Mike Norman Economics

In pursuit of Russia-gate, the U.S. mainstream media embraces any attack on Russia and works to ensure that Americans don’t hear the other side of the story, as with the Magnitsky myth, reports Robert Parry.... This is to journalism as ignoring data, historicity, and operations is in economics.Consortium NewsGuardians of the Magnitsky Myth Robert Parry

Until relatively recently, the decline of coal was the result of competition with gas, while new renewables weren’t even enough to cover the growth in demand. But a quick calculation shows that renewables will soon be taking out a bigger bite. Global electricity generation is currently about 20000 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year, growing at around 1.5 per cent, or 300TWh a year. Installations of solar PV and wind (I haven’t checked on hydro and other renewables) for 2017 look set to come in...

The Bitcoin mining industry consumes 22.5 TWh of energy annually, which amounts to 13,239,916 barrels of oil equivalent. With 12.5 bitcoins being mined every 10 minutes, that means the average energy cost of one bitcoin would equate to 20 barrels of oil equivalent....Bitcoin transactions are secured by computer miners, who are competing for rewards in the form of coins from the network. The more computation power they use, the better their chances. The drill rig is a computer, and hydraulic...

Communist Party leader, Gennady Zyuganov, called the draft federal budget for 2018-2020 "a budget of the oligarchy", which will increase stagnation and poverty.... According to Zyuganov, the current budget policy "creeps of the old Gaidar-Chubais [liberal] reforms [under Yeltsin that plunged ordinary Russians into poverty]. It does not smell of modernization, nor a breakthrough for the future. "... Zyuganov's Communist Party enjoys the second most popular rating in the Russian political...

Another takedown. But let's take this result at face value. So now we have a largely model-independent finding that to first order the effect of corporate tax cuts is increased wages. The scientific thing to do is not to continue arguing about the model, but to in fact compare the result to data. What should we expect? We should a large change in aggregate wages when there are changes in corporate tax rates — in either direction. Therefore the corporate tax increases in the 1993 tax law...

A television interview of a top Qatari official confessing the truth behind the origins of the war in Syria is going viral across Arabic social media during the same week a leaked top secret NSA document was published which confirms that the armed opposition in Syria was under the direct command of foreign governments from the early years of the conflict. And according to a well-known Syria analyst and economic adviser with close contacts in the Syrian government, the explosive interview...

From my 2009 paper with Weakliem: Throughout, we use the term statistically significant in the conventional way, to mean that an estimate is at least two standard errors away from some “null hypothesis” or prespecified value that would indicate no effect present. An estimate is statistically insignificant if the observed value could reasonably be explained by simple chance variation, much in the way that a sequence of 20 coin tosses might happen to come up 8 heads and 12 tails; we would say...

The road to serfdom – sponsored by big business. Some history of economics.Evonomics If You Look Behind Neoliberal Economists, You’ll Discover the Rich: How Economic Theories Serve Big BusinessDániel Oláh See also Naked CapitalismGaius Publius: Defining Neoliberalism

Still no determination of who was responsible.Intel TodayUN REPORT — External Attack Probably Caused Dag Hammarskjold’s Plane to Crash

Just about any one of them is fatal.Fresh Economic Thinking Decent criticisms of economics? Here are 111 of them. Cameron K. Murray