John Quiggin

It seems quite likely that we will soon see the introduction of a wage subsidy along the lines of that announced by Boris Johnson (himself now testing positive!) in the UK. That is, a payment to employers equal to 70 or 80 per cent of workers’ pre-crisis wages, in return for keeping them on for some period. That would be better than doing nothing beyond what has already been announced, but I have two big problems with it. First, it is paid to companies rather than workers. The ACTU...

The ABC has an article quoting University of Melbourne epidemiologist Tony Blakely as saying (approvingly) that the object of the current “flattening the curve strategy is to smooth the path to herd immunity. Key quotes You don’t go in too hard because you actually want the infection rate to pick up a bit and then hold,” he said. “What they’re not saying is [that] ‘flatten the curve’ likely means [that] by the time this is over, 60 per cent of us will have been infected, to...

We won’t be travelling anywhere much  by air for some time to come, so this is a good time to reconsider our whole approach. I thought I’d start by digging out this post from 2007. A lot of discussion of climate change is based on the implicit or explicit premise that, since we use energy in everything we do, and most energy is derived from carbon-based fuels, large reductions in CO2 emissions will require radical changes in the way we live. Some people welcome this prospect, but most...

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

The coronavirus crisis is very different, at least in its origins, from the Global Financial Crisis. Both differ in crucial respects from other crises in living memory, notably including the Great Depression and World War II, as well a string of severe but not catastrophic crises that have affected the global economy and society. But thinking about them all together brings home the point that major economic crises are quite common events. The crisis of the past took each took between...

Last year I published a book chapter arguing that the first step way to get to a Universal Basic Income was to expand the existing benefit system, increasing payments and removing conditionality (relevant extract over the fold). This is often called a Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI). I counterposed the GMI approach to the alternative of making a small payment to everyone in the community, and then trying to increase it over time. I suggested three initial steps Assuming a...

I had an inquiry about this and am posting my response Some relatively good news on this. The volume of over-the-counter derivatives, including Credit Default Swaps, has generally been declining since the Global Financial Crisis. It’s still large and a potential source of danger.  The place to go for detailed information is the Bank of International Settlements. Here’s a press release from late 2017 with a graph for the declinehttps://www.bis.org/publ/otc_hy1711.htmI’ve attached...

Thanks to Big Data, it would be easier to stop the toilet paper panic in its tracks. Step 1: Announce that anyone holding more than, say, 50 rolls (per person in a household) must hand in the excess to a charity, and notify the government that they have done so. Step 2: A week later, order supermarkets to hand over the data they collect on purchases, and raid people with large stocks that have not been surrendered. Confiscate the lot, and leave them with an ample supply of...

I just gave my first UQ departmental seminar using Zoom. As in most places, our usual practice is to have visiting speakers present their work and meet colleagues in the same field. When large numbers of Chinese students were prevented from returning to Australia in the first round of the coronavirus epidemic, the cost to the university’s budget was such that nearly all travel, including paying for visitors’ travel was cancelled. As it’s turned out, a good thing to. This left big gaps...