Mike Norman Economics

We are joined by Andrés Bernal, policy advisor to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and doctoral student at the New School for Public Engagement, Division of Policy Management and Environment. We speak with Bernal about his history with political organizing and the critical role he has come to play in the Modern Money movement, including the struggle for a Green New Deal. He also sketches out his dissertation project, which focuses on the Green New Deal as a site of collective action, political...

Cost is the reason that climate change is putting many people in deep denial, and even some people most committed to addressing this emerging challenge have not come to grips with what it will take engineering-wise, which determines the cost. Nor is the engineering solution always readily evident. Engineering solutions to design problems on this scale are enormously expensive in any case.  But the challenge is identifying the proper case, and getting the assumptions right.  Recall New...

Communism doesn't work because the incentives are all wrong, but some capitalism with some socialism can, in fact, this seems to be most successful type of economic system (Scandinavia). And MMT could make it even easier to implement.Imagine in tribal times you're a great hunter, and you get all the glory (competition, individualism) but one day you're badly hurt and can't hunt for a while. Rather than perish, the tribe takes care of you and your family (social security, welfare) and then...

Yanis Varoufakis says the left are too divided, but we need to unite to take on the real challenges ahead of us.  [embedded content]

'Just to put you in the picture', says the Cowboy Economist, ' I won't be voting for any metal loving, communist hating Democrats'. [embedded content]

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...