How the economy helped change marriage

I've never been impressed by those economists who think they can use their little pocket model of the economy to explain every aspect of life. Who want to understand the search for a partner by thinking of marriage as a market. Who think the only motivation – the only emotion – is the desire to make a buck.

On the other hand, if economics is, as one great economist said, the study of the daily business of life, if none of us could exist without the wherewithal to pay for food, clothing, shelter and much else, if most of us have to work to earn that wherewithal, and if most of our time is devoted to producing and consuming, then it's hardly likely that big changes in the economy and education and technology have no effect on such things as marriage.

(While I'm on the topic, I'm never impressed by people who profess to have a soul above such a venal and boring subject as economics. Just threaten to cut their income and see if they're still so uninterested.)

So I thought it worth explaining the theories of two academic economists, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers. Wolfers is the young Sydney economist, long resident in America, who's most likely to make a name for himself in international economics circles. Already has, really.

Wolfers has taken time off from his job as a professor at the University of Michigan while his partner, Stevenson, is working in Washington as an adviser to President Obama.

Their theory is that economic and social changes have caused the basic rationale for marriage to change from "productive" to "hedonic".

Historically, marriage has been the product of the economic environment of the time. People have used marriage and family to overcome the limitations of the formal economy at the time. Social institutions such as marriage have evolved as economic opportunities have changed and the economy's degree of development has risen.

There was a time – I can remember it – when a number of goods and services, such as freshly cooked meals and childcare, weren't sold in the marketplace. And when keeping house involved long hours of labour.

In such circumstances, it made sense for the family to become the firm producing these household services. It also made sense for the partners to a marriage to increase the efficiency of the "firm" by specialisation.

It was usually the case that husbands, being better educated, were better suited to going out and earning income in the marketplace, while wives had prepared themselves for a life of child-rearing and housekeeping.

Largely unconsciously, young women and men sought out partners they believed would be capable opposite numbers in such a production team.

Then followed, in the lifespan of the Baby Boomers, much technological and social change, all of it with economic implications.

With the invention of a host of "mod cons", housekeeping became a lot less time-consuming and onerous. Cheap imported clothing became available, so people stopped making and repairing their own. More processed foods and takeaways became available.

"While the political emancipation of women is surely a key factor in their movement from the home to the market, deeper economic forces are also at play," Stevenson and Wolfers say.

What came first? The rise of feminism, advances in technology or changes in the economy? Easiest to say they all happened at about the same time and interacted with each other.

Once girls started staying on to the end of school, then going on to uni, things really started to change, in the way partners were selected for marriage and in the things going on in the economy.

With more women wanting to take paid work, the market began supplying things to make that possible: more pre-prepared food, childcare, after-school care, people who mow your lawn, cleaners who can whip through your house in an hour before moving on to the next one.

"While the benefits of one member of a family specialising in the home have fallen, the costs of being such a specialist have risen. Improvements in the technology of birth control have made investing in a wife's human capital a better bet ...

"These greater opportunities also connote a greater opportunity cost for a couple contemplating a stay-at-home spouse," the authors say.

Advances in medicine have yielded rising life expectancy, and the average woman will now spend less than a quarter of her adult life with young children in the household.

By increasing the number of potential years in the labour force, the opportunity cost of women staying out of the labour market to be home with children is higher.

"Rising life expectancy also reduces the centrality of children to married life, as couples now expect to live together for decades after children have left the nest," they say.

With women now better educated than men, we've seen the rise of a human version of "assortative mating": the tendency for people to marry those of the same level of education, even the same occupation.

So what drives modern marriage? "We believe the answer lies in a shift from the family as a forum for shared production, to shared consumption . . .

Modern marriage is about love and companionship. Most things in life are simply better [when] shared with another person.

"We call this new model of sharing our lives 'hedonic marriage'."

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Turnbull’s tax reform striptease has started

Sorry, Malcolm, but it's not adding up. Of course, it's probably not intended to add up just yet. That's what our Prime Minister's still working on. But last week we got a big hint on how we'll be let down gently.

Turnbull replaced Tony Abbott in September with three key tasks to perform: restore the government's popularity by being very different to his bellicose predecessor, make progress in delivering big business's reform agenda, and do better on returning the budget to surplus.

For good measure, he needed to cheer up our business people, whose lack of faith in the economy's future was holding back the recovery in non-mining business investment.

I have no problem with last week's package of measures to encourage innovation, even if there's no assurance most of them will prove effective. We've been promised that Tuesday's mid-year budget update will reveal how their cost of $1.1 billion over four years will be covered.

Turnbull is providing what his predecessor never could, a positive "narrative" of how he, with a few judicious policy changes, is leading us onward and upward to a brighter, more prosperous future. All the talk of innovation is part of that. Fine.

But it doesn't fit. His package of increased spending (and increased tax concessions) doesn't fit with Scott Morrison's rhetoric that increased taxation is unthinkable, so all measures to repair the budget must involve reduced spending.

Nor do his new tax concessions fit with the most basic principle of tax reform: broaden the base to cut the rate.

And even if he does find spending cuts to cover the cost of his new spending, they'll come at an opportunity cost to budget repair. Measures that could have been used to reduce the deficit have instead been used merely to stop it getting worse.

A key tactic in Turnbull's efforts to restore big business's confidence in the government was to announce that all options for tax reform were now back on the table.

Fine. But most of them were mutually exclusive. If you jump one way, that rules out jumping four other ways. In particular, we have at least three competing ways to use the proceeds from an increase in the goods and services tax.

But if Turnbull is to take a tax reform package to next year's election, its details will need to be finalised before the May budget. So we've come to the point where Turnbull must start taking options off the table.

Though it's not clear to many observers which options will go and which survive, it would be surprising if, by now, Turnbull and Morrison hadn't formed a pretty clear idea of where they want to end up.

Almost three weeks ago, my colleague Peter Martin got way ahead of the game – so far ahead it suited not the government, the opposition or the media to admit they'd read his piece – and confidently laid out the various reasons why the government had pretty much decided not to go ahead with any significant changes to the GST.

The first problem was that ownership of the GST had been bequeathed to the states. Why would the feds incur the huge political risk involved in increasing the rate or broadening the base of the GST just to make life easier for the premiers?

But how could they use the proceeds from a GST increase for other purposes without paying a sufficient bribe to the premiers? Fail to do so and the premiers have nothing to lose by opposing the increase.

The other big problem is that increasing the GST is political suicide without adequate compensation to low and middle income earners, but various changes since 2000 have made this very much harder and more expensive.

More than half the gross proceeds from a GST increase would be needed for compensation, with a much higher proportion of it going as increases in welfare spending rather cuts in income tax.

Everything that happened at last week's meetings with state treasurers and premiers was consistent with the thesis that the states have been cut out of the GST inheritance as just the first veil to be removed in the tax reform striptease.

But with a deteriorating budget position, how could the government afford to cut income tax and company tax without having the net proceeds from a GST increase to call upon?

It's obvious, though not easy: broaden the income tax and company tax bases by removing sectional concessions – superannuation, for starters – and use the proceeds to fund a revenue-neutral cut in tax rates.

Not exactly what Turnbull's big-business backers were hoping for.

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Why governments should subsidise innovation

What can governments do to encourage innovation? Well, as we learnt this week, Malcolm Turnbull can think of $1.1 billion-worth of things to do.

His "national innovation and science agenda" involves 24 mainly small spending or tax concession programs, grouped under four headings.

Culture and capital, to help businesses embrace risk and to incentivise​ early-stage investment in start-ups.

Collaboration, to increase the level of engagement between businesses, universities and the research sector to commercialise ideas and solve problems.

Talent and skills, to train Australian students for the jobs of the future and attract the world's most innovative talent to Australia.

And government as an exemplar, to lead by example in the way government invests in and uses technology and data to deliver better quality services.

Will all those programs prove to be money well spent? Who knows? The safest prediction is that some will and some won't.

At present, the government is spending almost $10 billion a year on research and development. This involves about $2 billion on government research activities (mainly the CSIRO), almost $5 billion on grants to university and other research institutions (including medical research), and about $3 billion on tax breaks to business to encourage them to engage in R&D.

We do know a fair bit about the effectiveness of schemes to subsidise business R&D activity, whether in Oz or other countries.

And last week we saw the Australian Industry Report for 2015, produced by the chief economist of the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, which reported the results of a new study of the effectiveness of the government's R&D tax concession scheme.

But first things first. This week's innovation statement tells us "innovation and science are critical for Australia to deliver new sources of growth, maintain high-wage jobs and seize the next wave of economic prosperity".

Which is nice, but what exactly is it? "Innovation is about new and existing businesses creating new products, processes and business models."

Ah, so that means innovation is just the latest business buzzword for what economists have always called technological advance. That means we can believe the happy chat about how wonderful innovation is.

Economists have long known that most of the rise in our material standard of living over the decades and centuries has come from advances in technology, which include better knowhow as well as better machines.

R&D, the industry report informs us, is the main vehicle for innovation. You wouldn't know it from the cost-cutting efforts of Treasury and the Department of Finance over the years, but economists have long accepted that there's a good case for government spending on R&D and for government subsidy of business spending on R&D.

A business engages in R&D in the hope that it leads to new or improved products and processes which will allow it make more bucks. They don't do it because they're nice guys but, even so, the rest of us benefit from their contribution to technological advance.

This means R&D has the characteristics of a "public good" – a good (or service) that's "non-excludable and non-rivalrous". You can't exclude me from using it (which means you can't charge me for using it) and my use of it doesn't interfere with other people's use of it.

Trouble is, public goods are a major instance of "market failure". We obviously benefit greatly from public goods  – particularly because they're non-rivalrous  – and so would benefit from them being produced in large quantity.

But we can't rely on the market  – profit-motivated businesses  – to produce as much of them as we'd like. Why not? Because they're non-excludable. Because too many people can use them without paying.

Economists call this the "free-rider" problem. They also say public goods generate "positive externalities"  – benefits that go to people even though they weren't a party to the original transaction between seller and buyer.

Where market failure can be demonstrated, you've made the case for government intervention in the market to correct the failure by "internalising the externality"  – always provided the intervention doesn't end up making matters worse, which these days is called "government failure".

So economists have long accepted the case for government to subsidise private R&D because this will benefit all of us, not just the business that gets the subsidy.

Of course, this is just theory. It's worth checking to see if our government's R&D tax concession really does produce positive externalities. Does the knowledge generated by the subsidised firm really "spill over" to other firms? And, if so, what can we learn about how this works?

To answer these questions the Industry department made available to Dr Sasan Bakhtiari and Professor Robert Breunig, of the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy, data from its administration of the R&D program.

The program began in 1985, but the data used was from 2001 to 2011, during which time the number of participants grew from less than 4000 firms to more than 9000.

The program was open to firms in all industries, but the main industries using it were manufacturing, professional and scientific services, mining, and information media and telecommunications.

The researchers found evidence of significant spillovers of knowledge to particular firms from firms in the same industry, their suppliers, their client firms and from universities. Significantly, these spillovers came from outfits located within 10 km of the receiving firm, except in the case of suppliers, which were located more than 250 km away.

This leads the researchers to conclude, in line with other research, that knowledge spillovers from competitors and client firms mostly occur through face-to-face contacts between the R&D staff of the two firms.

So now you know why firms in the same business tend to cluster together, why that's a good thing and also, perhaps, why more and more of the nation's economic activity happens in or near the central business districts of our capital cities.

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The best economists know the market is flawed

As almost every economist will tell you, the market economy – the capitalist system, if you prefer – works in a way that's almost miraculous. All of us owe our present prosperity to it.

Think of it: each of us in the marketplace – whether we're buyers or sellers, consumers or producers – is acting in our own interests. A butcher sells us meat not to do us a favour, but to make a living. We, in turn, buy our meat from him not to do him a favour, but to feed ourselves.

That's how market economies work: everyone seeks to advance their own interests without regard for the interests of others. It ought to produce chaos, but doesn't.

Somehow the market's "invisible hand" has taken all our selfish motivations and transformed them into an orderly, smooth-working system from which we all benefit. The butcher makes her living; we get the meat we need.

Heard that story before? It contains much truth. But not the whole truth. Business people, economists and politicians often use it to imply that everything that happens in a market economy is wonderful.

Or they use it to argue that the best way to get the most out of a market economy is to keep it as free as possible from intervention by meddling governments. We should keep government as small as possible and taxes as low as possible.

But market economies aren't always orderly and smooth working. They move through cycles of wonderful booms but terrible busts.

And it's not true that "all things work together for good". A fair bit of the self-seeking behaviour of producers isn't miraculously converted into consumer benefit.

I've been reading a book called Phishing for Phools, a play on the online practice of phishing: posing as a reputable company to trick people into disclosing personal information.

The authors say that "if business people behave in the purely selfish and self-serving way that economic theory assumes, our free-market system tends to spawn manipulation and deception.

"The problem is not that there are a lot of evil people. Most people play by the rules and are just trying to make a good living. But, inevitably, the competitive pressures for businessmen to practice deception and manipulation in free markets lead us to buy, and pay too much for, products that we do not need; to work at jobs that give us little purpose; and to wonder why our lives have gone amiss."

You're probably not terribly surprised to read such sentiments. The surprise is that they're being expressed by two economics professors, George Akerlof, of the University of California, Berkeley (and husband of the chair of the US Federal Reserve), and Robert Shiller, of Yale University, who are held in such high regard by their peers that they're separate winners of the Nobel prize in economics.

They say they wrote the book as admirers of the free-market system, but hoping to help people better find their way in it.

If competition between business people too often induces them to manipulate their customers, why do we so often fall for it? Because though economists assume we always act in our own best interest, psychologists have convincingly demonstrated that people frequently make decisions that aren't in their best interest.

The market often gives people what they think they want rather what they really want. The authors point to common market outcomes that can't possibly be wanted.

One is a high degree of personal financial insecurity. "Most adults, even in rich countries, go to bed at night worried about how to pay the bills," they say. Too many people find it too hard to always resist the blandishments of marketers so as to live easily within their budgets.

It was all the phishing for phools in financial markets – people were sold houses they couldn't afford; people sold securities that weren't as safe as they were professed to be – that led to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession that hurt so many.

Then there's the way processed foods from supermarkets and food sold by fast-food outlets and restaurants come laced with the health-harming things they know we love: salt, fat and sugar.

The authors say a great deal of phishing comes from supplying us with misleading or erroneous information. "There are two ways to make money. The first is the honest way: give customers something they value at $1; produce it for less.

"But another way is to give customers false information or induce them to reach a false conclusion so they think that what they are getting for $1 is worth that, even though it is actually worth less."

Another class of phishing involves playing psychological tricks on us. According to the research of the American psychologist Robert Cialdini, we're phishable because we want to reciprocate gifts and favours, because we want to be nice to people we like, because we don't want to disobey authority, because we tend to follow others in deciding how to behave, because we want our decisions to be internally consistent, and because we are averse to taking losses.

There's no better way to organise an economy than by using markets. But market outcomes are often far from perfect and we need governments to regulate them as well as offset some of their worst effects.

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Broken public service leads to broken governance

There's no bigger question in politics today than why our governance has become so bad. Why our discussion of policies is so superficial and how any government could come up with so many ill-considered policies as we saw in Tony Abbott's first budget.

No doubt the answer has many parts, but the more I think about Laura Tingle's Quarterly Essay, Political Amnesia, the more I think she's identified a key but neglected part of the explanation.

She says our politicians and public servants have forgotten how to govern. In particular, the public service has lost much of its policy expertise – including its memory of what works and what doesn't.

And the politicians have forgotten that they can't do their job to the electorate's satisfaction without the guidance of an expert public service. That's what the bureaucracy is for.

Relations between the politicians and their bureaucrats are so little discussed by the media that I suspect many people still have a Yes, Minister view of what goes on in Canberra: the public servants pretend to be the servants of the politicians, but they're actually the bosses. Government is run by a bunch of Sir Humphreys who manipulate their ministers, pollies who come and go without making much difference.

It did indeed work like that in Canberra as well as Whitehall, but that's been becoming less and less true since the 1970s. By now it's the very opposite of the truth. These days, ministers and their private office advisers have most of the power and their departments have surprisingly little.

I might have said Treasury was the major exception to the new rule, were it not for the unprecedented disaster of the 2014 budget.

No influential Treasury and Finance departments could have handed their political masters such a booby trap. It had to be largely the pollies' and their advisers' own incompetence.

The move from Yes, Minister to Be It On Your Own Head, Minister has come in stages, starting with the decision of the Whitlam government to allow ministers a much greater personal staff of (unaccountable) policy advisers and media managers. The Fraser government perpetuated this "reform" with enthusiasm.

The Hawke-Keating government's main contribution was to replace "permanent heads" of departments with department secretaries on five-year contracts. After five years heading one department you'd be moved to heading another.

Thirty-odd years of this and now senior bureaucrats rarely stay long in any department, but climb the ladder by moving from department to department.

They've gone from being long-experienced experts in particular policy areas to "universal managers". I may not know much about health or finance, but I know how to run a department. Great.

It was John Howard who, on coming to government, immediately sacked many department heads. Abbott did the same on a smaller scale, but even sacked the secretary to the Treasury (and his likely successor).

Their purpose was not so much to "politicise" the public service as to scare hell out of the other department heads: toe the line, don't give fearless advice. And don't get identified with a controversial policy the other side may take exception to.

The plain fact is the Libs neither like nor trust the public service, the last bastion of the hated union movement. They've largely given up the practice of having many of the jobs in ministers' offices done by people on secondment from their department.

They've been replaced by young bossyboots hoping for a career in politics, who know more about partisanship than policy and are more inclined to listen to lobbyists.

Add to this the annual, deeper, across-the-board cuts in departmental budgets – ironically known as "efficiency dividends" – and you end up making many policy experts and repositories of corporate memory redundant.

The result is that many departments are weak on policy – there was a time when officers in Finance knew where each department's bodies were buried – and have to call in expensive consultants, who act like they know more than they do. The part of Treasury responsible for tax reform has lost a third of its staff.

Last year's budget and the fate of its progenitors stand as a lasting monument to the folly of running down the bureaucracy's policy-making capacity and limiting its role in policy formation in favour of young amateurs with a party pedigree.

Fortunately, there are signs Malcolm Turnbull has learnt this lesson. He has just appointed his former department secretary in Communications as his chief-of-staff, and brought sacked Treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson in from the cold to be secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet.

He's too smart to think he doesn't need the bureaucrats' advice.

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Economy's transition grinds on, despite quarterly bumps

What an exciting week it's been for lovers of thrills and spills in the economy. This time three months ago they were telling us it was near to subsiding into recession in the June quarter, but now they're telling us it took off like a rocket in the September quarter.

Phew, what a miraculous escape. Or what a load of cods, brought to us by those who've learnt nothing from years of watching the national accounts' gyrations in real gross domestic product from one quarter to the next.

You can either take those gyrations literally, or you can "look through" them, hoping for a better idea of what's really happening in the economy. The advantage of the first approach is that it's a lot more exciting. The disadvantage is that it convinces the public that economists know nothing and aren't to be trusted.

Let's take the story back a further three months to the March quarter. The literalists told us the economy was growing strongly because the Bureau of Statistics announced a first stab at growth in the quarter of 0.9 per cent.

Then we get growth slumping to 0.2 per cent (since revised to 0.3 per cent) in the June quarter, and now we get it soaring by another 0.9 per cent last quarter.

If you had a better feel for arithmetic than the literalists, you might think that, since the March quarter increase was a lot bigger than could have been expected, it wasn't all that surprising the June quarter increase was a lot smaller than could have been expected.

And since the June quarter increase was a lot smaller than could have been expected, it wasn't all that surprising the September quarter increase was a lot bigger than could have been expected.

It's notable that the component of GDP that explained most of the weakness in the June quarter also did most to explain the strength in the September quarter: the volume of exports.

Export volumes grew by an unusually strong 3.7 per cent in the March quarter, then fell by 3.3 per cent in the June quarter, then grew by an unusually strong 4.6 per cent in the latest quarter.

This tells us little about what was happening in the wider economy. Rather, it tells us how climate change is playing havoc with the bureau's seasonal adjustment process.

Huh? Export volumes have been growing mainly because all our new coal and iron ore mines are coming into production. Seasonally adjusted exports of coal were up in the March quarter because there were fewer cyclones than usually happen at that time of year.

They were down in the June quarter because the weather was much worse than usual. And why did they rebound in the September quarter? You guessed it: the weather was better than normal.

So those economists warning that our strong GDP growth in the latest quarter is unlikely to represent the start of a better growth trajectory are no doubt right.

But those people arguing that, since the growth in exports last quarter accounts for more than all the growth in GDP in the quarter, the domestic economy obviously went backwards and so must be very weak, aren't making a sensible comparison.

It's not sensible to give the "domestic economy" no credit for all the export growth our miners are generating, while making it bear the full burden of the sharp fall in mining investment spending.

No, to get a better idea of how the great "transition" to broader-based growth is progressing, it makes more sense to divide the economy between the mining and mining-related sector, and the rest of the economy.

Doing this shows that, whereas the latest accounts say the overall economy grew by 2.5 per cent over the year to September – a quite believable figure – the non-mining economy grew by about 3 per cent.

That is, when you put all the elements of mining together – the growth in its production and exports, the fall in its investment spending and the associated fall in imports of mining equipment – you find that, rather than accounting for more than all of it, mining is actually subtracting from overall growth.

To get a better handle on what's happening inside the non-mining sector, the Reserve Bank reported in its latest statement on monetary policy an exercise where it set aside mining – and agriculture – and divided the rest of the economy into three sectors.

First was the "goods-related" sector, composed of manufacturing, construction, utilities and distribution (transport, wholesale and retail trade). Second was the "household services" sector, including health, education, hospitality and recreation.

Third was the "business services" sector, including professional and scientific services, finance and insurance, hiring and real estate, and information and telecommunications.

The rate of growth in the household services sector has increased considerably over the past few years. It has experienced increased employment and job vacancies over the past year or more.

The rate of growth in the business services sector has picked up a bit, to be about average. It has experienced a recovery in job vacancies and employment.

So the economy's huge services sector is doing reasonably well. It's the goods-related sector where output growth remains weak, little changed for more than two years. Vacancies and employment have been little changed for about three years.

Thus there's been an accelerated shift from goods to services. And since services are more labour-intensive, while the goods-related sector is more capital-intensive, this explains why non-mining business investment has yet to recover.

It also explains why, economy-wide, we've enjoyed above-average growth in employment in spite of below-average growth in GDP for the past year or more.

So the transition to broader-based growth is proceeding. And once the huge fall in mining investment spending has come to an end, our growth figures should look a lot better than they do now. That, too, is just arithmetic.

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Times get tougher for the oldies

Glenn Stevens, governor of the Reserve Bank, is used to getting letters from angry citizens. Aside from the ones demanding to know why the Reserve can't solve all our problems by just printing more money, in days past most would have come from small-business people complaining about the latest increase in the official interest rate, which had taken their overdraft rate to ruinous levels.

These days, most come from angry retirees complaining about yet another cut in rates. Doesn't he realise people are trying to live on the interest on their savings?

That's the trouble with interest rates, of course, they cut both ways – a cost of borrowers, but income to savers. The media assume we're all borrowers, so they boo rate rises and cheer rate cuts, adding insult to the oldies' injury.

Like all central banks, the Reserve raises interest rates when it wants to slow the economy by discouraging borrowing and spending, and cuts rates when it wants to speed things up – as now. It jumps that way because households' and businesses' debts total a lot more than their savings.

When I was a young economic journalist in the 1970s, the retired were always complaining about high inflation. Their cost of living was rising rapidly, but they had to live on "fixed incomes" that didn't keep pace.

We eventually solved that problem. Interest rates caught up with higher inflation and, as well, we moved to adjusting pensions regularly in line with prices and then with wages. By the early 1990s we finally had inflation back under control.

How times change. These days, most people retire with superannuation or other savings, which they use to supplement – or occasionally replace – their pension. And since they need to live on the earnings from their savings, they need those earnings to be steady, not go up and down like the share market.

Thus the retired like to put most of their savings in interest-bearing bank accounts, term deposits or pension funds that have most of their money in bonds. So these days a lot of retired are back to living on "fixed incomes", meaning they hate to see interest rates falling.

Our official interest rate is down to 2 per cent, a record low, having been cut 10 times since late 2011. The rates paid to savers are only a little higher. Even so, our rates are relatively high compared with most advanced countries. They're near zero in most developed economies, and in parts of Europe you actually have to pay the bank a tiny percentage to persuade it to hold your money.

I'll let you into an open secret: Stevens will be retiring as governor next September, though since he'll only be 58 – just a boy, really – I doubt he'll be putting his feet up.

He said a few things last week that make you think he's turning his mind to retirement. And he doesn't like what he sees.

"My guess is that global interest rates are still going to be very low for a good part of the decade ahead," he told the Australian Business Economists.

It's likely the US Federal Reserve will raise its official interest rate a fraction this month. But Stevens doesn't see US rates rising far. The European Central Bank and the Bank of Japan were "a long way from even thinking about higher interest rates". And the Europeans are openly contemplating further cuts.

So the average official interest rate in the major money centres may be very low for quite a while, he said.

Trouble is, "in a low interest-rate world, the problems of providing retirement incomes will become ever more prominent".

The very low level of yields (returns) on government bonds and other fixed-interest securities means the prices of such securities are very high (it was actually rising bond prices that caused yields to go so low).

So these days it costs you or your pension fund a lot just to buy securities that pay such low amounts of interest. Which is another way of saying you now need to retire with a lot more savings than you did to maintain a given standard of living.

Added to that, we're living longer and so need our savings to last longer.

Stevens said the retiree can, of course, respond to the reduced attractiveness of fixed-interest securities by holding more of her savings in dividend-paying shares. This involves accepting more risk of volatility, of course.

Certain well-known Aussie companies pay big, steady dividends, which usually come with refundable income tax rebates (known as franking credits) attached. Most people would also be hoping to see these dividends grow over time, as inflation continues.

"It certainly seems that many Australian listed corporates feel the pressure from shareholders to deliver that, even some whose earnings are inherently volatile," Stevens said.

Can the corporate sector realistically promise growing dividends over a long period? Not without being prepared to take on greater risk by investing in new projects.

"How much of that risk an older shareholder base will allow boards and managements of listed entities to take is an important question," he said.

"Overall, in a world where a bigger proportion of the population wants to be retired and living (even if only in part) off the return on their savings, those returns are likely, all other things equal, to be lower."

A good argument for delaying retirement.

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Let’s not repeat our many competition stuff-ups

The belief that increased competition leads to greater efficiency and higher productivity is one of the articles of faith for admission to the economic priesthood.

Economic practitioners often know little about the peculiarities of particular markets – about their specific areas of market failure – and often don't think they need to know because what they do know about is their profession's two magic answers to inefficiency.

The first is to "get the incentives right" (the claimed rationale for much tax reform) and the second is to increase competitive pressure.

There's a lot of truth to both propositions, but not as much as it suits economists to believe. Because it comes from their model of markets, many economists' belief that the more competition the better – and the more choice the better – is so deeply ingrained it requires no empirical confirmation.

This makes economists chronic sufferers from what psychologists call "confirmation bias" – they make a mental note of all the examples they see that seem to confirm their pre-existing views about how the economy works, but quickly forget those examples that don't.

So when the Turnbull government confidently asserts that implementing the many recommendations of Professor Ian Harper's review of competition policy will do much to lift the economy's rate of productivity improvement, few economists are inclined to demur.

Many of the reforms Harper proposes make much sense: ending the protection of chemists, coastal shipping and the owners of taxi licences and intellectual property, rationalising the pricing regimes for roads and water, and changing to an "effects test" in trade practices law.

Initially, Harper wanted deregulation of liquor licensing laws, but pulled back when economists who did know about the market failures in the area showed him evidence of the significant "negative social externalities​" (e.g. people getting bashed outside pubs) associated with alcohol consumption. Who knew?

Unfortunately, Harper's church-going ways haven't helped him appreciate the potentially adverse effects on family life – family life? Why would an economist know or care about family life? – arising from further deregulation of retail trading hours.

We'll see how many of Harper's braver proposals are actually implemented. In any case, most of them are up to the premiers, not the feds.

But the most potentially alarming is Harper's proposal that the principles of competition policy be extended to the domain of "human services" – healthcare, education and community services – which is mainly the responsibility of the states.

There's no denying that health and education are areas of huge government spending and economic significance, replete with inefficiencies and ineffectiveness. They ought to be much higher on the reform agenda than yet more tinkering with the tax system and the wage-fixing rules.

But to frame them as part of competition policy is an old economists' trick: take an area that's always been outside the marketplace and marketise​ it. Take the world as it is and make it more like the textbook assumes it to be.

Apply the economists' two magic answers – getting the incentives right and introducing competition and choice – and everything will fix itself without the economists ever needing to come to grips with the causes of the particular inefficiencies that are causing the problem.

Brilliant. But often disastrous. Think of the string of stuff-ups that have followed the econocrats' efforts to contract-out the provision of government services.

Think of the allegations of widespread rorting by operators of the job services network that replaced the Commonwealth Employment Service.

Think of the way contracting-out of childcare services allowed the rise and collapse of ABC Learning, at great cost and inconvenience to parents and taxpayers.

Think of last week's collapse of Vocation Ltd and the much wider rorting of the misguided experiment with profit-motivated provision of higher education. Federal and state "reformers" are totally stuffing up vocational education in response to the problems with TAFE.

Think of all the money federal taxpayers have pumped into private schools in the sacred name of choice, without any evidence of this wider competition leading to higher standards of education on either side of the fence.

Think of all the effort put into the MySchool website to promote choice and competition while our scores continue to slide on the international indicators of literacy and numeracy.

Even the pink batts scheme is an example of the disaster – and death – that can follow when you naively give profit-motivated business people a pipeline into government coffers.

Sorry, econocrats. If you want to achieve genuine improvements in the delivery of health and education and community services, you'll have to try a mighty lot harder than applying magic answers.

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GDP slows as population slows

When is slower economic growth not such a bad thing? When it's caused by lower growth in the population.

If that puzzles you, you're a victim of the economists' practice of focusing on growth in gross domestic product rather than GDP per person.

Nigel Ray, a deputy secretary of Treasury, acknowledged in a speech to the Australian Business Economists this week that last financial year, 2014-15, the economy recorded its third straight year of below-trend growth.

"This means Australia is now in a prolonged period of below-par growth, the likes of which we have rarely seen outside of a recession," he said.

We'll be seeing the national accounts for the September quarter on Wednesday, but they're unlikely to show much improvement.

Reserve Bank heavies have been hinting at it for months, but this week Ray made it official: the economy's trend rate of growth is actually lower than the econocrats had been assuming in recent years.

But what exactly is "trend" growth? Good question because there are actually two versions of it (or three if you include the Bureau of Statistics' practice of referring to its smoothed seasonally adjusted estimates as "trend" estimates).

The backward-looking version of trend is the economy's average actual rate of growth over past 10 years or more. Since 1976-77, for instance, real GDP has grown at an average rate of 3.1 per cent a year.

If nothing in the economy ever changed, the backward-looking version of trend would be the same as the forward-looking version, but things do change.

The future trend rate of growth is also known as the economy's "potential" rate of growth, the maximum rate at which it can grow over the medium-term – periods of five or 10 years or so – without causing a big problem with inflation.

The economy's potential rate of growth is the rate at which its ability to produce goods and services is growing.

This, therefore, refers to the supply side of the economy. The supply side involves combining the economy's three "factors of production" – land, labour and capital – to produce goods and services.

Here, "land" includes natural resources and "capital" means man-made, physical capital, such as buildings and equipment, but also roads and other public infrastructure.

But the economists' custom is to view the economy's supply side – its capacity to produce goods and services – through the perspective of just one factor, labour.

So the economy's potential output is seen as being determined by "the three Ps": population, participation and productivity. Potential growth in production is determine by growth in the population of working age (everyone 15 and over) plus change in the rate at which people of working age choose to participate in the labour force by working or seeking work, plus growth in the productivity of labour (average output per hour worked).

Of course, the economy's potential to supply goods and services is only half the story. How much is actually produced in any period will be determined by the demand for goods and services at the time.

Demand can't exceed supply (when it tries, the excess demand that can't be satisfied from imports just forces prices up), but it can fall short of potential supply. When it does, labour is unemployed or underemployed (people not working as many hours as they want to) and factories and offices have idle capacity.

That's the position we've been in for the past three years: the growth in our demand for goods and services has been falling short of the growth in our potential to supply them. So when the econocrats say growth has been "below trend", that's what they mean.

And every year that actual output falls short of our potential output we get a widening in what economists call "the output gap", which will be manifest in rising unemployment or underemployment as well as unused production capacity in factories and offices.

Whereas we usually think of potential output as an annual rate of growth, the output gap is measured as the difference between the absolute levels of potential and actual output.

The size of the output gap is an indicator of the failure of the managers of the macro economy to achieve their goal of keeping its actual growth in line with its potential growth – that is, to keep it growing at full capacity or "full employment" (of all the factors of production, not just labour).

The continued existence of the business cycle means they can never achieve this goal, of course, but it's still their job to try.

The size of the output gap is also a measure of the extent to which a recovering economy can for a few years grow faster than its trend (potential) rate without that causing any inflation problem. A period of above-trend growth is actually the only way to eliminate the output gap and get the economy back to growing at its full-employment rate.

For some years the econocrats' estimate has been that the economy's potential or (forward-looking) trend rate of growth is 3 per cent a year, compared with its actual growth over the year to June of 2.3 per cent.

Ray said this includes an assumption that the working-age population grows by 1.75 per cent a year, its actual rate over the past 10 years. But now actual growth has slowed to 1.5 per cent because of a decline in holders of temporary visas and lower net migration from New Zealand.

So Treasury has cut its estimate of trend (potential) growth to 2.75 per cent, thereby reducing its estimate of the size of the output gap.

Why is this not such a bad thing? Because, although the growth in workers helping to produce goods and services is likely to be lower than we thought, there'll also be fewer people we have to share those goods and services with. GDP per person shouldn't be much affected.

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Oldies looked after while young don't notice

If I was going to wander around the inner city chalking messages on the pavement in copperplate, they wouldn't say Eternity. They'd say Wake Up. Why? Because, contrary to rumour, the Nanny State doesn't exist.

If you fail to pay attention because you assume that the market economy will always deliver you a square deal, you're heading for disillusionment. If you think it's the government's job to ensure no one ever rips you off, you have much to learn.

Indeed, it's just as likely to be the pollies who decided to short-change you when they realised you were too busy watching reality television to notice.

Take the great debate about tax reform. Now the best-informed are telling us the government has thought better of changing the goods and services tax, I fear the debate will turn in a distinctly more boring direction – to reducing the generosity of tax concessions for superannuation.

Mention super and everyone over 50 pricks up their ears, while everyone under 50 wonders what's on telly tonight. To date, that's meant that the over-50s have been looked after at the expense of the under-50s.

To date, the debate over super tax concessions has been about their rapidly growing cost – about $25 billion a year in reduced tax collections – and the fact that the lion's share of this loss to the budget goes to high-income earners (like me). That is, it's a question of fairness between rich and poor.

But in their latest paper on super tax concessions, to be released on Wednesday, John Daley, Brendan Coates and Danielle Wood, of the Grattan Institute, argue that the reform of super can also be advocated on the grounds of fairness between the old and the young.

It's not something often talked about, but our budget and social security arrangements – as with all advanced economies – have a "generational bargain" built into them.

The bargain is simple: except perhaps for the period when they're raising a family, people of working age generally pay more in tax than they get back in benefits, with the difference used to provide those who are too old to work with a lot more in benefits than the little they pay in taxes.

Since we all expect to get old one day, this was regarded as a quite fair bargain between the generations. And until recently, paying for it all wasn't a big problem, because the number of workers was growing a lot faster than the number of oldies.

What's changed is the ageing of the population and the retirement of the baby boomers, which means the number of oldies needing to be supported from the budget has started growing a lot faster than the number of workers.

But Daley and his co-authors point out that it's not just demography that's undermining the generational bargain. The politicians have been making it worse by increasing the generosity of benefits to the old.

In Australia's case, John Howard was always slipping extra benefits to the alleged "self-funded retirees", who he regarded as a key part of the Liberal heartland. He gave them the senior Australians tax offset and made it easier for them to get health cards and the pensioners' rate for pharmaceutical benefits.

Then Peter Costello came along and made a lot of supposedly self-funded people eligible for a part pension, as well as making super payouts completely tax-free for people over 60.

Not to be outdone, Kevin Rudd granted pensioners a big discretionary increase on top of regular indexation to average weekly earnings.

Daley and his colleagues show that the largest increases in government spending have been on healthcare (where federal and state governments spend twice as much on each 60-year-old as on a 30-year-old) and the age pension.

"Both of these spending categories grew substantially faster than gross domestic product, not because of the ageing of the population, but because of explicit and implicit choices to spend more per person of a given age," they say.

In 2010, and after removing the effect of inflation, the two levels of government spent $9400 a year more per household over 65 than they did six years earlier. At the same time, the average amount of income tax paid by those 65 and over fell in real terms, despite an increase in incomes.

This generosity has been funded by running budget deficits and borrowing to cover them. Who'll be paying the interest on that debt? Not the oldies.

Over the past decade, according to Grattan's calculations, older households captured most of the growth in Australia's wealth. Households aged between 65 and 74 years today are $400,000 (or 27 per cent) wealthier in real terms than households of that age 10 years ago.

Meanwhile, the wealth of households aged 25 to 34 years fell by $2000 (or 4 per cent).

This is partly explained by rising house prices, of course. Older households are far more likely to own their home than younger households. And, of course, the value of their home is ignored when assessing their eligibility for an age pension.

If the young do take an interest in the reform of super tax concessions, they'll find they're being asked to agree to exclude themselves from the largess being enjoyed by the older generation. But until a halt is called, the generational unfairness will keep worsening.

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Lower-tax dream feeds the budget deficit

Remember when we used to worry about the budget deficit? In case you've stopped following the story, recent developments are well summarised by a crikey.com headline: Lucky we don't have a revenue problem, because revenue looks bad.

The big budget news last week was that wages grew by just 2.3 per cent over the year to September, taking wage growth in the private sector - of 2.1 per cent - to its lowest in the 18-year history of the wage price index.

Add to that the recent weakness in iron ore and other commodity prices and it won't be surprising to find Treasury revising down its revenue forecasts yet again when we see the mid-year budget review next month.

The closer the review's publication is to Christmas, the more anxious we'll know the government is to avoid having us realise how far the Coalition's concern about debt and deficit has receded.

Apart from the dishonest nonsense the Coalition talked when in opposition, you could feel some sympathy for it as, like its Labor predecessors, it watches Treasury's confidently predicted resurgence in tax collections fail to materialise year after year.

But it's hard to be sympathetic when you find the new Treasurer, Scott Morrison, instead of seizing the God-given opportunity to set his predecessor's follies behind him, jumping into Hockey's hole and starting to dig.

Morrison hadn't been in the job long before he began repeating a line Hockey had belatedly stopped repeating that, with the budget, "we don't have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem".

Why would any treasurer in his right mind say such a patently stupid thing? Because he's allowing ideological preference to override the plain facts.

There's a strong anti-government prejudice alive in the hard right of the Liberal Party, which proceeds on the assumption that all increases in government spending are wasteful and wrong, whereas all cuts in taxes and increases in tax expenditures are a step forward, even if they add to the budget deficit.

There's some sympathy for these prejudices among economists because their neo-classical model of markets assumes a world composed solely of individual consumers and firms, and thus has a built-in presumption against the legitimacy of any form of collective action.

So, though it's true that Labor's big, unfunded spending plans are part of the present budget problem, it's necessary for the anti-government brigade to insist that excessive spending is the only problem.

The eight tax cuts in a row and Peter Costello's unsustainably generous increases in superannuation tax concessions simply can't be part of the problem since, by assumption, all reductions in tax are a good thing.

Trouble is, this prejudice is what shaped the most politically disastrous budget in living memory, the one that did most to cause its treasurer and prime minister to be deposed within the following 18 months.

The 2014 budget sought to return the budget to surplus almost solely by measures to reduce the growth of government spending, but was repudiated by the electorate and the Senate.

The plain fact is, the great majority of voters are not anti-government. They won't tolerate serious cuts in spending on welfare, health or education, even if they're often tempted by happy talk of lower taxes.

You'd expect the man who lusted after Hockey's job to be the first to get that message, but apparently not. So it's time for Malcolm Turnbull to come in over the top and set the government's thinking on a more sensible course, just as he's doing with defence and security.

Both history and commonsense say the budget won't be got back on track without both spending cuts and revenue measures, particularly cuts in tax expenditures such as super concessions.

Tax reform is the enemy of budget repair. It's being pushed by people who really believe the dream of lower taxes (for them, if not for everyone else).

If the tax package doesn't worsen the budget deficit directly - as it probably will - it will harm it in an opportunity-cost sense by appropriating tax-expenditure savings that should have been used to reduce the deficit.

Tax reform is shaping as a huge anticlimax. By the time Turnbull knocks it into shape politically it will involve a lot of change and political risk, while leaving a lot of people feeling short-changed in the lower-tax department and achieving surprisingly little in the way of improved economic efficiency.

As every Treasury intergenerational report reminds us, tax is headed inexorably up, not down.

The sooner Turnbull kills off the lower-taxes pipe dream, the better he'll be able to manage the nation's affairs.

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Don't imagine China's troubles to be bigger than they are

Is the Chinese economy slowing down or melting down? You don't have to go far to find someone purporting to know a lot more about China than you do, who's making the most apocalyptic predictions.

And who knows? Maybe one day they'll be right. But I'll wait for it to happen before I start worrying.

By the same token, to say China is "slowing" seems a bit euphemistic. Being a developing country you can't say it's in recession the way you might say it of an advanced economy, because developing economies rarely experience an actual contraction in real gross domestic product.

At their worst they just grow at rates that, by their standards, are pretty bad, but by ours we'd be very pleased to have. In that sense it seems likely China is in or entering its own version of a recession.

Its rate of growth has been slowing for more than a year, it probably has more slowing to do, and with a bit of bad luck it could slow a lot more. At worst we're talking about growth in GDP slowing to maybe 4 per cent a year.

The biggest problem – as the doomsayers have long been saying – is the "overhang" from China's long-running real estate boom, in which far more apartments were built than there were people wanting to buy them.

Now housing construction has come to a halt in various parts of China, and it won't resume until the existing stock of empty homes is finally sold off. That could take at least a year, probably two. So the economy won't start to pick up anytime soon.

Limited housing construction means weak or declining growth in the manufacture of housing materials such as crude steel, cement and plate glass.

That's not the whole story, but it does mean the weakness is concentrated in construction and manufacturing, which just happen to be the main components of "industrial production" – an economic indicator the world's financial markets pay great attention to, not least because it's published monthly.

Trouble is, industrial production ain't easy to measure. It's particularly hard to do in developing countries, which don't have the bureaucratic infrastructure we have and where the shape of the economy keeps changing, not to mention the extra problems in measuring it monthly rather than quarterly.

This has prompted some in the markets to suspect a conspiracy rather than a stuff-up, and allege the Chinese authorities are making the numbers up. They may not be as reliable as we'd like, but don't believe that.

Another thing to remember – as people in the market tend to forget – is that industrial production accounts for only about 45 per cent of Chinese GDP. The remaining 55 per cent is in a lot better shape, as a Reserve Bank assistant governor, Dr Christopher Kent, argued in a speech this week.

By the way, if you're looking for someone to trust on China you could do worse than our central bank. It's well aware of the importance of China to our international prospects and so puts a lot more personpower than most into studying it: six or seven economists in Sydney, plus another two attached to our embassy in Beijing.

Kent says that although the weakness in China's property and manufacturing sectors is clearly of concern to commodity exporters like Australia, there are a number of countervailing forces supporting broader activity in China.

"First, growth in the services sector [worth about 45 per cent of GDP] has been resilient, and should continue to be assisted by a shift in demand towards services as incomes rise," he says.

"Second, growth in household consumption has also been stable in recent quarters, aided by the growth in new jobs. Of course, such outcomes cannot be taken for granted; if the industrial weakness is sustained, it might eventually affect household incomes and spending.

"Third, Chinese policymakers have responded to lower growth by easing monetary policy [access to loans] and approving additional infrastructure investment projects.

"They have scope to provide further support if needed, although they may be reticent to do too much if that compromises longer-term goals, such as placing the financial system on a more sustainable footing."

So what does this mean for us? The substantial slowing in industrial production has contributed to the further decline this year in the prices we get for our exports of coal and iron ore. (Of course, the bigger reason for the lower prices we're getting is the substantial increase in the supply of these commodities from places such as Australia.)

Kent says that what transpires with China's industrial production, and in Asia more broadly, will have a big influence on how much further commodity prices fall.

And the changing nature of China's development – a higher proportion of services and lower proportion of goods – limits the potential for commodity prices to go back up.

But here's the good news: Kent reminds us that the shift in demand towards services and Western agricultural products in China and Asia more broadly presents new opportunities for Australian exporters.

As recently as the mid-noughties, China's GDP was growing at the rate of 10 per cent. This is why money-market types are shocked to hear it's now growing by only 6.5 per cent, let alone 4 per cent.

But this just shows that even money-market types can be innumerate. As the distinguished former economic journalist Anatole Kaletsky has reminded us, China's GDP today is $US10.3 trillion ($14.5 trillion).

In 2005 it was $US2.3 trillion. So even just 4 per cent of $US10.3 billion is much more than 10 per cent of $US2.3 trillion.

To the Chinese, what matters most is the rate at which GDP is growing. To the rest of us, however, what matters is the size of the absolute addition the Chinese are contributing to gross world product.

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Terrorism: we must learn to think like economists

I've spent a lot of my life arguing that the hard-headed "rational" analysis so beloved of economists needs to be tempered by human emotion. But it also works the other way: sometimes we need to curb our emotional reactions and force ourselves to think coolly about what we really want and the most sensible ways to go about getting it.

I think this every time we're faced with another terrible act of terrorism. The first emotions are shock and horror, soon followed by a desire to hit back, to find a government to blame and demand action from. Promise us this will never be allowed to happen again.

Such reactions are only human, but when we surrender to them, we leave ourselves open to manipulation by the unscrupulous – and I don't just mean the terrorists.

But that's a good place to start. Terrorism is practised by the weak to get under the guard of strong. Their goal is not so much to terrify us and weaken our resolve as to provoke us into doing something stupid; something that damages us and benefits them.

Vengeance, retaliation, belligerence – these are common emotions at times like this, particularly among men. The great temptation at present is to send all our military might to the Middle East and defeat these forces of evil once and for all.

But how many times have we tried that without it working?

It's not easy to defeat your opponent so completely that no problem remains. It's much easier to make a strike that doesn't fix anything and actually makes things worse.

It never crosses the mind of the bellicose among us that the other side may be hoping to provoke us into hitting back. Why? To make them into martyrs, to show it's Muslims against the world, and to win them support from young potential fighters or terrorists in our midst.

Even the heroes who indulge themselves by shouting at women wearing headscarves are helping the side they hate.

It's arguable that, in its desire to punish someone after the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, the US has made things worse for itself and the rest of us. It's doubtful how much lasting benefit will result from all the lives lost and money spent in Afghanistan.

And the decision to invade and occupy Iraq has achieved little, but has destabilised long-standing enmities in the Middle East, greatly increased hatred of the US and, as the rise of Islamic State demonstrates, created a quagmire from which the Americans can't extract themselves.

No one's allowed to say it, but it's obvious: every time Australia muscles its puny way into these problems on the other side of the world – as if the Americans and Europeans need our help – we increase the risk of terrorism Down Under.

It's funny that the people who worry most about the "unsustainable" growth in government spending, tend to worry least about ever-increasing spending on defence, policing, security and surveillance.

Years of contact with economists has made me hyper-conscious of people using the media to push their vested interests. Almost all the alleged terrorism experts broadcast by a wide-eyed media at times like these seem to have a single message: do more, spend more. Oh, the risks we face.

All the understandable attention the media devote to terrorist attacks, anywhere in the world, can't help but leave us with an exaggerated impression of the risk of such an attack happening here.

A few years ago, Mark Stewart, a professor of civil engineering at my own University of Newcastle, estimated that the risk of an Australian being killed in a terrorist attack is one in 7 million each year, which is about the same as the risk of being struck by lightning.

It's not possible for our politicians to guarantee nothing bad will ever happen to us. But it is possible for them to cover their backsides by spending lots of money, progressively diminishing our freedoms in the name of protecting them, and putting on a show at airports.

A timely article in this week's issue of The Economist says that "a lot of what passes for security at airports is more theatrical than real".

Despite the likelihood that the recent Russian plane crash over the Sinai desert was caused by a bomb in the hold, attempts to blow up airliners are quite rare, it says. And the enhanced airport security introduced after 2001 has played no role in thwarting any attacks.

The ban on carrying liquids on board was introduced in 2006 after a plot to bring down several planes crossing the Atlantic was foiled thanks to a tip-off. In the time since then, nobody has been caught trying to get liquids on board to combine into a bomb.

Nor have any would-be bombers been intercepted since the requirement for passengers to remove their shoes was brought in, after a shoe bomber trying to set off an explosion was subdued by passengers.

The US Transportation Security Administration has a budget of more than $US7 billion ($10 billion) a year, but this year government inspectors succeeded in getting fake bombs and weapons through the screening process in 67 out of 70 tests in airports across the US.

So maybe no passengers have been caught doing the wrong thing because the security is such an effective deterrent, or maybe it's largely a showy waste of our time and money.

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How to fix everything: cut my tax

If I was on a mission to make big progress in increasing productivity and participation in the workforce, I wouldn't start with tax reform.

That the people who profess to be so concerned about productivity and participation have started with tax reform does make you wonder about their motivations. Especially when you realise that the primary beneficiaries of the particular reforms the urgers are seeking would be their good selves.

The motives of the Business Council and other business lobby groups are transparent: their high income-earners want to pay less tax, so are happy to see other people pay more.

To them, this is the attraction of using an increase in the goods and services tax to pay for cuts in income taxes.

The better-off (such as me) benefit because their higher rate of saving limits how much more GST they pay. They benefit even further if the cut in income tax is shaped in a way that favours high income earners.

Powerful people pursuing their self-interest is hardly surprising. Nor is seeing them seek to disguise their self-interest with happy chat about improving incentives to "work, save and invest" and professing to be terribly concerned that Oz will miss out on foreign investment or that all our top executives will be lured away by American corporations.

But if, as a would-be reformer, I did get down the to-do list as far as taxation, what "reforms" would I make?

First, I'd remember that all the bracket-creep we've subjected ourselves to in recent years is the standard way governments achieve a recovery in tax collections after they find they've earlier gone overboard with tax cuts and tax breaks - as we did in the first stage of the resources boom.

I'd remember that Treasury has overstated the extent of bracket creep because its projections assumed a much higher rate of wage growth than has transpired. It's true, however, that bracket creep is regressive, hitting people on the lower tax rates proportionately harder than people whose incomes have reached the top tax rate.

So if I felt it was time to ease up on bracket creep, I'd do it simply by lifting all bracket limits bar the top one by the same percentage, determined by the rate of price (not wage) inflation over the period. This would yield a quite noticeable weekly saving to workers.

That is, I'd belatedly do what in an ideal world I should have been doing once a year: indexing the tax scales to price inflation.

What I wouldn't do is con the punters by using the regressiveness​ of bracket creep as cover for a tax cut biased in favour of high income-earners (particularly when the earlier tax cuts and tax breaks the punters have been paying for were themselves biased in favour of high income-earners).

Second, to cover the cost of this tax cut - and possibly also to increase our tax-raising capacity to cover the future growth in health and education spending Treasury is always agonising over in its intergenerational reports - I'd increase not GST but a uniformly applied land tax (which could apply to the same tax base as local government rates).

Why? Partly because GST is a regressive tax, whereas land tax is progressive, hitting higher-income households proportionately harder than lower-income households.

Do that and the need to "compensate" low income-earners disappears - though it would be necessary to institute reverse-mortgage arrangements for asset-rich/income-poor oldies.

It would also remove the government's temptation to short-change the punters by double-counting the return of bracket-creep as compensation.

Increasing land tax would mean the reform package made the tax system fairer rather than less fair - surely an important goal of honest tax reform.

As well, universally applied land tax is more efficient than GST in that, as every economist is supposed to remember, it would do less to distort people's decisions about whether to "work, save and invest".

The argument that income from capital and, for high earners, income from labour, need to be taxed more lightly because globalisation has made financial capital and executive labour more mobile between countries, is widely used - especially by Treasury - to justify taxing consumption more heavily.

But how can these guys be fair dinkum in this argument when they're overlooking the ultimate immobile tax base, land?

Finally, though excessively generous superannuation tax concessions and capital gains tax concessions are overdue for reform, I'd use the proceeds to reduce the structural budget deficit, not throw them into the tax reform pot to help justify tax cuts for high income-earners.

It's arguable that budget repair is more important than tax reform.

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Go to ex-bureaucrats' blogs for the good oil on policy

Dr Ken Henry, a former Treasury secretary, says he can't recall a time when the debate about public policies has been poorer. I can't either, and I guess the dreaded MSM - mainstream media - is part of the problem.

But if the challenge of digital disruption has tempted the mainstream to devote more time to political colour and movement and less to debating government policies, there's one respect in which the internet has made things better.

The advent of blogging has given anyone who wants to the ability to air their thoughts to the world. A lot of blogs come under the heading of you're-entitled-to-your-opinion, but sometimes they're written by people who know a lot more about the topic than most of us and have a valuable contribution to make.

That's particularly true when academics take to blogging. One of the earliest bloggers about economic policy  was Professor John Quiggin, of Queensland University. Other high quality Australian blogsites are Club Troppo, Core Economics and, for the more libertarian, Catallaxy Files. (There was a blog called Ross Gittins, Corrected but they seem to have given up.)

The best academic blogsite is undoubtedly the uni-sponsored The Conversation. To have all those academics writing short, timely, readable pieces in their area of specialty is an invaluable contribution to the policy debate.

And then there's the blog of the former bureaucrat John Menadue, called Pearls and Irritations. Menadue brings in other contributors, and his blog is the place to go to see ex-bureaucrats casting a critical eye over present government policy.

These guys know where the bodies are buried, and no one sees through the political smoke and mirrors  more easily than they do.

Earlier this year Menadue teamed up with the former econocrat Dr Mike Keating to instigate a special series on the many challenges facing the government today, called Fairness, Opportunity and Security, with a wide range of contributions from ex-bureaucrats (including Stephen Fitzgerald, David Charles, Andrew Podger and Jon Stanford), academics (including Michael Wesley, Ian Marsh, Ian McAuley and Julianne Schultz) and academics who've spent time in government (including Ross Garnaut, Glenn Withers and Stuart Harris).

Now Menadue and Keating have turned the series into a book of the same name, published by AFT Press, which they asked me to launch last week. It covers 13 topics ranging from the role of government to the economy, foreign policy, health, the environment and Indigenous affairs.

In his discussion of the way vested interests seem to have excessive influence over policymaking, Menadue notes the remarkable rise of the lobbying industry, estimating there are now more than 1000 lobbyists operating in Canberra.

"The health 'debate' is really between the minister and the Australian Medical Association, the Australian Pharmacy Guild, Medicines Australia and the private health insurance companies," he writes.

"The debate is not with the public about health policy and strategy; it is about how the minister and the department manage the vested interests."

Menadue says much of the policy skills in Canberra departments have been downgraded and policy work is contracted out to accounting and consultancy firms. Policy work within the government is now undertaken more in specialist organisation such as the Productivity Commission.

"Departmental policy capability has been seriously eroded. That is the real story behind the problems of the pink batts scheme."

As for the "inexperienced and young ministerial staffers", they're "much more likely to listen to vested interests".

On foreign affairs and internal security, the blog collection says we've become overdependent on the United States at the expense of our relations in our region. As Paul Keating once said, we should be "finding our security in, not from, Asia".

In dealing with the threat from terrorism, "a balance needs to be struck between national security and the freedoms essential for a civil society, including the humane treatment of refugees. The politicisation of security has arguably made us less safe."

On Medicare we're told it "has stood the test of time but it now represents the single biggest budgetary challenge and it is over 30 years since it has been seriously reviewed and reformed".

On superannuation, Andrew Podger, former head of various government departments and now a professor at the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy, makes a plea for considered and balanced reform rather than piecemeal tinkering.

You'll go a long way before you find someone providing a more authoritative, independent and sensible commentary on budget repair and other fiscal matters than Mike Keating, former head of the Finance department and Prime Minister's and Cabinet.

In this book he has hardheaded things to say about the dream of lower taxation, which "has been embraced by all political parties without any evidence that, given our already low starting point, less taxation will in fact lead to higher economic growth, let alone pay for itself".

He quotes John Howard saying that tax cuts should be considered only "after you have met all the necessary and socially desirable expenditures".

All the evidence is that these spending demands, even if efficiently funded, are most unlikely to be fiscally sustainable without a modest increase in taxation relative to gross domestic product.

"Indeed, Australia already has lower taxation than almost any other advanced nation, but we aim to provide the same level of public services and welfare as the others," he writes.

"Thus the biggest challenge facing modern governments is the gap between expectations on them and their capacity to deliver.

"In these circumstances, encouraging unrealistic expectations of tax cuts is only making government more difficult."

Reading this collection of blogs leaves you with the impression the good bureaucratic advice our successive governments have needed to do a better job of running the country now resides outside the public service, in the minds of the retired bureaucrats who're from the days when they were expected to know about policy.

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We can grow GDP if we stop growing natural resource use

Some things are more important even than the fate of the goods and services tax. A question I regard as just a tiny bit more significant to our future is whether we can continue increasing our population and material standard of living without doing irreparable damage to the natural environment.

Few of us noticed in all the excitement over tax reform, but last week we made a big step forward in answering this question. The CSIRO unveiled the results of a ground-breaking, two-year project – the Australian National Outlook report – in which it integrated a model of the economy with no less than eight models of different aspects of the global and domestic natural environment in which the economy exists.

So, is ecologically sustainable growth possible? Is it possible to "decouple" continuing economic growth from continuing environmental vandalism?

It depends on what you mean by "growth". There's enormous confusion on this point because what economists take the word to mean is not what scientists take it to mean.

What scientists mean by growth is growth in the "throughput" of natural materials and energy – using those resources to generate economic activity and, in the process, turning them into various forms of pollution and other waste.

They point out that such growth simply cannot continue indefinitely because the natural world – the global ecosystem – is of fixed size. And they have to be right because they're merely stating the first law of thermodynamics.

But that's not what economists mean by growth. They mean an increase in gross domestic product, most of which is cause by increased productivity (efficiency). It may or may not involve an increase in the economy's throughput of natural resources.

So what does the CSIRO's modelling say about whether we can continue to grow without inflicting further damage on the environment?

It says GDP can continue growing strongly, but throughput of natural resources can't. So the people who want continued growth in GDP win, but so do those saying ever-increasing use of natural resources must stop.

Since no one knows the future, CSIRO's economists and scientists ran through their super model 18 different scenarios covering different rates of growth in the global population, different degrees of global action to restrain climate change and a range of differing development in Australia and its economy.

All 18 scenarios project continuing strong growth in Australia's population and GDP out to 2050. But get this: only three of those scenarios also saw improvement or no further deterioration on the model's three key indicators of environmental health: emissions of greenhouse gases, water stress, and loss of native habitat.

As well, two of the three scenarios see no increase in the economy's annual throughput of natural resources, while the third projects a fall in material throughput of 38 per cent.

All this says ecologically sustainable growth and decoupling do seem to be possible, provided the world gets its act together.

The good news is that the model's results don't rely on "technological optimism" (don't worry, market forces will call forth a technological solution to every problem before the proverbial hits the fan) but nor do they require that we renounce our materialist ways and become greenie vegan mud-brick makers.

We don't need to do anything we don't already know how to do and, in many cases, have already begun doing. We just need to do a mighty lot more of it.

The bad news is that we can't do it on our own. To achieve improvement in the key environmental indicators and a fall in material throughput we need effective international action to limit the world's population to 8 billion in 2050 and limit global warming to 2 degrees in 2100.

This would require "very strong" global and Australian effort to reduce greenhouse emissions.

The two other environmentally not-so-bad scenarios – involving world population growing well beyond 8 billion and global warming limited to 3 degrees – would require "strong" global and Australian effort to reduce emissions.

Strong translates as a worldwide price per tonne of carbon dioxide emissions of $US30 ($42) in today's dollars; very strong translates as $US50 a tonne.

These world prices would be applied in Australia. But we'd have a comparative advantage over many countries that would reduce the carbon price's adverse effects on our economy: we could achieve up to half our required reduction in net emissions by "carbon sequestration" – reforestation of cleared land, either with one species of eucalypt (to maximise sequestration) or a range of eucalypts (to also restore native habitat).

At these carbon prices, our farmers could earn up to five times what they make from using the land to produce beef.

Our greenhouse emissions per person would fall from five times the global average in 1990 to below average by 2050.

Our biggest problem would be avoiding water stress, particularly because reforestation would add to the problem. The price of water for agriculture would be a lot higher and, in the cities, we'd have to do a lot more desalination and water recycling for industrial use.

I don't regard this as the last word on the subject. All modelling is far from infallible and this exercise is no different. The good thing is that a last we've made a start at reconciling our materialist ambitions with the constraints imposed by the natural environment we hope to continue living in.

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Tax reformers forget budget repair

Don't say no one warned you. As finally the nation focuses on tax reform, something is quietly slipping out of our grasp: the return to a balanced budget.

How so? Short answer: an annoying little thing called opportunity cost. Long answer: tax reform and budget repair are, to a significant extent, in conflict. The more we get of one, the less we get of the other.

So which does the government, its big business urgers and most economists want more? The choice will be most excruciating for Treasury.

The first reason for doubting we'll ever see a return to structural budget balance starts with simple arithmetic. For tax reform to have no direct effect on repair of the budget, the total reform package needs to be "budget neutral": its net changes on the revenue side should exactly offset its net changes on the spending side.

But major, potentially unpopular tax reform doesn't work that way. In practice, governments need to minimise the number of net losers by giving away more than they take.

John Howard's package introducing the goods and services tax in 2000, for instance, was heavily budget negative. He'd taken the precaution of saving up, so to speak, to pay for disproportionate tax cuts by amassing huge bracket creep, having avoided tax cuts for five or six years.

Of course, he had the budget well back into surplus by then and could take the hit without causing concern.

Nothing about Malcolm Turnbull's rhetoric suggests he's headed for a budget neutral package. He's been assuring his right wing that the package won't involve any net increase in the overall tax take.

But if it's revenue neutral rather than revenue positive, that means it has to be budget negative.

Why? Because the package will need to compensate low-income earners via increased spending on pensions, the dole and family allowances.

And if the premiers aren't to oppose the reform package, the feds will need to pay a fair proportion of the GST proceeds to the states. This would represent a decrease in Tony Abbott's $80 billion in prospective budget savings from cuts to the states' grants for schools and hospitals, already in the budget's forward estimates.

The second reason for doubting the budget will ever be repaired is that much of the present deficit is structural rather than cyclical. Turnbull has been saying the budget will return to surplus once the economy gets back to trend growth.

Sorry, Malcolm, not right. By definition, to say we have a structural deficit – as Treasury does in each year's budget papers – is to say the budget will still be in deficit even when we've returned to the normal part of the business cycle.

Structural deficits are the cumulative effect of past unfunded decisions to cut taxes or increase spending. This may not have been obvious at the time if the economy happened to be booming, giving you a big cyclical surplus to hide your transgressions.

This is why so much of our present structural deficit is owed to the decisions made by the Howard government during the first stage of the resources boom, including the eight successive tax cuts and, notably, Peter Costello's unsustainably generous increase in superannuation tax concessions in 2007. Also, Howard's halving of capital gains tax in 1999 (which has done so much to fuel negative gearing).

Labor's unfunded spending on the national disability insurance scheme and the Gonski school funding reforms have added to the structural problem laid by the Coalition, though much of this spending is to come.

Apart from allowing bracket creep, the only way to eliminate a structural deficit is via explicit cuts in spending and "tax expenditures" (special tax breaks), and explicit tax increases.

With tax cuts and tax expenditures playing such a big part in creating the structural problem, to resolve to fix it solely via spending cuts is a recipe for failure. That's the lesson of last year's disastrous budget.

The obvious way to begin eliminating the structural deficit is to reverse at least some of the irresponsible tax expenditures that gave rise to it. However, if Turnbull summons the courage to act on super and capital gains, it's likely he'll use the proceeds to make his tax package look fairer, not to cut the deficit.

The third reason for doubting we'll ever see budget repair also concerns opportunity cost. Even a leader as popular as Turnbull has a limited supply of political credit to draw on.

The more points he uses on the unpopular elements of his tax reform package, the fewer are left to cover the unpopular measures needed to get the budget back to balance.

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CSIRO fills Treasury's gap on environment modelling

After Treasury's hopelessly inadequate attempt to peer into the future in its intergenerational report earlier this year, just look at the far more fair dinkum future-viewing exercise that CSIRO unveiled on Thursday.

Treasury's effort was little more than a propaganda exercise about the need to restrain government spending, and showed clear signs of government interference. It was widely criticised for purporting to tell us what could happen to the economy over the next 40 years while making no allowance for the effects of climate change and other environmental problems.

By contrast, CSIRO's peer-reviewed modelling exercise attempts to look at what may happen to the economy out to 2050, after accounting for the economic effects of climate change – and our efforts to reduce it – plus other environmental problems such as energy use, water use and use of other natural resources.

This attempt to integrate changes in the natural environment with standard economic modelling is a heroic effort, the first time to my knowledge it's been attempted for our economy.

It's contained in CSIRO's first Australian National Outlook report, but also reported separately in this week's issue of the prestigious scientific journal, Nature.

The project was directed by Dr Steve Hatfield-Dodds, a former Treasury economist now with CSIRO, with participation by another three economists and 13 scientists, mainly from CSIRO.

The question they sought to answer was whether the mounting ecological pressures in Australia can be reversed while our population continues growing and our material living standards continue rising.

To put it another way, can economic growth be "decoupled" from natural resource use and environmental stress?

The modelling takes a fairly conventional "computable general equilibrium" model of our economy, but surrounds it with eight other models of different aspects of the environment – global climate change and economic growth, water use, energy use, transportation, land use, material flows and biodiversity – which have effects on the economy.

But can any person or model accurately predict what will happen in the future? Of course not. So the exercise identifies 18 different plausible "scenarios" of how things may unfold and runs each of them through the nine-model set-up.

Each scenario combines differing global drivers of change with differing domestic drivers. The global drivers cover differing rates of growth in the global population by 2050 – it may grow to 8 billion, 9 billion or 11 billion – and differing rates of greenhouse gas emission.

Limiting global warming to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100 would require "very strong" efforts to "abate" (reduce) emissions. Limiting it to 3 degrees would require either a "strong" abatement effort if the global population was allowed to grow to 11 billion, or a "moderate" effort if the population grew only to 9 billion.

That leaves "no abatement action", with the global population growing to 11 billion and global warming reaching 6 degrees. Gasp.

The domestic drivers of change cover differing degrees of improvement in agricultural productivity, differing land-use changes from the development of reforestation markets for sequestration of carbon dioxide or for protection of biodiversity, individuals' take-up of opportunities to use energy and water more efficiently, how much of our improving productivity we take as reduced working hours rather than higher real incomes, and how much of our consumer spending we devote to buying "experiences" rather than goods.

(Turns out those last two drivers made little difference to environmental outcomes, according to the model.)

It's assumed that Australia's abatement effort is at the same rate as the global effort. Up to half our net reduction in emissions is achieved by "carbon sequestration" – withdrawing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in plants – achieved by reforestation of cleared land.

So, we build this amazing nine-model model, then run each of the 18 different scenarios through it. What results do we get?

In all scenarios, the economy and living standards are projected to grow strongly. The value of economic activity (gross domestic product) is projected to rise 10-fold over the 80 years to 2050 (the exercise actually starts in 1970, with actual data up to 2012).

This increase in GDP is driven by a 2.9-fold increase in population, leaving a 3.2- to 3.6-fold increase in GDP per person.

On some scenarios, net greenhouse emissions fall to zero or lower by 2040. From four times the global average today, our emissions per person could fall below the global average by 2050.

Apart from reforestation, emission reduction comes from reduced emissions (within Australia, not elsewhere) and from the economy's reduced resource-intensity (that is, fewer natural resources being used to generate each dollar of GDP).

National water extractions are projected to maybe double in 2050, but up to half this increase could be met by desalination in coastal cities and water recycling for industrial use.

Water stress – seen in rain-fed water use in water-limited catchments – improves or is stable in seven of the 18 scenarios.

Pressures on biodiversity (preservation of species) could also be reduced despite economic growth and increased agriculture. But carbon and biodiversity tree-planting could increase the pressure on river-based water systems.

Overall, 13 of the 18 scenarios show improvement in a least one environmental indicator, but only three – each requiring "strong" or "very strong" abatement effort and development of reforestation markets – show improvement in all three environmental indicators.

So the modelling suggests economic growth can continue without worsening – and even while improving – pressures on the natural environment, but only if we and the rest of the world greatly increase our efforts to reduce emissions.

Now, I should warn you that modelling exercises – economic and scientific – are always subject to limitations and open to criticism. They rely on many assumptions and are widely misused by vested interests.

I'm sure in 20 years' time, this CSIRO modelling will look very crude. Right now, however, it's a wonder of the modern world.

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