John Quiggin

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...

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...

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. Share this:Like Loading...

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. Share this:Like Loading...

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...

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...

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. Like Loading...

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. Share this:Like Loading...

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...

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 Share this:Like Loading...