Tag Archives: Books and culture

That’s the headline for my latest piece in Crikey reproduced over the fold. Labor’s poor performance in the by-election seat of Upper Hunter, held by the National Party since 1931 has provoked a new round of soul-searching about the party’s failure to maintain the support of its traditional ‘base’. Implicitly or explicitly, the ‘base’ is assumed to be typified by male manual workers, particularly those in rural and regional areas like Upper Hunter, or in industrial cities like...

I’ve started writing a regular column for Independent Australia (every two weeks), and my first column has just gone up. It’s a response to Nick Dyrenfurth and David Furse-Roberts, Australian advocates of Maurice’s Glasman’s Blue Labour ideas in the UK (apparently Glasman visited here for a few months. The central point is that, far from offering a policy alternative to the political right, Blue Labor is all about a specific kind of identity politics, focused on stereotypical male...

Paul Norton has alerted me to a new book by Andrew Thompson, published by rightwng outlet Labor’s Forgotten People: The Triumph of Identity Politics  It appears to be a rehash of Thompson’s Labor Without Class which I reviewed back in 2000 (reprinted over the fold). The blurb states that “this title is sure to cause a stir within the Labor Party membership”, and I’ll confine my remarks to the title. The idea that the left had an excessive focus on identity politics was popular, and...

Inside Story runs an annual feature in which contributors nominated new and interesting books that may have been overlooked in 2018. I picked Fictions of Sustainability: The Politics of Growth and Post-Capitalist Futures by Boris Frankel. Like this:Like Loading...

In the light of the recent Productivity Commission report on inequality in Australia, I thought I would repost this piece from 2016. It’s not radically dissimilar in terms of its conclusions, but is, I think, more balanced than the “nothing to see here, move on” spin that’s characterized much of the coverage of the PC report. Over the past forty years, leading developed economies, most notably the United States have experienced an upsurge in inequality of income and wealth. Most of...

At a certain point in an academic career, you start getting lots of invitations to write book chapters, which is a lot easier than going through the mill of submitting articles to journals, dealing with referee reports and so on. I’ve had three emails in the last few days, telling me that books to which I’ve contributed chapters have come out. The one of most interest to readers here will be The Coal Truth: The fight to stop Adani, defeat the big polluters and reclaim our democracy by...

I’ve finally committed to delivering a manuscript of my long-overdue book Economics in Two Lessons. As part of the process, I’m going to post the chapters, one at a time, and ask for comments, criticism, encouragement and so on. To begin at the beginning, here’s the Introduction.