John Quiggin

As I foreshadowed a while ago, the financial effects of the pandemic have been reflected in an agreement for university staff to take temporary pay cuts in order to save the jobs of casual workers. Lots of people are unhappy about this, but it’s hard to see an alternative, and the deal seems to be the best that can be reached, with the requirement that senior management take the biggest cuts and (I think) the cuts for academic staff being scaled to protect the lowest paid. The...

Some responses I gave to a student journalist asking about universal basic income. There are two main approaches to implementing a universal basic income. One is to introduce a universal payment to everyone in the community, funded by taxation, and gradually increase this to a “livable income”, that is, one sufficient for people to meet their basic needs on a sustainable basis. The second is to focus on those who currently don’t receive a basic income and provide it to them....

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. I’ll open this by saying I agree with the view that even an optimal response to the pandemic by China would have given the world only a few days more notice, and that most Western governments would have wasted that time anyway. Like this:Like Loading...

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...

Thanks to a recommendation from Seth Godin, Economics in Two Lessons is suddenly a best seller in microeconomics on Amazon. Won’t last long, I expect, but nice while it does. Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

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...