Mike Norman Economics

A contrarian view. Idiosyncratic WhiskLeverage is not a sign of risk seeking, a continuing seriesKevin Erdmann

There seems to be an expectation in science that the people who gather a dataset should also be the ones who analyze it. But often that doesn’t make sense: what it takes to gather relevant data has little to do with what it takes to perform a reasonable analysis. Indeed, the imperatives of analysis can even impede data-gathering, if people have confused ideas of what they can and can’t do with their data. I’d like us to move to a world in which gathering and analysis of data are separated,...

This is a summary distinction between liberalism and traditionalism, although Weiner doesn't use the term traditionalism specifically. The distinction in the Western intellectual tradition begins with Plato and Aristotle's different political theories, with Plato's theory developing into traditionalism and Aristotle's into liberalism. In modern times, this would be reflected in the dichotomy between Hegel and Locke, and Continental versus Anglo-American thought.  The main protagonists...

After decades of turbulence, the world order led by the United States has begun to change, with the 2008 global financial crisis possibly being the turning point and this year signaling a new beginning....The changing world order is not about the decline of the U.S. but about the rise of other countries, as Fareed Zakaria, a CNN journalist and author of The Post-American World, said. Nevertheless, global governance is set to change from West-led governance to co-governance by the West and...

I am more positive and optimistic about the TOP (The Opportunities Party) critique of MMT than Bill is. It seems to me that it makes the major concessions that are most significant to reversing the status quo mindset about government finance. The objections are easily met, and Bill does in the post. So I would say that the ball has been advanced toward the goal in New Zealand. MMT got some free publicity, too.  I don't see a problem with people bringing up questions or making objections,...

Putin puts his finger on a key issue without naming explicitly.This is the classical question about what it means to be a good person in a good society.Under Anglo-American liberalism, this question is not to be asked because the market is the arbiter of truth and value equates to prices. In this view, culture is based on utilitarianism, with its stimulus-response model of human behavior, and law exists chiefly to provide security and protect private property.Traditionalism disagrees. In...

New sanctions are coming, whether he wants them or not. NATO expansion and the West’s Ukraine meddling will continue. Encirclement is firmly in place. It’s difficult to envision where this could lead, short of actual hostilities. Russia’s fundamental national interests, the ones Trump was prepared to accept, will almost certainly render such hostilities inevitable. The National InterestStop poking the Russian bearRobert W. Merry | Editor of the American Conservative

John Locke's epistemological realism versus George Berkeley's linguistic constructivism. Subsequent findings favor Berkeley's view. Human's participate in the construct of their reality through the way they express themselves about it and their relationship to it. Short and worth a read.OUPblog — Oxford University Press's Academic Insights for the Thinking WorldGeorge Berkeley and the power of words Kenneth L. Pearce | Ussher Assistant Professor in Berkeley Studies (Early Modern...

After Trump announced the existence of the alt-left on live TV, media outlets scurried to tell the world exactly where the term emerged from. CBS explains that it “came out of the conservative media.” CNN, quoting a director at the Anti-Defamation League, describes it as a “made-up term used by people on the right.” Heavy.com writes that “the term ‘alt-left’ began being used by the online conservative media in 2016 before it slowly migrated to more mainstream conservative voices, like Fox...

Donald Trump’s rhetoric, promises and even at times his policies (when they see the light of day) are as far from the neo-con/neo-liberal status quo of contemporary American policies as one could have deemed imaginable for a US President, not long ago. When one analyses his policy rhetoric, Donald Trump remains something of a Robert Taft style conservative. The defining characteristics of such an ethos is an opposition to foreign interventions and the bloated ‘moral’ (aka immoral)...