Mike Norman Economics

The research shows that happy workers are more productive. If a company is deemed to be fair, people work harder for it. Some companies have shortened the hourly week and yet productivity went up.  Workplace harassment is far from unusual in Japan, with its hierarchical company structure and culture of subservience and long hours. The government has taken steps to tackle this, introducing legislation specifically to eliminate harassment at work and encouraging companies to draw up...

lol! ... hate to break the news to you but checkmate (again!) to all the hypocrite Darwin people here...After napping on it, I have a theory of what ails capitalism: it is not Darwinian enough.The “selfish” motive in Adam Smith corresponds to personal fitness rather than inclusive fitness. Taxation is a crude and insufficiently precise mechanism to add inclusive fitness back in. https://t.co/JWLNC8egy3— Venkatesh Rao (@vgr) October 26, 2019

Imagine inviting your mates around and your mum's the best guitarist in town. [embedded content]

Ex-Green Party politician puts the record straight about the EU. All my friends think the EU is committed to social democracy and they weren't happy with me when I said I voted to leave.Greg Palast says how the Euro was designed to destroy Europe's welfare state. Also at the Climate Change Conference in Warsaw in 2013 we were told that “continuing with economic growth over the coming two decades is incompatible with meeting our international obligations on climate change”. But the UK...

SouthFront U.S. Is Looting Syrian Oil Fields To Fund Mercenaries And Intelligence Operations RTRussian MoD says US protects oil smugglers in Syria, offers aerial images as proof RTThe Russians are meddling again, this time in Chile, warns US diplomat Sic Semper TryannisExposing John Brennan's Secret CIA Trump Task Force? by Larry C Johnson

It is not common for an OECD county to shoot and kill 16 people in two days of socially motivated riots. (Perhaps only Turkey, in its unending wars against the Kurdish guerilla, comes close to that level of violence.) This is however what Chilean government, the poster child of neoliberalism and transition to democracy, did last week in the beginning of protests that do not show the signs of subsiding despite cosmetic reforms proposed by President Sebastian Piñera.The fall from grace of...

When the Blackouts occurred in Venezuela the right blamed socialism, well, we can certainly blame neoliberal capitalism for the blackouts in California. Palast blasted the outages as a result of PG&E’s alleged venality — but also reserved some ire for the deregulation agendas pursued by liberal Democrats over the past few decades. “Leaving hospitals, schools and 1 million homes without power — and that means without water — in California is the endgame of deregulation mania,” the former...

The depths of the planet offer a rock-hard potential solution to climate change. Stephen Leahy believes a significant amount of carbon can be removed from the atmosphere. He's quite excited about its potential but doesn't mention how much it might cost.  These new discoveries about the ability of the Earth to absorb carbon “give me tremendous optimism,” Hazen says. Watching rock grow One of these sequestration methods involves a large slab of rock pushed up from Earth's upper...

US oil giant Exxon Mobil is being sued for misleading investors and consumers for decades about the role fossil fuels play in climate change. Boom Bust talks to oil and gas historian Doug Elenbaas about the historic climate fraud case. “For quite a number of years Exxon understood the impact of fossil fuels and climate change,” the expert says, adding that the company recognized “the cost of carbon was going to be going up.” However, Exxon kept that valuation lower for investors so that...

Oxfam Blogs — From Poverty to PowerWill Open Access disrupt Books even more than Journals?Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GBAndrew Batson's BlogWho deserves the Nobel for China’s economic development?Andrew Dances with BearsGORILLA RADIO — THE SYRIAN TUG OF WAR IS STILL WAR AGAINST SYRIA, AND RUSSIANS TRUST THE ARMY MORE THAN PRESIDENT PUTIN TO WAGE ITJohn HelmerFairFretting About Progressives’ ‘Electability,’ Establishment Dems Are Really Worried About Their Power in the...