Tuesday , April 8 2025
Home / John Quiggin / For-profit services drive standards down

For-profit services drive standards down

Summary:
That’s the key point of my article in The Guardian this week. The intro focused on aged care and the headline picked that up, but the main points are general There’s nothing inherently desirable about competition. If the alternative is collusion against the public interest, competition is a necessary evil. Far better, when it can be achieved, is cooperation to be the best we can at what we do. That’s the core value of the service professions, professions derided by market reformers as “producer interests”. Much the same is true of choice. As far as flavours of ice cream are concerned, some people will like butterscotch, some will go for mango and some might even prefer Neapolitan. The more choices the better. But for the human services that matter most to us, it’s not a

Topics:
John Quiggin considers the following as important:

This could be interesting, too:

Stavros Mavroudeas writes CfP of Marxist Macroeconomic Modelling workgroup – 18th WAPE Forum, Istanbul August 6-8, 2025

Lars Pålsson Syll writes The pretence-of-knowledge syndrome

Dean Baker writes Crypto and Donald Trump’s strategic baseball card reserve

Lars Pålsson Syll writes How economists forgot the real world

That’s the key point of my article in The Guardian this week. The intro focused on aged care and the headline picked that up, but the main points are general

There’s nothing inherently desirable about competition. If the alternative is collusion against the public interest, competition is a necessary evil. Far better, when it can be achieved, is cooperation to be the best we can at what we do. That’s the core value of the service professions, professions derided by market reformers as “producer interests”.

Much the same is true of choice. As far as flavours of ice cream are concerned, some people will like butterscotch, some will go for mango and some might even prefer Neapolitan. The more choices the better. But for the human services that matter most to us, it’s not a question of how many choices we have. What matters is the quality of the best choice. We want our doctors and nurses to keep us well, our teachers to educate and inspire us, and our carers to give us comfort and dignity.

John Quiggin
He is an Australian economist, a Professor and an Australian Research Council Laureate Fellow at the University of Queensland, and a former member of the Board of the Climate Change Authority of the Australian Government.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *