I can't think why, but Easter always reminds me of Christianity. Not, of course, that Christianity has anything to do with the grubby, materialist world of economics. Or does it?
Australia is the most unbelieving it has ever been, with the most recent census saying that only 61 per cent people identify themselves as even nominally Christian.
Twenty-two per cent say they have no religion and another 9 per cent didn't bother...
Monday, March 28, 2016
Saturday, March 26, 2016
How signalling helps make the economy work
Why do so many people go on to university after finishing school? Why do some uni graduates get a job, but then go back to uni for further qualifications?
Why do sensible people dress up for a job interview – or wear a suit and tie if they're in court charged with an offence?
For that matter, why do people engage in conspicuous consumption – buy flash clothes or cars or houses, or send their kids to flash private schools?
Why...
Wednesday, March 23, 2016
Business - and customers - pay for bad business behaviour
It's remarkable the way the Business Council of Australia constantly lectures us on the "reform" we should be accepting to improve our economic performance (and, purely by chance, their profits), but never seems to lecture its big-business members on their manifest need to "reform" their own standards of behaviour.
Among its most profitable members would have to be the four big banks. But the litany of scandals over their bad...
Wednesday, March 16, 2016
Let's 'reform' lack of satisfaction at work
Has it ever occurred to you that, in all our economic striving, most of us – almost all our business people, economists and politicians, but also many normal people – are missing the point?
It occurred to me years ago, and I've thought about it often, but reading a little book by one of my gurus, Barry Schwartz, a professor of psychology at Swarthmore College in the US, has revved me up.
In my job I have to focus mainly on...
Monday, March 14, 2016
CHINA'S ECONOMY: AN UPDATE
Comview 2016As you may have noticed, earlier this year I went on a journalists’ junket to China, which has rekindled my interest in the rise of the Chinese economy and its influence on our own economy. I know this is a subject of interest to many economics teachers and their students, so I’m going to start with China’s effect on our economy and a discussion of ChAFTA, then evaluate the policies used to promote growth and development...
How to get better, not smaller, government
Whether it's a week early or not, it looks a safe bet that this year's budget will do little more than keep the wheels of government turning for another 12 months. If so, it will confirm our worst fears that neither side of politics is capable of improving things.
I hope I'm wrong, but it now seems that the sweeping tax reform we were long promised by the Coalition – with everything on the table, and a white paper to follow...
Saturday, March 12, 2016
THE ‘CRISIS’ IN HEALTHCARE FUNDING, AN ECONOMIST’S VIEWPOINT
Talk to UON Master of Clinical Medicine residential workshop, Sydney, Saturday, March 12, 2016I want to talk to you about the widely perceived crisis in the funding of healthcare, and do so from a wider, more economic perspective than you may normally be exposed to. I should say I don’t claim to be an economist, just a journalist who writes about economics.As we were told in the Abbott government’s commission of audit, for example,...
China still our advantage in a dismal world
We are living in an era of exceptionally weak growth in the world economy. We can now look back and see that era began after the global financial crisis in 2008. We can look forward and not see when the era will end. It could be years, for all we know.
Naturally, this continuing global weakness has its effect on us. So we shouldn't blame ourselves for our own weaker growth relative to our earlier performance. Rather, we should...
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