First of a line of green Treasury bosses

In the olden days you didn't get to be boss of a major company, government department - or this newspaper - until you were in your late 50s or early 60s. You stayed in the job until you reached what was then imagined to be the official retirement age of 65. So whether they performed well or badly, no one spent all that long in a top job. (Going not that far further back, you didn't get to be governor of NSW, Anglican archbishop...

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Take a break and we'll all be happy

Psychologists have a form of treatment for unhappy people called PAT: pleasant activity training. It's quite simple: you make a list of the things you like doing, then do them more often. It's not as silly as it sounds. We've learnt our brains have one system that controls wanting and one that controls liking. The wanting system tends to dominate the liking system, so we often end up doing less of what we like than we'd like...

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Beware gurus selling high migration

The economic case for rapid population growth though immigration is surprisingly weak, but a lot of economists are keen to give you the opposite impression. Fortunately, the Productivity Commission can't bring itself to join in the happy sales job. I suspect that, since almost all economists are great believers in economic growth as the path to ever higher material living standards, they have a tendency to throw in population...

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A reality check at last on what we take for granted

A recurring theme in my writing this year has been to point out the limitations of gross domestic product as a measure of wellbeing, particularly as related to the environment. But today I have good news: something is being done about it. Economists and statisticians long ago developed a "system of national accounts" to measure developments in the economy, based on Keynesian theory about how economies work. Although these accounts...

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Only part of our fortune is down to minerals

If it exercises my doctor's mind I imagine it occurs to a lot of people: are we a stuffed nation living off our mineral wealth? The thought that we're making a lot of our income merely by digging stuff out of the ground and shipping it overseas seems to worry a lot of people. Is that the best we can do? Considering the fuss politicians, economists and the media are making about the resources boom, you could be forgiven for thinking...

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Faithful few attend the economic church

If the nation's economists are right in assuming almost all of us share their belief that the pursuit of an eternally rising material standard of living must be a key goal of government, they're left with a puzzle: why then is there so little support for further micro-economic reform? It's true virtually all our politicians and business people share the economists' assumption that almost every Australian sets a high store by...

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A few facts would be useful in the migration debate

If we are going to have great debate about whether we want a Big Australia, people will need a much stronger grasp on the factors driving population growth and immigration than they've shown so far. This is the rationale for a useful booklet, Population and Immigration: Understanding the Numbers, issued by the Productivity Commission this week. Over the past 50 years, Australia's population has averaged growth of 1.6 per cent...

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OUTLOOK FOR POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 2011

Talk to Australian Business Economists Annual Forecasting Conference Sydney, December 8, 2010 Just as Glenn Stevens starts each appearance before the House economics committee by reviewing the fate of the forecasts he made at his previous appearance, so I have to start by reviewing the fearless forecasts I made this time last year. Usually Stevens can say his forecasts turned out pretty well, but I can’t. Since I know you guys...

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Creating jobs not the be-all and end-all

I reckon I've had only about half a dozen job interviews in my life and only one - with the Financial Review - where I wasn't offered a job. When I was leaving school in Newcastle in the mid-1960s a local chartered accountant needed a youngster to be a junior audit clerk. He approached the school careers adviser, who recommended me. I was pleased to take the job, but left after two years to go full-time at uni. Nearing the end...

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