Mike Norman Economics

AT&T is laying off thousands of workers at the beginning of the year without severance pay.  Instead, the employees will have to train their foreign replacements.  At the same time, the company saved $3B thanks to Trump's tax cuts.  Trickle down economics is a cruel joke.

The west is still finding it extraordinarily difficult to come to terms with China’s remarkable ascent The West took over the world by military conquest and technological achievement, but China is now doing the same, but only with technology and commerce. China's wealth is built by hard work, not conquest.Many Western economists and academics said China was an economy built on steroids with printed money and would soon collapse, but it was the West that collapsed instead - in 2008 - and we...

Trump, the down-to-earth guy who's on the side of the average American. A populist. Under the insidiously named Secure Act (Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement) the children who could previously inherit their parent’s IRA and take the Required Minimum Distribution based on their own age – effectively giving them the ability to compound that inherited IRA over their own lifetime on a tax-sheltered basis – will now be required to reduce the account to zero (yes, ZERO!) over...

As 2019 (already) comes to an end, I rounded up the top 10 most-read posts of the year on the Economic Sociology and Political Economy community blog. You are welcome to (re)read and share them. And, let’s try something new, this list are followed by the 10 least-read posts of the year which are surely worth reading....  Economic Sociology and Political EconomyTop 10 Most-read Economic Sociology and Political Economy Posts of 2019Oleg Komlik | founder and editor-in-chief of the ES/PE,...

It's China’s side of the story, and it makes some good points. Many in the West believe that China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is plagued by "ethnic repression" instead of facing a terrorism challenge. The "re-education camps" are the most recent case in point. These views are based on reports and studies from largely western sources, which can be seriously flawed and painfully uninformative. CGTN's Wang Guan investigates these biases as he travels deep inside Xinjiang. [embedded...

A signal not sent through space and time, but by quantum entanglement. What happens to one happens to the other - the distance is unimportant.As 2019 winds to a close, the journey towards fully realised quantum computing continues: physicists have been able to demonstrate quantum teleportation between two computer chips for the first time.Science AlertPhysicists Just Achieved The First-Ever Quantum Teleportation Between Computer Chips

Understanding the Chinese mindset means understanding their history. Key Point: China plans on never being humiliated ever again. Bingo. Harry J. Kazianis nails it.The US-initiated "trade war" and the manufactured Hong Kong separatist revolt are eerily reminiscent of the British colonization of China and the Opium War. It is blazingly obvious to all Chinese people but is lost on the West that the intention is to keep China down and make it subservient to the the West, led by the US.China...

"Retraining." Another reason why Joe Biden should not be president of the United States. Joe Biden may have just fallen for a fatal argument from Hillary Clinton's 2016 run. Unemployment is a systemic issue and needs to be addressed systemically. The MMT JG is a first step in this since it addresses unemployment locally and immediately. The MMT JG is not the solution to unemployment however, since alone it is merely an ad hoc measure.Societies are social systems embedded in the larger...

Still have a few hours to sign up for MMT Trader before the subscription rate goes up on Jan 1. https://www.pitbulleconomics.com/mmt-trader/?s2-ssl=yes/

Even from a conservative point of view, the concentration of power at large tech companies is scary. As a true conservative, you’re afraid of the constitutional power in the government. Not because the government is evil per se, but because you don’t trust human nature and concentration of power. So if you have the same concentration of power in the private sector it doesn’t become fine all of a sudden. If anything, it becomes more dangerous. At least, we have ways to address the...