A second former econocrat has joined former secretary of the Prime
Minister's department Dr Mike Keating in seeking to lift the tone of the
economic debate.
"We are spending too much effort debating how and
how quickly we should bring the Commonwealth budget back into balance,"
Dr Ric Simes said in a speech to the Australian Business Economists this
week.
"We need to elevate the economic debate from the level of
catchcries...
Saturday, August 30, 2014
Wednesday, August 27, 2014
Why almost all of us are 'out of touch'
When politicians say things such as that the poor don't buy petrol, it's easy to accuse them of being "out of touch". Actually,
all politicians face that accusation before they're through. It's one
of our favourite things to say about pollies we disapprove of.
But let's turn it around: exactly how in touch are you and I? Much less than we imagine.
We
know a lot about our own circumstances and those of our friends and
neighbours,...
Monday, August 25, 2014
Mining boom makes little sense
Conventional economic analysis assumes the behaviour of businesses is
always rational but, in reality, the booms and busts that cause the ups
and downs of the business cycle are driven by emotion more than rational
calculation: unwarranted optimism, greed, impatience, short-sightedness
and herd behaviour. Consider our resources boom.
The ideology of
economic rationalism says private enterprise can do no wrong;
ill-advised...
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Many reasons for the impossible: power demand falling
We know the two great certainties in life are death and taxes, but
many thought there was a third: the inexorable rise in consumption of
electricity. As the population grew and each of us got a little more
prosperous each year, we'd use more power. The mighty electricity
industry was built on that certainty.
Except that electricity consumption has been falling for the
past four years. To say this has taken the industry...
Friday, August 22, 2014
CARING ABOUT FAIRNESS
Talk to Legal Aid Conference, Sydney, Friday, August 22, 2014I’m trying to give fewer speeches these days, and I knock back far more invitations than I accept, but I agreed to talk to you today mainly because I felt I ought to thank you. Thank you for the work you’re doing, for the contribution you make in ensuring that people are informed about their rights and responsibilities under the law and are adequately represented before...
Wednesday, August 20, 2014
Abbott's economic script is out of date
It doesn't seem yet to have dawned on Tony Abbott that he was elected
because he wasn't Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd, not because voters
thought it was time we made a lurch to the Right.
The man who imagines
he has a "mandate" to mistreat the children of boat people, ensure free
speech for bigots, give top appointments to big business mates and
reintroduce knights and dames, represented himself as a harmless
populist before...
Monday, August 18, 2014
Stop wasting money on infrastructure
Don't laugh too hard at the ABC's new satire, Utopia, and the wasteful
and appearances-driven antics Rob Sitch gets up to as head of the Nation
Building Authority. It's too close to the truth to be funny.
One of
the foremost areas where governments need to lift the efficiency of
their spending - as opposed to cutting payments to the needy or
short-sighted cost-shifting - is infrastructure. It has become an area
where too...
TALK TO TREASURY SEMINAR ON COMMUNICATING ECONOMIC IDEAS
National Library of Australia, CanberraAs far as journalism is concerned, economics is the great contradiction. On the one hand, there’s no subject more like to get you a guernsey on the front page. On the other, there’s no subject more likely to confuse, irritate or simply bore the reader rigid.If economics is the study of the ordinary business of life, and GNP is what ensues when 86 million Americans get up and go to work,...
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Economists should learn some geography
One of the great failings of economists is their confident assumption
that their way of looking at the economy is the only way - certainly,
the only useful way - of understanding it.
For one thing, their almost
exclusive focus on money - prices, actually - and their convenient
assumption that people are rational, allows them to analyse an economy
populated by automatons rather than fallible, flighty humans.
Behavioural...
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Big business now calling the economic shots
Sometimes I wonder whether the economy is being managed for our benefit
or for the benefit of the big businesses that dominate it. The two big
supermarket chains we get to choose between, the two domestic airlines
and privately owned airports, the three foreign mining giants that were
allowed to redesign the mining tax they didn't like, and the four big
banks that control so much of our superannuation and the investment...
Monday, August 11, 2014
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ON THE TRICKY TOPIC OF PRODUCTIVITY
Talk to VCTA Teachers Day, Melbourne, Monday, August 11, 2014Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything. A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise its output per worker. Paul...
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