Wow. Did you see the latest figures for the falling crime rate? Pretty good, eh? What's that, you didn't see the figures? No one told you, eh.
It's true. Despite the best efforts of the federal Minister for Justice, Jason Clare, on Sunday, the Australian Institute of Criminology's latest compilation of statistics got remarkably little attention.
Why? One reason could be that it's old news. Levels of property crime have been...
Wednesday, March 7, 2012
Monday, March 5, 2012
Want better productivity? Try better education
The American con man Bernie Cornfeld's sales pitch was, "Do you sincerely want to be rich?" That is, are you prepared to pay a price to be rich? The question for Australia's business people is, do you sincerely want to raise our productivity?
It seems just about all our senior business people have taken to preaching sermons about the need to improve our flagging rate of productivity improvement, but I'm not sure how sincere...
Saturday, March 3, 2012
All work creates wealth
You'll find this hard to believe but not every reader of my columns agrees with everything I write. And when I wrote recently that jobs lost in manufacturing would be offset by jobs gained in other parts of the economy, one reader emailed to say he could see a gaping hole in my argument.
My point was that the high dollar wouldn't destroy jobs so much as "displace" them: shift them from contracting industries to expanding industries.
This...
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Education is mainly about teachers
Thank goodness for that. David Gonski and his committee have produced a comprehensive review of school funding without setting off a bitter debate between the proponents of government and non-government schools.
They've done it by focusing not on how the lolly is divided between the rival systems but on the needs of students, with greater funding to be shifted over time to those suffering disadvantage.
Their report has been...
Monday, February 27, 2012
How manufacturing will survive the high dollar
Beware of dire predictions that manufacturers will be wiped out by the strong dollar unless they're propped up by the government. All our experience says it won't happen.
Manufacturers and their (highly vociferous) unions gave us the same warning in the 1980s when the Hawke-Keating government decided to take away their protection from imports. It didn't happen - the industry adapted, and survived to complain another day.
Though...
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Jobs aren't lost, just moved
As the media keep reminding us, the many pressures for change in the structure of our economy are causing some workers to be thrown out of their jobs. But this is unlikely to cause a decline in overall employment. Huh?
The structure of the economy - as represented by the relative sizes of the various industry sectors - is always changing. Normally the rate of change is so slow we don't notice it. At present, however, the pace...
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
Yes, there is more to life than happiness
Fed up with all the wrangling and speculation over who should be leading the Labor Party? Want something more substantial? How about the meaning of life - that weighty enough for you?
The question has been an object of contemplation by clerics and philosophers throughout the ages, of course, but in more recent times many psychologists and even a few economists have taken to studying it.
Psychologists' traditional focus has...
Monday, February 20, 2012
High dollar’s job losses will raise productivity
If your goal is to raise Australians' material standard of living, the debate about what must be done to increase our flagging productivity is vitally important. But if we want the debate to achieve something, we should stop talking so much weak-headed nonsense.
People are talking about productivity as if it's motherhood for businessmen - all fluffy and soft. Sorry, productivity is more nasty than nice. Sometimes it's red in...
Saturday, February 18, 2012
Herd behaviour, fashion and status seeking
Think for more than a moment about the causes of the global financial crisis - the fallout from which is still hurting the US and Europe - and you realise herd behaviour had a lot to do with it.
People paid extraordinarily high prices for houses because they felt they were trailing the Joneses. Brokers sold unsound mortgages because they had to keep up with rival brokers. Funds managers - remunerated according to their relative...
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Jobs market isn't nearly as bad as you think
Economists don't have a good record on forecasting what will happen to the economy, but here's a prediction I make with great confidence: whatever happens, it won't be as bad as you think it is. That applies particularly to the jobs market.
Consider this. One day you pick up a newspaper and on page five you read a small story saying employment grew by 10,000 last month, leaving the rate of unemployment unchanged at 5.2 per cent....
Monday, February 13, 2012
TALK TO FAIRFAX MEDIA SENIOR MANAGEMENT FORUM
Sydney, Monday, February 13, 2012
Greg has asked me to talk to you about the state of the world economy we find ourselves coping with, particularly the problems in the euro zone. But before I do I have to issue a standard consumer warning: economists have a very bad record in forecasting what will happen in the economy, so you’d be wise not to take a blind bit of notice of anything I say.
I can say that confident you will take...
What happens now on interest rates
Until last week, the financial markets and most business economists thought the Reserve Bank had several rate cuts up its sleeve and would start doling them out this month. The smarter ones don't think that any more.
When the Reserve failed to cut the official interest rate last week, some observers swung to the opposite view of expecting no further cuts for the foreseeable. And with all the fuss about the banks' small "unofficial"...
Saturday, February 11, 2012
How fiscal policy does and doesn't work
It's remarkable that the politicians of Europe and America are making things much worse for themselves and their people because they've unlearnt the economic lessons of the past 70 years.
Economists spent many years studying what policymakers did wrong in the Great Depression of the 1930s, making it much worse than it needed to be. One well-understood lesson was not to try to get the government budget back into balance too quickly.
This...
Wednesday, February 8, 2012
Propping up private heath insurance unfair, inefficient
Despite the untiring efforts of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott to make themselves seem poles apart in their policies - he/she is hopeless, I'm really good - the ideological gap between the two sides has never been narrower.
If you look carefully, that's true even in one of the few remaining points of ideological difference: the funding of healthcare, particularly private health insurance.
When John Howard resumed leadership...
Monday, February 6, 2012
Asia well-placed to withstand global slowdown
Perhaps it's our natural eurocentricity, but we've been hearing a lot more about recession and the risk of worse in Europe than about the resilience of our own region. Fortunately, the International Monetary Fund set the record straight last week.
At a briefing in Washington, the director of the fund's Asia and Pacific department, Anoop Singh, focused on the counter-weight to the weakness in the North Atlantic economies.
If...
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