In 50 years, Trump will be remembered as just a puzzling footnote

I know I’m a bit late, but welcome to 2025. Before we get on with a year of absolutely gratuitous economic angst courtesy of a great American conman’s second coming, let’s take a breath and realise we’re already a quarter of the way through what many still think of as the “new” century.

How time flies while you’re preoccupied with one crisis – one damn thing – after another. I hate to undercut the media’s business model, but old age has taught me that most of the things we find so momentous at the time don’t leave much of a mark on the course of history.

In the heat of battle, we imagine the distant future having been irreversibly shaped by the latest unexpected excitement. A global trade war, for instance. Sorry, a beginner’s error.

Late last year I learnt that, in 1975, “15 leading Australians” had produced a book titled Australia 2025, which examined “the changing face of their country 50 years from now”. It was published by Electrolux, maker of vacuum cleaners.

What a great way to kick off another year of columns, I thought as I asked our library to disinter this gem from the archives. To be honest, I expected it would be great fun. All those fearless predictions about how, by 2025, we’d be flying to work in our spaceships. Or maybe by then computers would mean everyone was working from home.

Wrong. The chapter on the economy was written by someone I dimly remember, BHP’s chief economist at the time, John Brunner. He was far too smart to get caught making fanciful predictions about spaceships or anything else much. He devoted most of his 10 pages to explaining why anything he predicted was likely to be wrong.

He listed all the country’s recent problems, which many more impetuous observers could be tempted to foresee changing our future, while then expressing his doubts. For example, at that time, and still under the Whitlam government, we had a big problem with double-digit inflation. Would this problem be with us for another 50 years?

Brunner recorded all the reasons for thinking it might: “the increasing power of the unions, more generous unemployment benefits, vulnerability of capital-intensive industry to strikes” and “perhaps most potent of all, the commitment of governments to full employment”.

Even so, Brunner doubted it. And he was right. “What?” you say. “We’ve had a problem with high inflation in just the past few years.”

True. But much of the reason we’ve found it so disconcerting is that we’ve become so unused to high inflation. This latest, pandemic-caused surge in prices ended a period of about 30 years in which inflation stayed low, in Australia and all other rich countries.

Why is it so rare for the problem of the moment to be the thing that shapes the next 50 years? Because, as Brunner well understood, when big problems emerge, ordinary businesses and consumers look for ways around them, while governments look for ways to fix them. Action leads inevitably to reaction. And market economies like ours are adept at finding solutions to problems.

Consider Brunner’s list of reasons for predicting eternal high inflation. Powerful unions? Globalisation stopped that. So did the deregulation of wage-fixing. Generous unemployment benefits? Tell that to the Australian Council of Social Service. These days, every sensible person thinks the dole is too low.

As for “the commitment of governments to full employment”, it became a commitment in name only just a few years after Brunner was writing. Overseas economists invented an escape clause they called the “non-accelerating inflation” rate of unemployment, or NAIRU, and naturally, our government and its econocrats jumped at it.

For about the first 30 years after World War II, our rate of unemployment rarely got above 2 per cent. Allow for the workers who happened to be between jobs at any given time and that really was full employment.

But by 1975, inflation was in double digits and the unemployment rate had jumped to 4.6 per cent. The governments of the rich economies dumped the full-employment objective and turned every effort towards getting inflation down.

Thanks mainly to all the extra money the Morrison government spent during the pandemic, our unemployment rate fell to 3.5 per cent early in the Albanese government’s term. As I hope you remember hearing, this was the lowest unemployment had fallen to “in about 50 years”.

Quite accidentally, we’d got back to something like full employment. But get this. If you wonder why the Reserve Bank is so reluctant to cut interest rates, it’s because its battered old NAIRU machine keeps telling it unemployment is still too low.

This brings me to a bit of Brunner wisdom worth repeating 50 years later. “One of the superstitions to which modern man is particularly susceptible is the idea that what comes out of the computer must represent the law and the prophets [the Old Testament].”

“But of course what comes out of a computer depends on what goes into it and if you feed in neo-Malthusian assumptions you will get gloomy answers.” (Thomas Malthus was a notoriously pessimistic English economist from the 18th century.)

Finally, this: “Probably no profession spends more time contemplating the future than the economics profession and yet few are worse equipped for the task. For whatever facility they may have for manipulating economic variables, economists really know very little indeed about what determines economic magnitudes, particularly in the long run.

“The long-term rate of economic growth, for instance, will be determined by a host of political, technological and cultural factors which no economist has any special claims to be able to predict.”

Ah. They don’t make business economists like him any more.

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The future of work won't be as bad as we're told

I can't remember when there's been so much speculation about what the future holds for working life. Or when those who imagine they know what the future holds have worked so hard to scare the dickens out of our kids.

Getting on for 100 years ago – 1930, to be precise – the father of macro-economics, John Maynard Keynes, wrote an essay, Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, in which he calculated that if technological progress produced real economic growth per person averaging 2 per cent a year for 100 years, by then people would enjoy a comfortable standard of living while needing to work only 15 hours a week.

He was writing during the Great Depression, so I doubt if many people believed him. He was right, however, to predict the Depression would end and growth would resume, powered by continuing advances in technology.

By the 1960s and early '70s it was common for futurologists to predict that more and more labour-saving technology would allow big reductions in the standard 40-hour working week.

What a laugh. Today's futurologists – amateur and professional – are predicting roughly the opposite to what Keynes and the '60s futurologists were.

Thanks to continuing technological advance and the digital disruption it's producing, working life is getting ever tougher and less secure, we're told.

As we learnt last week, all the extra jobs created in Australia over the year to February – a mere net 100,000 – were part-time, with full-time jobs actually falling by 21,000.

So there's the proof we're going to the dogs – and it'll keep getting worse. All those part-time and casual jobs. The growing army of the "under-employed".

We're moving to the "gig economy", where full-time, permanent jobs become the exception and most workers are employed on short-term contracts, many are self-employed like Uber drivers or need a "portfolio" of jobs on different days.

Frightening, eh? I read someone confidently assuring school kids they'd have 10 different jobs – or was it 10 different occupations? – in their working lives. Then I read someone assuring kids they'd have 17 different jobs. Not 16, or 18, but 17.

This growing job insecurity is why there's a renewed push among progressives – including Greens leader Richard Di Natale – for a "universal basic income". It'll be needed because so many people will be earning little or nothing from employment.

Have you detected my scepticism? This is people during a period of weakness in the jobs market predicting – like Keynes's pessimists – it will stay weak forever – and get worse.

That's part of it. The other part is the futurologists who, unlike us mere mortals, can see with perfect clarity what our technological future holds.

If you think economists aren't good at forecasting, futurologists are much worse. Much of what they predict never comes to pass and most of what they correctly predict takes much longer than they expected. Then there's the things they failed to predict.

The only safe prediction is that the future will be different to the present. Any more specific prediction is mere speculation.

The futurologists generally know – or profess to know – a lot more than the rest of us about all the new tricks the latest technology will soon be able to do. What they almost always underestimate is the human factor: whether we'll want it to do those tricks.

If the futurologists had been right, by now most of us would be working from home. We aren't – because it suits neither bosses nor workers.

It's tempting to predict the digital revolution will eliminate many jobs in the services sector, leading to mass unemployment.

Trouble is, employers have been installing labour-saving equipment since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and so far the unemployment rate is hardly up to double figures.

That's because improving the productivity of a nation's labour increases its real income. When that income is spent, jobs are created somewhere in the economy.

Technological advance doesn't destroy jobs, it "displaces" them from one part of the economy to another.

It's possible the digital revolution is so different to all previous technological revolutions that what's been true for 200 years is no longer true. Possible, not probable.

Those predicting our kids will be tossed out of their jobs many times in their working lives forget that market forces involve the interaction of supply and demand.

Their prediction of almost universal job insecurity in the gig economy assumes this will happen because it's what the demanders of labour – employers – want.

This is naive. It assumes all labour is unskilled – so employers don't care who does it and never have trouble recruiting and training a constantly changing workforce – and that there's no such thing as "firm-specific knowledge".

No employer would treat skilled labour in such a cavalier fashion. Employers know the suppliers of labour – employees – wouldn't want to work for such an appalling outfit.

And such an apocalyptic prediction fails to allow for what economists call the "policy reaction function" – if things get too bad for too many workers, governments will step in and legally require employers to treat their staff fairly – just as they already impose paid public holidays, annual leave, minimum wages, penalty payments and much else on unwilling employers.

Why do they do it? Because, in a democracy, workers have far more votes than bosses.

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