Mike Norman Economics

“By failing to prosecute the crime of torture in CIA custody, the U.S. is in clear violation of the Convention against Torture and is sending a dangerous message of complacency and impunity to officials in the U.S. and around the world,” [U.N. special rapporteur on torture Nil] Melzer said in the statement.… There was no immediate comment from U.S. officials in Geneva.  ReutersU.N. expert says inmate U.S. torture continues at Guantanamo Bay Tom MilesUPDATED:U.N. expert says torture...

Remember the flurry about Aleppo and its "fall" to the regime from the "moderate opposition"? Here is an eye-witness report from a journalist who was there that debunks it. Did any Western media report this?  So much for the free Western media – proving excellently their place as the second M in the MIMAC – the Military-Industrial-Media-Academic Complex – that is always ready to promote violence and omit or marginalise the voices of conflict understanding and peace.... TFFAleppo’s...

American history. The Establishment and its propagandists regularly insist that a structural aristocracy is a “democracy” because the latter is defined by the guarantee of certain fundamental rights (legal definition) and the holding of regular elections (procedural definition). This is, of course, a purely formal, abstract and largely negative understanding of democracy, which says nothing whatsoever about people having real, sustained power over the governing of their lives.…...

The US thinks it can "bankrupt" Russia with sanctions. Contrary to Western claims Russia in 2017 did not ‘run out of money’… What is extraordinary is not that Russia has not run out of money. It is that supposedly serious people in the West ever thought it would. The dismal truth is that no economic catastrophe in Russia is too farfetched to prevent some people in the West predicting it, whilst there is never any penalty for these people when regular as clockwork the predicted economic...

To put it another way: Sure, it’s fine to say that you “cannot reach external validity” from your sample alone. But in the meantime you still need to make decisions. We don’t throw away the entire polling industry just cos their response rates are below 10%; we work on doing better. Our samples are never perfect but we can make them closer to the population. Remember the Chestertonian principle that extreme skepticism is a form of credulity. Making assumptions is necessary. However, it is...

Third way evangelists presented globalisation as inevitable and advantageous to all. In reality, it is neither, and the liberal order is paying the price.... The fundamental thing to grasp is that globalisation is—and always was—the product of human agency; it can be shaped and reshaped, for good or ill. The great problem with Blair’s forceful affirmation of globalisation back in 2005 was the presumption that it is essentially one thing, immutable to the way that our societies must...

If multinationals had to pay their dues where they make their sales, the kind of activities revealed in the Paradise Papers would be a thing of the past Companies can set up their headquarters in tax havens and then they become difficult to tax, also, countries end up competing with each other to offer the lowest taxes to attract companies, but in 2008 two professors suggested a solution, impose a type of sales tax on the products sold in a country related to the profit the companies...

When I first attended Davos in January 2013, I asked everyone I met if they’d heard of the term “sharing economy.” Ninety percent of people said no, 5% assumed I was talking about barter exchange, and the remaining 5% acknowledged new technologies and peer-to-peer networks were enabling emergent business models. It was difficult to find anyone who had used Airbnb or BlaBlaCar. Later that year I co-founded the Forum’s Sharing Economy Working Group with other Young Global Leaders, with the...

Many professions, including education and health care, will become increasingly automated. This won't eliminate the need for humans, however, since the social element is also a vital factor in many fields, especially education, which involves socialization.The problem inherent in this article is difficulty thinking outside the box, in this case the traditional classroom. That model is obsolescent, and technology will soon make it obsolete. Then we will look back on it and wonder why it...

Roger Farmer is out with an argument for the optimal level of public debt being 70% of GDP. Ralph provides the MMT answer. It is nicely succinct. MMTers have solved this one. Others are still floundering, in particular Roger Farmer in this NIESR article on the subject, is all over the place far as I can see (1). So I’ll run thru this vexed question for the umpteenth time.... Farmer bills himself as a Keynesian. Ralph reminds us of the answer Keynes himself gave to the question of public...