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John Quiggin

John Quiggin

He is an Australian economist, a Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a former member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government.

Articles by John Quiggin

Monday Message Board

1 day ago

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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From micro to macro, Andrew Leigh’s accessible history covers the economic essentials: My review from The Conversation

8 days ago

Andrew Leigh’s The Shortest History of Economics is the latest in a series of such histories, mostly focused on particular countries.

It begins with a striking mini-history of household lighting, focusing on the amount of labour required to produce the light now given off by a standard lightbulb: 58 hours for a wood fire, five hours for a candle based on animal fat, a few minutes for an early electric lightbulb, and less than one second for a modern light-emitting diode.

The Shortest History of Economics – Andrew Leigh (Black Inc.)

Importantly, what is true of labour hours is also true of material inputs. Older technologies required felling a tree or killing an animal, but an LED uses the photoelectric properties of common crystals. It only needs tiny quantities. The input

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Monday Message Board

8 days ago

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Old

11 days ago

In a few days time, I’ll be lining up in the 65-69 category for the Mooloolaba Olympic triathlon (1500m swim, 40km cycle, 10km run)[1]. People in this age category are commonly described as “aging”, “older”, “seniors”, “elders” and, worst of all, “elderly” (though this mostly kicks in at 70). The one thing we are never called is “old”. But this is the only term that makes any sense. Everyone is aging, one year at a time, and a toddler is older than a baby. Senior and elder are similarly relative terms. And “elderly” routinely implies “frail” (a lot of old people are frail, but many more are not.

What accounts for the near-universal squeamishness that surrounds the term “old”? Apart from the obvious fact that you are a bit closer to death, it’s not that bad being old. Even if not

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Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal

16 days ago

My latest in The Conversation via my Substack

If you believe Newspoll and the Australian Financial Review, Australia wants to go nuclear – as long it’s small.

Newspoll this week suggests a majority of us are in favour of building small modular nuclear reactors. A poll of Australian Financial Review readers last year told a similar story.

These polls (and a more general question about nuclear power in a Resolve poll for Nine newspapers this week) come after a concerted effort by the Coalition to normalise talking about nuclear power – specifically, the small, modular kind that’s meant to be cheaper and safer. Unfortunately, while small reactors have been around for decades, they are generally costlier than larger reactors with a similar design. This reflects the economies

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Monday Message Board

16 days ago

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Back to the office: a solution in search of a problem

21 days ago

Managers need to recognise that the best way to dissipate authority is to fail in its exercise

My latest in Inside Story

Authority is powerful yet intangible. The capacity to give an order and expect it to be obeyed may rest ultimately on a threat to sanction those who disobey but it can rarely survive large-scale disobedience.

The modern era has seen many kinds of traditional authority come under challenge, but until now the “right of managers to manage” has remained largely immune. If anything, the managers’ power has increased as the countervailing power of unions has declined. But the rise of working from home and, more recently, Labor’s right to disconnect legislation pose unprecedented threats to the power of managers over information workers — those employees

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Light-touch competition policy hasn’t helped Australian mortgage holders. It’s time to get tough

22 days ago

My latest in The Guardian

Just two weeks after Prof Allan Fels reported on the extent of monopoly power and resultant price gouging, Australia’s supreme body on competition law has delivered its answer.

The Australian competition tribunal has determined that the banking industry has all the competition we need and that no harm will be done by allowing ANZ to swallow one of the few competitors to the Big Four by acquiring the banking operations of Suncorp. This was the latest in a string of defeats for the Australian competition and consumer commission (ACCC), the regulator formerly headed by Prof Fels.

In effect, the tribunal reversed the burden of proof. Whereas the ACCC said it was not satisfied that the merger would not reduce competition significantly, the tribunal said

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Monday Message Board

22 days ago

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Monday Message Board

February 18, 2024

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Some good news from Oz (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

February 15, 2024

Over the last few years, the Australian and UK Labor/Labour[1] parties, have followed strikingly parallel paths.

A better-than expected result with a relatively progressive platform (Oz 2016, UK 2017)

A demoralizing defeat in 2019, followed by the election of a new more conservative leader (Albanese, Starmer)

Wholesale abandonment of the program

Failure of the rightwing government to handle Covid and other problmes
Because we have elections every three years, Australia is now ahead of the UK and we now have a Labor government led by Anthony Albanese. In its election campaign and its first eighteen months in office, Labor ran on a platform of implementing rightwing policies with better processes and minor tweaks to the most repressive aspects. This is, AFAICT, what can be

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For corporations, greed is good – so how can Australia really tackle price gouging?

February 11, 2024

My latest piece in The Guardian.

The long-running debate over “price gouging” should have been settled yesterday by the release of a report by Allan Fels, the former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). The report, commissioned by the ACTU, found that a wide range of Australian industries are characterised by limited competition, giving powerful firms ample scope to extract large profit margins.

Consistent with international evidence, most of the inflation observed in the wake of the pandemic was captured in the form of increased profit margins. Contrary to the dominant economic model – in which inflation begins in the labor market, with higher wages being passed on to prices – the recent inflation has seen wages lag far behind prices. In some

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Sandpit

February 11, 2024

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.

To be clear, the sandpit is for regular commenters to pursue points that distract from regular discussion, including conspiracy-theoretic takes on the issues at hand. It’s not meant as a forum for visiting conspiracy theorists, or trolls posing as such.
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Monday Message Board

February 11, 2024

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Labor’s fuel-efficiency standards may settle the ute dispute – but there are still hazards on the road

February 10, 2024

My latest piece in The Conversation, looking at Australia’s belated move to adopt fuel efficiency standards for light vehicles

Australia looks set to adopt fuel-efficiency standards after the Albanese government on Sunday revealed options for the long-awaited policy. The government says the reform would lead to more cars that are cheaper to run, eventually saving Australians about A$1,000 per vehicle each year.

The announcement comes a decade after the Climate Change Authority first proposed such a standard for Australia. The United States has had such a policy since the 1970s and the European Union implemented mandatory standards in 2009.

The Coalition has already sought to stoke fears among tradies and regional voters by claiming Labor’s policy threatens to take utes off

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Irresistible Force meets Immovable Object

February 6, 2024

I’ll be presenting a talk at the Australasian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society conference. Title Irresistible Force* meets Immovable Object**

* Massive expansion in production of low-cost solar PV

** Entrenched resistance to deployment.

Shorter JQ: Irresistible force will win in the end

Presentation is here
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The end of maritime power

February 2, 2024

Noah Smith has posted an interesting interview with Sarah Paine who looks at the distinction between maritime powers (in modern history, Britain and the US) and continental powers (everyone else). Paine sees maritime powers as beneficent creators and upholders of a peaceful and rules-based international order

It’s a distinction I’ve discussed in the past, but with very different views. Here’s a full-length response

The maritime/continental distinction is crucial, but not in the way suggested here. The era of maritime dominance is over.

That’s partly because the UK is now negligible as a power, and the US isn’t as dominant as it was.

But it’s mainly because ships are an old technology that hasn’t advanced much over the past century or so, either in commercial or in

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Monday Message Board

January 22, 2024

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Won’t somebody think of the old people?

January 18, 2024

Continuing my discussion of the recent upsurge in pro-natalism, I want to talk about the idea that, unless birth rates rise, society will face a big problem caring for old people. In this post, I’m going to focus on aged care in the narrow sense, rather than issues like retirement income, which depend crucially on social policy.

Looking at Australian data on location of death, I found that https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/research/classifying-place-death-australian-mortality-statistics”>around 30 per cent of people die in aged care, and that the mean time spent in aged care is around three years, implying an average of one year per person.

Staffing requirements in Australia amount to aroundone full-time staff member per residents. So the “average” Australian requires

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Monday Message Board

January 14, 2024

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Mute inglorious Miltons

January 12, 2024

This Crooked Timber post on declining population has prompted me to get started on what I plan, in the end, to be a lengthy critique of the pro-natalist position that dominates public debate at the moment. My initial motivation to do this reflected long-standing concerns about human impacts on the environment but I don’t have any particular expertise on that topic, or anything new to say. Instead, I want to address the economic and social issues, making the case that a move to a below-replacement fertility rate is both inevitable and desirable.

I’m going to start with a claim that came up in discussion here and is raised pretty often. The claim is that the more children are born, the greater the chance that some of them will be Mozarts, Einsteins, or Mandelas who will contribute

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Australia’s cost-of-living crisis isn’t about the price of groceries. It’s about wealth distribution

January 11, 2024

In my latest Guardian piece, I argue that, unless we pay attention to the purchasing power of wages, talk about the “cost of living” is like the sound of one hand clapping

The policy debate about the cost of living is among the most confused and confusing in recent memory. All sorts of measures to reduce the cost of living are proposed, then criticised as being potentially inflationary. The argument implies, absurdly, that reducing the cost of living will increase the cost of living.

The issue here is that the “cost of living” is an essentially meaningless concept, rather like the sound of one hand clapping. The problem isn’t the cost of buying goods, but whether our income is sufficient to pay for those goods. For most of us, that means the real (inflation-adjusted) value of

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Monday Message Board

January 8, 2024

A day late, but Monday Message Board is back! Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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The gallon loaf

January 6, 2024

I’ve been working a bit on inflation and the highly problematic concept of the ‘cost of living’ (shorter JQ: what matters is the purchasing power of wages, not the cost of some basket of goods). As part of this, I’ve been looking at how particular prices have changed over time, focusing on basics like bread and milk.

One striking thing that I found out is that, until quite late in the 20th century, the standard loaf of bread used to calculate consumer price indexes in Australia weighed 4 pounds (nearly 2kg). That’s about as much as three standard loaves of sliced bread. Asking around, this turns out to be the largest of the standard sizes specified in legislation like the Western Australian Bread Act which was only repealed in 2004, AFAICT.

Going back a century or so further,

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New Year Gifts

January 2, 2024

The New Year has barely started, but the world of academia seems to be back to work, and sending me a variety of gifts, some more welcome than others. Coincidentally or otherwise, it’s also the day I’ve moved to semi-retirement, a half-pay position involving only research and public engagement.

Most welcome surprise: an email telling me I’ve been elected as a Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory. In the way academia works, some friendly colleagues must have proposed this, but I had no idea at all

Most culturally clueless: A request for a referee report, due in three weeks. This is January in Australia – only the most vital jobs get done

Most interesting: An invitation to join the editorial board of Econometrics, an MDPI journal in which I have

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Monday Message Board

December 17, 2023

Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

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Half-time for the Albanese government

December 11, 2023

My latest Blogstack

It’s now just over 18 months since the 2022 election, so we are halfway through the the Albanese government’s term. At this point, it looks highly unlikely that the government will be returned with an outright majority, whenever the next election is held. So, it’s worth thinking about the government’s strategy, why it has apparently failed and whether it ever had a chance of success.Even before the 2019 election Albanese was positioning himself to challenge Shorten from the right if Labor did badly in the Longman by-election. That didn’t happen and Labor went into the election with all the opinion polls pointing to anarrow win. When the result turned out to be a narrow loss, the political class took that as an emphatic rejection of Shorten’s ambitious program

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