Tag Archives: economic policy

Pavlina Tcherneva: There is nothing more crippling to a bold policy agenda than the myth that the government can run out of money. This myth is behind every But how will you pay for it? objection to proposals such as a Green New Deal and Medicare for All. New House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has even proposed instituting self-defeating PAYGO (pay as you go) rules, which would require all new government spending to be matched with increased revenue, wrongly prioritizing the...

Common Weal director Robin McAlpine finds that the debate around Modern Monetary Theory can help the independence movement develop an economic case for independence far better than a redacted version of the Growth Commission [UK]. Common SpaceRobin McAlpine: Why the debate about MMT in the indy movement is exactly what we need right now

The long-running Brexit fiasco has overshadowed most news coming out of the United Kingdom these days. It’s not surprising, therefore, that hardly any attention was paid to news that may be of more long-term economic significance to Australia, and to the current crisis of neoliberalism, than a rearrangement of relations between the UK and the European Union. In the Budget brought down in late October, UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Phillip Hammond announced the end of the Public...

One of the things that annoys about the neoliberal era is the constant advice to “shop around” for the best deal for services we could once assume were fairly priced, like electricity or banking services. A crucial feature of this is that you can’t do this once and for all.  Loyal customers are routinely punished by being left on unfavourable deals while new customers are offered better terms. It struck me that we could get substantially better outcomes from markets if all firms were...

My latest piece in the Guardian is headlined The national energy market is an abject failure – it’s time for a publicly owned grid   I’ve said this before and I don’t mind repeating myself. But the new insight that provoked me to write this piece is a bit further down Why has Australia done so badly? The reform process in Australia has treated markets and competition as goals in themselves, rather than as policy instruments designed to produce useful price signals and thereby guide...

Abstract An increasingly visible school of heterodox macroeconomics, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), makes the case for functional finance – the view that governments should set their fiscal position at whatever level is consistent with price stability and full employment, regardless of current debt or deficits. Functional finance is widely understood, by both supporters and opponents, as a departure from orthodox macroeconomics. We argue that this perception is mistaken: While MMT’s policy...

In the light of Scott Morrison’s latest exercise in jettisoning unpopular commitments, in this case the proposal to raise the pension age to 70, I thought I would relink this piece on the Intergenerational Report, from the Abbott-Hockey era. The crucial observation is that, had the increase gone ahead, it would have cancelled out all of the increase in conditional life expectancy at pension age for women since the pension was introduced back in 1907, and most of the increase for men....

That’s the title of my latest article in The Guardian. Opening paras The royal commission into banks has uncovered fraud and misconduct on a massive scale, amounting to nearly $1bn and perhaps more. The usual defences of “bad apples” and “rogue advisers” have fallen apart as it becomes evident the problems are systemic, driven by relentless pressure from the top to maximise profits at all costs. The royal commission into misconduct in the banking, superannuation and financial services...

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...

In a previous post (Milton Friedman: A Man of the Past?), I concluded that Milton Friedman, an extreme advocator of "free market" and individualism, is mostly an economist of the past. In this post, I will highlight John Maynard Keynes, a balanced advocator of both "free market" and "managed market", as the best economist since 1899.... Frank Li is a Chinese ex-pat now a businessman in the US, has a BE, ME, and PdD in electrical engineering. So cut him some space on the economics. He is...