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

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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Brad DeLong (in a recent post summarising a joint podcast with Noah Smith) walks back his previous suggestion that it was time for neoliberals, among whom he had numbered himself, to pass the baton to “the Left”.

The political basis for this is that 20 or so Senate Republicans have been willing to pass legislation from time to time, rather than shutting down the government altogether. I don’t find this compelling, but I also don’t want to debate the issue.

Rather, I’m interested in the following remark, which crystallized a bunch of thoughts I’ve been having for some time

”How has the left been doing with its baton? Not well at all, for anyone who defines “THE LEFT” to consist of former Bernie staffers who regard Elizabeth Warren as a neoliberal sellout.”

This is a

The Conversation asked economists about the budget. I thought the questions poorly framed.

Q: What grade would you give the budget, given Chalmers’ stated objective of “fighting inflation in the near term and then growth in the medium term”? A, B, C, D, E or F

My answer: An exclusive, or even primary, focus on a rapid return to an arbitrary inflation target represents a misconception of the role of fiscal policy.

I decline to offer a rating on this basis.

Considered more generally, I would give the budget a grade of C.

It is essentially a continuation of the policies of the previous Coalition government

Q: Is the budget likely to achieve its aim of getting inflation back within the RBA target band by the end of this year and back to 2.75% by mid next year?

My

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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My Budget response from The Conversation

This week’s budget was Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ third and – for practical purposes – final for the current parliamentary term.

Even if the 2025 election is delayed long enough to give Labor another budget, that speech would represent more of an election manifesto than any deliverable legislation.

We are therefore now in a position to assess the Albanese government’s record on public spending and taxation.

Most strikingly, the Albanese government’s electoral strategy has constrained it to do little more than tweak the policy settings it inherited from the previous government, and adopt them as its own.

There’s nothing new about opposition parties campaigning on a “small target” strategy. Howard, Rudd and Abbott all did the

For quite a while I’ve been meaning to write a piece appreciating Ross Gittins’ 50 year run as Australia’s leading economic journalist. He’s one of the few who is neither an ideologue nor a recycler of corporate talking points (no names, no pack drill, but most of my readers will be able to think of plenty of examples).This plan was pushed to the top of my agenda when Ross gave an exceptionally generous donation to support my Brissie to the Bay cycle ride in support of MS Queensland. It reminded me of the generosity of spirit Ross has displayed throughout his career.Rossstarted writing economic commentary for the Sydney Morning Herald in 1974, the year I started my undergraduate economics degree at ANU. So, I’ve been in a position to follow his entire career, which coincides almost

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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It’s International Workers Day, still celebrated as the May Day public holiday here in Queensland, at least when the Labor party is in office. So, it’s a good day for me to set out some tentative thoughts on work and its future.

Via Matt McManus, I found this quote from Marx ‘Fragment on Machines”.

The hand tool makes the worker independent — posits him as proprietor. Machinery — as fixed capital -posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated

Reading this, it struck me that, whereas mainframe computers were archetypal examples of impersonal and alienating machines, personal computers are, or can be, regarded as extensions of their users, that is, as tools. Employers have long struggled to exert control over office computers and the workers who use them, making

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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Anzac Day (the anniversary of the disastrous Gallipoli landings in 1915) is always a sad day, but even more so this year, with the horrors unfolding before us in Gaza.

The carve-up of the Ottoman Empire by the British and French, of which the Gallipoli campaign was part is the direct cause of the current catastrophe. As well as grabbing colonial possessions for themselves, the Allies made promises to Jews (seeking a homeland) and Arabs (seeking independence from Turkey) which could not both be kept. The resulting conflict has never ended.

The war in Ukraine is also a consequence of the disaster that was rightly called the Great War, and of which the 1939-45 War and the Cold War were continuations. But that’s enough sadness for one day.
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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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Robert Farley has replied to my recent post on the obsolescence of naval power. Unlike our previous exchange, a pile-on where I was (as he points out) in a minority of one, Robert’s tone is mostly civil this time, and I intend to reciprocate. Our disagreements have narrowed a fair way. On many points, it’s a matter of whether the glass is half-full or half-empty.

For example, Farley observes that despite Houthi attacks, 2 million tonnes of shipping per day is passing through the Suez canal. I’d turn that around and point out that 4 million tonnes of shipping per day has been diverted to more roundabout routes. However, since we agree that naval authorities overstate the macro importance of threats to shipping lanes, we can put that point to one side.

A more relevant case is

In all the discussion of Leif Wenar’s critique of Effective Altruism , I haven’t seen much mention of the central premise: that development aid is generally counterproductive (unless, perhaps, it’s delivered by wealthy surfers in their spare time). Wenar is quite clear that his argument applies just as much to official development aid and to the long-standing efforts of NGOs as to projects supported by EA. He quotes burned-out aid workers “hoping their projects were doing more good than harm.”

Wenar provides some examples of unintended consequences. For example, bednets provided to fight are sometimes diverted for use as fishing nets. And catching more fish might be bad because it could lead to overfishing (there is no actual evidence of this happening, AFAICT). This seems

My latest in Crikey

Peter Dutton (Image: AAP/Diego Fedele)Peter Dutton can’t seem to take a trick on nuclear power. Any option he puts forward seems to vanish as soon as he makes a commitment.

Since Dutton became opposition leader, he’s pushed the idea of small modular reactors (SMRs). At least in their original concept, these were reactors small enough (say 50-to-70MW capacity) to be built in a factory and shipped to sites where they could be installed in whatever number was required. The leading candidate was NuScale, a US firm that had contracted with a group of utilities in Utah to develop a pilot project of 12 (later reduced to six) SMRs.

The idea had the enthusiastic backing of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO), the government’s

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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My latest in The Guardian

Supermarkets are the public face of inflation. Every time we go shopping, we are reminded that just about everything costs more than it did before Covid. And shrinkflation, once subtle and insidious, has become blatant. A standard chocolate bar is now what used to be called “fun size”. A natural response, particularly for politicians seeking to divert attention from themselves, is to blame greed and monopoly power.

Explanations based on greed are rather naive. Corporate executives are paid by shareholders to be greedy – that is, to maximise profit subject to a somewhat hazy concept of “social licence” regarding the treatment of customers, employees and other stakeholders. And there is no reason to think that Coles and Woolworths were any less greedy

That’s what the Bible (or at least, the preacher in Ecclesiastes) says, and sometimes I feel as if that’s right. But right now, I’m basking in the glow of having returned final proofs for Public Policy and Climate Change: Politics, Philosophy and Economics, a text to appear in the Lecture Notes in Economics and Policy series put out by World Scientific Publishers.

As well as approving the proofs, I produced an index, using a program with the self-explanatory title PDF Index Generator (this is different from the index function in Acrobat, which indexes every word for search purposes). As with lots of software, it’s not as good as what a professional editor would produce, but much cheaper and faster. I plan to write about the economic implications some time, but this kind of thing

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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Daniel Kahneman, who was, along with Elinor Ostrom, one of the very few non-economists to win the Economics Nobel award, has died aged 90. There are lots of obituaries out there, so I won’t try to summarise his work. Rather, I’ll talk about how it influenced my own academic career.

When I was an undergraduate, in the late 1970s, economic analysis of decisions under uncertainty was dominated by the expected utility (EU) theory of von Neumann and Morgenstern. The mean-variance approach, still popular in finance, was regarded as, at best, a special case of the correct EU theory. Some early theoretical challenges, notably from French theorist Maurice Allais around 1950 had been thoroughly refuted, at least to the satisfaction of most in the field. (A more fundamental critique by

Elections over the last week have seen some pretty good outcomes for the Greens and some very bad outcomes for both Labor and the LNP.

Here’s what ChatGPT came up when I asked for a representation of Green Labor

In the Brisbane Council elections, the Greens got 23.1 per cent of the vote, barely behind Labor on 26.9. The combined total of exactly 50 per cent wasn’t reflected in terms of seats, mainly because of preference leakage and exhaustion, but I want to focus on the longer term implications here.

In Tasmania, the incumbent Liberals suffered a 12 per cent swing on primary votes, falling to 37 per cent, after a series of elections in which they received an absolute majority, or very close to it, on first preferences. Most of the aggregate loss went to independents and

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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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

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 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

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

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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