Mike Norman Economics

Economic growth is linked to population growth. Russia's demographics are not exceptional, however. Population decline is becoming the norm, and it is not just the pandemic. It's the national birth rates.Beyond this, modern societies do not encourage large families. Young people are in education for longer, thus postponing marriage and children. Women have more career opportunities, producing similar results. And children are expensive. State assistance can do something about the last...

According to Eyck Freymann, author of ‘One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World,’ the BRI is evolving to place less emphasis on traditional heavy infrastructure, and more on high-tech cooperation and digital services.He told Nikkei Asia that "Beijing wants to dominate the physical infrastructure underlying global communications, particularly the internet,” adding: "This will give it an advantage in internationalizing its tech sector and pursuing future tech-related deals with partner...

The decision to deploy counter-terrorism officers on the streets of Manhattan was not well appreciated, at least judging by replies left on the unit’s official social media pages. “Perfect example of how police exist to protect private property and not people,” was the highest rated response. Other popular replies included, “You brought out the automatic rifles and body armor… for tape,” “Good ad for defunding the police right here,” and, “If this was a shot in a movie, I’d think it was too...

 The public has become weary of the lockdown and sociel distancing, but the British and Americans governments have let this get out of hand, and who knows what it might mutate into next? They should have gone for Zero Covid at the beginning like many Eastern countries did. The big picture: The U.S. and the world are in a race to control the virus before these variants can gain a bigger foothold. But many experts say they already expect things to get worse before they get better. And that...

 Some say China is socialist, others say it's capitalist, let's just say it has a mixed economy. A middle income country, I'm hoping that one day it will be rich enough to be able to have a European style welfare state system. This video is a story about China, past to present. But in telling the story of the Rise of China (and Asia generally), it's impossible to not talk about fundamental lessons that have emerged. In this video I try to tell the story but then also look back and at the...

Impressions of a Russian leftist on the recent protests in Russia in relation to the developing situation there, which is influenced by the pandemic and also the effect of economic sanctions. As he notes, there are no studies on this yet, so the evidence is anecdotal. There are many impression and they are all over the lot, depending on the authors' bias. This is a rather sober view from the left, whereas most of the views I have read are wildly unrealistic, e.g., based on polling. Russia is...

 The Covid skeptics were saying on twitter today that no one has yet isolated SARS-CoV-2, and posted articles by scientists saying this. They asked, does SARS-CoV-2 really exist? Yes, I said, and tweeted this. Laboratories (RML) in Hamilton, Montana, produced images of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2, previously known as 2019-nCoV) on its scanning and transmission electron microscopes on Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020. New Images of Novel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 Now Available

The definition and treatment of capital is an important issue that arises quickly when discussing neoclassical approaches to the business cycle. In particular, one can rapidly fall down the rabbit hole of the Cambridge Capital Controversies. However, if the objective is to focus on what is important for understanding the business cycle, we see that capital is hard to easily model, and this is related to the opacity of business cycle analysis.Heterodox economists put great weight on the...

whoa! On Jan 28, in #Shijiazhuang City, #China, after being given anal swab #COVID19 testing, people walked like this...1月28日，石家莊民衆經歷核酸肛拭子檢測後，走路變這樣了……#COVID19 #CCPVirus #AnalSwabSub for more 請訂閱頻道：https://t.co/tcGU3k8ZKk pic.twitter.com/9LRF0thKHB— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferatntd) January 30, 2021

Based on my surveying the evidence, this conspiracy theory seems to be far more wide-spread and much more unhinged than the article makes out, at least at the fringes. The issue now is distinguishing the morons from the crazies.I have not been posting on this so far, but it is getting to be pretty huge.At the same time, as the article points out also, conspiracy theories are not necessarily totally wrong and often are based on an element of truth that exaggerated so greatly as to distort the...