Mike Norman Economics

I wrote in a previous post how I went to the shops wearing goggles, a bike mask with a medical mask underneath, plus with my gloves on and my coat, it felt like I was in a deep sea diving suit, and totally safe inside my cocoon, except with so much clobber on I could hardly breathe, or see where I was going. Plus the goggles kept misting up and the masks kept slipping off because one is better than two, as I found out. But this guy beats me. Well, if it's all you have at hand. [embedded...

The last paragraph from the excerpt below describes how people who are in jobs they hate would be able to leave if they had a Basic Income.I hated my job, but I couldn't leave because of my huge mortgage. I had also been there a long time so I was on top whack too. My work was specialised, so I would have had to travel for two hours or more each way if I wanted to leave, plus it would have been the same horrible job, just somewhere else.I had a Higher National Certificate (HNC) in...

A really interesting video about the virus, and why it's so effective. [embedded content] I went shopping yesterday and felt my medical mask was a bit flimsy so I put my bike mask over the top as well. I also put my DIY eye protection glasses on, so I felt pretty safe, like I was in a deep a sea diving suit, except my glasses kept misting up because as I breathed out my breath came right out of the top of the mask straight up into them.Also, the double mask idea wasn't such a great idea...

An editorial in the Financial Times headlined “Virus lays bare the frailty of the social contract” says that recent developments “shine a glaring light on existing inequalities” and that “to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone.” The FT states: “Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see...

In my book “Geld und Kredit: Eine €-päische Perspektive” (3rd edition, 2020) I gave the following recommendation on p. 243 (English version available here): “This [stabilizing employment in the eurozone with fiscal measures] can be done by the ECB declaring that, in case of doubt, it will buy up all the government bonds of eurozone countries. This would make national government bonds risk-free. It must then be clarified which deficit limits are reasonable in times of upswing and recession....

As MMT has been thrust into the spotlight, misrepresentations and misunderstanding have followed. MMT supposedly calls for cranking up the printing press, engaging in helicopter drops of cash or having the Fed finance government spending by engaging in Quantitative Easing. None of this is MMT. Instead, MMT provides an analysis of fiscal and monetary policy applicable to national governments with sovereign, non-convertible currencies. It concludes that the sovereign currency issuer: i)...

There has been a small flurry of publications by neoclassical economists attempting to fit a pandemic into standard frameworks. This is what to be expected, as neoclassical models are frameworks designed to maximise the amount of publications over time. However, aggregated models are not particularly useful right now. This is true both for neoclassical as well as traditional heterodox macro models. The reason is that they do not offer much insight into either forecasting, nor are they...

Starting to miss baseball a bit...Great highlight from last season where Aaron Boone speaks truth to incompetent power...We need a lot more of this type of thing out there in general... A LOT more...Epic rant from Boone... Great video...[embedded content]

How the denier mind works.I've been debating with deniers for weeks on Twitter and it can be soul destroying, but I'm sure some are sockpuppets, that is, they are professional, paid deniers.It got interesting the other day when we got onto politics where I agreed with deniers about Hillary Clinton, but after that the liberals went mad at me. It was strange because now the conservatives were on my side about Putin, Hillary, and Russia, although it didn't last long.The liberals also started to...