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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Like most academics these days, I spend a lot of time filling in online forms. Mostly, this is just an annoyance but occasionally I get something out of it. A recent survey in which the higher-ups tried to get an idea of how the workforce was feeling, asked the question “Do you think of the University as We or They?”.

Unsurprisingly given my reference to “higher-ups”, my answer was “They”. But giving the answer reminded me that, not so long ago, it would have been “We”. In its idealized form, a university was a self-governing community, with a well-understood teaching and research mission (which did not require a Mission Statement). All but the most senior management jobs were done by academics taking turns before returning to their real jobs. Administrative staff did

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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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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In today’s AFR. It’s paywalled and I don’t have access (I’ve been promised a PDF) so here’s what I submitted, which may not be final.

Six months ago, Federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers was planning legislation to remove his own power (never used, but always available until now) to over-ride decisions of the Reserve Bank. Now, he has not only decided to retain this power, but has openly criticised the Bank’s interest rate decisions as “smashing the economy”.

It’s easy enough to understand Chalmer’s criticism in terms of the political interests of a government seeking to survive and retain power. The government is focused, to the point of obsession, on the “cost of living”, a nebulous term that can best be interpreted as “the reduced purchasing power of household disposable

This study showing that US academic faculty members are 25 times more likely than Americans in general to have a parent with a PhD or Masters degree has attracted a lot of attention, and comments suggesting that this is unusual and unsatisfactory. But is it? For various reasons, I’ve interacted quite a bit with farmers, and most of them come from farm families. And historically it was very much the norm for men to follow their fathers’ trade and for women to follow their mothers in working at home.

So, I decided to look for some statistical evidence. I used Kagi’s AI Search, which, unlike lots of AI products is very useful, producing a report with links to (usually reliable) sources. That took me to a report by the Richmond Federal Reserve which had a table from a paper about

The latest massive $1.1bn profit reported by Coles will doubtless produce a new round of hand-wringing about the “cost of living”. Governments will produce initiatives aimed at capping or reducing prices. Pundits will use a variety of measures to argue as to whether such measures are inflationary. Then there will be debates about whether splitting up Coles and Woolworths into smaller chains would enhance competition. And the Reserve Bank will be encouraged to push even harder to return inflation to its target range.

But these responses, focused on the cost of goods, miss the point. Coles and Woolworths have increased their margins, yes – but prices for groceries have increased broadly in line with other goods. The real driver of supermarket profits is their ability to drive down

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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The mining magnate does away with the constraints of arithmetic, simultaneously demanding lower taxes more public spending and lower deficits

From The Guardian

A striking feature of the age of billionaires in which we now live is that billionaires are more and more inclined to give us the benefit of their opinions. In the past year alone, we’ve had Marc Andreessen’s retro-futurist “Techno-optimist manifesto”, Mark Zuckerberg’s pronouncements on the future of media, and, most recently, a cosy chat between Elon Musk and Donald Trump (whose billionaire status is often touted but remains questionable). In most cases, the main effect has been to demonstrate that, however good they are at making money, billionaires are no smarter than the rest of us when it comes to politics or the

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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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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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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I have a letter in The Chronicle of Higher Education responding to Steven Teles’ call for more conservative college professors. It’s a shortened version of a longer piece I wrote, which I’m posting here.

The fact that conservatives are thin in the humanities and social sciences departments of US college campuses is well known. A natural question, raised by Steven Teles, is whether the rarity of conservative professors in these fields reflects some form of direct or structural discrimination.

But the disparities are even greater in the natural sciences. In 2009, a Pew survey of members of the AAAS found that only 6 per cent identified as Republicans and there is no reason to think this has changed in the subsequent 15 years. One obvious reason for this is that Republicans are

An edited version of this ran in The Guardian under the headline “Why aren’t the likes of Rex and Bonza flying high in Australian skies? Ask the politicians”. Here’s my original, a bit more sharply worded.

Politicians fly a lot, and mostly enjoy it. So do many of the people they interact with on a daily basis: senior public servants, business leaders, lobbyists and so on. That’s a crucial fact in understanding the mess that is the Australian airline industry. 

Politicians in Australia routinely fly business class, and enjoy membership of Qantas’ invitation-only Chairman’s Lounge. Air travel is not only an occupational necessity but a relatively pleasant and relaxing part of a generally stressful job.

For most Australians, air travel is an occasional experience. We fly

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 The Guardian

Among many other challenges in dealing with the failure of urban policy in Australia, the Minns (NSW state) government is faced with the task of renegotiating, or repudiating, the disastrous set of contracts for toll roads in New South Wales made by its predecessors (Labor and Liberal) with the Transurban group. As a review by Allan Fels and David Cousins has found, the government is at risk of being held hostage by toll operators. According to Fels and Cousins, immediate legislation is needed “as a backup to negotiations and to give the government power if necessary to determine final outcomes”.

This is by no means an isolated case. The failure of the National Electricity Market, premised on the idea of competition between private companies, has led state

Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the US presidential election has prompted me to write down a few thoughts about getting old and being old.

First up, I’m going to rant a bit (in classic old-person mode) about how much I loathe the various prissy euphemisms for “old” that appear just about everywhere: “older”, “aging”, “senior” and, worst of all, “elderly”. I am, of course, aging, as is everyone alive. Similarly, like everyone, I’m older than I was yesterday and older than people who are younger than me. What no one seems willing to say out loud is that, at age 68, I am old. As Black and queer people have already done, I want to reappropriate “old”.

It’s not hard to see why people are so timid when talking about getting, and being, old. It is, after all, a journey that has only one

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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I’ve written another piece on the uneconomics of nuclear power in Australia

The big unanswered question about nuclear power in Australia is how much it would cost. The handful of plants completed recently in the US and Europe have run way over time and over budget, but perhaps such failures can be avoided. On the other hand, the relatively successful Barakah project in the United Arab Emirates was undertaken in conditions that aren’t comparable to a democratic high-wage country like Australia. Moreover, the cost of the project, wrapped up in a long-term contract for both construction and maintenance, remains opaque.  Most other projects are being constructed by Chinese or Russian firms, not an option for Australia

In these circumstances, CSIRO’s Gencost project relied mainly

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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What to do when we can’t trust our own eyes (or at least, the videos we are looking at.

I spoke last weekend at a panel discussion on Navigating Lies, Deepfakes & Fake News, organised by McPherson Independent. This a group promoting the idea of an independent community candidate in the (LNP held) electorate of McPherson. It’s part of the broader disillusionment with the two-party system we are seeing in Australia and also in the recent UK election.

It was a great discussion. I prepared some preliminary notes, which I’ve provided below. Comments and constructive criticism most welcome

Lies, Deepfakes and Fake News

It’s important to understand that there is nothing fundamentally new here. Both propaganda and forgery have been around at least since the invention of

Another belated reprint, from The Conversation, 27 June

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants in Australia has attracted plenty of critical attention. But there’s a striking feature which has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear plants would be publicly owned and operated, similar to the National Broadband Network (NBN).

On the contrary, it received enthusiastic endorsement from free-market advocates such as The Australian’s Judith Sloan, who observed: “It’s how the French nuclear plants were first constructed.” It is also the way Australia built its biggest single piece of energy infrastructure, the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

But there’s a fundamental problem here. Over the last three or four decades the federal

The third in the famous trilogy of spurious Chinese curses that begins with “May you live in interesting times” is “May all your wishes come true”. I may have triggered this curse with a piece I wrote for The Conversation in March. headlined “Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal” which ended

Talk about hypothetical future technologies is, at this point, nothing more than a distraction. If Dutton is serious about nuclear power in Australia, he needs to put forward a plan now. It must spell out a realistic timeline that includes the establishment of necessary regulation, the required funding model and the sites to be considered.

In summary, it’s time to put up or shut up.

Much to my

My latest in The Guardian

henever I mention concepts such as gross domestic product (GDP), there’s a high probability that arguments about the merits of “growth” and “degrowth” will erupt. Almost invariably, these arguments are stuck in a conceptual framework that’s 50 years out of date, or even more.

The national accounting system, of which GDP is a central part, was developed in the 1930s. It was designed to measure the working of the industrial economy that had emerged in the 19th century and remained the dominant form of economic activity until the late 20th century.

The industrial economy could be conceptually understood in terms of three sectors. Primary industries, such as agriculture and mining, produced raw materials. Secondary industry (manufacturing, broadly

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 The Conversation

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power plants in Australia has attracted plenty of critical attention. But there’s a striking feature which has received relatively little discussion or criticism: the nuclear plants would be publicly owned and operated, similar to the National Broadband Network (NBN).

On the contrary, it received enthusiastic endorsement from free-market advocates such as The Australian’s Judith Sloan, who observed: “It’s how the French nuclear plants were first constructed.” It is also the way Australia built its biggest single piece of energy infrastructure, the Snowy Mountains Scheme.

But there’s a fundamental problem here. Over the last three or four decades the federal public service has been hollowed

From The Guardian

The release of recent data suggesting that inflation appears to be stuck at 4%, above the Reserve Bank of Australia’s target range of 2% to 3%, has raised plenty of concern among economic and political commentators. These commentators might be surprised to learn that many, perhaps most, macroeconomists who have looked at the question have concluded that a 4% inflation rate would be the ideal target, at least providing that wages and other incomes kept pace.

The underlying reasoning is simple. Interest rates are the main tool of monetary policy. In a deep recession such as that following the global financial crisis, or in an emergency such as that created by the Covid-19 pandemic, it is desirable that the interest rate should be well below the rate of

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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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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Referring back to this 2002 post defining “neoliberalism”, I find the claim that the “The (UK) Conservative party is hovering on the edge of extinction”. That wasn’t one of my more accurate assessments, and I’m bearing it in mind when I look at suggestions that the party is now “facing a defeat so dramatic it may not survive.” (that’s the headline, the actual suggestion is that the future may be one of “long periods of Labour with occasional periods of Conservative governments”

As shown the example of my 2002 assessment (quite widely shared at the time), there’s a lot of ruin in a political party. Particularly in a constituency system like that in the UK and its offshoots, political parties are long-lived and can recover from crushing defeats. The Canadian experience is, in