John Quiggin

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...

Noah Smith has posted an interesting interview with Sarah Paine who looks at the distinction between maritime powers (in modern history, Britain and the US) and continental powers (everyone else). Paine sees maritime powers as beneficent creators and upholders of a peaceful and rules-based international order It’s a distinction I’ve discussed in the past, but with very different views. Here’s a full-length response The maritime/continental distinction is crucial, but not in 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. Share this:Like Loading...

Continuing my discussion of the recent upsurge in pro-natalism, I want to talk about the idea that, unless birth rates rise, society will face a big problem caring for old people. In this post, I’m going to focus on aged care in the narrow sense, rather than issues like retirement income, which depend crucially on social policy. Looking at Australian data on location of death, I found that <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...

This Crooked Timber post on declining population has prompted me to get started on what I plan, in the end, to be a lengthy critique of the pro-natalist position that dominates public debate at the moment. My initial motivation to do this reflected long-standing concerns about human impacts on the environment but I don’t have any particular expertise on that topic, or anything new to say. Instead, I want to address the economic and social issues, making the case that a move to a...

In my latest Guardian piece, I argue that, unless we pay attention to the purchasing power of wages, talk about the “cost of living” is like the sound of one hand clapping The policy debate about the cost of living is among the most confused and confusing in recent memory. All sorts of measures to reduce the cost of living are proposed, then criticised as being potentially inflationary. The argument implies, absurdly, that reducing the cost of living will increase the cost of...

A day late, but Monday Message Board is back! 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...

I’ve been working a bit on inflation and the highly problematic concept of the ‘cost of living’ (shorter JQ: what matters is the purchasing power of wages, not the cost of some basket of goods). As part of this, I’ve been looking at how particular prices have changed over time, focusing on basics like bread and milk. One striking thing that I found out is that, until quite late in the 20th century, the standard loaf of bread used to calculate consumer price indexes in Australia...