John Quiggin

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...

ABC Fact Check has a piece looking at a claim by the Young Greens that “making lattes provides more Australian jobs than the entire coal industry.” The detail of the tweet included the claim that there were 86000 barista jobs compared to 52000 in the coal mining industry The Fact Check Unit observed that the quoted firgure is for total employment in the cafe industry, not just barista. By comparing an estimate of the number of baristas to total employment in coal mining, the Fact...

That’s how a Labor partisan on Twitter described my criticism in Independent Australia of Labor’s strategy of avoiding any policy difference with the Morrison government, and shutting down all discussion of the climate catastrophe until they get around to announcing a policy for the 2022 election. The one exception I noted (and the one that incited this response) was support for the coal industry. As I noted Rather than offer a climate policy in response to the catastrophic...

Here’s a review of Economics in Two Lessons, by Nikki Dumbrell in the Australian Journal of Agricultural and Resource Economics. It’s the first in an academic journal, and captures all the main points nicely. Free market economics (or ‘One Lesson Economics’, Hazlitt 1946) refers to the idea that markets, left alone with very minimal intervention, will achieve equilibrium and as such allocate resources to their most valued use. This idea is persistent. Indeed, famous schools of...

I’ll be speaking at the launch of the NTEU Climate Crisis campaign at Queensland College of Art Southbank tomorrow (Wednesday 12 Feb) . Share this:Like this:Like Loading...

Following the release of Economics in Two Lessons, Sophie Roell of Five Books invited me to do an interview. The Five Books format is that the interviewee (usually an author) nominates the best five books (not including their own) on a given topic. My topic was the Best Books on Learning Economics, with the explanation these are not textbooks for students studying economics. They’re books for the intelligent, general reader to learn what economics is about—and what the important...

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 couple of years ago, I published an article on why “extremely unlikely” climate events matter. The central point was that climate outcomes with a probability of 5 per cent or less (“extremely unlikely” in IPCC terminology) were still much more likely than risks we take seriously in our daily life, like dying in a car crash). As an illustration, at the time the piece was written, it seemed less than 5 per cent probable that, within two years, many countries in the world (including...

I’ve generally taken a pretty dim view of focus groups, which seem to be used mostly to detect and amplify unthinking prejudices. But, I have to admit, that probably is due at least in part to the fact that my prejudices aren’t very close to those of the median focus group participant. So, it wasn’t until I saw focus group results matching my own thoughts that I paid any attention to the question of whether the results actually meant anything. According to the SMH report,...

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