Mike Norman Economics

The world’s billionaires have seen their wealth surge by over $5.5 trillion since the beginning of the pandemic in March 2020, a gain of over 68 percent. The world’s 2,690 global billionaires saw their combined wealth rise from $8 trillion on March 18, 2020 to $13.5 trillion as of July 31, 2021, drawing on data from Forbes.Global billionaire total wealth has increased more over the past 17 months of the pandemic than it did in the 15 years prior to the pandemic. Between 2006 and 2020, global...

Why newspaper reporting of "statistics" is often goes wrong. This is about vaccines and their efficacy but it applies to other areas as well, like economics. But a lot of the abuse of statistics is in media headlines about health.Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social ScienceCoronavirus and Simpson’s paradox: Oldsters are more likely to be vaccinated and more likely to have severe infections, so you need to adjust for age when comparing vaccinated and unvaccinated peopleAndrew...

 Real-World Economics Review BlogReview of J. Maesse et al. (forthcoming)“Power and Influence of Economists: Contributions to the Social Studies of Economics”Mitja Stefancic

 As I've been saying for some time. It's right out of the disaster capitalism playbook. While the conspiracy theories about this are loony, there is a certain truth to them. This is an extension of the neoliberal project for installing global corporatism as the basis of global governance through internationalism, of which international interventionism is a part. Nothing new to see here, really. The tactics have changed with changing conditions. That is all.The idea of stakeholder capitalism...

Yes. You can win a Nobel prize for realizing and explaining clearly what the business world had been doing for the better part of two hundred years....The Radford Free PressEconomics as Myth MakingPeter Radford

"Thanks to us being trained and well-organized, all of us workers reopened the factory and put it into production. We took over the factory to protect the rights of the workers. We enforce the food policies inside our homeland of Simone Bolivar and Chavez. Now, Kellogg’s company here is a socialist enterprise. The basic principles of our socialist enterprise are to dignify the work of our working class, increase the levels of production, guarantee that the equipment is highly maintained,...

 The new world isn't about imperialism, it's about designing great products that improve our lives and which also promote a sustainable future. Warships and massive armies are Victorian  - expensive dinasaurs of the past - with all those over decorated crusty generals and admirals. Compete by designing better technology. China is far more advanced in renewable energy.  It can be an amazing world!AS THE Chinese economy continues to grow and grow, it will challenge America’s status as the...

 Scotty Kilmer is a car mechanic, but I don't know much more about him. He says a lot of pollution is made when making a Tesla car. He's not anti electric cars, though, but he says that electric cars should be smaller. In the second video he gives quite a good review of a Tesla car. They are so cheap to run, which would be tempting if I had the money, but Chinese companies are making much smaller ones, and for parking around here where I live, that would be much better. Electric cars are so...

Today (August 18, 2021), the ABS released the latest – Wage Price Index, Australia – for the June-quarter 2021. The WPI data shows that nominal wages growth remains suppressed, and, as a result of the transitory spikes in inflation recently, workers in all sectors experienced sharp drops in their real wages (purchasing power). The behaviour of nominal wages in Australia gives us a clear signal that there is little prospect of sustained inflationary pressures emerging from the labour market...

 Jeffrey Sachs has similar politics to me, it seems. I saw him being ruthlessly questioned about his role in reforming the Soviet Union, where he said he tried his hardest to get it right, but people, both Russians and Americans, were working behind his back to wreck his plans. There was massive corruption, he said. Almost every modern US military intervention in the developing world has come to rot. It’s hard to think of an exception since the Korean War. In the 1960s and first half of the...