Mike Norman Economics

Child hunger in America. Shades of the 3rd world.Reminiscence of the FutureEven Brookings Institution Can't Keep Silent.Andrei Martyanov

George Galloway is tweeting that the Chinese have a safe vaccine for COVID-19, but this is what I found on the Internet. It still has to go through human trails.  One of China's COVID-19 vaccine candidates has proven effective in protecting monkeys from the novel coronavirus, according to a report released on May 6 in Science magazine, in the world's first report on animal trial results for COVID-19 vaccine candidates.  Global Times Chinese scientists release world’s first animal...

Talking points.  The so-called MMT critics need to read more MMT in order to actually criticize MMT. They are criticizing MMT based on straw man arguments. I, too, am getting bored with plodding through it to see if anyone has come up with anything substantial.  Without doing the necessary prep, criticism appears not only unprofessional. In this case, it also leads to the question of whether the criticism is an ideological attempt to control the narrative by influence based on...

Following a two year experiment, the results of a new study show just paying people money with no conditions attached makes them more likely to find work than normal benefits do This article has a more positive take on the Finnish Basic Income experiment. The Daily MirrorUniversal basic income makes people more likely to find work

A U.S. mayor claims he had COVID-19 last November, over one month before China reported its initial cases. If this was really the case, how did he get it and from where? How long ago did the virus start spreading in the U.S.? In this episode of Getting to the Point, CGTN anchor Liu Xin asks the big question! [embedded content]

There is money and power in identifying Russia and cyber attacks as the key security threats facing Britain — but not in addressing the more important issues of pandemics and climate change. Former UK intelligence chiefs are personally profiting from the ‘revolving door’ between government and business, and the public is paying the price. A real conspiracy: Britain's intelligence agencies don't know anything about pandemics or climate change, which are real security threats, because there...

A good critique of the film, Plandemic. I do love that last paragraph. It is exactly why people are prone to conspiracy theories. A good conspiracy theory turns the believer into a hero, a warrior with secret knowledge that none of the other ignorant “sheeple” know, against powerful forces arrayed against him. A good conspiracy theory almost always has a part at the end in which the “people” (in this case, the people believing the conspiracy theory) “wake up” and see what is being...

The conspiracists believe the government is implementing lockdown so that elites can take control and make a lot of money, but the countries which are the most neoliberal, that is, pro elite, were always very reluctant to impose any Lockdown, and now also want to remove them as fast as possible. And why would North Korea, Russia, Cuba, and China participate in this conspiracy? The conspiracists seem unable to think anything through. The evidence is mounting that America is steamrolling...

Online sales continue to benefit and offline sales lag, as would be expected. Probably too early to tell whether and how much this will persist.McKinseyHow Chinese consumers are changing shopping habits in response to COVID-19 Xin Huang is a partner in McKinsey’s Hong Kong office, where Sha Sha is a senior partner; Dymfke Kuijpers is a senior partner in the Singapore office; Lavonda Li is a consultant in the Shanghai office, where Chenan Xia is a partner.See also at McKinseyFast-forward...

What a shame! Warren Mosler said in a recent tweet that if money is created at the central bank to pay for a Basic Income it could work, but your playing with fire. With MMT, he says, money creation is tied to the Job Guarantee.An experiment with 'free money' in Finland made people happier but did not improve employment levels and would be 'unsustainable', a study has found.  Participants in the Finnish study 'were more satisfied with their lives and experienced less mental strain,...