Mike Norman Economics

It's a CGTN Chinese state broadcaster video so it certainly has some spin on it, but it's interesting viewing just the same.Over the last four decades, China has achieved significant results in poverty alleviation and reduction. From 1978 to 2018, the number of impoverished people dropped from 770 million to 16.6 million, and the poverty rate dropped from 97.5 percent to 1.7 percent. Check out this video and have a look at how China lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty....

On YouTube the right are having a field day over Venezuela, but Argentina, which is fully neoliberal, is a capitalist nightmare.Jack Rasmus says Obama helped to get Macri, the current President, elected because he promised to pay the full amount demand by Paul Singer and his hedgefund. The Macri government went to the IMF to get a loan and then paid Paul Singer the maximum amount he demanded. After that the Macri government went to New York to borrow more borrow more money but it was never...

So, here's my hypothesis. The road to serfdom thesis was if not inspired by Lippmann, at least prompted, in part, by him. But Lippmann did not hold the thesis; it is articulated by Knight in his review of Lippmann and (mistakenly) ascribed to Lippmann. Knight, however, thinks there is nothing inevitable about the thesis because he thinks the future is still very much open. I cannot prove that Hayek read Knight's review of Lippmann. (Knight was later a somewhat ambivalent referee for The...

What is going on? Is there some unifying thread connecting this sudden outbreak of widespread global tension? Of course all these conflicts have their separate background contexts. But why so many at the same time? Well, in a word, it’s all about change — about the recognition that we are at the cusp of major changes. The world is beginning to pre-position.... We are indeed at a point of inflection. Some westerners may muse that the status quo ante is somehow recoverable (if only Trump is...

Rather than attempt to explain what the mainly neoclassical economists are going on about, I want to step back and try to translate their debate into terms that would be understood by people who do not share the same assumptions. I am pretty sure that post-Keynesian economists have a lot to say about the topic as well, but once again, they tend to be discussing wonkish points that would elude an outsider.…I have an engineering background, and engineering is largely the science of...

I quite enjoyed this, which I thought it was rather uplifting!A look at bridge building across the Bering Strait. Who, how and why? [embedded content]

A 2012 article based on the work of Steve Keen. But China hasn't collapsed yet.The Fall of the Communist Dynastyand The Looting of China touched on the widespread fraud that has become apparent, both in mainland and US listed Chinese companies. I also showed that an extraordinary number of the Communist Party and the military cadre  had massive unexplained wealth, with the Top 70 recording a net collective worth of over $80 billion.  This week Bloomberg  was banned by the Chinese government...

Wednesday and a short blog post. I regularly work for unions as an expert analyst/witness in their struggles to achieve wage justice with employers who are intent on paying as little as possible. Often these are private employers but at the moment I am helping a union with their campaign to win a reasonable wage increase against a state government. The logic deployed by the government in relation to their fiscal affairs and their wage setting behaviour is a classic demonstration of how...

This is just a fact.