Mike Norman Economics

Policymakers and researchers have sought to understand the causes of and effective policy responses to recent increases in mortality due to alcohol, drugs, and suicide in the US. This column examines the role of the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit – the two most important policy levers for raising incomes for low-wage workers – as tools to combat these trends. It finds that both policies significantly reduce non-drug suicides among adults without a college degree, and that the...

Godfrey Roberts exposes the Western propaganda against China, where he also gives evidence of Western backing of Jihadist Islamic groups in China and the rest of the world. After deploying Islamists in Pakistan in the 2000s to disrupt Chinese infrastructure, in Myanmar to disrupt the China-Myanmar energy assets and across Sudan, Libya and Syria to choke off China’s oil and gas Fuller said, “Uyghurs are indeed in touch with Muslim groups outside Xinjiang, some of them have been radicalized...

In his final paper on the multiverse hypothesis, the world’s best-known atheist made a supernatural creator more plausible Many scientists believe that that are an infinite amount of universes which are being formed all the time. They could all have different laws of physics and if there are an infinite amount of them, then occasionally one could support life. But what happens is the maths tells us that all the universes have the same laws of physics? The problem is that the less...

I sometimes think is it just me that is impressed by Putin and Xi Jinping, and then I wonder whether I am just being naive when neoliberalism and libertarianism, i.e, pressent western philosophy, teaches us that we are all just entirely selfish, and that any good deed we do is just to satisfy a selfish desire - fame, admiration, glory, popularity, etc.Fortunately, no, not just me, but Paul Craig Roberts as well as many others who believe that there can be a better world and that our leaders...

Could all of time be here at once and we are just observing life like watching a movie go by. The beginning, middle, and the end are all here at once, but just like reading a book, we are forced to observe it one moment at a time.But why is there struggle when everything is preordained? And yet without the struggle there can be no consciousness. Creatures became aware of reality in order to be able to survive in it, and so evolution took place and higher consciousness came about.Carl Jung's...

Press freedom and narrative control.IrrussianalityFunny old worldPaul Robinson | Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa

Abstract This paper presents an alternative presentation of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). The main thesis of this paper is that when a nation has monetary sovereignty and fiat currency, government is quite flexible its methods in controlling price level through market mechanisms, as Warren Mosler - one of the founders of MMT - often states. The reason given, however, differs from typical MMT or chartalist accounts and comes more from a traditional monetarist origin. This somewhat...

How should we measure inequality? There are two metrics that economists use: relative and absolute. In the past I have argued that the relative metric – which is by far the dominant approach, embodied in the standard Gini index, in the famous “elephant graph”, and inlogarithmic distribution graphs – is problematic in that it is aligned with the interests and perspectives of the rich, and effectively obscures real inequalities in the distribution of new income around the world. From the...

Okay, living in the medieval times was no picnic, but they did have loads of leisure time. I read how craftsmen would only work for a few weeks when they had run out of money, and when they had earned enough, they would go back to a leisurely life. No fifty to sixty hours plus a week for them. No looking out of the window and dreaming of getting home, or doing something far more interesting, or having plenty of time to be with friends and family, or just going fishing.With all the machinary,...

A new world is emerging, in which it will be much harder to separate economics from geopolitics. It’s not the world according to Myrdal, Frank, and Perroux, and it’s not Tom Friedman’s flat world, either. It’s the world according to Game of Thrones. Naked CapitalismFarewell, Flat World  Jean Pisani-Ferry | Tommaso Padoa Schioppa chair of the European University Institute in Florence and is Senior Fellow at Bruegel.  Cross-posted from Bruegel