Aurora College Economics HSC Study Day, Sydney, Thursday, July 27, 2017Globalisation is very much in the news. You won’t need me to tell you that the quite remarkable political developments around the world in recent times – Britain’s surprise decision to leave the European Union, Donald Trump’s unexpected election as US President and, here, the resurrection Pauline Hanson’s One Nation at last year’s federal election – represent...
Thursday, July 27, 2017
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
How we're scammed by our fear of terrorism
These days there aren't many scams bigger than all the fuss we're making about the threat of terrorism coming to our shores.
What makes the scam worse is that we bring it on ourselves.
But I'm not first to point out that this degree of concern is totally out of whack with the actual risk of being attacked.
In the past two decades, just three people have died as victims of terrorist attacks (broadly defined) in Australia. They...
Monday, July 24, 2017
Big business influence wanes as public rejects ‘bizonomics’
The collapse of the "neoliberal consensus" is as apparent in Oz as it is in Trump's America and Brexitting Britain, but our big-business people are taking a while to twig that their power to influence government policy has waned.
Their trouble is the way the era of micro-economic reform initiated by the Hawke-Keating government in the 1980s eventually degenerated into "bizonomics" – the pseudo-economic belief that what's good...
Saturday, July 22, 2017
Occupations are changing as the jobs total grows
Have you heard that most of the jobs being created in the economy these days are part-time? No? Good. Yes, you have? Sorry, your info's out of date.
It was true last year, but not this year. As this week's figures for the labour force from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed, of the 176,000 additional jobs created in the first six months of this year, 93 per cent were full-time.
That, BTW, was an exceptionally rapid...
Friday, July 21, 2017
ETHICS IN ECONOMICS
Australian Conference of Economists, Special Session, Sydney, Friday, July 21, 2017The notion that ethics has anything to do with economics, that economists should subject their professional behaviour to some sort of ethical standard, is such a foreign one that we have a long way to go in just accepting the idea, let alone finding a way to put it into practice.I don’t pretend to have all the answers, though I do have some strong...
Wednesday, July 19, 2017
The era of neoliberalism is ending and reversing
If there's some trend in the world that we don't much like but has been happening for ages, there's a human tendency to assume it will keep on forever and just get worse. Occasionally, however, this moment signals it won't be long before it starts going away.
I'm a great believer in the pendulum theory of history: trends in human activity go on and on until they reach an unacceptable extreme, and then one day they turn and start...
Monday, July 17, 2017
Worsening school performance is everyone’s business
Amid all the uncertainty about where we'll be left by the many pressures bearing on us and our economy – climate change and digital disruption, for starters – there's one truth we can cling to: the more we enhance our natural capital and our human capital, the better placed we're likely to be.
Unfortunately, seeing the sense of this is a lot easier than ensuring it happens.
On natural capital – the preservation of species and...
Saturday, July 15, 2017
Why global trade growth has slowed
One thing you can be sure of is that international trade grows much faster than the world economy. It's the classic proof of growing globalisation, and it's been happening for ages. Except that it seems to have stopped.
For two decades from the mid-1980s, world trade – measured as exports plus imports – grew at more than double the rate of growth in gross world product.
Between 1986 and 2007, the volume of trade grew at an...
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