Mike Norman Economics

When economist Thomas Picketty released his book ‘Capital in the 21Century’ people clambered to get a copy.  The filmmaker Justin Pemberton has since made the film – in it, he points hard to how rentier capitalism has disenfranchised the west.  Host Ross Ashcroft caught up with the Kiwi director to understand what needs to change if we want 21st Century capital to serve, not enslave us. [embedded content] Is Success Luck or Hard Work [embedded content]

Occasionally, Alastair Crooke hits one out of the park and this post is one of those. He reiterates a point that Alexander Dugin ("Putin's brain" NOT) makes foundational in The Fourth Political Theory. He argues that the twentieth century was about fascism and communism, and that that dichotomy no longer exists. Presently, the historical dialectic has shifted to the conflict between liberalism and traditionalism, which will occupy at least the first part of the twenty-first century, as...

China takes the lead in radar?SouthFrontChina’s New Carrier-Based AWACS Made Its Maiden Flight

Huawei has dramatically ramped up investment in Russia due to US restrictions against the tech giant, CEO Ren Zhengfei has said. “After the United States included us in the Entity List, we transferred our investment in the United States to Russia, increased Russian investment, expanded the Russian scientist team, and increased the salary of Russian scientists,” Ren said in a recent speech to Chinese universities, his comments cited by Shanghai Jiao Tong University on Sunday.... Sputnik...

In sum, lockdown has been positive for knowledge worker productivity in the short term. But it has also created some concerns and challenges around longer-term effectiveness, creativity, and personal resilience. Let’s consider the findings from the research in more depth, then discuss what the opportunities and challenges are for the months and years ahead.... Harvard Business ReviewResearch: Knowledge Workers Are More Productive from HomeJulian Birkinshaw, professor at London Business...

Regular readers will know that for the last few years I have been documenting the way that the dominant paradigm in macroeconomics (New Keynesianism) is slowly disintegrating as the dissonance between its empirical predictions and reality becomes too great to ignore and justify. The once-in-a-century pandemic hasn’t given us much to celebrate in 2020. One cause for optimism, perhaps, is that we might finally jettison the mainstream economics fictions about government deficits and debt,...

The Monetary Monopoly Model (Section 4.3) is a core model of Modern Monetary Theory. If we take it literally, we do not need a theory of inflation, since the price level in some variants of the model is explicitly set as a policy variable. However, reality is far more complex than the model suggests, and if we want to match theory to reality, we are faced with the realisation that governments act in a fashion that sabotages the control of the price level that they do have. (Note: This is...

A propos our recent discussion of whether MMT is a theory, a dogma, or a description.I’ve always been baffled why ‘modern monetary theory’ is called a theory. I don’t mean this in a disparaging way. As far as theories of money go, I think modern monetary theory (MMT for short) is the correct one. But having a correct theory of money is a bit like having a correct theory of traffic lights.Understanding this act of money creation is trivial — much like understanding the creation of a traffic...

Plans for a TikTok sale may have a new obstacle, with China implementing new rules on AI technology exports, The New York Timesreported. The new export control rules, which focus on technology the Chinese government considers sensitive, could mean that TikTok’s parent company, Beijing-based ByteDance, might need a license before it can sell TikTok to an American company. The updated regulations prohibit exporting technology including text analysis, voice recognition, and content...

A socialist government such as China’s can keep its industry going simply by simply writing down debts when they can’t be paid without forcing a closedown and bankruptcy and loss of assets and employment. The world thus has two options: a basically productive public financial system in China, or a predatory financial system in the United States.... Incidentally, I searched on the title in Google search to see whether this site is being deplatformed and came up with nothing. The Unz Review...