Mike Norman Economics

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.

The FT has just run an article saying that exponential growth is a pipe dream, but it was behind a firewall.This article is from Max Keiser's site. The revelation that strikes me is the insanity of pursuing eternal economic growth, not as an option but as the only possible path: there is literally no alternative to extracting ever greater quantities of the planet’s resources to enable ever greater consumption by the planet’s 7.7 billion humans. Stripped to its essence, this mad drive is...

I've been staying away from linking to the Epstein affair other than with respect to finance. There are many unanswered questions about Epstein's finances and his links and relations with the financial world, which seem to be many.Here are two links that are worth knowing about. I'm sure there will be more unless it gets buried. The underbelly is getting exposed, and it's not pretty.Wall Street On ParadeJeffrey Epstein’s Death Adds to the JPMorgan Body CountPam Martens and Russ Martens...