John Quiggin

Now that the World Health Organization has finally endorsed a recommendation for wearing masks in public, it’s time for Australia to do the same. The most important case is that of public transport including air travel. Urban public transport is vital, but until we take the necessary steps on masks, we will be stuck with recommendations to avoid peak hour travel, guaranteeing a return to private cars and congestions The airlines have been the biggest transporters of the...

When the Covid-19 pandemic started, it was generally assumed that the only serious policy option was to “flatten the curve”: that is, keep the spread slow enough that the hospital system was not overwhelmed, until either a vaccine was developed and generally available or most of the population had caught the disease giving rise to herd immunity. Both approaches looked likely to take at least a couple of years to work. In retrospect, this assumption was surprising. China suppressed...

I’ve just responded to a poll of economists, run by The Conversation and The Economic Society of Australia on this question. Here’s my response No There has been extensive debate on the effects of minimum wages on labor demand. Over the last 25 years, the general conclusion has been that these effects are relatively small.However, these questions are irrelevant in the current context. The pace of economic recovery will be determined entirely by macroeconomic conditions, including...

I’ve been working for some time on a review of the first full-length text based on Modern Monetary Policy, Macroeconomics by William Mitchell, Randall Wray and Martin Watts. A near-final draft is over the fold <h3>Macroeconomics – Review</h3> Voltaire once said of the Holy Roman Empire that it was “Neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire”. Something similar might be said of Modern Monetary Theory, which has shot to prominence in policy debates recently. It is...

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 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...

A colleague wrote to me today asking about the case of Drew Pavlou, a student suspended by the University of Queensland for two years as a result of actions in the course of protests against the policies of the Chinese government in Hong Kong. Here’s my reply I don’t know any more about it than what I read in the papers, but it certainly looks bad for UQ. To the extent that anything has come out about the reasons for suspending the student, they seem to be political stunts that are...

Following my post on pandemic whataboutery, James Joyner had some interesting thoughts, noting that Interestingly, Quiggin doesn’t circle back to the third example from his introduction: influenza. Will Americans, having been conditioned to lockdowns during this pandemic, be more likely to implement them again for lesser ones? Or will this be a Never Again moment? I was thinking over a post on this topic when I read that New Zealand is planning to use the testing contact tracing...

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...

Mitchell, Wray and Watts Macroeconomics p 323, give a the correct version of the #MMT position on budget aggregates . Taxes create real resource space in which the government can fulfil its socio-economic mandate. Taxes reduce the non-government sector’s purchasing power and hence its ability to command real resources for the government to command with its spending. Take a situation where the national government is spending around 30 per cent of GDP, while its tax revenue is...