Mike Norman Economics

How New Zealand responded to Covid-19 compared to the UK. New Zealand said it was paramount to save lives. [embedded content]

Wuhan has ordered fresh Covid-19 tests for all 14 million residents after six new infections were reported over the weekendWuhan orders fresh coronavirus tests for all residents as new cluster fans fears of second wave

Frank Li presents an alternative picture.econintesect.comCovid-19: How Has China Been Dealing with It?Frank Li | Chinese ex-pat, Founder and President of W.E.I. (West-East International), a Chicago-based import & export company, B.E. from Zhejiang University (China) in 1982, M.E. from the University of Tokyo in 1985, and Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 1988, all in Electrical Engineering

While many advanced economies increase government spending to unprecedented levels to mitigate the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, most developing countries have struggled to marshal even relatively small rescue packages. These differences reflect a systemic flaw in the global economy.... The Post-Colonial Era is really the neocolonial era.Project SyndicateMessages from “Fiscal Space” Jayati Ghosh | Professor of Economics at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, School of...

And all this needs to be integrated into a systems approach. This is very difficult since solutions must be implemented in an ideologically diverse and oppositional political environment in which the general level of education is not high. Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social ScienceHere’s what academic social, behavioral, and economic scientists should be working on right now.Andrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics...

Disaster capitalism is being tried, and the worst case is now the likely case. But there is a scale beyond which disaster capitalism cannot go. At a certain point, the carnage becomes too great to neglect, impossible to avoid and lethal to overlook. At a certain point, ordinary people will stand up and refuse to be bullied any more. That point has not quite arrived; we are still in the mind-set of “getting back to normal,” even as the pandemic continues. The contradiction between...

Data is useless unless it’s used. Everything above is pointless unless governments actually want to use all this data to make decisions. And the last few years have been, ahem, challenging ones for those who think big decisions are best made using good evidence.So better data after COVID-19 isn’t about any one thing. It’s a slow incremental process of creating a system, based on good law and respect for rights, fully embedded into political cultures and expectations, attuned to market...

I suppose some people wonder why I keep coming back to Marx. Here is the reason.   This is how very influential - and not at all communist - Jacques Attali once described him, "He was the first to grasp the world as a whole, which is at once political, scientific and philosophical. From that point of view, he is, as the communist historian Eric Hosbawm said, “the recognized founding father of modern thinking about society.”... There is also a return that implies greater practical...

"The Treasury view" that fiscal  responsibility requires balancing the budget led to the second leg down in the US during the Great Depression when FDR listened to the fiscal disciplinarians at the outset of his second term. Note that Keynes had published the General Theory in 1936, and FDR was already quite aware of Keynes. When FDR adopted the Treasury view in 1937, the recovery began to tank, and and he reversed his position in 1938. See, How FDR Learned to Stop Worrying and Love...

It is Wednesday, so only some snippets today as I have deadlines and some travel to deal with. We have been finalising a Report on our latest estimates of the investment required to introduce a full-scale Job Guarantee in Australia. As part of that work, I have been going back through my NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) estimates and updating data. I am also going to talk about that a bit in my presentation to the Economic Society of Australia tonight. That talk is...