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A colleague wrote to me today asking about the case of Drew Pavlou, a student suspended by the University of Queensland for two years as a result of actions in the course of protests against the policies of the Chinese government in Hong Kong. Here’s my reply I don’t know any more about it than what I read in the papers, but it certainly looks bad for UQ. To the extent that anything has come out about the reasons for suspending the student, they seem to be political stunts that are...

from Peter Radford Are economists so befuddled by the elegance of their machinery that words have lost all meaning? Two definitions, one for ‘essential’ and the other for the way in which, according to economics, people are rewarded for their work. In recent weeks we have become accustomed to calling someone an ‘essential worker’.  These are our most important people.  They are, if the dictionary doesn’t lie, indispensable.  They are extremely important.  They are key, crucial, vital, and...

Following my post on pandemic whataboutery, James Joyner had some interesting thoughts, noting that Interestingly, Quiggin doesn’t circle back to the third example from his introduction: influenza. Will Americans, having been conditioned to lockdowns during this pandemic, be more likely to implement them again for lesser ones? Or will this be a Never Again moment? I was thinking over a post on this topic when I read that New Zealand is planning to use the testing contact tracing...

from Norbert Häring Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality. According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from...

I have been monitoring  the close relationship between bond yields and monetary velocity ( personal income/zero maturity money) for years without coming to strong conclusion about what to make of it.  In particular, it displays the long term secular rise and fall of bond yields before and after 1980.. I do not know of any other economic variable that parallels bond yields so tightly for such a long period.  OK, first question.  Which way does the causal...

I have been monitoring  the close relationship between bond yields and monetary velocity ( personal income/zero maturity money) for years without coming to strong conclusion about what to make of it.  In particular, it displays the long term secular rise and fall of bond yields before and after 1980.. I do not know of any other economic variable that parallels bond yields so tightly for such a long period.  OK, first question.  Which way does the causal...

from Jamie Morgan Part 5 of Pandemic aware economies, public health business models and (im)possible futures An economy that grows through increasing final consumption is one that evolves with final consumption and so its reproduction, stability and growth are specially dependent on it and on the associated characteristics of work and financing. It matters how people are paid, how they are contracted, what levels of debt they take on in order to work  – for example reliance on a...

from Norbert Häring Distributing additional money to stimulate demand is seen by economists as a recipe for boosting demand in a crisis. But you have to do it right, not like Donald Trump did it. In response to the corona crisis, US President Donald Trump had consumption cheques with his signature worth 1200 dollars sent to all citizens. This bears a strong resemblance to an anti-crisis recipe of economists, which has been known as helicopter money since Milton Friedman coined this term....