At the end of every year, I remind readers of the ten most popular posts on my blog over the last 12 months.
But first, just to let you know: since I started the blog in 2010, there have been 6.2m viewings on the blog from 2.5m visitors. During that time I have posted 1350 times. In 2025, I did 69 posts with 483,365 viewings. That’s fewer postings than in 2024 (87), but a higher number of viewings (467,000 in 2024). Visits to my blog site rose to 191,767 during the year compared to 173,678 visits in 2024. There are now 8,459 subscribers, up from 8,032 subscribers in 2024. Geographically, most subscribers are from the US and the UK, followed by Brazil, Spain, Canada and Germany. Overall, there are subscribers from 198 countries globally, including such locations as Haiti, Norfolk Island, Madagascar, Afghanistan, Yemen and Syria.
I also have a Facebook site, which I started ten years ago. Michael Roberts Blog Facebook site is where I put short daily items of information or comment on economics and economic events. That site now has 15,420 followers, up from 14,380 at the end of last year. Of these followers, 71% are men and 29% women (not good, but better than before), and are mostly aged between 18-45 years, with the largest group being 35-44 years old. Geographically, most Facebook followers come from the US and the UK, but Brazil, India, Australia and Greece are also highly represented. And Athens, Mexico City, Melbourne, New York and Sao Paolo have the greatest concentrations of followers.
And at the beginning of 2020, I also launched the Michael Roberts You Tube channel. This now has 3760 subscribers, with 87 videos and 64,496 viewings, up sharply from 2024. If you haven’t joined up yet, have a look at the channel, which includes presentations by me on a variety of economic subjects; interviews with other Marxist economists; and some zoom debates in which I participated.
In 2023, I also launched a Twitter site (now Musk’s X). That now has 608 followers, much fewer than Facebook. That’s partly because the blog and my Facebook site cover the same things and Twitter requires much more work on a daily basis so there are fewer posts. And of course, there is the issue of Elon Musk controlling the content of X. But I think it’s still worth viewing.
So what were the most popular blog posts of 2025? Readers concentrated on the big topic of the year: artificial intelligence (AI). The top post of 2025 was the AI bubble and the US economy, but other posts on AI, namely AI going Deepseek and AI bubbling up were also in the top ten viewings. 2025 certainly was the year of AI. It seems that capitalism has put all its bets for future success on AI: all the profit eggs are in one basket: AI. Investors are betting that AI will eventually deliver huge returns on their stock and debt purchases, as the productivity of labour rises dramatically and with it, the profitability of AI companies. My posts discussed the likelihood of the AI investment boom being a ‘bubble’ that will burst, as did the railway mania of the 19th century or dot.com bubble of 2000.
Will it be different this time? After all, the big tech companies have so far mostly financed their AI investments out of free cash flow. But the huge cash reserves of the Magnificent Seven are being drained and AI companies are increasingly turning to equity and debt issuance. So a financial bust is on the cards. But when financial investment bubbles burst, the new technology does not disappear. Instead, it can be acquired at low prices by new players in what Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter called ‘creative destruction’.
So AI technology could eventually deliver higher productivity growth if it manages to shed human labour sufficiently. But that may materialise only after a financial crash and consequent slump in the US economy. And if the AI-driven US economy dives, so will the rest of the major economies. Time is not on the side of the Magnificent Seven. Indeed, adoption of AI technology by companies remains low and is even falling among larger companies. Next year will tell us more.
Another top post was on the impact of China’s cheap open source AI models as rivals to the expensive proprietary US models. China’s DeepSeek was a torpedo that hit the Magnificent Seven US hi-tech companies below the water line. DeepSeek did not use the latest and best Nvidia’s chips and software; it did not require huge spending on training its AI model unlike its American rivals; but it offered just as many useful applications. Most important, DeepSeek’s R1 is ‘open source’, namely that is coding and training methods are open to all to copy and develop. This is a real blow to the ‘proprietary’ secrets that OpenAI or Google’s Gemini lock away in a ‘black box’ in order to maximise profits. The analogy here is with branded and generic pharmaceuticals.
However, Deepseek did not stop the stock market boom in US AI companies and OpenAI’s Altman and the other AI moguls will not stop expanding their data centres and developing yet more advanced chips just because DeepSeek has undercut their current models. That was because of their aim to achieve super-intelligent AI that could totally replace human labour. This is what I call the ‘holy grail’ of AI hyperscalers; and remember, the ‘holy grail’ as an object of enlightenment was just Victorian and Dan Brown fiction.
There were three posts in the top ten that focused on the US economy and the likely impact of Trump’s tariff policies. In the US economy: stagflation more than a whiff, I argued that the US economy was entering a period of ‘stagflation’ ie rising inflation and rising unemployment.
Stagflation shows that both the Keynesian and monetarist theories of inflation were false. And it meant that whatever the Federal Reserve does on interest rates or monetary injections will have little or no effect on inflation or employment. Whether inflation and unemployment subsides or not depends on whether US real GDP and productivity growth revives or not. That depends on whether business investment continues to grow or not. And ultimately, that depends on whether business profitability and profits are sustained or fall. So far, there has been no fall, but no significant rise either.
2025 was also the year of tariffs. In another post, I spelt out the impact of Trump’s tariff increases on the US economy. Tariffs are paid by either US companies or US consumers, or both. So the impact can be both inflationary and depressionary. However, since I wrote that blog last April at the time of Trump’s ‘Liberation Day’ tariff announcement, the Trump administration has watered down its tariff hikes significantly, so the impact in 2026 is likely to be less significant.
There was one other post that caught the eye of blog readers, namely rearmament by the major imperialist powers as they start to prepare for possible wars against those countries they see as threatening their hegemony. In From welfare to warfare: military Keynesianism, I pointed out that warmongering has reached fever pitch in Europe. It started when Trump decided to stop paying for the bulk of the financing of NATO and providing its military might, and also pushing for an end to the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Trump wants to concentrate US imperialist strategy in the ‘Western hemisphere’ and the Pacific, with the aim of sustaining hegemony over Latin America and ‘containing’ and weakening China’s economic rise. European leaders’ response has been to propose a ‘Rearm Europe’ Plan, which aims to mobilise up to €800 billion to finance a massive ramp-up in defence spending.
In my post, I outlined several mainstream arguments offered for rearming. There was the idea that military spending was necessary for the survival of European ‘civilisation’ against the threat of Russian invasion. Then there was the claim that military spending would boost economies and avoid stagnation or slump. I discussed whether military weapons production is productive of value in a capitalist economy. The answer is that it is: for arms producers. But at the level of the whole economy, arms production is unproductive of future value, in the same way that ‘luxury goods’ for just capitalist consumption are. While being productive of surplus value for the arms capitalists, the production of weapons does not create new value and thus eventually weakens the reproduction of capital.
So the issues that blog readers saw as the most important in 2025 were AI, stagflation and military spending – and I think my readers had it right.