Mike Norman Economics

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

Geo-economics based "competition" — for power through economic means.GeopolitikaUS-China: Geoeconomics TussleAbu Hurrairah

The new guidelines for the US sanctions policy include the development of targeted sanctions, a more serious analysis of their economic costs for American business, as well as business from allied and partner countries and, finally, closer coordination with allies, writes Valdai Club Programme Director Ivan Timofeev....Valdai ClubBiden Revises US Sanctions PolicyIvan Timofeev, Valdai Club Programme Director

The game’s little-known inventor, Elizabeth Magie, would no doubt have made herself go directly to jail if she’d lived to know just how influential today’s twisted version of her game has turned out to be. Why? Because it encourages its players to celebrate exactly the opposite values to those she intended to champion.Naked CapitalismHow Monopoly Was Invented to Demonstrate the Evils of CapitalismKate Raworth, senior visiting research associate at Oxford University’s Environmental Change...

Many social media commentators that have become interested in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) regularly cite sections of the article written by businessman and former Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York Beardsley Ruml – Taxes for Revenue Are Obsolete – which appeared in the January 1946 edition of the American Affairs journal. The article was actually a speech that he made “before the American Bar Association during the last year of the war”. Some claim that the content provides...

 Dominic Frisby is a bit of a libertarian and a populist, but he has some good points about the causes of house price inflation here in the UK, and probably in many other countries too. [embedded content]Dominic Frisby - Why Houses Cost So Much - And What To Do About It

 The underworld! There's some seriously evil people is this world, and it's best to keep well clear of them. I read recently how the hacking business has changed, which I should have posted here. Hackers now design software not to use themselves, but to sell to less experienced hackers, who are prepared to take the risks, but it lowers the risk all around. Crypto has been linked to a series of security issues, with a boom in kidnappings of wealthy individuals followed by the criminals...