John Quiggin

Is it time for the progressive movement in Australia to revisit its socialist roots? In the USA and the UK there are mass movements under the banner of socialism. Young people, in particular, are flocking to the cause. In Australia, the ALP was founded as a democratic socialist party. Fabian socialism is the foundation of our own movement. Do we therefore need to pay close attention to this revival of interest in socialism and to consider whether we are seeing, or are likely to see, a...

Is it time for the progressive movement in Australia to revisit its socialist roots? In the USA and the UK there are mass movements under the banner of socialism. Young people, in particular, are flocking to the cause. In Australia, the ALP was founded as a democratic socialist party. Fabian socialism is the foundation of our own movement. Do we therefore need to pay close attention to this revival of interest in socialism and to consider whether we are seeing, or are likely to see, a...

The National Interest has a story headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis and the Chimera of Authoritarian Competence“. I expected to read about failure of Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and other autocrats to contain the pandemic. But it was all about China. China is the only autocracy that has had a serious pandemic and controlled it. Xi has told lies and suppressed info, just like all the other autocrats, but at least he hasn’t denied the severity of the problem and actively undermined...

For a long time, I’ve used Twitter to publish links to posts on this blog. But a lot of what I write now is on Twitter first. So, I’ve started using a tool called Spooler to turn Twitter threads into blog posts. Here’s the first one According to Gallup 62 per cent of currently employed US workers have worked from home during the crisis, and 59 per cent of those would prefer to continue doing so “as much as possible” Important qualifications:* not the whole workforce, since so...

I’ve got two newspaper articles out today. In the Australian Financial Review, a piece written jointly with Warwick McKibbin and Richard Holden, arguing that the Reserve Bank should dump inflation targeting and switch to targeting the level or growth rate of nominal GDP. Paywalled, but a near-final version is over the fold. And, in Inside Story, a piece looking at the kinds of reforms we need once the lockdown phase of the pandemic is over. Rather than trawling over the remnants...

It’s the May Day public holiday here in Queensland, transformed, like every other public event by the coronavirus pandemic. Most obviously, there is no May Day march for the first time in many years (possibly since the first march in the 1890s, I haven’t been able to find out for share). More significantly, ideas associated with May Day that seemed to belong to a distant past have suddenly become crucially relevant. The most important of these is the injustice, inefficiency and...

Back again with 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. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link http://eepurl.com/dAv6sX You can also follow me on Twitter @JohnQuiggin, at my Facebook public page   and at my Economics in Two Lessons page Like this:Like Loading...

I haven’t done a fundraiser for a while, but this seems like a good time. Like everything, the Brissie to the Bay cycle fundraiser for Multiple Sclerosis isn’t going ahead as usual. It’s been replaced with a challenge where participants record their own efforts and set targets for distance and fundraising. I aim to cycle at least 400km in June (my average is around 200), and raise $1000 or more in the process. Feel free to suggest challenges of your own, with a donation to back...

Our policy on fights between the US and China, until now, has been to avoid them, regardless of the merits. On the coronavirus, both are badly at fault, arguably the US more so. And there’s no obvious reason why Australia has any special interest in working out who is to blame. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

I was contacted by a Greek language newspaper with questions about the next steps in economic policy. On the assumption that most of my readers don’t read Greek, I’m posting my response here The Morrison government’s economic policy response to the pandemic so far has been broadly appropriate, putting practicality ahead of ideology in general. There are numerous anomalies arising from the haste with which the program was developed and from some residual ideological constraints...