Mike Norman Economics

In the same way that Capital in the Twenty-First Century transformed the way economists look at inequality, Piketty’s new book Capital and Ideology will transform the way political scientists look at their own field. ProMarket — The blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of BusinessThomas Piketty’s New Book Brings Political Economy Back to Its Sources Branko Milanovic | Visiting Presidential Professor at City University of New York Graduate Center and senior...

Numbers may be eternal and unchanging, but they are not gods. Andrew Gelman observes that we also have to step back and use our common sense regarding what the numbers actually say, instead of drawing arbitrary lines based on self-imposed criteria like "significance" and then take them as "messages from the gods." It doesn't work like that. Formalism only goes so far. So. Yes, it seems goofy to draw a bright line between p = 0.048 and p = 0.052. But it’s also goofy to draw a bright line...

The Plan of the Ministry of Economic Development for the Transformation of the Business Climate Was Supplemented with New Measures Vladimir Putin set an ambitious goal for the Ministry of Economic Development: by 2024, Russia should rise to 20th in the World Bank’s Doing Business rating (now our country occupies 31st place out of 190).... Russia and China have managed economies along with market-based economies. This is proving to be be a good balance between hierarchical technocracy and...

Free is good. Karl Widerquist specializes in basic income. The MMT position on basic income is that it should be in addition to a universal job guarantee since they address fundamentally different issues. Moreover, basic income should be means-tested rather than universal, which MMT economists argue is inflationary instead of stabilizing as purported. Since this is shaping up as a policy debate going forward as fiscal rises relative to monetary policy, it is useful to know both sides...

The politicians and media don't know what to make of a real person, a person with strong conviction, a combat veteran and a person of honor.  There aren't many of those around at the upper echelons of TPTB in America, where only money talks and the name of the game is power. "Sell, grandma?" "How much are you willing to pay?" Disclosure: As a Vietnam era vet — naval officer serving on a ship in the Western Pacific 1964-1967, I support her non-interventionist position. She is the only...

Due to the urgency of developing hypersonic technologies, both contracts used Other Transaction Authority (OTA) to bypass the usual procurement process to field the weapons faster.… Ka-ching!Zero HedgeUS Army Awards Two Key Hypersonic Missile ContractsTyler Durden

Trump wants to bring the jobs home. That means huge capital investment, ramp up of facilities, training workers, etc. All China has to do is redirect production from exports to domestic consumption, which will simply requires increasing domestic demand. The obvious way to do this is to reduce saving and increase spending by expanding social welfare, which an objective of the CCP anyway. And it's in the 5-year plan to shift emphasis from external to domestic and to gradually increase the...

As energy or trade corridors, the fact is both Chennai-Vladivostok and Belt and Road spell out Eurasia integration. India in this particular case will profit from Russian resources traveling all the way from the Arctic and the Russian Far East, while Russia will profit from more Indian energy companies investing in the Russian Far East. The fine-print details of the Russia-China “comprehensive strategic partnership” as well as Russia’s push for Greater Eurasia were also discussed at length...

Since various economics professors noticed that Marxists had been publishing articles showing, from empirical data, that the labour theory of value was right[ 5,3,4,6,1 7,2 ], they have felt the need to come up with objections. Whilst in the past the objections economists raised to the labour theory of value were purely abstract and theoretical, now they had a harder job. They now had Marxists producing actual figures which they had to cast doubt on.  The objections raised by economists...

All but one have been preceded by a decline in Real Gross Private Domestic Investment, which we have just observed. One indicator is hardly definitive, and presently, the economy is strong, with fiscal flows very positive. Nevertheless, private investment along with government spending drives and economy, and in the case of a net importer, it offsets demand leakage from a trade deficit. A trade deficit is offset by a fiscal deficit, but the targeting of the spending determines the...