Mike Norman Economics

Amazon make no profit at all on its postal deliveries. Years ago everything was delivered by a Royal Mail postman which was a low paid, but pleasant job if you didn't mind the cold weather in the winter. Up until a few years ago the postmen used bicycles and you could see their Royal Mail bikes chained up everywhere - and often not chained up at all because no one would nick them with their distinctive company colours. It was a little bit of Old England seeing the postmen on their bikes, but...

The Democratic Party establishment apparently hasn't gotten the word yet. The HillRNC raises millions more than DNC in JulyBen Kamisar

If the genuine left is smart, it will take a step back and see this for the gigantic opening it is. Lots of Trump voters are now up for grabs, and if they can come up with a genuine message of economic populism that avoids the typical leftist pitfalls — such as supporting misguided young people dressing up like ninjas, carrying flags and hurling rocks at people trying to give a talk — the opportunity to create a populist movement of immense national significance is there. People across the...

Backgrounder.Business InsiderChina and India are guarding against the preposterousGeorge Friedman, Geopolitical Futures

As Sagan and Valentino note, the results speak for themselves. “The main conclusions of these survey experiments are clear,” they write. “The majority of the U.S. public has not internalized either a belief in the nuclear taboo or a strong noncombatant immunity norm. When faced with realistic scenarios in which they are forced to contemplate a trade-off between sacrificing a large number of U.S. troops in combat or deliberately killing even larger numbers of foreign noncombatants, the...

The Saker: Today I want to introduce you to a book whose importance simply cannot be overstated: The Killing of William Browder: Deconstructing Bill Browder’s Dangerous Deception by Alex Krainer. I consider that book as a *must read* for any person trying to understand modern Russia and where the new Cold War with Russia came from. Most of you must have heard of the Magnitsky Act or even maybe of William Browder himself. You probably know that Browder was a British businessman who...

President Trump’s former chief strategist Stephen Bannon returned to Breitbart News on Friday just hours after parting ways with the White House. Bannon has reclaimed the title of executive chairman for Breitbart and directed the outlet’s Friday editorial meeting, the website said in a statement on Friday. “The populist-nationalist movement got a lot stronger today,” said Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow. “Breitbart gained an executive chairman with his finger on the pulse of...

What will — and won’t — change in a post-Bannon White House. The establishment and deep state win. Mike Flynn and Steve Bannon gone. What's next? Vox Steve Bannon’s exit from the Trump White House, explainedAndrew Prokop

According to Keynes we live in a world permeated by unmeasurable uncertainty – not quantifiable stochastic risk – which often forces us to make decisions based on anything but rational expectations. Sometimes we ‘simply do not know.’ Keynes would not have accepted the view of Bayesian economists, according to whom expectations “tend to be distributed, for the same information set, about the prediction of the theory.” Keynes, rather, thinks that we base our expectations on the confidence or...

Last summer, researchers at the International Monetary Fund settled a long and bitter debate over “neoliberalism”: they admitted it exists. Three senior economists at the IMF, an organisation not known for its incaution, published a paper questioning the benefits of neoliberalism. In so doing, they helped put to rest the idea that the word is nothing more than a political slur, or a term without any analytic power. The paper gently called out a “neoliberal agenda” for pushing deregulation...