Mike Norman Economics

I learned as a child about Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) as the founder of the modern profession of nursing and probably the single person who did the most to make it socially acceptable for women from middle- and upper-class background to become nurses.... What I had not learned about Nightingale as a child was that she was also an early innovator in applying statistical analysis to health data, and in the graphic presentation of data. Indeed, he was the first female member of...

The Finish Basic Income experiment didn't fully test the idea.Once people got a Basic Income they were more prepared to take on a low income job. I guess it makes it feel more worthwhile and also less stressful. It shows how incentives can work - the carrot or the stick.However, the Finnish study is not a true test of UBI for two reasons: Instead of giving money to a random sample of the population, or perhaps a representative region, all the beneficiaries were unemployed when the study...

Andrew Gelman takes a look at the noise.Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science2 perspectives on the relevance of social science to our current predicament: (1) social scientists should back off, or (2) social science has a lot to offerAndrew Gelman | Professor of Statistics and Political Science and Director of the Applied Statistics Center, Columbia University

I don't know what the answer is, as it seems we are stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea.Boris Johnson is now getting criticised by the right-wing press for ruining the economy, but many other people are also criticising him for coming out of the knockdown too early.A tweet yesterday by someone from the MSM, said that Boris Johnson hates being Prime Minister. I can well believe it.Robert Reich says that Trump is ending the lock-down because he thinks if he doesn't he will lose the...

The – RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) – technology marks best-practice in data storage and backup systems. It replaced SLED (single large expensive disk) to improve performance and insure against data loss from hardware failures. I have a series of RAID disks backing up the IT systems that I manage within my research centre. But when it comes to humanity, we do not follow this practice. Neoliberalism clearly subjugates human development and opportunity to the interests of...

Capitalism, imperialism and colonialism were joined at the hip at the birth of capitalism as an iteration of feudalism in which landlords had to admit industrialists and financiers to the club. Neoliberalism is an iteration of this arrangement that is joined to the hip of neo-imperialism and neocolonialism.The political arrangement that corresponds to this economic arrangement is oligarchy.The Case for Concerted ActionThe Purpose Of Economics Is To Camouflage Imperialism V. Ramanan

In order to understand better how the unfolding economic crisis is likely to affect U.S. households, this Chicago Fed Letter looks at what happens when borrowers miss debt payments and how long it takes for them to face a severe adverse consequence, such as foreclosure, wage garnishment, or repossession. FRB ChicagoWhat Are the Consequences of Missed Payments on Consumer Debts? Jonathan Lanning, Senior Policy Economist, and Jonathan Rose, Policy Advisor

Longish but one of the best I have encountered about what needs to be done to get past this event in a scientifically informed way as possible. I have chosen not to post much on the pandemic since the there is just so much material. To keep up, I recommend the daily Links post at Naked Capitalism.IEEE SpectrumHow Control Theory Can Help Us Control COVID-19 Greg Stewart is vice president of data science for the agriculture technology startup Ecoation and an adjunct professor at the...

Fed loan programs may now start to increase; Mnuching here saying he transferred balances to the Fed for financial guarantees for the corporate bond ETF lending program: Mnuchin says he sent the Fed money from a $454 billion coronavirus rescue package to begin lending to U.S. corporations https://t.co/aN8DYrAKPG — Bloomberg (@business) May 11, 2020 “I can tell you I’m authorizing a wire this morning going into the secondary corporate facility. It’s on it’s way out,” Mnuchin said in a CNBC...

I really liked this article, which is from 2007. Depending on how fast you read, the population of the planet is growing with every word that skitters beneath your eyeball. There are more than 211,000 people being added every day, and a population the size of Germany every year. As someone who has now been travelling around the world for decades, I see this change, and I feel it. You can smell it in the traffic jams of the Middle East. You can see it as you fly over Africa at night, and you...