John Quiggin

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 a sucker for taxonomies, and Ross Douthat has quite a good one in the New York Times Like any strange and quarrelsome sect, the church of anti-Trump conservatism has divided and subdivided since Donald Trump’s election. Some members have apostatized and joined the ranks of Trumpists; others have marched leftward, with anti-Trumpism as a gateway drug to wokeness. There is a faction that is notionally skeptical of Trump but functionally anti-anti-Trump, a faction that insists it’s just...

I mentioned a while ago that I was making a submission to a Senate inquiry into Vocational Education and Training in South Australia. My submission has now been published on the Committee website with the title “The failure of vocational education and training policy in Australia” I was a bit surprised to be told it was Submission Number 1, but it turns out they’ve only published two so far. The other one, from Dr Gavin Moodie makes most of the same points as mine. As I mentioned 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.

A while ago I had one of those “Someone on the Internet is Wrong” arguments with the authors of an article arguing that we would need massively more evidence before we could conclude that autonomous cars are safer than those driven by humans. Rather than dig back to find those arguments again, I thought I’d link to this Bloomberg piece and, in particular the following passage GM’s autonomous test cars were in 22 accidents in California last year, according to data from the state’s...

International Studies Quarterly has just published a symposium responding to a paper by Henry Farrell and me, which has been released from behind the paywall for the occasion. Our paper has the fairly self-explanatory title “Consensus, Dissensus, and Economic Ideas: Economic Crisis and the Rise and Fall of Keynesianism ” In our paper we looked at the resurgence of fiscal Keynesianism in the immediate aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis and of the successful counterthrust leading to...

Since I wrote my post on good climate news for 2017, a couple of news items have caught my eye * Britain now generates twice as much electricity from wind as from coal, and around 30 per cent from renewables in total * More than half the vehicles sold in Norway are now electric or plug in hybrid My thoughts on these examples over the fold: TL;DR version: These examples show that, at least for developed countries, massive reductions in CO2 emissions are feasible right now, with no...

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

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’ve just been advised that my latest article “The importance of ‘extremely unlikely’ events: Tail risk and the costs of climate change” has come out online in The Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. For those who can use it, the DOI is 10.1111/1467-8489.12238. For everyone else, here’s a link to a pre-publication version. The main points are * The IPCC convention is to use the phrase “extremely unlikely” to refer to outcomes (in particular, values of climate...