Mike Norman Economics

If you recall, we were out front in questioning this hoax from the get-go. Patrick Lawrence sums up the travesty. The sad reality is that while the Democrats had plenty of ammunition to attack candidate and then president Trump based on policy and character, too, if they wanted, they chose to concoct a bogus account of how they had managed to loss an election in which they were heavily favored. First, the impeachment scheme failed, and now their plot has been outed. What a bunch of...

SouthFront appears to operate on solicitations for donations if their frequent appeals for reader support are any indication. SouthFront's "sin" seem to be reporting real news (not fake news) embarrassing to the US, and the site's reporting is often referred to by retired intelligence and military analysts that are now blogging.SouthFrontA Close Look At Efforts Of Pro-NATO Propaganda Units Behind the Scenes Of SouthFront Censorship

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...