I’ve kept out of the latest silly culture war so far, but I couldn’t resist this from Josh Frydenberg. After decrying a “long march to the left” in Australian universities, he says
It is absolutely critical that the next generation of students understand about where the rule of law came from, where democracy came from, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, women’s suffrage
Looking through that list, it can be described as a potted summary of the “long march to the left”  in Britain (and by extension Australia) over the course of the “long 19th century” from the French and American revolutions to the outbreak of the Great War.  At the beginning of that period, Freydenberg’s conservative precursors supported the rule of law, and opposed democracy, freedom of speech and religion and

Thanks to everyone who commented on the first eleven chapters of my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons.
Here’s a draft of https://www.dropbox.com/s/seojgihd4mrkcrq/QuigginChapter%2012Draft.pdf?dl=0″>Chapter 12 on Predistribution
Comments, criticism and praise are welcome.

Earlier draft chapters are available. These aren’t final versions, as I am now editing the entire manuscript, but you can read them to see where the book is coming from.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ilqwwru858rihrl/QuigginTwoLessonsDraftTOC.pdf?dl=0″>Table of Contentshttps://www.dropbox.com/s/d8x2dp5sbxi70er/QuigginTwoLessonsIntroductionRevised.pdf?dl=0″>IntroductionChapter 1: What is opportunity cost?https://www.dropbox.com/s/r1k8iqcpeboosbh/QuigginChapter2Revised.pdf?dl=0″>Chapter 2: Markets, opportunity

There’s been another kerfuffle about gender-neutral language. Although it’s mostly anecdotal outrage, the main issue seems to be whether, as is claimed by traditionalists, the masculine third person pronoun should be used in cases where no gender is specified. For example, “If a student writes an essay, he should not be marked down for his choice of pronoun”.
People have had fun with some extreme cases, like “since Man is a mammal, he suckles his young”.  But I think the problem can be posed with much more standard sentences. Let’s take sentences of the general form
“If you ask a [worker of occupation X], [pronoun] will say the biggest problem with the job is …”
The traditionalist claim is that, in all cases, the appropriate pronoun is “he”.  Think about that for a moment, and then

The claim that our current healthcare and pension policies are unsustainable is a classic zombie idea on the political right, embodied in the regular Interngerational Reports produced by the Australian Treasury which invariably fail to mention the real threat to the future posed by climate change and environmental destruction more generally.
In the US, the release of the trustees reports for Social Security and Medicare has produced https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cowardice-of-the-political-class/2018/06/10/71520c0e-6b40-11e8-9e38-24e693b38637_story.html?utm_term=.42caa7a6e650″>the usual crop of alarmist articles, though with more pushback than in the days when the political class was united around the idea of a “grand bargain”. So, I thought I’d repost

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on.
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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.
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Thanks to everyone who commented on the first ten chapters of my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons.
Here’s a draft of Chapter 11: Market failure: Information, uncertainty and financial markets. Comments, criticism and praise are welcome.

Earlier draft chapters are available. These aren’t final versions, as I am now editing the entire manuscript, but you can read them to see where the book is coming from.
Table of ContentsIntroduction.Chapter 1: What is opportunity cost?Chapter 2: Markets, opportunity cost and equilibriumChapter 3:Time, information and uncertaintyChapter 4:Lesson 1: Applications.Chapter 5: Lesson 1 and economic policy.Chapter 6: The opportunity cost of destructionChapter 7: Property rights, and income distributionChapter 8:UnemploymentChapter 9: Market

Following my critique of generational cliches in the New York Times a while back, I was invited to talk to public radio program Innovation Hub. Here’s the link. If you couldn’t get past the NYT paywall, this gives a pretty good idea of my argument.

I’m reposting this piece from 2011, as a prebuttal of  arguments like this. I give a bit more detail here.
One of the most striking successes of the Occupy Wall Street movement has been the “We are the 99 per cent” idea, and more specifically in the identification of the top 1 per cent as the primary source of economic problems.

Thanks to #OWS, the fact that households the top 1 per cent of the income distribution now receive around 25 per cent of all income (up from 12 per cent a few decades ago) has been widely disseminated. The empirical work on tax data that produced this evidence, done most notably by Piketty and Saez, has been slowly percolating into the mainstream consciousness, but “We are the 99 per cent” has hammered it home with surprising speed.
Even more surprisingly, the

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

I’m back again with another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. I’d be interested in suggestions for the blog, both in terms of substantive topics that readers might like me to discuss and in terms of layout, features and so on, now that I am managing all that for myself.
Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

Hi everyone. As you can see, there have been a few changes. For many years, Jacques Chester has kindly hosted this site and other Australian blogs. He’s had to move on, and the site has been migrated to WordPress.com. In the process, the theme has been lost and some recent comments may also have gone.
At the same time, I’ve had a lot of commitments that have slowed me down. I’ll be restoring as much as I can over the next week or so, and trying to resume normal posting.
Mostly, I’d like to thank Jacques for the massive effort he’s put in to supporting this and other blogs.

I’ve stopped doing instant reactions on Budgets. There’s always plenty available now, at places like Inside Story, as well as in the newspapers.
But there’s often something of interest that gets overlooked a bit. In this case, it’s the government’s proposal to legislate tax cuts for the rich seven years in advance. This is an idea with a lengthy and inglorious history, taken to a new extreme.
As far as I know, the first government to legislate future tax cuts was that of Paul Keating, who proudly proclaimed, before the 1993 election, that his tax cuts were not mere promises, but L-A-W. Sadly, he ran into difficulties and the L-A-W had to be amended to take some of the tax cuts back.
The next instance was that of John Howard and Peter Costello, in the 2007 Budget, which promised

In a comment posted yesterday, I said
I suppose this should be obvious, but the HC decision actually creates a perfect opportunity to generate divided loyalties where none previously existed. Suppose you want to run for Parliament but your parent came here as a 3-year old from some other country. A government official explains that the process of losing citizenship normally takes years, but for special friends of the country, it can be rushed through in time to nominate. After you have been elected, an issue arises where friends of the country concerned have an opportunity to do a favour. The logic is pretty clear.
Just a day later, we have the Oz reporting almost exactly this allegation against Labor MP Anne Aly. I have no idea of the validity or otherwise of the claim, but

Thanks to everyone who commented on the first nine chapters of my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons.
Here’s a draft of Chapter 10: Market failure -Externalities and pollution. Comments, criticism and praise are welcome.

The book so far is availableTable of ContentsIntroduction.Chapter 1: What is opportunity cost?Chapter 2: Markets, opportunity cost and equilibriumChapter 3:Time, information and uncertaintyChapter 4:Lesson 1: Applications.Chapter 5: Lesson 1 and economic policy.Chapter 6: The opportunity cost of destructionChapter 7: Property rights, and income distributionChapter 8:UnemploymentChapter 9: Market Failure
Feel free to make further comments on these chapters if you wish.

This entry was posted on May 17, 2018 at 10:01 am and is

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

This entry was posted on May 15, 2018 at 5:49 am and is filed under Regular Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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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.

This entry was posted on May 15, 2018 at 5:48 am and is filed under Regular Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The series of absurd rulings from our High Court has now reached the point where the majority of Australians are debarred from standing for election to Parliament, unless some foreign government chooses to help them. The latest ruling means that even renouncing a citizenship you never sought and have never exercised is not enough. Unless you start the process well before an election is even called, possibly years before, you are ineligible if you were born overseas, have an overseas-born parent and (probably) if you belong to an ethnic group which has a “right of return” to a national homeland. We have yet to explore the possible limits of other exclusion clauses.
There is some poetic justice in the embarrassment now being faced by Labor and Bill Shorten, who wrongly assumed they had

It was the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx a couple of days ago. I planned to repost my series from 2011 on “Marxism without Revolution”, but didn’t get to it. I was reminded when Matt Yglesias mentioned it on Twitter, so here it is, in three parts.
ClassCrisisCapital

This entry was posted on May 9, 2018 at 8:48 am and is filed under Economics – General, Politics (general). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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Zombie ideas never die. Among the hardiest, it seems, is the suggestion that nuclear power represents a possible solution to Australia’s energy problems, including the need to decarbonize energy supply. I just received an invitation to an event entitled Going Nuclear: Reconsidering Australia’s Energy Mix being organized by the by Centre for Market Design at the University of Melbourne.

The speakers are Renaud Coulomb of the University of Melbourne talking about public attitudes and, more interestingly to me, Mr Tony Wood, Director of the Energy Program at the Grattan Institute.
I was struck by the suggestion that Wood planned to discuss his, report; ‘No easy choices: which way to Australia’s energy future?‘, which I hadn’t seen come out. I looked it up, and it turns out to have been

Here in Queensland, at least while the ALP is in office, we celebrate Labour Day as May Day, with a holiday long weekend on the first Monday in May. It’s a good time to think about how workers, in Australia and globally, can turn around the long decline in the reach and influence of trade unions and the resulting decline in the wage share of national income.
The decline has been going on for decades, pushed hard by the conservative parties, but also by Labor governments since the 1980s. It was the Keating government, for example, that introduced the concept of “protected industrial action”, thereby making strikes prima facie illegal.
We are finally seeing some turnaround on this, with the ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign calling for a reversal of at least some of the anti-union 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.

This entry was posted on May 7, 2018 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Regular Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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