The nation's practicing economists are working themselves into a state over the future of the economy, convincing themselves the prospects for growth are dismal and the only answer is more "reform".
They're being rallied by former Treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson.
He told the National Reform Summit that Australia risked sacrificing as much as 5 percentage points of economic growth over the next 10 years, the equivalent of the production and income lost during a recession.
"Unless we grab this challenge by the horns and really get concrete about what are the priority issues, we are actually going to find ourselves sleepwalking into a real mess," he said.
There's a host of dubious assumptions hidden behind this stirring call to economic arms. For a start, how do we know we've got a problem? How do we know we're heading for a decade of slow growth unless the government acts?
We don't. We look at the below-trend growth in six of the past seven years and, as any economic illiterate would, simply extrapolate it for 10 years. But why stop at 10? Why not make it 40?
One of the shafts of enlightenment at the summit, we're told, came when a modeller from Victoria University challenged the inter-generational report's modelling that the productivity of labour would improve at an average annual rate of 1.4 per cent over the next 40 years. The rival modeller's modelling put it at less than 1 per cent.
Really? Talk about the biter bit. Rather than using their models to bamboozle the punters, economists are bamboozling themselves, mistaking an "exogenous" variable for an "endogenous" one.
Putting that in English, both the 1.4 per cent and the 1 per cent are merely assumptions, not a finding of the models. No economist knows what will happen to productivity over the next two years, let alone the next 40. And no model can tell them.
All the economists are doing is what any mug punter would do: relying on gut feel rather than science. You may be optimistic about the future, but I'm pessimistic.
They're making the economic illiterate's assumption that our recent weak growth is structural rather than cyclical. Sure, falling commodity prices are reducing our real income, but one day they'll stop falling.
Sure, we're making heavy weather of the transition from the resources boom, but one day it will have been made. Simple statistical theory should be telling economists that a protracted period of below-average growth is most likely to be followed by a period of above-average growth.
The next weird thing about the economists' bout of depression is their assumption that the economy will go nowhere without government intervention. It's as though they've lost their faith in capitalism.
The economy isn't a living organism whose growth and striving is driven by consumers' self-interest and producers' profit-seeking; it's more like a marionette whose animation depends on the Public Puppeteer continually jerking its strings.
Economic growth, it seems, is exogenous not endogenous. Really? What textbook did you read that in?
When you convince yourself, as many economists have, that the only way we'll see faster growth and further productivity improvement is for governments to engage in extensive reform, you've convinced yourself our economy is deeply dysfunctional.
Hugely inflexible and uncompetitive, highly protected, rife with cartels and lazy government-owned monopolies.
You're saying all the (unrepeatable) reform of the 1980s and '90s – floating the dollar, deregulating the financial system and a dozen industries, removing import protection, decentralising wage-fixing and privatising or corporatising public utilities – delivered a once-only productivity improvement but no lasting gain in efficiency, flexibility or dynamism.
There's nothing about those reforms that will help the economy grow in the future, you imply. Somehow in the intervening decade or so all those reforms have disappeared under a jungle of inefficiency; the jungle that's preventing us from ever returning to our former average growth rate.
So now you're threatening to slash your wrists unless the government trawls through all the second-string reforms not yet made and gets on with them.
Naturally, your best advice on how we can get productivity improving faster relies on the things economists think matter most: prices (including tax rates and the wage-fixing system) and intensifying competition (much of which would appal the Business Council and other industry lobbies).
And what do we get if we follow your advice? Another fleeting productivity improvement or something of continuing benefit?
Sorry, guys, but the propositions you're advancing are more like a high-pressure sales job than a rational analysis of our future opportunities and threats. Why don't you take a break and cheer up?
