Mike Norman Economics

Bingo!By "propaganda" Caitlin Johnstone means "narrative control."Maintaining narrative control was relatively easy prior to the Internet and social media. Now, the process has turned to access and exclusion as the means of censorship through control of the media and social media in particular. Access and exclusion have always been a reality in the case of print media. Now this is being extended to digital platforms. Caitlin Johnstone — Rogue JournalistPropaganda Is The Root Of All Our...

Simon Wren-Lewis is obviously upset because some MMTers have called his economic policy proposals (providing the theoretical foundation for Labour’s Fiscal Credibility Rule) “neoliberal”. Neoliberal or not, what he does have to say about MMT and his own mainstream economics makes it clear what the debate really comes down to: Monetary policy, except at the lower bound (to which Labour affixes a rule), versus fiscal policy in accordance with functional finance.What this boils down to is...

In the decades following the 1980s, free market policies dominated policy agendas across the world. The gains from growth, however, were not broadly shared within countries, as evidenced by the high levels of economic inequality in the United States and most other advanced economies. In a recent paper, a group of economists at the International Monetary Fund argue for a rethinking of the rules—actual or perceived—that guide economic policies, so that the distributional consequences are...

Yet again, the question of "printing money" and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has come up on Twitter. In my view, these debates are confusing because critics of MMT tend to mash multiple concepts into a pile of textual sludge. Unfortunately, MMTers are forced to respond to those attacks, and the end result is that everyone is confused.One of the advantages of mathematical training is that you are forced to take definitions seriously, and step cautiously from premise to premise. This enforces...

Here we go again with the employment of mythology; from Bill's part 2 Tom posted down-thread: If the reader finds all this perplexing, it is because for the past forty or so years policymakers and mainstream economists and commentators have peddled a series of false myths about how modern monetary systems work.... To be clear, politicians and central bankers know full well how the system works. Uh.. no...lol... they don't know full well how the system works; that is why they are making...

Still clueless. Caught in the bubble and out of touch. “For every one positive article about capitalism, there are 11 negative ones,” said Nathan Rosenberg, founding partner of Insigniam, a management consulting firm. “CEOs should seize their job. Capitalism has created more elevation of [the] human condition than any religion or government ever has. We don’t tell our story. We don’t talk about the benefits. We have to get out and tell our story.”... FortuneDoes Capitalism Have a PR...

No way this is comparable to Japan. It amounts to adding apples and oranges. The differences outweigh the similarities.  China is not Japan, just as Iran is not Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, or Libya. There's a big difference in opening a can of worms and opening Pandora's box. The result so far has been to drive China and Russia closer together, which is a strategic nightmare for the US since this is the only existential military threat the US faces. That was a strategic blunder that...

Last week, Thomas Fazi and I had a response to a recent British attack on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) published in The Tribune magazine (June 5, 2019) – For MMT. The article were were responding to – Against MMT – written by a former Labour Party advisor. In – Part 1 – we considered how the MMT critique was not really about MMT at all. We provided a more accurate summary of what MMT is and what it is not. In this second Part we consider the way the former advisor’s article misrepresented...

The elephant in the room now is that the tech market is global and the rising demand is in non-Western emerging economies, where price point can be determinative. Huawei is succeeding because it can produce highly competitive products not so much because they are superior technologically but because they are adequate and less expensive than the competition. Apple has chosen to position itself as a luxury product and so it is not chiefly threatened. But the bulk of tech market is...

Important. Demonstrates the need for a return to political economy" to right the balance, which has swung too far in the direction of economic liberalism.The problem is that the assumptions on which economic liberalism is based are ideological and not empirical, seeming to contradict what actually happens institutionally especially in democratic societies regarding "public goods." Economic liberalism assumes that public goods are only needed as a result of "market failure," so the solution...