Mike Norman Economics

When I studied British politics (as one unit in a politics minor) at university, I was bemused by the role of the House of Lords. I know it is a curiously British institution that would be hardly tolerated anywhere else. But the fact that it serves as a part of the British democratic system continues to amaze me. Recently, the Economic Affairs Committee has been investigating (if that is what they get up to) Quantitative Easing because, apparently, some of the peers were worried about the...

 Although caffeine is a stimulant, it actually relaxes people, a study showed. Caffeine directly boosts cortisol, but the relaxation it induces lowers it. This research was done on regular tea drinkers, though, who may get stressed without their caffeine fix, so more research is needed. I first started drinking tea and coffee at about the age of 7 to 8, and I never noticed the caffeine. Drinking tea from the age of four helps children to combat obesity, stress and heart disease, according to...

 I thought it was spot on! The libertarianism that says "I should do what I like, regardless of the impact on others" is the worldview of the toddler. Of someone who has not yet learned that the world doesn't revolve around them.Yet we have elected people with this extreme form of arrested development.Ayn Rand's "philosophy", of which @sajidjavid is a proud disciple, is exactly this: the angry wail of a giant toddler, demanding to have everything, in both fists.

 Spread wars all over the world, grab the resources, then say you are protecting women. The Liberal internationalists. Photos before US war in Afghanistan and after.In the U.S., 58% of all women living in poverty are women of color. It’s why author Rafia Zakaria, who lived in a shelter in the U.S. as a single mother, believes “putting the fangs back in feminism is a very urgent project.” In her new book “Against White Feminism,” she urges for transformative change. From the so-called war on...

This is just a market correction. But there's a much larger danger to the economy. Trade and invest using the concepts of MMT. Get a 30-day free trial to MMT Trader. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/ Download my podcasts! New one every week. https://www.buzzsprout.com/1105286 Mike Norman Twitter https://twitter.com/mikenorman Mike Norman Economics: https://mikenormaneconomics.blogspot.com/

There is plenty of propaganda and fake news in the MSM about Uyghur forced labour in the Xinglian region of China, but the evidence of Nike exploitating its workers is mainly ignored.  After it emerged in the 90s that Nike's factory workers were allegedly toiling in inhumane conditions, the company pledged to fix things. But has anything changed?According to the ethical clothing advocacy group Good On You, Nike is certified under the Fair Labor Association Workplace Code of Conduct. But a...

I loved the game Monopoly the first few times I played it when I was a boy, and with all those fancy little houses and hotels it was kind of magical. But I soon learned to not like it so much as it was a slow, drawn out, painful death most of the time. The purpose of the dual sets of rules, said Magie, was for players to experience a 'practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences' and hence to understand how different approaches...

One practice of economists that draws a lot of complaints is the use of subsets of the consumer price indices. Most commonly it is core CPI – excluding food and energy – although there are fancier measures like median CPI (which I describe below). Meanwhile, if a component of the CPI rises a lot in a month, commentary will often state things like “if we exclude {whatever had a price spike}, then CPI increased by only 0.2% on the month, instead of 0.5%.” (As should be expected, complaints are...

Structuring the world so you can win. This sounds like sorcery, but in politics there is a phenomenon known among the social scientists as heresthetics, and it has been with us for centuries. It paved the way for an Illinois senator named Abraham Lincoln to achieve the presidency. Closer to our time, oligarchs deploy the techniques of heresthetics as they seek to strangle the United States Postal Service. Militant libertarians, not to be left out, use it to cripple the very machinery of the...

Collectively, Amazon, Facebook, and Google make over $112 billion in advertising revenuesTwo-thirds of ads in the U.S. are now digitalVisual Capitalist3 Companies Now Make Up 50% of U.S. Ad RevenuesAran Ali