Home ownership has become a devouring monster

Like all the advanced economies, ours has stopped working the way we’re used to. Our obsession with home ownership is a fair part of the problem.

Let’s be clear: I’m a believer in the Great Australian Dream of owning your own home.

But right now, it’s adding to the economic troubles of many countries. I doubt if the preference for home ownership is causing those countries bigger problems than it’s causing us. We have one of the highest rates of household debt to household disposable income (although ours is made to look worse than the others because of our unusual tax breaks for negatively geared property investments).

Like a lot of people who care about the state of the world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren (my four-year-old grandson is “helping” me as I write this), I was pleased to see the period of spiralling house prices come to an end a few years back and prices start falling.

But, for Sydney and Melbourne, this sorely needed correction came to an end last year, after three interest-rate cuts and a change in prudential lending rules saw prices resumed their upward climb.

If we can’t cut interest rates a little without an upsurge in borrowing causing us to resume bidding up house prices, we’ve got a problem. Our household debt is at near-record levels, but let’s add to it.

Meanwhile, when you add falling house prices to the economy’s deeper problem of protracted weak wage growth, many home buyers worry and slash their consumer spending to try to reduce their debt.

That huge household debt will be a drag on our economy for years, keeping growth low. Another issue that isn’t helping is our “new normal” of exceptionally low price and wage inflation.

Until recent years, first-home buyers (or any other borrowers for owner-occupied housing) used to be able to load themselves up to the gunnels in debt and monthly payment obligation, secure in the knowledge that, after a few years of high growth in nominal wages, those repayments (little changed in nominal terms) would be reduced to a much more manageable share of their income.

When such “norms” get stuck in people’s heads, it can take years for people to realise they can no longer be relied on. And for those couples for whom the memo arrived too late, they’ll be struggling to keep up their huge mortgage payments for many more years than they bargained for.

So, on one hand we’ve got the economy being held back by households’ huge level of debt and mortgage payments while, on the other, home ownership is becoming unattainable for an increasing proportion of the population. Those who do eventually manage to attain it have to scrimp on other aspects of their living standards, and often get there so much later in their working lives that their ability to save for retirement is diminished.

The devouring monster we’ve allowed home ownership to become is now eroding what’s long been the fourth leg of retirement income policy. More people are retiring without owning a home, whereas the level of the age pension is kept low under the assumption that almost everyone owns their home outright.

Get it? We’re suffering the wider economic disadvantages of huge household debt without the commensurate advantage of a higher rate of home ownership. The rate of home ownership is actually falling slowly as the oldies with high rates of home ownership are dying and being replaced by newly formed, young households, very few of which can afford a mortgage.

But Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe has injected a note of hope. When measured against the ruler of household income, America’s house prices are much lower than ours. Why? Because of differing policies towards housing. The Yanks have kept land prices lower by allowing more suburban sprawl.

For our part, we’ve had various tax and pension policies seemingly intended to help would-be first-home buyers that, in reality, work to benefit existing home owners. We’ve made housing – whether owner-occupied or rental properties – a tax-preferred investment, not just a means to security of tenure. In the process, we’ve made it too hard for young first-home buyers to afford.

When parents respond to this by recycling to their offspring some of the capital gain they’ve enjoyed on their own property investment (as I have), they’re solving their own children’s affordability problem in a way that keeps house prices high, at the expense of those many young people whose parents aren’t able to help out.

No, if we want to make home ownership more affordable for more young people seeking security of tenure for their home, the answer is to make home ownership less attractive as a form of investment.

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Lucky Country has lost its dynamism and can't find where it is

Do you know what economists mean when they talk about the nation’s “economic fundamentals”? I thought I did until I heard what Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe said they were.

When Lowe had a meeting with Treasurer Josh Frydenberg after last year’s election, I was puzzled by him saying that the economy’s fundamentals were “sound”. How could he say that when the economy had grown by an exceptionally weak 1.8 per cent over the year to March?

But at his appearance before the House of Reps economics committee last week, he had to respond to a challenging description of the state of the economy by Labor’s Dr Andrew Leigh, a former economics professor.

“We have seen declines in labour productivity for the first time on record, the slowest wage growth on record, declining household spending per capita, record household debt, record government debt, below average consumer confidence, retail suffering its worst downturn since 1990 and construction shrinking at its fastest rate since 1999,” Leigh said.

“The economy is in a pretty bad way at the moment, isn’t it?” he asked.

“That wouldn’t be my characterisation,” Lowe responded. “One thing you left out of that list is that a higher share of Australians has jobs than ever before in our history ... ultimately what matters is that people have jobs and employment and security.”

What’s more, “our fundamentals are fantastic”, Lowe went on – but this time he spelt out what he meant.

“We enjoy a standard of living in this country that very few countries in the world enjoy. More of us have jobs than ever before. We live in a fantastic, prosperous wealthy country, and I think we should remember that.”

Well, if that’s what he thinks our fundamentals mean, who could argue? Even if Leigh thought the weaknesses he was outlining were a description of our fundamentals. Maybe Lowe’s fundamentals are more fundamental fundamentals than other people’s are.

Under further questioning from Leigh, however, Lowe said he didn’t want to deny that “we have very significant issues, and the one that worries me most is weak productivity growth ... We’ve had four or five years now where productivity growth has been very weak ... in my own view it’s linked to very low levels of investment relative to gross domestic product.”

This is an important point. As former top econocrat Dr Mike Keating has been saying for some years, you can take a neo-classical, supply-side view that weak productivity improvement explains why the economy’s growth has been so weak (a view that assumes productivity improvement is “exogenous” – it drops on the economy from outside), or you can take a more Keynesian, demand-side view that weak economic growth explains why productivity improvement has been so weak (that is, productivity is “endogenous” – it’s produced inside the economy).

Keating keeps saying that it’s when businesses upgrade their equipment and processes by replacing the old models with the latest, whiz-bang models that improving innovations are diffused throughout the economy, making our industries more productive.

Why is it that our businesses (particularly those other than mining) haven’t been investing much in expanding and improving their businesses? The simple, demand-side answer is that they haven’t been seeing much growth in the demand for their products.

But Lowe sees something deeper. “I fear that our economy is becoming less dynamic [continuously changing and developing],” he told the economics committee. “We’re seeing lower rates of investment, lower rates of business formation, lower rates of people switching jobs, and in some areas lower rates of research-and-development expenditure.

“So right across those metrics it feels like we’re becoming a bit less dynamic. I worry about that for the longer term.

“Public investment is not particularly low at the moment. What is low is private investment. Firms don’t seem to be investing at the same rate that they used to, and I think this is adding to the sense I have that the economy is just less dynamic ...

“There’s something deeper going on, and it’s not just in Australia: it’s everywhere. At the meetings I go to with other central bank governors, this is the kind of thing we talk about. Something’s going on in our economies that means the same dynamism that used to be there isn’t there.”

Asked later by another MP what was causing this loss of dynamism, Low replied, “I wish I knew the answer to that ... My sense is, as an Australian and looking at what’s going on in our economy, that we’re becoming very risk-averse.” (A sentiment I know other top econocrats share.)

“It’s a global thing that happens – I think it probably happens partly when you’re a wealthy country. The standard of living here is fantastic. It’s hardly matched anywhere in the world, so we’ve got something important to protect,” he said.

“But I think in that environment you become more risk-averse. Probably with the ageing of the population, we become more risk-averse. When people have a lot of debt, they’re probably more risk-averse.

Risk-aversion seems to help explain the slow wage growth we’ve had “for six or seven years” now. “It’s the sense of uncertainty and competition that people have, and this is kind of global. Most businesses are worried about competition from globalisation and from technology, and many workers feel that same pressure.

“There are many white-collar jobs in Sydney and Melbourne and Canberra that can be done somewhere else in the world at a lower rate of pay, and many people understand that ...,"Lowe said.

“So the bargaining dynamics ... for workers is less than it used to be. And firms are less inclined to bid up wages to attract workers because they’re worried about their cost base and competition,” he said.

Doesn’t sound too wonderful to me. But not to worry. Just remember, our fundamentals are fabulous.

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The Great Australian Dream is keeping the economy weak

Do you worry about the enormous size of your mortgage? If you do, it seems you’re not the only one. And the way Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe sees it, people like you are the main reason consumer spending is so weak and the Reserve and the Morrison government are having so much trouble getting the economy moving.

Until the global financial crisis in 2008, we were used to an economy that, after allowing for inflation, grew by about 3 per cent a year. The latest figures show it growing by barely more than half that. (This, of course, is before we feel the temporary effects of bushfires and the coronavirus.)

This explains why the Reserve cut its official interest rate three times last year, dropping it from a record low of 1.5 per cent to an even more amazing 0.75 per cent. Cutting interest rates is intended to encourage people to borrow and spend. So far, however, it’s shown little sign of working.

Similarly, the first stage of the massive tax cuts that were Scott Morrison’s key promise at last year’s election, a new tax break worth more than $1000 a year to middle-income-earners, was expected to give the economy a kick along once people started spending the much bigger tax refunds they got after the end of last financial year.

Despite Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s confident predictions, it didn’t happen. Why have the authorities had so little success at pushing the economy along? Why did real consumer spending per person actually fall in the year to September?

That’s what Lowe sought to explain to the House of Reps economics committee last Friday. His theory – which he backed up with statistical evidence – is that, the combination of weak growth in wages with falling house prices has really worried a lot of people with big mortgages.

So, rather than increase their spending on goods and services, they cut it and used whatever spare money they could to pay down their mortgage.

In principle when interest rates fall, people with home loans now have more money to spend on other things. In practice, however, most people leave their monthly payments unchanged. The amount they’re paying above the bank’s newly reduced minimum payment comes straight off the principal they owe, thus further reducing (by a little) the interest they’re charged.

That’s pretty much standard behaviour for Australian home-buyers. But this time they’ve also avoided spending their tax refunds, leaving the money in their “offset account”. They may or may not decide to spend it later. But for as long as it’s sitting in the offset account it’s reducing their net mortgage debt and the interest they’re paying.

But get this: not content with those two moves, households have also decided to cut their consumer spending and so save a higher proportion of their income. It’s a safe bet that people with home loans have got that extra saving parked in their offset accounts.

Lowe makes the point that, when worried home-buyers take money sent their way to get them spending and use it to reduce their debt, this does bring forward the day when they feel confident enough to start spending again. That’s true, but very much second prize.

If people with mortgages are feeling anxious, that’s hardly surprising. By June last year, household debt reached a record 188 per cent of annual household disposable income, before falling a bit in the September quarter (see above). About half that debt was for owner-occupied housing and about a quarter for personal loans and credit cards, leaving about a quarter for housing investment debt.

This is higher than in most rich countries, but that’s mainly because of our generous tax breaks for negatively geared property investors, a loophole most other, more sensible countries have closed.

But hang on. Those of us living in Melbourne or Sydney (but not elsewhere in Australia) know that, in response to the recent cuts in interest rates, people have resumed borrowing for housing, causing house prices to stop falling and start rising again.

Is this a good thing? Lowe can see advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, rising house prices are likely to make people with big mortgages feel less uncomfortable and so get closer to the point where they allow their spending to grow. It also brings forward the day when the building of new homes stops falling and starts rising again.

On the negative side, is it really a great thing for house prices to take off every time interest rates come down? How’s that going to help our kids become home owners?

Lowe asks whether we benefit as a society from having very high housing prices relative to the level of our incomes. “There are things that we could do on the structural side . . . to have a lower level of housing prices relative to income.” They’re much lower across the United States, for instance, even though, by and large, the Americans’ interest rates have been lower than ours.

What are these “things on the structural side” we could be doing to make our housing more affordable? He didn’t say. But I think he was referring to more liberal council zoning regulations and to getting rid of the many tax concessions that favour home owners at the expense of would-be home owners, including negative gearing.

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Unions conspire with bankers to make you pay more super

When is big business most successful at "rent-seeking" – winning special favours – from government? Often, when it’s got its unions on board. That way, both the Coalition and Labor are inclined to give it the privileges it seeks.

Despite the decline in the union movement’s power and influence in recent decades – and all the nasty things the bosses continue saying about unions – it’s very much a product of the capitalist system.

Over the decades, its greatest success has come in industries with some form of pricing power that’s allowing businesses to make outsized profits. The union simply applies pressure for the workers to be given their share of the lolly.

What kept Australia’s manufacturing industry heavily protected against competition from imports for most of the 20th century, before the Hawke-Keating government pulled the plug in the 1980s, was the manufacturing unions’ strong support for the manufacturers’ success in getting the Coalition committed to protection.

In the end, however, the manufacturing unions got screwed. While being protected in the name of preserving jobs, the manufacturers began automating and shedding many jobs. Turns out protection is better at protecting profits than jobs.

In last year’s election campaign, some part of Labor’s ambivalence on the question of new coal mines in North Queensland is explained by the support the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, one of the few remaining powerful unions, has thrown behind the foreign mine owners.

At present, however, there’s no more significant instance of the unions being in bed with the bosses than their joint campaign to have the government increase compulsory employee superannuation contributions.

When it comes to government-granted favours to business, there aren’t many bigger than the one that compels almost all the nation’s workers to hand over 9.5 per cent of their wage, every year of their working lives, to financial institutions which will charge them a small fortune each year to "manage" their money, until the government thinks they’re old enough to be allowed to get their money back.

I’ve supported compulsory super since it began because, when it comes to saving for retirement, most of us suffer from myopia. But it does leave the government with huge obligations to ensure the money’s safely invested, ensure super tax incentives aren’t biased in favour of the highly paid (such as yours truly) and ensure the money managers don’t abuse the monopoly they’ve been granted by overcharging the punters.

And, since most of us also save for retirement in ways other than super (such as by buying a house and paying it off), governments have an obligation to ensure that workers aren’t compelled to save more than needed to live in reasonable comfort in retirement.

Compulsory super is such an easy money-maker for the for-profit financial institutions (mainly bank-owned) that it’s not surprising they’ve gone for years trying to con governments into increasing the percentage of their wages that workers are compelled to hand over. They’ve done this by exploiting people’s instinctive fear that they aren’t saving enough, using greatly exaggerated estimates of how much they’ll need to be comfortable.

What’s harder to understand is why the non-profit "industry" super funds – with union officials making up half their trustees and the employer reps not taking much interest – go along with the for-profit industry lobby groups’ self-interested empire-building.

The main reason compulsory super isn’t a particularly good deal for most union members is that when forced to pay super contributions, employers reduce their workers’ pay rises to fit. This has been understood from the outset, but last week’s report from the Grattan Institute convincingly demonstrates its truth.

The second reason is that, by design and above certain limits, super savings reduce workers’ eligibility for the age pension. Treasury and independent analysts have repeatedly discredited the industry’s claims that the present contribution rate is insufficient to provide workers with a reasonably comfortable retirement.

The present legislated plan to raise the contribution rate to 12 per cent represents the industry funds’ gift to the army of ticket-clippers making their living off the super industry. It’s origins lie in the Rudd government yielding to industry fund pressure because it believed the huge cost to the budget would be more than covered by its wonderful new mining tax.

But, as an earlier Grattan report has shown, raising the contribution rate as planned would force many workers to accept a lower-than-otherwise standard of living during their working lives so their living standard in retirement could be higher than they ever were used to when working.

This is the union movement protecting its members’ interests? Sounds to me more like union officials expanding the union institution at the expense of their members – and delivering for the banks’ "retail" super funds while they’re at it.

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Sorry, the government can't make the boss pay for your super

When the government compels employers to contribute to their employees’ superannuation, it seems obvious that it’s forcing the bosses to give their workers an extra benefit on top of their wage. Obvious, that is, to everyone but the nation’s economists.

They’re convinced it’s actually the workers themselves who end up paying because employers respond to the government’s compulsion by giving their workers pay rises that are lower than they otherwise would have been.

But can the economists prove their intuition is right? Not until this week.

The argument about who ends up paying for compulsory employee super is hotting up. The Hawke-Keating government’s original scheme required employers to make contributions equal to 9 per cent of a worker’s pay. But when former prime minister Tony Abbott took over from Labor in 2013, he inherited a law requiring the contribution to be gradually increased to 12 per cent.

The Coalition has never approved of compulsory super, which began as part of the union movement’s Accord with the Labor government. By the time Abbott got around to it, the contribution rate had crept up to its present 9.5 per cent, but he managed to persuade the Senate to delay the next (0.5 percentage point) increase until July next year, with the 12 per cent to be reached in July 2025.

Everything about this scheme’s history says Prime Minister Scott Morrison wouldn’t want the contribution rate to go any higher. It’s likely he’s hoping the looming inquiry into super will recommend this, and so help him persuade the Senate to change the law accordingly.

The superannuation industry has been campaigning for years to convince you and me that 9 per cent or so isn’t sufficient to pay for a comfortable retirement, and to get the contribution rate greatly increased. In this, the non-profit “industry” super funds (with much union involvement) are at one with the largely bank-owned, for-profit part of the super industry.

Apart from some important reports by the Productivity Commission, the most authoritative independent analysis of super comes from Brendan Coates of the Grattan Institute. Grattan has argued that raising the compulsory contribution rate would be contrary to employees’ interests, forcing them to live on less during their working lives so their incomes in retirement could be higher than they were used to and more than they needed.

To strengthen the case for continuing to raise the contribution rate, the industry funds have commissioned a couple of studies purporting to show that the conventional wisdom is wrong and contributions do indeed come at the employers’ expense.

So this week Grattan issued a paper providing empirical evidence supporting the economists’ conventional wisdom that, in the end, workers have to pay for their own super.

If the notion that employees pay for employers’ contributions strikes you as strange and hard to believe, it shouldn’t. Consider the goods and services tax. Have you ever sent the taxman a cheque for the GST you pay? No, never. The cheques are written by the businesses you buy from. So, does that mean they pay GST but you don’t? Of course not. Why not? Because the businesses pass the tax on to you in the retail prices they charge.

Economists have long understood that the “legal incidence” of a tax (who’s required to write the cheque) and the “economic incidence” or ultimate burden (who ends up paying the tax) are usually different.

It’s convenient for the government to collect taxes from a smaller number of businesses rather than from a huge number of consumers or employees. Economists know that businesses may pass the burden of the taxes they pay “forward” to their customers or “backward” to their employees. Only if neither of those is possible is the ultimate burden of the tax passed from the business to its owners.

Naturally, the business would like to pass the burden anywhere but to its owners. But whether it’s passed forward or backward (or some combination of the three) will be determined by the market circumstances the business finds itself in.

That is, the question can’t be answered from economic theory, but must be answered with empirical evidence (experience in the real world). Theory (using the simple demand and supply diagram familiar to all economics students – see page 12 of the Grattan report) can, however, clarify the exact question.

Theory suggests that the ultimate destination of the burden depends on how workers and employers respond when super is increased. There are two “effects”. First, when workers value an extra dollar of super, even if they value it less than an extra dollar of wages, then some (but not all) of the cost of super will come out of their wages.

Second, if workers’ willingness to work doesn’t vary much when wages change – that is, if labour supply is relatively “inelastic” – then they’d be expected to bear a larger share of the cost. Similarly, if employers’ willingness to hire people doesn’t vary much when wages change – labour demand is inelastic – then more of the cost will fall on the bosses.

Most overseas studies have confirmed the economists' conventional wisdom. But what about us?

Coates and his team examined the details of 80,000 federal workplace agreements made between 1991 and 2018. They found that, on average, about 80 per cent of the cost of increases in compulsory super was passed back to workers through lower wage rises within the life of an enterprise agreement, usually two to three years. (This leaves open the question of how much of the remaining 20 per cent was passed forward to customers in higher prices.)

Only about a third of workers are covered by enterprise agreements. For the many wages linked to the Fair Work Commission’s annual adjustments to award wages, it has said explicitly that when super goes up, award wages grow more slowly. As for workers covered by individual agreements, it’s a safe bet which way the employers will jump.

Whatever it suits the superannuation industry to claim, increased super contributions are no free lunch.

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Morrison's dream: climate fixed with no changes to jobs or tax

When I was new to journalism, there was a saying that the two words which, when used in a newsagents’ poster or a headline, would attract the most readers, were "free" and "tax". These days, the two words politicians use to suck in unwary voters are "jobs" and "tax".

These words have magical powers because we attach our own meaning to them and assume the polly is using them to imply what we think they imply. They evoke in us an emotional reaction – welcoming in the case of "jobs", disapproving in the case of "tax" – and so we ask no further questions.

Those two words have the magical ability to cut through our distrust and disarm our powers of critical thought. Scott Morrison has been using both in his belated response to this appalling summer of bushfires, heatwaves, smoke haze and dust.

Many of us have realised how terrible climate change actually is, that it’s already happening and will keep getting worse – much worse – unless all the world’s big countries get serious about largely eliminating their carbon emissions, and doing so pretty quickly.

Although Australia is a big emitter relative to our small population, in absolute volume we’re not in the same league as America, China or Europe. But the rest of the world’s horrified reaction to our fire season has helped us see we’re in the vanguard, that the Wide Brown Land is going to cop it a lot harder than the green and pleasant lands.

So our self interest lies not just in doing our fair share, but in doing more than our share, so we’re well placed to press the big boys to try harder.

Initially, Morrison seemed to want us to believe he agreed with those saying we must do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. "We want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better at it. In the years ahead, we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further," he said.

But then he wanted to reassure his party’s climate-change deniers, and those of us who want to fight climate change without paying any personal price, that nothing had changed. "But what I won’t do is this: I am not going to sell out Australians – I am not going to sell out Australians based on the calls from some to put higher taxes on them or push up their electricity prices or to abandon their jobs and their industries."

On the question of jobs, don’t assume it’s your job he’s promising to save. What we know is that jobs in the coal industry are sacred, but what happens to other jobs isn’t the focus of his concern. Don’t forget, this is the same government which, as one of its first acts, decided we no longer needed a motor vehicle industry. Favoured existing jobs take priority over future jobs – which can look after themselves.

But even this doesn’t fully expose the trickiness of the things politicians say about jobs. What governments usually end up protecting in an industry isn’t its jobs, but its profits. For instance, when not in the hearing of North Queensland voters, Adani boasts about how highly automated its mine will be. Apart from the few years it takes to construct a mine, mining involves a lot of expensive imported machines and precious few jobs.

Looking back, it’s arguable that most of the jobs lost from manufacturing were lost to automation, not the removal of tariff protection.

As for taxes, the latest turn in Morrison’s spin cycle is that his "climate action agenda" is "driven by technology not taxation". This, apparently, is a reference to technologies such as hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, lithium production, biofuels and waste-to-energy.

Like many of politicians’ efforts to mislead us, this contains a large dollop of truth. It’s likely that our move to zero net emissions will involve the adoption of most if not all of those new technologies, in the process creating many job opportunities in new industries and – inevitably – doing so at the expense of jobs in existing fossil-fuel industries.

So this seems to have a lot of similarity with Professor Ross Garnaut’s vision of us becoming a renewable-energy superpower. But get this: Garnaut’s grand plan has been designed to require no return to any form of carbon tax.

Economists advocate "putting a price on carbon" because they believe it’s the best way to minimise the ultimate cost to the economy (and the punters who make it up) of moving to a low-carbon economy.

But if Australian voters are stupid enough to allow some on-the-make politicians to persuade them to reject the economists’ advice, then so be it. You prefer to do it the expensive way? Okay, have it your way. There’s no shortage of more costly alternatives.

So Morrison is busy demolishing a straw man. Why? Because he wants to distract your attention from the likelihood that his preferred way of skinning the cat will require a big increase in government spending to facilitate all those new technologies and industries.

You don’t think this increased spending will eventually have to be covered by higher taxes? Dream on.

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Lack of trust may have made economic reform impossible

Life’s getting a lot tougher for optimists. I’m starting to wonder whether our politics has passed the point of peak economic reform and controversial policy changes are no longer possible.

We keep berating our politicians, urging them to show leadership and have the courage to make much-needed reforms, but they never do. Right now, it’s easy to look at the way Scott Morrison has fumbled the bushfire response, the need to get real about climate change, and even his reluctance to take a stand against blatant rorting of taxpayers’ money, and decide we have a Morrison problem.

But though we’re discovering the miracle election-winner’s various shortcomings, it’s a mistake to think one man is the cause of our reform problem. It’s possible to argue things have got steadily worse in the revolving-door period since the departure of John Howard, but the greater truth is that the problem’s systemic.

It’s hard to think of any major improvements made by five prime ministers over the past 12 years, with the possible exception of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (which we’re still busy stuffing up).

The carbon tax was a significant reform before Tony Abbott abolished it, but Labor had sabotaged its mining tax long before Abbott got to it. Malcolm Turnbull took one look at the great goal of increasing the goods and services tax and realised it was politically impossible without full compensation of low to middle income-earners, but net of compensation it would have raised peanuts.

All this is just the Australian version of similar stories that could be told in most of the other rich democracies. But, sticking with our story, why has it become next to impossible for our governments to make controversial policy changes?

The pollies would tell you it’s because the 24-hour news cycle – the media are constantly demanding to be fed, and will turn to you opponents if you don’t oblige – and the power of social media to set hares running that have to be chased. This now gets so much attention from ministers and their staff they have little time left to get on with policy development.

Maybe. A less convenient explanation is the way politics has turned into a lifelong career – from staffer to minister to a late-career job advising big business – leading pollies to worry more about their careers and less about the ideals they espoused in their first speech on entering Parliament.

But however you explain it, there’s little doubt that the life of ministers has become pretty much all day-to-day tactics and no long-term strategy. This both explains and reinforces the long-established trend – which Morrison now freely acknowledges – for ministers to prefer the advice of the ambitious young punks in their office to the advice of their department.

The staffers know about what matters – political tactics – whereas the bureaucrats want to keep banging on about policy and warning you about looming problems. Worse, they’re obsessed by the notion that whatever governments do must be strictly in accordance with the law.

Partly because fixing problems usually costs money, the era of Smaller Government and the politically motivated obsession with returning the budget to surplus has heightened the politicians’ normal temptation to pigeonhole government reports warning about problems that need to be fixed now before they get much worse.

A bunch of former fire chiefs want a meeting to warn about how much worse this year’s bushfire season will be and the need for much more equipment and action to limit climate change? Sorry, too busy with more pressing matters.

Even the idea that politicians should “never waste a crisis” – that you won’t get broad support for unpopular measures until everyone’s up in arms about the actual arrival of the problem – and its corollary – don’t act on the multitude of mere warnings of problems ahead, wait and see which of them actually transpire – seem themselves to have been pigeonholed.

Why are politicians no longer game even to seize the moment to do something real when everyone’s demanding that something be done? Because years of declining standards of political behaviour mean that trust in political leaders is now lower than ever. There’s strong survey evidence of this.

Neither side of politics is trusted to take tough measures that are genuinely in everyone’s interests. It’s got to be a trick. Mainstream politicians are trusted only when they run scare campaigns against the other side’s reform plans. But hope springs eternal that some populist rabblerouser may have the answers.

The more impotent mainstream politicians are seen to be, the more disillusioned voters will turn to populist saviours – and the more the main parties will themselves turn to populist diversions and trickery. Freeing ourselves from this vicious circle won’t be easy.

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It's official: too much banking is bad for you

When the newish boss of the International Monetary Fund, Bulgarian economist Kristalina Georgieva, contemplates the challenges of the new decade, she thinks of many things: increasing uncertainty, climate change and increasing inequality – particularly the role the financial sector in making it worse.

Georgieva foresees increasing uncertainty over geopolitical tensions, uncertainty that the trade truce between the US and China will last, and uncertainty that governments can fix the frustrations and growing populist unrest in many countries. "We know this uncertainty harms business confidence, investment and growth," she said in a recent speech.

On climate change, after observing that the "brush fires" blazing across Australia are a reminder of the toll on life that climate change exacts, she avoids saying that we are possibly the most vulnerable among the rich countries (something that might have surprised the she’ll-be-right Scott Morrison).

But she did note that it’s often the poorest and most vulnerable countries that bear the brunt of "this unfolding existential challenge". "The World Bank estimates that unless we alter the current climate path an additional 100 million people may be living in extreme poverty by 2030," she says.

The previous decade saw the rich world’s economists become much more conscious of the economic importance of inequality, with the IMF’s economists at the forefront of this realisation. "We know that excessive inequality hinders growth and hollows out a country’s foundations. It erodes trust within society and institutions. It can fuel populism and political upheaval," she says.

Many people think of using the budget to reduce inequality, which they should, "but too often we overlook the role of the financial sector, which can also have a profound and long-lasting positive or negative effect on inequality," she says.

"Our new staff research shows how a well-functioning financial sector can create new opportunities for all in the decade ahead. But it also shows how a poorly managed financial sector can amplify inequality."

"Financial deepening" refers to the size of a country’s financial services sector relative to its entire economy. Georgieva notes that, on one hand, developing countries benefit from the growth of their undeveloped financial sectors as small businesses and ordinary households gain access to credit and saving and insurance products.

The sustained growth in the financial sectors of China and India during the 1990s, for instance, paved the way for enormous economic gains in the 2000s. This, in turn, helped in lifting a billion people out of poverty.

On the other hand, the IMF’s latest research shows there’s a point at which financial deepening is associated with exacerbated inequality and less-inclusive growth. Many factors contribute to inequality, but the connection between excessive financial deepening holds across countries, she says.

Why is too much "financialisation" of an economy a bad thing? "Our thinking is that while poorer individuals benefit in the early stages of deepening, over time the growing size and complexity of the financial sector end up primarily helping the wealthy.

"The negative impact is especially visible where financial sectors are already very deep. Here, complicated financial instruments, influential lobbyists, and excessive compensation in the banking industry lead to a system that serves itself as much as it serves others."

The US has one of the most diversified economies in the world (it has a lot of everything). And yet, in 2006, financial services firms comprised nearly a quarter of the S&P500 share index and generated almost 40 per cent of all profits. (Read that again if it doesn’t amaze you.) Obviously, this made the financial sector the single biggest and most profitable part of the whole sharemarket.

Does that strike you as out of whack? What happened next – the global financial crisis and the Great Recession – tells us that excessive financial sectors increase the risk of financial instability and collapse.

The painfully slow recovery from that episode of financial crisis was the defining issue of the past decade. Research shows that, on average, a country’s financial crisis leads to a permanent loss of output (gross domestic product) of 10 per cent. This can cause a lasting change in the country’s direction and leave many people behind (as the Americans, with their opioid and middle-aged male suicide crises, know only too well).

The IMF’s latest research shows that inequality tends to increase before a financial crisis, suggesting a strong link between inequality and financial instability. But also, of course, the subsequent recession usually leads to a long-term worsening in inequality.

Much effort has been made since the global financial crisis to make the banks more stable and better regulated. But no one imagines this guarantees there couldn’t be another major crisis.

Georgieva says financial stability will remain a challenge in the decade ahead – for all the usual reasons, but also for "climate-related shocks". "Think of how stranded assets [such as now-unviable coal-fired power stations or coal mines] can trigger unexpected loss," she says. "Some estimates suggest the potential costs of devaluing these assets range from $US4 trillion to $US20 trillion."

The private sector and the banking industry, not just governments, have a critical role to play in making the financial system more stable, she says. That’s certainly the case when it comes to the climate’s effect on financial stability.

"The financial sector can play a critical role in moving the world to net zero carbon emissions and reaching the targets of the Paris agreement. To get there, firms will need to better price climate change impacts in their loans.

"Last year, climate change claimed its first bankruptcy of an S&P500 company. It is clear investors are looking for ways to adapt. If the price of a loan for an at-risk project increases, companies may simply decide the money for the project could be better spent elsewhere."

What has stopping climate change got to do with inequality? If we don’t, the consequences will fall hardest on the world’s poor (and Australians).

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Zero net carbon choice: do we want to be losers or winners?

You may regard economists as a dismal lot, always reminding us of the cost of this or the risk of that. But there’s one prominent economist with a much more positive story to tell.

Professor Ross Garnaut is more prophet than gloomy economist, a man with the vision of a better future that our politicians have lost as they squabble over votes.

The Morrison government trembles at the thought of the Paris agreement’s goal of achieving zero net carbon emissions by 2050. All it can see is the need for higher taxes and the loss of jobs in coal mining. Garnaut, by contrast, sees a golden opportunity for us to shift from an industry in terminal decline to a new set of industries with bright prospects in the low-carbon world that’s coming.

Garnaut foresees that, if we rise to the challenge of climate change, we "will emerge as a global superpower in energy, low-carbon industry and absorption of carbon in the landscape".

This vision is set out in his latest book, Superpower, which seems to offer something for everyone. Do you regret the decline of manufacturing? Garnaut sees how we could give it a new lease on life.

Have you always thought that, rather than sending our minerals off for further processing abroad, we should do it ourselves? Garnaut sees how we can.

With climate change making the land hotter, drier and more prone to bushfires, do you fear for the future of farming? Garnaut sees the bush getting a whole new source of income and activity.

Do you fear that, with the decline of coal mining, regional Australia will be left even further out of the economic action? Garnaut see all the new industries created by the world’s move to renewable energy being located in the regions.

Of course, as the author of two government reports on our response to climate change, Garnaut has form as a prophet. In his first report in 2008, he relied on scientists’ advice to predict that "fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020."

On the other hand, Garnaut now admits that even his second report, in 2011, has been overtaken by events. Then, he calculated that the cost of moving to renewable energy would come early and reduce our rate of economic growth for many years before it was eventually outweighed by the benefits of climate change avoided.

Now, he sees that the move to renewable energy won’t cost a lot, low-carbon electricity will be cheaper and will give us major new export opportunities. These more positive benefits will come earlier than the benefit of less climate change.

The cost of moving to all-renewable electricity has been transformed by two things. First, the huge reduction in the cost of solar panels and lesser falls in the cost of wind turbines and batteries.

Second, by the fall in global interest rates to record lows, which seem likely to persist. Whereas much of the cost of coal-fired electricity comes from the cost of the coal, with solar and wind power almost all of the cost comes from setting up the system – sun and wind are free. Lower interest rates mean the capital cost is much reduced.

So far, a chunk of Australia’s prosperity derives from our huge natural endowment of coal and gas. Now Garnaut has realised that, relative to the size of our population, Australia is more richly endowed with sun and wind than any other developed country – or our Asian neighbours.

So zero-emissions electricity will be cheaper to produce (though we may have to pay more in transmission costs). More significantly, our carbon-free power will be much cheaper than other countries’.

Carbon-free electricity is the key to our efforts to achieve zero net emissions overall, and to our various opportunities to profit from the world’s move away from fossil fuels. Our transport emissions will be slashed by moving to electric vehicles and increased use of public transport.

The scope for exporting our electricity through submarine cables – or via tankers of electrolysis-produced hydrogen – is limited. But this will now make it economic to further process alumina, iron ore, silicon and ammonia before we export them. That processing is best done adjacent to the mine site.

At present, plastics and many chemicals used in manufacturing are produced from fossil fuels. But we will have more plentiful supplies of (renewable) biomass – plant material – than many other countries, which we can use to produce plastics and chemicals for ourselves and for export.

The "net" in zero net emissions implies that the world will still be emitting some carbon dioxide, but these emissions will be offset by "negative emissions" as atmospheric carbon is captured and sequestered in soil, pastures, woodlands, forests and plantations.

Guess what? Few countries have more scope for "natural climate solutions" such as carbon farming than we do. We need research to improve the measurement of carbon capture, but we have so much scope that, after meeting our own needs, we could sell carbon credits to the rest of the world. This could be a new rural industry, much bigger than wool.

To maximise our chances of benefiting from the move to a low-carbon world, however, we have to get to zero net emissions sooner than the other rich countries, not later.

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Getting and spending - what's it meant to prove?

In the Aussie calendar, tomorrow – the day after the Australia Day holiday – is the unofficial start to the working year. So today’s the last day we have a moment to pause and wonder what all our getting and spending – my usual subject matter – is meant to prove.

From a narrow biological and evolutionary perspective, our only purpose is to survive and replicate our genes, playing our part in the survival of our species. Apart from that, what we do on the way to our inevitable death is of little consequence.

Don’t like that idea? No one does. Enjoyable though we find the mechanics of reproduction, the human animal craves more than just sex, good meals and a bit of fun while we kill time until our funeral. We want somehow to find purpose and meaning in our lives.

Contrary to the message of much advertising and other marketing, this meaning can’t be supplied satisfactorily by the efforts of our business people, politicians and economists. Beneath the glitter, their message is simple: get back to your getting and spending. Just do more of it.

Is there anything scientists – as opposed to philosophers – can tell us about the meaning of life? Steve Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at Leeds Beckett University, can, even though he’s not religious.

In a recent article on The Conversation website, he tells of his work over the past 10 years talking to people who’ve had what he calls “suffering-induced transformational experiences”. These include being diagnosed with terminal cancer, suffering a bereavement, becoming seriously disabled, losing everything through addiction, or having a close encounter with death during combat.

“What all these people had in common is that after undergoing intense suffering they felt they had ‘woken up’. They stopped taking life, the world and other people for granted and gained a massive sense of appreciation for everything,” he says.

They spoke of a sense of the preciousness of life, their own bodies, the other people in their lives and the beauty and wonder of nature. They felt a new sense of connection with other people, the natural world and the universe, he says.

“They became less materialistic and more altruistic. Possessions and career advancement became trivial, while love, creativity and altruism became much more important. They felt intensely alive.”

A man who experienced a transformation due to bereavement spoke explicitly about meaning, describing how his “goals changed from wanting to have as much money as possible to wishing to be the best person possible”.

He added: “before, I would say I didn’t really have any sense of a meaning of life. However, [now] I feel the meaning of life is to learn, grow and experience.”

Taylor stresses that none of these people were, or became, religious. The changes weren’t merely temporary and, in most cases, remained stable over many years.

He says we don’t have to go through intense suffering to experience these effects. “There are also certain temporary states of being when we can sense meaning. I call these ‘awakening experiences’.”

Usually they occur when our minds are fairly quiet and we feel at ease with ourselves. When we’re walking in the countryside, swimming in the ocean, or after we’ve meditated, or had sex.

“We find the meaning of life when we ‘wake up’ and experience life and the world more fully. In these terms, the sense that life is meaningless is a distorted and limited view that comes when we are slightly ‘asleep’.”

So what’s the meaning of life, according to Taylor? “Put simply, the meaning of life is life itself.”

Wow. From my own reading of what psychologists tell us about life satisfaction, let me add two more-prosaic points. First, humans are social animals and we get much of our satisfaction from our relationships with our family, in particular, and also with our friends.

When economists and politicians try to make us more prosperous materially without ever considering what strain they may be putting on our relationships, they’re not doing us any favours. They – like us, so often – are mistaking the means for the end. Cannibalising our ends to improve our means doesn’t leave us better off.

Second, the simple economic model assumes work is an unpleasant means to the wonderful end of having money to buy things. But, as they say, if you can find a job you like – or get more joy from the job you have – you’ll never have to work.

If politicians, economists and the business people we work for put more emphasis on helping us find satisfaction from our work, they’d be adding more meaning to our lives (and theirs).

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Economics isn't as highfalutin' as the jargon makes it sound

If you’ve ever had the feeling you ought to know a lot more about economics than you do – even if only to make it harder for economists to bamboozle you – here’s my long-weekend special offer: the key concepts of the discipline explained in one article. As many as I can fit, anyway.

More than a year ago, the boss of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims – surely the most experienced senior econocrat evading retirement in Canberra – began a speech by saying economics had become too mathematical and that to be a good economist all you needed was a deep intuitive feel for 10 or 15 concepts.

He then rattled off what he regarded as the 15 most important concepts, “in no particular order”. From those I’ll explain, in order, the five I consider to be most significant.

1. Opportunity cost

The first is one you should have heard of: opportunity cost.

Many economists consider “opp cost” to be the single most important and fundamental concept in economics, and the discipline’s most useful contribution to the betterment of mankind. Indeed, that’s the view Professor John Quiggin, of the University of Queensland, takes in his book Economics in Two Lessons, which I recommend as the best book to introduce you to economics.

Quiggin says “the opportunity cost of anything of value is what you must give up to get it”. Our wants are almost infinite, but our resources are limited, so we have to make choices. Economists’ eternal message to individuals and to the community is: think carefully before you spend your money, make sure you’re spending it on what you really want because you can’t spend it twice.

Really? That complicated, huh? Quiggin says “the lesson of opportunity cost is easy to state but hard to learn”. We keep forgetting to apply it. For instance, Prime Minister Scott Morrison is saying he’s not going to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions if the opportunity cost is to endanger jobs in the coal industry.

Sounds fair enough until you realise he’s saying jobs in a particular industry matter more to him than us doing all we can to help reduce global warming (which will destroy jobs in many industries).

We live in a market economy. We sell our labour in the jobs market, then use the money we earn to buy the goods and services we need in 101 product markets. Economics is the study of markets and, in particular, of how the prices set in markets work to bring supply and demand, sellers and buyers, into agreement (aka “equilibrium” or balance).

2. Invisible hand

The first of Quiggin’s two lessons is “market prices reflect and [also] determine the opportunity costs faced by consumers and producers” – which brings us to Sims’ next key concept, “the invisible hand”.

In a market-based economy (as opposed to a feudal economy or a planned economy), the differing objectives of workers, employers, consumers and producers are co-ordinated (brought together) not by the government issuing orders to people, but by the “price mechanism” (prices going up or down until both sides are satisfied).

That’s the invisible hand. And what motivates this invisible hand is the self-interest of workers, bosses, consumers and businesses. In the famous words of the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, in 1776, “it is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest”.

It’s amazing to think of, but it holds much truth: the invisible hand of markets and prices takes the self-interest of all those competing players and turns it into a situation where most of us have our wants satisfied most of the time.

3. Imperfect competition

But if that sounds a bit too pat – a bit too perfect – it is. It is, in fact, a description of what economists call “perfect markets” and “perfect competition”. And in real life, nothing’s ever perfect. The greatest female economist, Joan Robinson, was the first to formalise Sims’ third key concept, “imperfect competition” – the study of why markets and the price mechanism don’t always work as perfectly as the oversimplified “neo-classical” model of markets assumes they do.

4. Market failure

From the subtitle of Quiggin’s book you see that lesson one is “why markets work so well”, but lesson two is “and why they can fail so badly”. This takes us straight to Sims’ fourth key concept “market failure”. Markets are said to fail when they deliver results that aren’t “allocatively efficient” – when they don’t lead to the particular allocation of economic resources that yields the maximum satisfaction of people’s wants.

Economists have spent much time studying the various categories of factors that cause markets to fail. More recently they have turned to studying “government failure”, which is when governments’ attempts to correct market failures end up making things worse.

5. Externalities

Sims’ final key concept is “externalities” – a major category of market failure. These occur when transactions between sellers and buyers generate costs (or benefits) for third parties – known as “social” costs or benefits – that aren’t reflected in the market or “private” prices paid and received by the buyers and sellers.

These social costs or benefits are thus “external” to the private transaction and the private price mechanism. They constitute market failure because the market generates more costs (or fewer benefits) than is in the public’s interest.

One example of an external benefit is the gain to the wider community (not just the particular individual) when a student graduates from university (which is why uni fees are set at only about half the cost of the course, so as to “internalise” the positive externality).

As for external costs (“negative externalities”), Quiggin notes that the leading British economist Lord Nicholas Stern has described climate change as “the biggest market failure in history”. So now you know why so many of the nation’s economists are appalled by Morrison’s dereliction.

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Climate change: we can't stop it by refusing to change

After Donald Horne's book in the 1960s, we all know we live in the Lucky Country. What we've forgotten until now, however, is the qualification Horne added: "Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second-rate people." We haven't been feeling so lucky this burning, smoky summer. But our present leader, Scott Morrison, has certainly been looking second rate.

This summer we've had our Pearl Harbour moment. Just as the Japanese bombing of Hawaii in 1941 stopped Americans viewing World War II as some distant threat, so our season of unprecedented drought, heatwaves, bushfires and smoke haze has woken us up to the present reality of global warming.

There we were thinking climate change would be a problem for our children and grandchildren – who, we hoped, wouldn't remember our refusal in 2013 to pay a bit more for electricity so as to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now we realise it's a problem – a frightening problem – for us. One likely at least to continue for the rest of our lives at its present level of harm and unpleasantness, and more likely get much worse in the years ahead unless something decisive is done by all the major economies, including us, to reduce net emissions to zero over the next 30 years and stop us cooking.

It's a wake-up moment not just for us, however, but for the entire rich world. They've been watching in fascinated horror as global warming has punished the Aussies for their repeated refusal to take it seriously.

Ostensibly, Morrison has realised we need to change course. "We want to reduce emissions and do the best job we possibly can and get better and better at it," he said when it dawned on him we were holding him responsible for the fires regardless of what the constitution says about them being a state responsibility.

"In the years ahead, we are going to continue to evolve our policy in this area to reduce emissions even further," he said. But then he started adding qualifications. "We're going to do it without a carbon tax, without putting up electricity prices and without shutting down traditional industries upon which regional Australians depend for their very livelihood."

Really? Sounds like he's promising us all the benefits without any of the costs. Nothing needs to change to make things much better. Which, in this age of cynicism and distrust of our lengthening string of second-rate leaders, makes you fear all that's changed is the marketing spiel.

What we need is a leader great enough to seize our Pearl Harbour moment and turn it into a Port Arthur moment – the moment when a prime minister exercises true leadership and uses the horrible reality of death and destruction to win public support for big changes to stop such things becoming regular events.

John Howard, Morrison's role model and mentor, saw such an opportunity and seized it. He did so not because it offered political gain, but because it was a leader's duty to deliver something great for those he led. He did so knowing it would prompt great resistance from within the Coalition. But with the public behind him and his political opponents unlikely to oppose him, that was a risk he was prepared to take.

Just the same conditions apply to Morrison's decision on whether to turn us from laggards to leaders in the global effort to halt the rise in average temperatures to less than 2 degrees. Has he the courage to stand up to the noisy minority of climate change deniers in the Coalition, who are now so badly out of step with public opinion?

There's a central lesson to be learnt from this appalling summer. The dichotomy Morrison has so far relied on – the environment versus the economy – is false. "We'd love to help the environment, but not if that involves a cost to the economy."

Sorry, since the economy sits within the natural environment, anything that damages the environment also imposes loss – of property, businesses, jobs, wellbeing, lives and health – on the economy and the humans who constitute it.

It follows that, in our obsession with the cost of fighting climate change, we can no longer ignore the far greater cost of not fighting it. The one option that's not available is no change. We can refuse to change, but nature will change things whether we like it or not.

The economy is always changing, as some industries expand and other contract. Jobs are continuously being lost in some fields and created in others. This is the very process by which we've become far more prosperous over the past two centuries.

So the notion that our steaming coal industry can be preserved in aspic is laughable. Its days are numbered. But we don't have to kill it, the rest of the world will do that for us as – like us – they increasingly turn to renewable energy and away from fossil fuels. Business can see that; Morrison professes not to.

Second-rate leaders throw in their lot with those who fear losing from change, letting the rest of us suffer while they attempt to resist the irresistible. First-rate leaders seek out ways we can benefit from that change, restoring the luck of the Lucky Country. How? Watch this space.

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RBA should stop pretending there's any more it can usefully do

Every institution – even, as we’ve learnt to our sorrow, the Christian church – is tempted to put its own interests ahead of its duty to the greater good. Now it’s time for the Reserve Bank to examine its own conscience. If it cuts interest rates again in a fortnight’s time, in whose interests will it be acting?

Many of the Reserve’s immediate customers in the financial markets expect it to cut the official interest rate at its meeting early next month and then again a few months later, at which point the rate will be down to its "effective lower bound" – 0.25 per cent – and it will be time for it to move to using purchases of government bonds to lower the risk-free rate of interest more widely in a program of "quantitative easing".

That’s what its market customers expect of it and it will be tempted to comply, showing it’s still at the wheel, in charge of steering the economy, doing all it can to get things moving and keeping itself at the centre of the macro-economic action.

What could be wrong with that? Just that it’s unlikely to do any good, and could do more harm than good. It’s hard to see that yet another tiny interest-rate cut will do anything of consequence to stimulate spending.

Rates are already so exceptionally low it’s clear that it’s not the cost of capital that’s making businesses reluctant to invest in expanding their production capacity. Whatever their reasons for hesitating, cutting rates further won’t change anything.

Moving to households, the record level of household debt does much to discourage them from borrowing to buy goods and services and so boost economic activity. Interest-rate movements mainly affect discretionary spending on household durables (cars, white goods, lounge suites etc), but sales of these are in the doldrums despite already super-low rates. So, again, another cut is unlikely to change that.

In justifying recent rate cuts, the Reserve has relied heavily on the expected consequent fall in our exchange rate, which should stimulate the economy by making our export and import-competing industries more price competitive internationally.

And the reverse is also true: if we leave our rates well above the low levels of the big advanced economies, the dollar will appreciate and make our industries less price competitive. However, that argument’s of little relevance by now, and we shouldn’t be encouraging a beggar-thy-neighbour game of competitive devaluations.

But even if further rate cuts, and quantitative easing after that, will do little to boost demand, surely they couldn’t do any harm? Don’t be too sure of that. They’d hurt those who rely on interest income from financial investments – though bank interest rates could hardly fall any further.

Speaking of banks, the closer interest rates get to the floorboards, the more their profits are squeezed. If you don’t see that as a worry, you should: when lending becomes unprofitable banks become reluctant to lend. Sound good to you?

There may also be some truth in the argument that whereas in normal times news of an interest-rate cut boosts the confidence of consumers and businesses, at times like this they’re a sign the economy isn’t travelling well and new commitments should be delayed.

But here’s the biggest reason further rate cuts would do more harm than good: the clear evidence that, since the cuts began and prudential supervision was relaxed, house prices in Melbourne and Sydney have resumed their upward climb.

This is an appalling development. Getting our households even more heavily indebted is a cheap price to pay for scraping the last bit of monetary stimulus off the bottom of the barrel? Making first-home ownership even more unaffordable for our young people is just something we have to live with?

The one thing we know is that while "monetary policy" has lost its ability to stimulate demand for goods and services, its ability to stimulate demand for assets - such as houses, commercial property and shares - most of it fuelled by rising debt, continues unabated.

When in the 1970s we switched from using the budget to using interest rates to manage demand, we little realised that the serious side-effect of monetary stimulus was rising asset prices and rising debt.

Essentially, Australians buy and sell our houses among ourselves, bidding up the price of that little-changing stock of houses. Then we tell ourselves we’re all getting richer. Why is this anything other than damaging self-delusion? Why should the Reserve Bank be one of its chief promoters?

It’s time for Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe to stop doing more harm than good and turn the management of demand back to the people we elected to run the economy.

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Populist revolt around the world making economists rethink

It’s often said that the failure of conventional economics revealed by the global financial crisis has prompted no serious effort to find a new economic theory that actually works. Look closer, however, and you see economists stirring themselves to lift their game.

That’s the view of a noted American economist and critic of his profession, Professor Dani Rodrik, of Harvard, in an article published this week by Project Syndicate.

Rodrik says the populist backlash sweeping the advanced economies in recent years – think Trump, Brexit and Pauline Hanson – has produced some soul searching in the discipline. It is, after all, a backlash against the austerity policies, free-trade deals, financial deregulation and labour market deregulation that economists urged on the politicians (and only in retrospect realised how naive they’d been and how misused by pollies with other agendas).

In consequence of this rethink, “the economics profession is gradually changing for the better”, according to Rodrik. But the transformation extends beyond thinking about economic policy.

Within the discipline there’s finally a reckoning with the hierarchical practices (reverence for seniority and high-status universities) and the macho seminar culture (where anyone who says something silly or unorthodox is brutally shot down) that have produced an inhospitable environment for women and minorities.

According to a survey of its members conducted last year by the American Economic Association, nearly half of female economists felt discriminated against or treated unfairly on account of their gender. Nearly a third of non-white economists felt they’d been treated unfairly because of their ethnicity.

Rodrik, an Egyptian American, thinks the bad policy advice and the inhospitality towards anyone not an old white male may be related. “A profession that is less diverse and less open to different identities is more likely to exhibit groupthink and hubris,” he says.

“If it is to generate ideas to help society achieve inclusive prosperity [and so not push outsiders into the arms of populist politicians with no real answers to the problems being reacted against] it will have to start by becoming more inclusive itself.”

The new face of the discipline was on display at its annual meeting in San Diego early this month. The sessions that attracted the greatest attention were the more than a dozen focusing on gender and diversity.

Also discussed was a new book by the Nobel laureate Angus Deaton and Anne Case, Deaths of Despair. Their research shows how a particular set of economic ideas privileging the supposed “free market”, along with an obsession with material indicators such as aggregate productivity and gross domestic product, have fuelled an epidemic of suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism among America’s (often jobless) working class.

Capitalism is no longer delivering for these people (many of whom switched their votes to get Trump over the line) and economics is, at the very least, complicit, Rodrik observes.

In a panel session at the annual meeting that Rodrik helped organise, Economics for Inclusive Prosperity (note that buzzword inclusive), several new strands of thinking were discussed that are, he claims, “taking over the discipline”.

One was the need to expand economists’ focus from average levels of prosperity (which often look okay) to the distribution of that increased income between top, middle and bottom (which often doesn’t).

Another strand of thought was the non-economic dimensions that are equally fundamental to wellbeing – such as dignity, autonomy, health and political rights – damage to which economists have tended to ignore.

“How economists talk about, say, trade agreements or deregulation may well change when they take such additional considerations seriously,” he says.

“This will require new economic indicators. One proposal that goes part of the way is for government agencies to produce distributional national accounts [something our Australian Bureau of Statistics has been working on].”

Mainstream economists have long claimed their theories and models to be “value-free”. This is self-delusion on a grand scale. In a paper presented to the panel session by Professor Samuel Bowles, of the Santa Fe Institute, and Professor Wendy Carlin, of University College, London, they boldly stated the bleeding obvious.

They argued that every policy paradigm has embedded within it not just a theory about how the economy works, but also a set of ethical values about what the good life entails. Neo-liberalism, for instance, presumes individualistic, amoral individuals and a free market that delivers efficiency, thanks to “complete contracts” (those that leave the other party no room to cheat you, but such contracts don’t exist) and few instances of “market failure” (where, for various reasons, the market fails to work the way the theory says it will).

Clearly, such assumptions go a long way towards explaining why economists failed to foresee that deregulation of the financial system and permissive supervision of it would lead eventually to collapse and deep recession.

Bowles and Carlin said what we needed was a new theory that integrates egalitarian, democratic and sustainability “norms” of acceptable behaviour (the ethical side) with a model of the economy as is really operates today (that is, which would incorporate the insights of behavioural economics).

Such a paradigm would place the community alongside the economists’ conventional dichotomy between the market and the government. And it would include policies such as wealth taxes, broader access to insurance to reduce people’s exposure to risks, workplace rights, reform of corporate governance (none of the convenient fiction that shareholders’ rights trump all others), and a substantial weakening of intellectual property rights (which have devolved from a device to encourage innovation to a prime source of big business rent-seeking).

Professor Luigi Zingales, of Chicago University’s business school, criticised economists for foisting their own preferences on the public. They tended to place greater value on certain outcomes (such as economic efficiency) rather than others (such as the distribution of income) and they fall prey to groupthink and to fetishising particular economic models over others.

I can’t say I’m convinced a revolution in economists’ thinking is imminent, but it’s a start.

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Is Morrison the man who killed the Aussie summer?

This is the summer from hell. I can’t imagine anyone is enjoying their break – not with the quadruple whammy of drought, heatwaves, bushfires and smoke haze we’re experiencing. If it happens again next summer – or the one after – as it very well could, can you imagine the political doghouse Scott Morrison and his Coalition parties will be in?

Morrison is already bearing most of the ire of people displaced by the fires. So much so that he’s learned not to show up to offer his commiserations. But is it really his fault? No. Just one of the six prime ministers we’ve had over the past two decades can hardly take all the blame.

In any case, Morrison is right to protest that nothing Australia could have done by itself could have stopped the deterioration in climate we’re seeing. The only solution is global, so all the big, rich economies – particularly the Americans, less so the Europeans – must share the blame for the continuing rise in average temperatures.

And even the biggest developing economies – China and India, particularly – could have done more to reduce the intensity of their emissions (emissions per dollar of GDP) without abandoning their efforts to raise their living standards to some higher fraction of those we have long enjoyed.

But Morrison doesn’t escape the responsibility of leadership as easily as that. For one thing, it’s his side of politics that’s done most to sabotage the limited and belated efforts Australia has made, since the defeat of the Howard government, to contribute to the global effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

And you have to go back to John Howard’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto agreement of 1997 to find an instance of Australia actively disrupting efforts to reach international agreement on stronger action, to match the shamefully destructive contribution Angus Taylor made at the conference in Madrid last month by insisting that Australia be allowed to use an accounting trick to shirk its responsibilities.

For any Australian leader to claim, hand-on-heart, to have done all they reasonably could to reduce global warming, they have to be able to say they committed us to a disproportionate reduction in our emissions, so as to have the moral authority to press the bigger players to do more. None of our leaders can say that, least of all Howard and Morrison.

And then there’s the law of politics that says if it's fair enough for the government of the day to claim the credit when things go well – even when the seeds of that success were sown by an earlier administration – it’s equally fair for the government of the day to cop the blame when the neglect of earlier administrations finally hits the fan, as it has this summer.

Not Morrison nor any of his predecessors can honestly claim to have been caught unawares by what’s happening before our eyes and noses. The CSIRO has been warning for at least a decade of just this concurrence of adverse and costly events – in lives and health, as well as property – as the planet warms.

At last year’s election, the climate change deniers demanded to be told the economic cost of stepping up our contribution to reducing global warming. The more sensible among us should have been demanding to be told the economic cost of allowing global warming to roll on. We’re finding that out as we speak, but doing so the hard way.

It’s tempting to wonder whether, in his heart of hearts, Morrison is himself a climate-change denier. But that hardly matters. These days, what politicians truly believe doesn’t have much bearing on what they do and say. Conviction politics is dead. These days, politicians seek out the position that, while sitting easily with their heartland supporters, is likely to give them the greatest short-term advantage over their political opponents.

Whatever he believes, Morrison is too cagey to come out as a denier. Like Malcolm Turnbull before him, he’s bound hand-and-foot by the deniers in his own party and the Nationals. So, until now, his safest position has been to say he accepts the science, while falsely claiming to be comfortably on target to reach the (inadequate) emissions reduction we committed to in the Paris agreement.

There are two approaches to the “wicked” problem of global warming: mitigation (reducing emissions) and adaptation (changing in response to whatever warming we get). The greenies have seen these as in conflict and frowned on efforts to adapt. But Morrison and his predecessors have been so bound up by their deniers that they haven’t wanted to talk about even such issues as getting set to cope with much worse bushfire seasons. No excuses for that, Scott.

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how we caught the economic growth bug, but may shake it off

Do you realise that the great god of mammon, Gross Domestic Product, has really only been worshipped in Australia for 60 years last month? Its high priests at the Australian Bureau of Statistics have been celebrating the anniversary.

Sixty years may see a long time to you, but not to me. And not when you remember that the study of economics, in its recognisable form, started with the publication of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776.

GDP is the most closely watched bottom line of the "national accounts" for the Australian economy.

So what do GDP and the national accounts measure, where did they come from and are they as all-important as our economists, business people and politicians seem to think, or is GDP the source of our problems, as many environmentalists and sociologists seem to think?

What GDP measures can be described in several ways. I usually say it measures the value of all the goods and services produced in Australia during a period.

But because workers and businesses join together to produce goods and services in order to earn income, it’s equally true to say that GDP is a measure of the nation’s income during a period.

And since income is used to buy things, it’s also true that GDP measures the nation’s expenditure (but only after you subtract our spending on imports and add foreigners’ spending on our exports).

Now some qualifications.

GDP measures the value of goods and services bought and sold in the market place, plus the goods and services supplied by governments but paid for by our taxes. This means GDP doesn’t include the (considerable) value of all the goods and services – meals and so forth – produced in the home without money changing hands.

Economists (and economic journalists) make so much fuss about the quarterly ups and downs of GDP – is the economy growing or contracting, is it growing faster or slower? – it’s easy to assume that economic growth is something they’ve always obsessed about.

In truth, it’s a relatively recent preoccupation – suggesting it’s a habit we may one day grow out of. You see this more clearly when you consider the origins of GDP and the national accounts it springs from.

The 60-year anniversary is of the move to quarterly estimates of the growth in GDP in September quarter, 1959. It’s hard to be obsessive about something when you don’t get regular reports on how it’s going.

Fact is, until the Great Depression of the 1930s, economists were preoccupied with studying how markets worked ("micro-economics") and gave little thought to how the economy as a whole worked ("macro-economics"), let alone how fast it was growing.

In his recent history of the federal Treasury, Paul Tilley noted that it was just a department full of bookkeepers until the upheavals of the Depression caused its political masters to ask questions about what they should be doing that it couldn’t answer. That’s when Treasury became macro-economists.

It was the failure of "neo-classical" economics to provide an effective response to the Depression that led to the ascendancy of an Englishman who did have answers, John Maynard Keynes. At the heart of the ensuing the "Keynesian revolution" in economics was the notion that there was such a thing as the macro economy and that it was the responsibility of governments to "manage" that economy, ending its slump and getting workers back to work.

Once you started thinking like that, it became obvious that, to manage the economy effectively, you needed to measure it and track the changes in it over time.

The first economists to start developing a systematic and internally consistent way of measuring the economy, in the early 1930s, were Simon Kuznets in the United States and Colin Clark in Britain. Clark, a disciple of Keynes, moved to Australia in 1938 and spent the rest of his life as an adviser to the Queensland government.

For some years after World War II, our Treasury issued annual, out-of-date estimates of the size of GDP and its components.

The Keynesian economists’ preoccupation then was not with growth as such, but with keeping the economy at "full employment" – in those days defined an unemployment rate of less than 2 per cent – which, admittedly, did require it to be growing pretty quickly. In those days, however, GDP was used more as an aid to the short-run stabilisation of the business cycle – "demand management".

Paul Samuelson’s legendary introductory textbook, first published in 1947, which "brought Keynesian economics into the classroom", didn’t have an entry for "growth" until its sixth edition in 1964.

It was only about then that people became preoccupied with economic growth, as indicated by the growth in GDP.

The critics are right to point out the many respects in which GDP falls short as a measure of human wellbeing. But, though it’s true many people treat GDP as though it is such a measure, it was never designed to be used as such.

I agree with the critics that there’s more to life than economic growth and that politicians and economists should give less attention to growth and more to the many less tangible, less well-measured social factors that also affect our wellbeing.

It’s true, too, that GDP was developed before we became conscious of the need for economic activity to be ecologically sustainable – which the present hellish summer reminds us it certainly isn’t at present. In this sense, GDP is no longer "fit for purpose".

It’s wrong, however, to conclude that continuing growth in GDP is incompatible with ecological sustainability. People say that because they don’t understand what drives the "growth" that GDP measures (hint: improved productivity).

We can have unending growth in GDP and sustainable use of natural resources (which is what the environmentalists care about) by changing the way economic activity is organised – including by getting all our energy from renewable sources.

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Government on the cheap leaves us burningly reliant on charity

As the cast were taking their bows at the end of a show before Christmas, one of them stepped forward to say that, as we left, we’d be approached by people with buckets collecting for the NSW Rural Fire Service. Normally I’d reach for my wallet – I’d done so a few weeks earlier when they were collecting for an actors’ charity – but this time I declined.

Like Victoria’s Country Fire Authority, the RFS is staffed by volunteers. Why did they need donations? Presumably, to help cover the cost of needed equipment or incidental expenses. Really? What’s happened to the state government’s cheque book? And don’t I remember hearing that the RFS had had its funding cut?

No one believes every worthy cause should be funded by the government so that private charity becomes redundant. And it’s true the federal government partially subsidises donations by making them tax-deductible. But where do you draw the line between what the government should cover and what can be left to the generosity – or otherwise – of private citizens?

The more I think about it, the more I realise that, as part of their commitment to Smaller Government and lower taxes, governments have been quietly shifting the dividing line between what the government pays for and what should depend on charity.

All governments have been doing it. State governments, for instance, have long left country (but not city) fire-fighting to volunteers. And have long underfunded the upkeep of public schools, believing parents and citizens can be left to make up the shortfall. But it’s been a particular trick of the federal Coalition government as it struggles to return its budget to surplus when there are expensive, vote-buying tax cuts to be covered.

If you’re wondering why, despite his contrition at having taken an overseas break his spin doctors tried to keep secret, and his freely dispensed “thoughts and prayers”, Scott Morrison remained adamant for so long that all that was needed was already being done to help the firefighters, it’s because he knows that too much generosity on the feds’ part could see his precious budget surplus whittled down to nothingness.

Since its election in 2013, this government has been insistent that the budget should be returned to surplus by cutting government spending, not by explicit increases in taxes (hidden tax increases caused by bracket creep are okay, of course, because the punters don’t notice ’em).

Its first budget in 2014 was a long-term plan to improve the budget by what the bureaucrats call “cost-shifting”. Much of the cost of health and education was to be shifted onto the states’ budgets. Some was to be moved to your household’s budget via the $7 charge for visits to the doctor.

That budget was so badly received most of those plans were reversed. But Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and his accountants have continued to limit the growth in government spending by penny-pinching in ways that voters wouldn’t notice or object to.

They’ve got welfare dependency to “its lowest level in 30 years” not by getting the unemployed into jobs, but by using petty excuses to suspend people’s dole payments. How do these unfortunates live without money to live on? They fall back on their families or go cap-in-hand to the Salvos or Vinnies. Get it? The feds are cost-shifting to charities – the same community groups whose grants they’ve cut back.

According to a recent survey of its members’ staffs by the Australian Council of Social Service, 76 per cent of staff dealing with housing the homeless reported an increase in demand, as did 71 per cent of those providing financial counselling and support (aka money). Respondents to the survey said the unmet demand naturally had adverse impacts on the community. Where people fall through the cracks they can end up in hospitals or the justice system (cost-shifting to the states).

I’ve been reading about how many small country towns are relying on newly formed charities for their supply of water. More broadly, the desire to limit government spending encourages politicians to ignore reports warning of looming troubles and push problems off into the future. Some of the foreseen problems fail to materialise, but many eventually reach crisis point and can no longer be ignored.

The aged care royal commission is revealing the shocking results of one attempt to keep government small by relying on for-profit providers, underspending on the provision of home-care packages and on policing institutions’ adherence to the rules.

Which brings us back to our truly heroic volunteer firefighters. Morrison’s reluctant decision to pay them $300 a day for a maximum of 20 days is the least he can do to acknowledge their loss of income (or annual leave) while serving their communities.

His reluctance – and anxiety to emphasise it’s not a payment of wages – is understandable, however. Behavioural economics is clear that paying people to do what they formerly did without payment can kill the motivation to donate your services for noble reasons. Morrison has stressed that this response to a problem of unprecedented severity shouldn’t be seen as setting a precedent.

Good luck with that. If climate change is making drought, heatwaves and bushfires bigger and more frequent, the horrific events of this summer will become a regular occurrence – meaning the days of leaving bushfire fighting to unpaid volunteers are numbered.

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Living in the post-inflation era turns out to be no fun

It’s Christmas shopping time, when the bills mount up and your money never goes far enough. So how come people are saying the inflation rate should be higher? I thought inflation was meant to be a bad thing?

It’s a good question when one of those people is Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe. He keeps saying we need to get unemployment lower and inflation back up into the 2 to 3 per cent target range. (At last count the annual rate of increase in consumer prices was "only" 1.7 per cent. I can remember when, for a brief period in the 1970s, it was 17 per cent.)

The short answer is that Lowe doesn’t see higher prices as a good thing in themselves. Rather, he sees them as a means to an end. Or better, as a symptom or by-product of something that is a good thing.

Why do prices rise? Because the demand for goods and services – the desire to purchase them – is growing faster than the supply of them – our businesses’ ability to produce them. So the rate of price inflation is a symptom or sign of strong demand.

And strong demand for goods and services is a good thing because it means the economy is growing and so is employers’ need for workers to help produce more goods and services. Employment increases and unemployment falls.

So Lowe wants to see higher prices simply because they’re a means to the end of lower unemployment. What’s more, increased employer demand for labour relative to its supply makes labour – particularly skilled labour – scarcer and so puts upward pressure on its price, otherwise known as wages.

And, as he’s often said, Lowe would like to see employers paying higher wages than they are, because consumer spending – consumer demand – is so weak at present mainly because wages are hardly growing faster than consumer prices, and real wages are the main thing that drives consumer spending.

All that make sense? Good – because now I’ll give you the more complicated answer. Surely, although strong demand is good for the economy, it would be better if supply was just as strong, meaning we could have growth in jobs and living standards without any inflation?

That makes sense in principle, but not in practice. The managers of the macro economy believe we need some inflation, though not too much. For two reasons. First, though you’ll find this hard to credit, economists are sure our consumer price index (like other countries’ CPIs) overstates inflation.

That’s because the official statisticians are unable to pick up all the cases where prices rise not simply because the firm’s costs have risen, but because the quality of the product has been improved. If so, aiming for a measured inflation rate of zero would require you to crunch the economy hard enough to make actual inflation less than zero – that is, prices would be falling.

The second reason is that sometimes, when the economy is growing too strongly, wages rise too much, prompting firms to lay off workers. Trouble is, workers hate having their wages cut. But if you’ve got a bit of inflation in the system, you can cut wages in real terms simply by skipping an annual pay rise, which workers find less unpalatable.

When the Reserve Bank set its target for inflation in the early 1990s, it settled on 2 to 3 per cent a year ("on average over the medium term"). It thought such a range would overcome both problems and insisted such a target range constituted "practical price stability".

But things in our economy and all the advanced economies have changed a lot since the 1990s. Demand has been chronically weak relative to supply since the global financial crisis and, in consequence, inflation rates have been below-target everywhere.

Some people have suggested we move to a lower, more realistic target range, but Lowe has resisted, arguing that to do so would lower firms’ and workers’ expectations about inflation, making our weak-demand problem even worse. He may be right.

But now try this thought. Inflation is 1.7 per a year, while wages are growing by 2.2 per cent and workers aren’t at all happy. I’ve had several top economists agree with my contention that, if we could wave a magic wand and raise both inflation and wages by, say, 2 percentage points, so that wages were growing by 4.2 per cent, workers would be a lot less discontented.

Why? Because of a phenomenon that economists used to talk about a lot in in the 1960s, but rarely mention today, called "money illusion". People who aren’t economists keep forgetting to allow for inflation. If so, the era of very low inflation isn’t proving to be much fun.

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