Mike Norman Economics

The ratio of average to median net worth is a measure of how equally wealth is distributed. If everyone’s wealth was exactly the same, the ratio of the two net worth measures would be 1.0. China’s mean household net worth is double its median. The ratio in the US is seven times, pointing to a much more unequal distribution of wealth. Mark Krugger - American Families Only Half as Rich as Those in Chinese Cities

Green Left’s Federico Fuentes spoke to National Network of Commune Activists spokesperson Atenea Jiménez to get a sense of what is happening in the country.... Green LeftMercenaries, pandemic and riots in Venezuela: A grassroots perspectiveFederico Fuentes interviews Atenea Jiménez

Based on data for the first four months of 2020, this post shows that U.S. imports from China declined sharply in February and March, before bouncing back in April. The decline was partially offset by growing imports from countries outside of China, such as Vietnam, India, and Bangladesh. As perhaps could have been expected, firms with established supply chain relationships in these countries benefited the most from the disruptions in China. Those reliant on China were largely unable to...

New information is trickling in quite slowly, and I doubt that we will have much in the way of clarity with respect to the economic outlook for awhile. The pandemic is a sort of exogenous shock economically, but not systemically. The high likelihood of a pandemic in the near future was already in the knowledge base. Unfortunately, a globalized world had not thought this through and prepared for the eventuality. As a result, uncertainty now prevails and there is a cacophony of voices all...

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