Mike Norman Economics

 Progressives will never dominate English politics without confronting Churchillism.The British Empire has his a big effect on the English psyche, where people see its 'greatness' as something to be very proud of and highly esteemed. The  Scottish and Welsh on the other hand were victims of the British Empire and so have less affinity for it. The English people see Conservative politicians as being very business-like the best people who will look out for  British interests - Britian...

Steve Keen shows how private debt, not public debt, causes many of our financial problems, in fact, government debt can help mitigate the worst of looming financial crisis that may be coming due to Covid, but sadly, he says, governments are more likely to do nothing about private debt, while cutting public expenditure, which will make the financial crisis even worse.  Is the financial system acting in favour of society’s needs?Far from it! As Marx once put it, the finance sector is a good...

In this case geographical diversity.Dani Rodrik has brought to our attention a rather serious problem within the economics profession: it is still dominated by people living and working in the West. As a consequence it has a decided bias towards issues that are of significant interest to the West.This is, of course, not news to any of you not living in the West. Nor is it news to anyone outside the profession paying attention to the product of the journals and various other outlets. The...

In May 2003, the late Princeton health economist Ewe Reinhardt and colleagues published a frequently-cited paper titled “It’s the Prices, Stupid: Why the United States is So Different From Other Countries”. This paper evaluated the reasons that the United States had more than double the median per capita health care spending of other OECD countries, at $4,631 compared to $1,983 in 2000. The authors found that the United States had higher use of some high-tech diagnostic/treatment services...

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,...