professor Simon Wren-Lewis wrote "Some thoughts about the Job Guarantee," in which he makes an attempt to analyse a Job Guarantee using the NAIRU concept. The analysis suffers from the well-known defects of NAIRU. In the article, he argues that a Job Guarantee implementation would cause a one-time upward shock to wages. He argues that this is not "acknowledged" by MMT authors, even though it appears this effect is common knowledge to anyone who has read the MMT literature. As a result,...

Good read. The review is mostly about Russia, despite the title.The Duran Does the United States have a future? A new book by Gilbert Doctorow (book review)Alexander Mercouris

Jonathon Freedland of the Guardian wrote this article titled, From Peppa Pig to Trump, the web is shaping us. It’s time we fought back, and he starts off by saying about the horror of a children's cartoon which parents might leave their kids in front of while they get on with stuff thinking it's a good way to keep them quite. But the cartoon, he says, may have been unofficially digitally altered to drive up lucrative ratings and could contain disturbing images like cartoon characters having...

Recently Alex Salmond of the Scottish National Party started working for RT this week and the UK Guardian hissed and booed calling him a narcissist and an egotist. The Guardian nowadays often doesn't allow readers comments when the topic is about Russia, or will close the comments section down quickly if the comments are negative so I keep missing my chance to reply even though I know my post will be removed.Lee Camp says that all the best journalists now work for RT. He says how the former...

The latest data for net fixed assets in the US have been released, enabling me to update the calculations for the US rate of profit a la Marx up to 2016. Last year, I did the calculations with the help of Anders Axelsson from Sweden, who not only replicated the results to ensure their accuracy (and found mistakes!), but also produced a manual for carrying out the calculations that anybody could use. As I did last year and in previous years, I have also updated the rate of profit using the...