Good news: why our low unemployment rate will last

Nobody’s noticed, but something really good has come out of the upheaval of the pandemic: more than 100,000 people who’d spent ages searching for a job without success, finally found one. The benefit to them – and the economy – will last a long time.

When I say nobody noticed, I mean no economist or econocrat. The person first to notice was a former economics writer for this august organ, now economics editor for The Conversation website, Peter Martin.

Because no one had experienced a pandemic, and because it was feared initially that the disruption to the economy would be much greater than it proved, both the Reserve Bank, with its cuts to interest rates, and the government, with its spending and tax cuts, responded to the need for lockdowns by giving a huge boost to demand.

The authorities responded as though the lockdowns were an ordinary recession, not something much more short-term and limited to particular parts of the economy. The economy bounced back strongly after each of the two lockdowns.

So, the surge in demand for goods and services led to a surge in demand for workers to produce them. Adding to the demand for workers were the high levels of absenteeism caused by the virus.

Normally, much of this increased demand for workers would have been satisfied by bringing in workers from abroad. This time, however, our borders were closed. Worse, we’d sent home many overseas students and backpackers.

So what happened? If they wanted more staff, employers were obliged to be less choosy about the workers they hired.

Some people in the pool of unemployment get to find a job and escape the pool after only a few weeks. Others take a lot longer. And the harsh truth is that the longer it takes you to find a job, the less likely an employer is to want you.

Employers think, “if no other employers have wanted you, why should I risk it?” It’s as though the longer you stay in the pool, the further down you sink until eventually, you get stuck in the mud at the bottom.

The Bureau of Statistics defines “long-term” unemployment as having been jobless for a year or more. The number of long-term unemployed always rises greatly in the years following a normal recession.

That’s because the normal pattern is for unemployment to shoot up at the start of the recession, but then take six or seven years to come back down.

Among the greatest victims of recessions are students who have the misfortune to be leaving education at the time. Economists say such unfortunates get “scarred” by the long delay in finding an appropriate job. Research shows it can take them up to 10 years to get their careers going properly.

But though Treasury economists feared the pandemic would leave many young people scarred, it didn’t happen because the “coronacession” proved so short and sharp.

Martin is the first person to shout that, over the year to June, the number of long-term unemployed fell from 218,200 to 130,100. And then to join the dots.

Over the 14 months to June, the fall’s even bigger: 125,000 – almost 1 per cent of the labour force.

This week, we learnt that the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.4 per cent, its lowest in almost 50 years. For the sceptics who think this a fudge, at 6 per cent the rate of underemployment is its lowest in more than 30 years.

This isn’t surprising since 98 per cent of all the extra jobs created since March 2020 have been full-time – suggesting the labour shortage has prompted employers to turn many part-time jobs into full-time.

Since March 2020, the rate of youth unemployment (people aged 15 to 24) has fallen from 11.6 per cent to 7 per cent. And you’d expect the labour shortage to have increased the labour-force participation of older workers, as employers encouraged them keep working or switch to part-time rather than retire.

All this is more than just good news for the people who’ve finally been able to find jobs, move from part-time to full-time, or keep working despite getting older.

It has important implications for the economy’s prospects, and for its ability to achieve lower rates of unemployment before this causes wage inflation to take off. By changing so many people’s category from unemployable to actually employed, it’s increased the effective supply of homegrown labour.

By getting 125,000 long-term unemployed back into the working world, it’s lowered the floor under the unemployment rate by about 1 percentage point. So even if the economy turns down in coming months or years, the unemployment peak, however high, is likely to be about 1 percentage point lower than it otherwise would have been.

It gets us closer to a level of full employment that makes more sense to an ordinary person who thinks full employment surely must mean unemployment close to zero.

It means a rare conjunction of circumstances – strong demand while the economy was closed to imported labour - has brought about a structural change in our labour market that makes nonsense of economists’ conventional estimates of our NAIRU - the “non-accelerating-inflation” rate of unemployment.

When the Morrison government decided to spend big in the 2021 budget to improve its political chances, the econocrats decided to make a virtue of necessity by moving to what I call Plan B: keep stimulating demand to get unemployment so low that employers would have to bid wages up to get all the workers they needed.

This week’s news that wage growth over the year to June has soared to the frightening rate of 2.6 per cent suggests that Plan B hasn’t been a roaring success, and certainly isn’t a reason to worry that labour shortages will lead to wage growth that threatens our return to low inflation.

But the econocrats could claim credit for an unintended consequence of Plan B: it’s helped bring about a long-term reduction in the rate of unemployment.

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I foresee a world where workers gain the upper hand

Former NSW premier Neville Wran was the first politician – but far from the last – to say the election would be about “jobs, jobs, jobs”. That line captured perfectly one of the great economic certainties of our age: you can never, ever have enough jobs to go around.

That’s what most of us think, and the reason we think it is that it’s been true for the past 50 years. That’s how long it’s been since we had a rate of unemployment so low no one worried much about it.

But, as my colleague Jessica Irvine reminded us only yesterday, at 3.5 per cent, unemployment is at its lowest in almost 50 years.

To put it more positively, at more than 64 per cent, the proportion of the working-age population with a job is higher than it’s ever been. If you don’t find that gratifying news, there’s something wrong with you.

At present, we have a record number of unfilled job vacancies, about as many as we have unemployed workers. (Of course, not all the jobless have the right training – or live in the right part of the country – to fill those vacancies.)

Now, you can argue this happy outcome is just a temporary consequence of the pandemic. For two years, the official interest rate was almost zero, and governments – federal and state – were spending like wounded bulls.

So we had a huge increase in the demand for labour, but at a time when there was a two-year ban on imported workers. Little wonder employment grew strongly, vacancies shot up and employers complain incessantly about skill shortages.

You can also argue that, now our borders have reopened, our normal high inflow of foreign students, backpackers and skilled workers on temporary visas will resume, and the jobs market won’t stay nearly so tight.

Then you can argue that it only needs Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe to step too hard on the interest-rate brakes and we – as with many other developed economies – will be plunged into recession and rising unemployment.

You can argue all that. But I think these short-term factors are hiding deeper, longer-term trends that have brought us to a turning point. We’re going from never having enough jobs available for people to fill, to never having enough people available to fill all the jobs.

And here’s the bonus: if I’m right, we’ll be going from insecure jobs and stagnant wages to much higher wages and bosses falling over themselves to attract and retain the workers they need.

Business people are nothing if not opportunistic. When workers are plentiful, they pick and choose and make demands. But when workers are hard to find, they become wonderful people whose only concern is their workers’ welfare.

The first factor that’s working to turn the tables is the ageing of the population: more oldies leaving the workforce than youngsters joining it. Fertility has fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids per woman.

For many years we’ve sought to slow population ageing by maintaining one of the advanced economies’ highest rates of immigration, with an emphasis on young, skilled workers.

Skilled immigration is also used to keep downward pressure on wage rates. With the pandemic receding, big business is desperate for high immigration to resume ASAP. And the Albanese government is likely to oblige.

But setting high immigration targets is one thing; attaining them is another. These days, migrants come mainly from developing countries. But all the other rich countries have an ageing problem, so we’ll be competing against them for takers.

China’s population is also ageing rapidly. Our intake of foreign students – some of whom are allowed to stay on – has been reduced by our falling out with China, but has always been a temporary play while Asia’s emerging economies get their universities going.

The final factor that will keep the demand for workers growing faster than the supply is the way the rich economies are becoming service economies, much of which represents the growth of the “care economy”.

Australia has already reached the point where 80 per cent of our production and 90 per cent of our employment is from the services sector. The thing about services is that they’re mainly delivered by people. As the Productivity Commission has noted, it’s much easier to use machines to replace people in farming, mining and manufacturing than it is in the services sector.

As people become old, they need more services – from doctors, nurses, paramedics and age care workers. All these people require education and training – by more services-sector workers.

Have you noticed all the stories lately about shortages of teachers, GPs, hospital workers and, before that, aged care and childcare workers? We’re going to get them all from overseas? I doubt it.

I noticed a tweet from an economics professor: “‘skill shortage’ = wages too low to attract workers”.

Get it? If we want all these people, we’ll have to pay them a lot more than we do now – and treat them a lot better.

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Inflation psychology: firms charge what they can get away with

Economists think inflation is all about economics. What they don’t know is that it’s also about psychology. But Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe shows a glimmer of understanding when he refers not to “inflation expectations” but to “inflation psychology”.

Notorious for their “physics envy” – where the world works according to known and unchanging laws, so everything can be reduced to mathematical calculation – economists think changes in prices are determined by the interaction of the “laws” of supply and demand.

This is true, but far from the whole truth. Especially for the prices set in the jobs market – aka wages – where this simple “neoclassical” analysis almost always gives wrong answers.

Economists’ first attempt at a less mechanical approach to the relatively modern problem of inflation – a continuing rise in the general level of prices – came from Milton Friedman and another Nobel laureate’s realisation of the important role played by people’s expectations about what will happen to the inflation rate.

If it worsens significantly and this leads enough people to expect it to stay high or go higher, their expectations may lead to the higher rate becoming entrenched via a “wage-price spiral”.

That is, expectations of higher inflation tend to be self-fulfilling because people act on their expectations. If businesses expect higher price rises generally, they adjust their own prices accordingly. And workers and their unions adjust their own wage demands accordingly.

When last the rich world had a big inflation problem, in the second half of the 1970s and much of the ’80s, this theory seemed to work well, though it took years for expectations to worsen. Then it took years of keeping interest rates high and demand weak, and getting actual inflation down below 3 per cent, before expected inflation came back down.

The inflation target, of 2 to 3 per cent on average, was set in the mid-90s to help “anchor” expectations at an acceptable level.

All this is why the latest leap in inflation has led some economists to worry that, if expectations become “unanchored”, inflation may become entrenched at a much higher level.

This fear explains why many are anxious to use higher interest rates to get actual inflation back down ASAP. If falling real wages help to speed the process, so much the better.

Two small problems with this. For a start, there’s little evidence – either here or in the other rich economies – that expectations have moved up. Sensibly, everyone expects that, before too long, the inflation rate will go back to being a lot lower.

In the real world of price-setting by firms and workers, it takes a lot longer for expectations to shift prices than it does for prices in share and other financial markets to bounce around.

But the deeper reason worries about worsening expectations are misplaced is that, since this theory became so influential in the ’70s, the mechanism by which the expected inflation rate becomes the actual rate has broken down.

Businesses retain the ability to raise their prices when they decide to – and to discount those prices should they discover they’ve pushed it too far and are losing sales - but organised workers have largely lost their ability to force employers to grant higher pay rises.

If you doubt that, ask yourself why the number of days lost to strikes is now the tiniest fraction of what it was in the ’70s. We’ve seen a little strike action lately, but it’s coming almost wholly from workers in the public sector – the main part of the workforce that’s still heavily unionised.

But the breakdown of the inflation-expectations theory and the “wage-price spiral” as explanations of the relatively modern phenomenon of inflation – a continuing rise in the general level of prices – leaves us looking elsewhere for explanations.

A big part of it is the message those economists who specialise in studying competition have to give financial economists such as Lowe: you don’t seem to realise that our modern oligopolised economy gives many big businesses a lot of power over the prices they’re able to charge.

Oligopoly is about the few huge firms dominating a particular market reaching a tacit agreement to keep prices high and stable, and limit their competition for market-share to non-price areas such as product differentiation and marketing.

As former competition czar Rod Sims has pointed out, this greatly reduces the ability of higher interest rates to influence prices in many big slabs of the economy.

But if many big businesses can improve their profitability by deciding to raise their prices, why did they wait until only a year ago to decide to start whacking up them up? Because it ain’t that simple.

All firms would like to raise their prices all the time. What stops them is the knowledge that they can’t charge more than “what the market will bear”. They worry about two things: what will my competitors do? And what will my customers do?

When there’s a big rise in input costs, the knowledge that all my competitors are facing the same cost increase gives me confidence we’ll all be passing it through to the customer at the same time.

That’s why it was the sudden, large and widespread increase in the cost of imported inputs caused by the pandemic and the Ukraine war that started the latest bout of prices rises at the retail level.

But, as Lowe keeps saying, the supply chain cost increases don’t explain all the rise in retail prices. He makes the obvious point that firms find it easier to raise their prices at a time when demand is strong and people are spending. His interest-rate rises are intended to stop demand being so strong and conducive to price rises.

But the less obvious point – especially to people mesmerised by the neoclassical way of thinking – is the role of psychology. I’ve got a great justification for increasing my prices, but no one’s counting. If my costs have risen by 5 per cent, but I increase my prices by 6 per cent, who’s to know?

Sims reminds us that this is just the way firms with pricing power behave. They raise their prices and profits in ways that aren’t easy for their customers to notice.

That covers big business. In the main, small businesses don’t have much pricing power. But “what the market will bear” is greater when the media has spent months softening up their customers with incessant talk about inflation and how high prices will go.

Lowe can’t say it, but it’s not uncooperative workers that are his problem, it’s businesses using the chance to slip in a little extra for themselves.

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Our hidden inflation problem: business has too much pricing power

Why is Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe so worried about getting inflation down when so much of the rise in prices comes from foreign supply constraints that will eventually go away, and so much of the rise won’t be passed on to workers in higher wages?

Because what he can’t admit is that inflation won’t fall back to the target range of 2 to 3 per cent until the nation’s businesses decide to moderate their price rises. And they’re not likely to do that until those rises reach the point where they’re driving away customers.

It’s said that using monetary policy (higher interest rates) to control inflation is a “blunt instrument”. The only way to discourage businesses from raising their prices is to get to their customers’ wallets - by cutting real wages, increasing mortgage payments and having falling house prices make them feel less wealthy.

When explaining problems in the economy, economists use two favourite analytical tools. First, determine how much of the problem is coming from the supply (production) side of the economy, and how much from the demand (spending) side.

Second, determine whether the problem is “cyclical” or “structural”. That is, has it been caused by the temporary ups and downs of the business cycle, or by longer-lasting changes in the economy’s structure – the way it works.

I’ve argued that most of the surge in prices has come from the supply side: a horrible coincidence of supply disruptions caused by the pandemic, the Ukraine war, and even climate change.

This matters because monetary policy can do nothing to fix disruptions to supply. All it can ever do is batter down demand.

It’s true, however, that this main, supply-side problem has been worsened by the effect of strong, government-stimulated demand for goods as services.

As for the cyclical-versus-structural distinction, it’s relevant because, as Lowe never tires of reminding us, monetary policy is capable of dealing only with cyclical problems. Its role is to smooth the ups and downs in demand as the economy moves through the business cycle.

But here’s the problem: higher interest rates aren’t working to reduce inflation the way they used to because of changes in the structure of the economy.

In particular, employees and their unions now have less power to insist on wage rises sufficient to keep up with price rises than they did when last we had a big inflation problem. But big business now has more power to raise its prices.

Partly because globalisation has moved much manufacturing from the high-wage advanced economies to China and other low-wage economies, and partly because of the decentralisation and deregulation of wage-fixing and the decline in union membership, most workers pretty much have to accept whatever inadequate pay rise their chief executive (or premier) chooses to give them.

This is why all the concern about inflation expectations becoming “unanchored” is so silly. Businesses have the power to act on their expectations of higher inflation, but workers no longer do.

This is why the rate of unemployment can fall far below what economists, using data going back decades, estimate to be the NAIRU - “non-accelerating-inflation” rate of unemployment - without wage inflation accelerating.

When thinking about inflation, macroeconomists – including Lowe, I suspect - often assume our markets are competitive, and that the markets for all goods and services are equally competitive.

But as Rod Sims, former chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, and now a professor at the Australian National University, has written, markets in Australia are generally far from strongly competitive.

“Many sectors ... are dominated by just a few firms – think beer, groceries, energy and telecommunications retailing, resources, elements of the digital economy, banking and many others,” Sims says.

“This means the dominant firms have some degree of market power. That is, they can set prices at higher levels knowing competitors are unlikely to undercut them and take market share from them.

“When there is high inflation, dominant firms often realise they can increase prices above any cost rises because consumers will be more accepting of this. They will often do this subtly over time.”

In concentrated markets, firms can also easily see the effects on their few competitors, and they can watch and follow each other’s behaviour. They are confident that none will break ranks on price rises because there are benefits to be had by all.

Firms with market and pricing power are also less likely to restrain prices in response to interest rate rises, Sims says. This is because it’s not competition, but dominant-firm behaviour, that’s driving pricing decisions.

As well, market power is usually associated with reduced production capacity. How often do we see reductions in combined capacity following a merger of two competitors? When demand increases, there’s then less capacity available to serve it, so we see prices rise more than they otherwise would have.

What all this means is that it may take longer for interest rates to work to slow inflation, so patience may be needed rather than further increases. And, Sims says, there could be a role for publicly exposing high margins, to put pressure on to reduce them.

Another point he makes is that this inflation owes much to price shocks in the key, highly regulated gas and electricity industries. In these cases, the best answer is to make their regulation more anti-inflationary, not just jack up interest rates further.

The micro-economic reforms of the Hawke-Keating government have made our economy much less inflation-prone than it was in the days when inflation was last a major problem.

Meanwhile, however, we’ve allowed the pricing power of big firms to grow as successive governments of both colours have resisted pressure from people like Sims to tighten our merger law, and state governments have maximised the sale price of their electricity businesses by selling them to business interests intent on turning the national electricity market into a three-firm vertically integrated oligopoly. Well done, guys.

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We've got more than we've ever had, but are we better off?

It probably won’t surprise you that the Productivity Commission is always writing reports about … productivity. Its latest is a glittering advertisement for the manifold benefits of capitalism which, we’re told, holds The Key to Prosperity.

Which is? Glad you asked. Among all the ways to co-ordinate a nation’s economic activity, capitalism – which the commission prefers to call the “market” economy – is by far the best at raising our material standard of living by continuously improving our … productivity.

Productivity is capitalist magic. It means producing more outputs of goods and services with the same or fewer inputs of raw materials, labour and physical capital. This involves not working harder or longer, but working smarter – using new ideas to reduce the cost of the goods and services we produce, to improve their quality and even to invent new goods and services.

Find that hard to believe? Keep watching the ad.

We’re told that sustained productivity improvement has happened only over about the past 200 years, since the Industrial Revolution. Then, 90 per cent of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, compared with less than 10 per cent today.

Technological developments and inventions – including vaccines, antibiotics and statins – have driven huge increases in the length of our lives and years of good health.

In Australia, output of goods and services per person – a simple measure of prosperity – is about seven times higher than it was 120 years ago at Federation. This means people today have access to an array of goods and services that were unimaginable in the past.

For every 10,000 newborn babies in 1901, more than 1000 died before their first birthday; today it’s just three. For those who survived childbirth, life expectancy was about 60 years, compared with more than 80 today.

During their 60 years, the average Australian worked much longer hours than today, with little paid leave. The 48-hour week wasn’t introduced until 1916 and paid annual leave didn’t become the norm until 1935. Workplaces were far more dangerous.

Most people died before becoming eligible for the age pension (introduced in 1909) and the average wage bought far fewer goods and services, with a steak costing 5 per cent of the weekly wage.

Homes were more crowded – about five people per home, which were much smaller. We had outside toilets until the 1950s and washing machines and dishwashers didn’t become common until at least the 1970s.

By making goods and services cheaper and better, productivity improvement has increased the typical worker’s purchasing power. That is, it has reduced the number of hours of work required to achieve any particular level of material living standards.

For instance, the cost of a double bed, mattress, blanket and pillows has fallen from 185 hours of work in 1901 to 18 hours today. The cost of a loaf of bread has fallen from 18 minutes to four minutes.

More recently, the cost of a new car has fallen from 17 months in 1990 to five. The cost of a smartphone has fallen from 60 hours in 2010 to 16.

End of advertisement.

When you think about it, this is amazing. Objectively, there’s no doubt we’re hugely more prosperous than our forebears. Our lives are longer and healthier, with less pain, less physical exertion, less work per week, bigger and better homes, more education, more comfort, more convenience, more entertainment, more holidays and travel, more ready contact with family and friends, and greater access to the rest of the world.

We’re not just better off than our great-grandparents, we’re clearly better off than we were 20 years ago. Oldies like me can’t begin to tell our offspring how much clunkier the world was before computers and the internet.

And yet … the trouble with the higher material living standard we strive for – and economists devote their careers to helping us achieve – is that we so quickly take it for granted. It’s always the next step on the prosperity ladder that will finally make us happy.

We’re undoubtedly better off in 100 ways, but do we feel much better about it?

I suspect our lives are like a Top 40 chart – when one tune falls back, another always takes its place. There’s always one tune that sold most copies this week – even if this week’s winner sold far fewer than last week’s.

Whether they’re life-threatening or just annoying, there’s always a set of worries that mar our sense of wellbeing. Makes you wonder whether there might be more to life than prosperity. Human relationships, for instance.

Then there’s the possibility – beyond the purview of most economists – that prosperity comes at a price. Maybe the world we’ve created in our pursuit of prosperity comes at the price of more stress, anxiety, depression and loneliness.

And maybe the natural world is about to present us with a belated bill for all our prosperity: more droughts, bushfires, cyclones, flooding and higher sea levels. All of it in a despoiled environment.

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Fixing inflation isn't hard. Returning to healthy growth is

Despite any impression you’ve gained, fixing inflation isn’t the end game. It’s getting the economy back to strong, non-inflationary growth. But I’m not sure present policies will get us there.

The financial markets and the news media have one big thing in common: they view the economy and its problems one day at a time, which leaves them terribly short-sighted.

Less than two years ago, they thought we were caught in the deepest recession since the 1930s. By the end of last year, they thought the economy had taken off like a rocket. Now they think inflation will destroy us unless we kill it immediately.

For those of us who like to put developments in context, however, life isn’t that disjointed. The day-at-a-time brigade has long forgotten that, before the pandemic arrived, the big problem was what the Americans called “secular stagnation” and I preferred calling a low-growth trap.

In a recent thoughtful and informative speech, Treasury secretary Dr Steven Kennedy observed that the pandemic “followed a period of lacklustre growth and low inflation”. (It was so low the Reserve Bank spent years trying to get inflation up to the target range, but failing. Businesses didn’t want to raise wages – or prices.)

So, Kennedy said, “when assessing the policy decisions made during the pandemic there was an additional consideration for policymakers in wanting to not just return to the pre-pandemic situation, but to surpass it.”

One economist who shares this longer perspective is ANZ Bank’s Richard Yetsenga. He describes the 2010s as our “horrendum decennium” where unemployment and underemployment were relatively high, consumer spending relatively weak and business had plenty of idle production capacity.

He reminds us that real average earnings per worker in 2020 hadn’t budged since 2012. “The resulting weakness in consumer demand meant that ‘need’ – the most critical ingredient [for] business investment – was missing,” he says. “Excess demand, and the resulting lack of production capacity, is a pre-condition of investment.”

See how we were caught in a low-growth trap? Weak growth leads to low business investment, which leads to little productivity improvement, which leads to more weak growth.

During the Dreadful Decade, the prevailing view among policymakers was that high unemployment was preferable to high inflation, which might become entrenched. So, unemployment was left high, to keep inflation low.

Yetsenga says this decision to entrench relatively high unemployment was a mistake. “Unemployment, underemployment and the inequality they contribute to, all affect macroeconomic outcomes [adversely]“.

“Those on higher incomes tend to save more, reducing consumption, but those on lower incomes tend to borrow more. Inequality, in other words, tends to lower economic growth and exacerbate financial vulnerability.”

Even so, Yetsenga is optimistic. The policy response to the pandemic has “changed the baseline” and we’re in the process of escaping the low-growth trap.

Unemployment is at its lowest in five decades and underemployment has fallen significantly. Real consumer spending is 9 per cent above pre-pandemic levels, and businesses’ capacity utilisation has been restored to high levels not seen since before the global financial crisis.

As a result, planned spending on business investment in the year ahead is about the highest in nearly three decades.

Yetsenga says the Reserve would like some of the rise in the rate of inflation to be permanent. “If monetary policy can deliver [annual] inflation of 2.5 per cent over time, rather than the 1.5 to 2 per cent that characterised the pre-pandemic period, it’s not just the rate of inflation that will be different.

“We should expect the ‘real’ side of the economy to have improved as well: more demand, more employment and more investment.”

“The role of wages in sustaining higher inflation is well known, but wage growth doesn’t occur in a vacuum. To employ more people, give more hours to those working part-time, and raise wage growth, business needs to see demand strong enough to pay for the labour.

“Some of the additional labour spend will be passed on to higher selling prices. The need to invest in more labour is likely to go hand-in-hand with more capital investment.”

I think Yetsenga makes some important points. First, the policy of keeping unemployment high so that inflation will be low has come at a price to growth and contributed to the low-growth trap.

Second, inequality isn’t just about fairness. Economists in the international agencies are discovering that it causes lower growth. So, the policy of ignoring high and rising inequality has also contributed to the low-growth trap.

Third, the idea that we can’t get higher economic growth until we get more productivity improvement has got the “direction of causation” the wrong way around. We won’t get much productivity improvement until we bring about more growth.

Despite all this, I don’t share Yetsenga’s optimism that the shock of the pandemic, and the econocrats’ switch to what I call Plan B – to use additional fiscal stimulus in the 2021 budget to get us much closer to full employment, as a last-ditch attempt to get wage rates growing faster than 2 or 2.5 per cent a year – will be sufficient to bust us out of the low-growth trap.

Yetsenga’s emphasis is on boosting household income by making it easier for households to increase their income by supplying more hours of work. He says little about households’ ability to protect and increase their wage income in real terms.

Another consequence of the pandemic period is the collapse of the consensus view that wages should at least rise in line with prices. Real wages should fall only to correct a period when real wage growth has been excessive.

But so panicked have the econocrats and the new Labor government been by a sudden sharp rise in prices (the frightening size of which is owed almost wholly to a coincidence of temporary, overseas supply disruptions) that they’re looking the other way while, according to the Reserve’s latest forecasts, real wages will fall for three calendar years in a row.

Since it’s the easiest and quickest way of getting inflation down, they’re looking the other way while the nation’s employers – government and business - short-change their workers by a cumulative 6.5 per cent.

This makes a mockery of all the happy assurances that, by some magical economic mechanism, improvements in the productivity of labour flow through to workers as increases in their real wage.

Sorry, I won’t believe we’ve escaped the low-growth trap until I see that, as well as employing more workers, businesses are also paying them a reasonable wage.

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If higher productivity comes from new ideas, it's time we had some

Economists and business people talk unceasingly about the crying need to improve the economy’s productivity, but most of what they say is self-serving and much of it’s just silly. Fortunately, this week’s five-yearly report on the subject from the Productivity Commission, The Key to Prosperity, is far from silly, and might just stand a chance of getting us somewhere.

It’s the first of several reports and, unlike the tosh we usually get, it’s not selling any magic answers. Business people mention productivity only when they’re “rent-seeking” – asking the government for changes that will make it easier to increase their profits without them trying any harder.

Their favourite magic answer is to say that if only the government would cut the tax paid by companies and senior executives, this would do wonders for productivity.

As for the econocrats, too often they see it as a chance to advertise the product they’re selling: “microeconomic reform” – by which they usually mean reducing government intervention in markets.

A lot of people think wanting higher “productivity” is just a flash way of saying you want production to increase. Wrong. The report makes it clear that improving productivity means producing more outputs, but with the same or fewer inputs.

It sounds like some sort of miracle, and it is pretty amazing to think about, but it happens all the time.

Another mistake is to think that wanting to increase productivity is the bosses’ way of saying they’re going to make us work harder. No, no, no. As the report repeats, productivity comes from working smarter, not harder or longer.

In response to the scientist-types who keep repeating that unending economic growth is physically impossible, and then wondering what bit of this the economist-types don’t get, the report says that “while economic growth based solely on [increased] physical inputs cannot go on forever, human ingenuity is inexhaustible”.

Get it? Economic growth doesn’t come primarily from cutting down trees and digging stuff out of the ground – and the scientists are right in telling us we must do less despoiling of the environment, our “natural capital” – it comes overwhelmingly from using human ingenuity to think of ways to produce more with less.

That’s why the report says improved productivity is “the key to prosperity” and is based on “the spread of new, useful ideas”.

To be more concrete, productivity is improved by people thinking of ways to improve the goods and services we produce, ways to make the production process less wasteful – more efficient – and thinking up goods and services that are entirely new.

This gives us a mixture of novel products, improved quality and reduced cost.

Over the past 200 years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution, the productivity of all the developed economies has improved by a few per cent almost every year. In our case, over the past 120 years the economic output of the average Australian is up seven-fold, while hours worked has consistently fallen.

Trouble is, the miracle of productivity improvement has been a lot less miraculous in recent times. Over the past 60 years, our productivity improved at an average rate of 1.7 per cent a year. Over the decade to 2020, it “slowed significantly” to 1.1 per cent a year.

The report is quick to point out that much the same has been happening in all the rich countries. (It does note, however, that the level of our productivity is now lower than it was compared with the levels the other rich countries have achieved.)

This is significant. It suggests that whatever factors have caused our productivity performance to fall off are probably the same as those in the other rich economies. But as yet, none of them has put their finger on the main causes of the problem.

If they’re still working on the answers, so are we. So the report focuses on thinking about what may be causing the problem and where we should be looking for answers. Remember, this is just first of several reports.

So, unlike the rent-seekers and econocrats, it’s offering no magic answers. But it does come up with a good explanation for at least part of the productivity slowdown: for most of the past two centuries, one of the main ways we’ve produced more with less is by using newly invented “labour-saving equipment” to replace workers with machines in farming, mining and then manufacturing.

The quantity of goods we produce in those industries has never been greater, but the number of people employed to produce it all is a fraction of what it once was. And this accounts for a huge proportion of the productivity improvement we’ve achieved since Federation.

Because producing more with less makes us richer, not poorer – increases our real income – total employment has gone up rather than down as we’ve spent that extra income employing more people to perform all manner of services – from menial to hugely skilled.

So successful have we (and all the rich economies) been at shifting workers from making goods to delivering services that the service industries now account for about 80 per cent of all we produce and about 90 per cent of all employment.

See the problem? In the main, services are delivered by people. So the economy’s now almost completely composed of industries where it’s much harder to improve productivity simply by using machines to replace workers. It’s far from impossible, but it’s much harder than on a farm, mine site or factory.

That’s the more so when you remember that two of the biggest service industries are health and social assistance, and education and training.

It’s pretty clear that, if we’re going to get back to higher rates of productivity improvement, we’ll have come up with some new ideas on how to make the service industries more productive, without diminishing quality. That’s what comes next in the Productivity Commission’s series of reports.

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A damaged environment leads to an unlivable economy

Economists are paid to worry about the economy, which they usually define fairly narrowly. And, like all specialists, they tend to overemphasise what they know so much about and underrate everything else.

Karl Marx usually gets the credit for saying that, in the economy, “everything’s connected to everything else”. The most conservative economist would agree. The economy is circular because what’s an expense to you, is income to me.

But what applies inside the economy applies equally outside it. Everything inside what we call the economy is connected to everything outside it. What is outside it? The rest of the world – the natural world.

The “economy” sits inside what we call “the environment”. Without the environment, there wouldn’t be an economy. Humans wouldn’t be here, and we wouldn’t need one.

When you step back from our daily preoccupations – at the minute, inflation and interest rates – the bigger picture reveals that economic activity – producing and consuming goods and services – mainly involves doing things to the natural environment: we clear the forest to grow food, scar the countryside to mine minerals, which we manufacture into a thousand kinds of machines.

As we get more prosperous, the population grows, our towns and cities get bigger and we clear more forest to build more houses, roads, highways and bridges. We pull more fish from the sea. We move around a lot. And we power it all by digging up fossil fuels and burning them.

As the population’s grown, but more particularly as consumption per person has multiplied, we’ve done more and more damage to the environment.

But here’s the trick: we’ve hit the environment so hard, it’s started punching back.

That’s why the most important economic event of recent times is not the latest rise in interest rates, it’s last month’s State of the Environment report – whose release was delayed until we found a government with the courage to break the bad news.

The report’s significance is not only its rollcall of how much damage we’ve done so far, but its account of the way that damage is damaging the humans who’ve done it.

We’ve been damaging the environment in many ways – loss of habitat and species, introduction of invasive animals and plants, pollution and waste disposal, salinity and other damage to soil and waterways, overfishing – but the greatest single source of damage, of course, is climate change.

The five-yearly report brings the bad news that climate change is compounding all the other problems. And whereas previous reports warned of future damage from climate change, this one shows it’s already happening – and getting worse.

It documents the extreme floods, droughts, heatwaves, storms and bushfires that have occurred across Australia in the past five years. The immediate effects have been millions of animals killed and habitats burnt, enormous areas of reef bleached, and people’s livelihoods and homes lost.

But there are many longer-term effects still to play out. Extreme conditions put immense stress on species already threatened by habitat loss and invasive species. An extreme heatwave in 2018, for example, killed 23,000 spectacled flying foxes, making them an endangered species.

Many of our ecosystems have evolved to rebound from bushfires. But now that the fires are coming more often and are more intense, the bush doesn’t have enough time to recover, which scientists expect will make it weedy – only those species that live fast and reproduce quickly will thrive.

But enough about plants and animals, what about us? While cyclones, floods and bushfires directly destroy our homes and landscapes, Professor Emma Johnston, of Sydney University, an author of the report, writes that heatwaves kill more people in Australia than any other extreme event.

Heatwave intensity has increased by a third over the past two decades. And climate change worsens air quality through dust, smoke and emissions. The Black Summer of 2019-20 exposed more than 80 per cent of our population to smoke, killing about 420 people.

As Liz Hanna and Mark Howden, of the Australian National University, remind us, clean air is just one of the “ecosystem services” the environment provides to you and me in the economy. Another is clean food. A lot of our recent complaints about the cost of living – the high cost of meat and vegetables, the mythical $10 iceberg lettuce – come from the delayed effect of the drought and the recent effect of the floods.

Yet another service is clean water. But many country towns had to truck in water during the last drought. Land clearing affects water quality. Run-off from agriculture damages water ecosystems and encourages algal bloom and species loss. More than 4 million people depend on the Murray-Darling rivers for their water, but the catchments are rated as poor or very poor.

Finally, the report reminds us that contact with (healthy) nature is associated with mental health benefits, promotes physical activity and contributes to overall wellbeing. Biodiversity and green and blue spaces in cities are linked to stress reduction and mood improvement, increased respiratory health, and lower rates of depression and blood pressure. Enjoy ’em while they last.

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We're struggling with inflation because we misread the pandemic

It’s an understandable error – and I’m as guilty of it as anyone – but it’s now clear governments and their econocrats misunderstood and mishandled the pandemic from the start. Trouble is, they’re now misreading the pandemic’s inflation phase at the risk of a recession.

The amateurish way governments, central banks and economists have sought to respond to the pandemic is understandable because this is the first pandemic the world’s experienced in 100 years.

But it’s important we understand what we’ve got wrong, so we don’t compound our errors in the inflation phase, and so we’ll know how to handle the next pandemic - which will surely arrive in a lot less than 100 years.

In a nutshell, what we’ve done wrong is to treat the pandemic as though it’s a problem with the demand (or spending) side of the economy, when it’s always been a problem with the supply (or production) side.

We’ve done so because the whole theory and practice of “managing” the macroeconomy has always focused on “demand management”.

We’re trying to smooth the economy’s path through the ups and downs of the business cycle, so as to achieve low unemployment on one hand and low inflation on the other.

When demand (spending by households, businesses and governments) is too weak, thus increasing unemployment, we “stimulate” it by cutting interest rates, cutting taxes or increasing government spending. When demand is too strong, thus adding to inflation, we slow it down by raising interest rates, increasing taxes or cutting government spending.

When the pandemic arrived in early 2020, we sought to limit the spread of the virus by closing our borders to travel, ordering many businesses to close their doors and ordering people to leave their homes as little as possible, including by working or studying from home.

So, the economy is rolling on normally until governments suddenly order us to lock down. Obviously, this will involve many people losing their jobs and many businesses losing sales. It will be a government-ordered recession.

Since it’s government-ordered, however, governments know they have an obligation to provide workers and businesses with income to offset their losses. Fearing a prolonged recession, governments spend huge sums and the Reserve Bank cuts the official interest rate to almost zero.

Get it? This was a government-ordered restriction of the supply of goods and services, but governments responded as though it was just a standard recession where demand had fallen below the economy’s capacity to produce goods and services and needed an almighty boost to get it back up and running.

The rate of unemployment shot up to 7.5 per cent, but the national lockdown was lifted after only a month or two. As soon it was, everyone – most of whom had lost little in the way of income – started spending like mad, trying to catch up.

Unemployment started falling rapidly and – particularly because the pandemic had closed our borders to all “imported labour” for two years – ended up falling to its lowest rate since 1974.

So, everything in the garden’s now lovely until, suddenly, we find inflation shooting up to 6.1 per cent and headed higher.

What do we do? What we always do: start jacking up interest rates to discourage borrowing and spending. When demand for goods and services runs faster than business’s capacity to supply them, this puts upward pressure on prices. But when demand weakens, this puts downward pressure on prices.

One small problem. The basic cause of our higher prices isn’t excess demand, it’s a fall in supply. The main cause is disruption to the supply of many goods, caused by the pandemic. To this is added the reduced supply of oil and gas and foodstuffs caused by Russia’s attack on Ukraine. At home, meat and vegetable prices are way up because of the end of the drought and then all the flooding.

Get it? Once again, we’ve taken a problem on the supply side of the economy and tried to fix it as though it’s a problem with demand.

Because the pandemic-caused disruptions to supply are temporary, the Ukraine war will end eventually, and production of meat and veg will recover until climate change’s next blow, we’re talking essentially about prices that won’t keep rising quarter after quarter and eventually should fall back. So surely, we should all just be patient and wait for prices to return to normal.

Why then are the financial markets and the econocrats so worried that prices will keep rising, we’ll be caught up in a “wage-price spiral” and the inflation rate will stay far too high?

Short answer: because of our original error in deciding that a temporary government-ordered partial cessation of supply should be treated like the usual recession, where demand is flat on its back and needs massive stimulus if the recession isn’t to drag on for years.

If we’d only known, disruptions to supply were an inevitable occurrence as the pandemic eased. What no one foresaw was everyone cooped up in their homes, still receiving plenty of income, but unable to spend it on anything that involved leaving home.

It was the advent of the internet that allowed so many of us to keep working or studying from home. And it was the internet that allowed us to keep spending, but on goods rather than services. It’s the huge temporary switch from buying services to buying goods that’s done so much to cause shortages in the supply of many goods.

But it’s our misdiagnosis of the “coronacession” – propping up workers and industries far more than they needed to be – that’s left us with demand so strong it’s too easy for businesses to get away with slipping in price increases that have nothing to do with supply shortages.

Now all we need to complete our error is to overreact to the price rises and tighten up so hard we really do have an old-style recession.

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The inflation fix: protect profits, hit workers and consumers

There’s a longstanding but unacknowledged – and often unnoticed – bias in mainstream commentary on the state of the economy. We dwell on problems created by governments or greedy workers and their interfering unions, but never entertain the thought that the behaviour of business could be part of the problem.

This ubiquitous pro-business bias – reinforced daily by the national press – is easily seen in the debate on how worried we should be about inflation, and in the instant attraction to the notion that continuing to cut real wages is central to getting inflation back under control. This is being pushed by the econocrats, and last week’s economic statement from Treasurer Jim Chalmers reveals it’s been swallowed by the new Labor government.

I’ve been arguing strongly that the primary source of the huge price rises we’ve seen is quite different to what we’re used to. It’s blockages in the supply of goods, caused by a perfect storm of global problems: the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and even climate change’s effect on meat and vegetable prices.

Since monetary policy can do nothing to fix supply problems, we should be patient and wait for these once-off, temporary issues to resolve themselves. The econocrats’ reply is that, though most price rises come from deficient supply, some come from strong demand – and they’re right.

Although more than half the 1.8 per cent rise in consumer prices in the June quarter came from just three categories – food, petrol and home-building costs – it’s also true there were increases in a high proportion of categories.

The glaring example of price rises caused by strong demand is the cost of building new homes. Although there have been shortages of imported building materials, it’s clear that hugely excessive stimulus – from interest rates and the budget – has led to an industry that hasn’t had a hope of keeping up with the government-caused surge in demand for new homes. It’s done what it always does: used the opportunity to jack up prices.

But as for a more general effect of strong demand on prices, what you don’t see in the figures is any sign it’s high wages that are prompting businesses to raise their prices. Almost 80 per cent of the rise in prices over the year to June came from the price of goods rather than services. That’s despite goods’ share of total production and employment being about 20 per cent.

This – along with direct measures of wage growth - says it’s not soaring labour costs that have caused so many businesses to raise their prices. Rather, strong demand for their product has allowed them to pass on, rather than absorb, the higher cost of imported inputs – and, probably, fatten their profit margins while they’re at it.

Take the amazing 7 per cent increase in furniture prices during the quarter. We’re told this is explained by higher freight costs. Really? I can’t believe it.

Nor can I believe that months of unrelenting media stories about prices rising here, there and everywhere – including an open mic for business lobbyists to exaggerate the need for price rises – haven’t made it easier for businesses everywhere to raise their prices without fear of pushback from customers.

But whenever inflation worsens, the economists’ accusing fingers point not to business but to the workers. No one ever says businesses should show more restraint, they do say the only way to fix the problem is for workers to take a real-wage haircut.

There’s no better evidence of the economics profession’s pro-business bias than its studious avoidance of mentioning the way the profits share of national income keeps rising and the wages share keeps falling.

In truth, the story’s not as simple as it looks, but it seems to have occurred to no mainstream economist that what may be happening is business using the cover of the supply-side disruptions to effect a huge transfer of income from labour to capital.

Allowing real wages to fall significantly for three years in a row – as Chalmers’ new forecasts say they will – would certainly be the quickest and easiest way to lower inflation, but do the econocrats really imagine this would leave the economy hale and hearty?

Yet another sign of economists’ pro-business bias is that so few of them know much – or even think they need to know much – about how wages are fixed in the real world. Hence all the silliness we’re hearing about the risk of lifting inflation expectations. Can’t happen when workers lack bargaining power.

You’d think an understanding of wage-fixing is something a Labor government could bring to the table. But no. All we’re getting from Chalmers is that we need to cut real wages so we can increase them later. Yeah, sure.

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Inflation: small problem, so don't hit with sledgehammer

It’s an old expression, but a good one: out of the frying pan, into the fire. Less than two years ago we were told that, after having escaped recession for almost 30 years, the pandemic and our efforts to stop the virus spreading had plunged us into the deepest recession in almost a century.

Only a few months later we were told that, thanks to the massive sums that governments had spent protecting the incomes of workers and businesses during the lockdowns, the economy had “bounced back” from the recession and was growing more strongly than it had been before the pandemic arrived.

No sooner had the rate of unemployment leapt to 7.5 per cent than it began falling rapidly and is now, we learnt a fortnight ago, down to 3.5 per cent – its lowest since 1974.

You little beauty. At last, the economy’s going fine and we can get on with our lives without a care.

But, no. Suddenly, out of nowhere, a new and terrible problem has emerged. The rate of inflation is soaring. It’s sure to have done more soaring when we see the latest figures on Wednesday morning.

So worrying is soaring inflation that the Reserve Bank is having to jack up interest rates as fast as possible to stop the soaring. It’s such a worry, many in the financial markets believe, that it may prove necessary to put interest rates up so high they cause ... a recession.

Really? No, not really. There’s much talk of recession – and this week we’re likely to hear claims that the US has entered it – but if we go into recession just a few years after the last one, it will be because the Reserve Bank has been panicked into hitting the interest-rate brakes far harder than warranted.

As you know, since the mid-1990s the power to influence interest rates has shifted from the elected politicians to the unelected econocrats at our central bank. A convention has been established that government ministers must never comment on what the Reserve should or shouldn’t be doing about interest rates.

So last week Anthony Albanese, still on his PM’s P-plates, got into trouble for saying the Reserve’s bosses “need to be careful that they don’t overreach”.

Well, he shouldn’t be saying it, but there’s nothing to stop me saying it – because it needs to be said. The Reserve is under huge pressure from the financial markets to keep jacking up rates, but it must hold its nerve and do no more than necessary.

It’s important to understand that prices have risen a lot in all the advanced economies. They’ve risen not primarily for the usual reason – because economies have been “overheating”, with the demand for goods and services overtaking businesses’ ability to supply them – but for the less common reason that the pandemic has led to bottlenecks and other disruptions to supply.

To this main, pandemic problem has been added the effect of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on oil and gas, and wheat and other foodstuffs.

The point is that these are essentially once-off price rises. Prices won’t keep rising for these reasons and, eventually, the supply disruptions will be solved and the Ukraine attack will end. Locally, the supply of meat and vegetables will get back to normal – until the next drought and flooding.

Increasing interest rates – which all the rich countries’ central banks are doing – can do nothing to end supply disruptions caused by the pandemic, end the Ukraine war or stop climate change.

All higher rates can do is reduce households’ ability to spend – particularly those households with big, recently acquired mortgages, and those facing higher rent.

The Reserve keeps reminding us that – because most of us were able to keep working, but not spending as much, during the lockdowns – households now have an extra $260 billion in bank accounts. But much of this is in mortgage redraw and offset accounts, and will be rapidly eaten up by higher interest rates.

Of course, the higher prices we’re paying for petrol, electricity, gas and food will themselves reduce our ability to spend on other things, independent of what’s happening to interest rates. It would be a different matter if we were all getting wage rises big enough to cover those price rises, but it’s clear we won’t be.

The main part of the inflation problem that's of our own making is the rise in the prices of newly built homes and building materials. This was caused by the combination of lower interest rates and special grants to home buyers hugely overstretching the housing industry. But higher interest rates and falling house prices will end that.

So, while it’s true we do need to get the official interest rate up from its lockdown emergency level of virtually zero to “more normal levels” of “at least 2.5 per cent”, it’s equally clear we don’t need to go any higher to ensure the inflation rate eventually falls back to the Reserve’s 2 to 3 per cent target range.

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THE STATE OF THE ECONOMY

Although most of us would like to think the pandemic is receding into the past and we can move on to other things, we’re starting to realise that it’s still with us and is still having a big effect not only on our health and our overstrained hospitals, but also on our economy. It’s still being greatly affected by the pandemic itself and by our response to the threat it poses to life and limb.

When the pandemic began in March 2020, federal and state governments closed our borders to travel, and locked down the national economy, so as to limit the spread of the virus. They ordered many retail businesses and forms of entertainment to close or severely limit their activities. People were required to stay in their homes and, if possible, work or study from home. Knowing this could cause much unemployment of workers, the government introduced the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme to maintain the link between employers and their employees, even if they had little work for those employees to do. It had other spending programs to support the incomes of businesses and households, as well as particularly industries, such as housing. The first, national lockdown lasted only about six weeks, but then a second, longer lockdown became necessary for NSW, Victoria and the ACT in the middle of 2021.

Although many economists feared we had entered a severe recession, with the government spending huge sums to limit the effect on incomes the national economy bounced back strongly after the first lockdown and again after the second one. Real gross domestic product contracted heavily in the June quarter of 2020 and to a lesser extent in the September quarter of 2021, but ended up growing by 1.4 pc over the year to March 2021, and by 3.3 pc over the year to March 2022.

The strength of the economy’s bounceback can be seen in what happened to employment and unemployment. Total employment actually grew by about 60,000 over the year to March 2021, and by about 390,000 over the year to March 2022. This meant that, although the rate of unemployment shot up to 7.5 pc in July 2020, it had fallen back to 5.7 pc by March 2021 and to 3.9 pc in March 2022. By June, it had fallen to 3.5 pc, its lowest in 50 years. Because most of the new jobs created have been full-time, the rate of under-employment has also fallen considerably. There is a shortage of suitable labour, with the number of job vacancies now at record levels. Yet another sign of how “tight” the labour market is: the “participation rate” – that is, the proportion of the working-age population participating in the labour force either by working or actively seeking work – is at a record high of 66.8 pc.

Why is the jobs market so tight? Partly because of the massive economic stimulus applied to the economy by governments, but also because the closure of our borders for two years has cut off employers’ access to what you could call “imported labour”. So job vacancies that normally would have been filled by backbackers, overseas students and skilled workers on temporary visas have either had to go to locals, or go begging. Our borders have now been re-opened to foreign workers, so the labour market’s present tightness is temporary, but it’s likely to take more than several months for the inflow of foreign workers to return to normal.

As I’m sure you know, the pandemic has led to big changes in the settings of both fiscal policy and monetary policy. Those changes do much to explain where the economy is now and what the economic managers must do ensure we stay on the path of material prosperity.

Starting with fiscal policy, the former Morrison government had just got the budget back to balance when the pandemic arrived in early 2020. It’s decision to limit the spread of the virus by locking down the economy, while using the budget to protect the incomes of households and businesses, ended any prospect of returning the budget to surplus. Instead, the lockdowns caused a big fall in tax collections, while the spending and tax cuts to protect household and business incomes cause the budget to return to huge deficits, peaking at a record $134 billion (6.5 pc of GDP) in 2020-21, then falling to an expected $78 billion (3.4 pc) in the present financial year, 2022-23. Note that, even if the government had not decided to lockdown the economy while protecting incomes, the economy would still have slowed and the budget returned to deficit as many people took their own measures to protect themselves from the virus by avoiding crowded shops and venues and staying at home as much as possible. The government’s response to the pandemic and the huge budget deficits it led to added to its already-high level of public debt, causing the gross debt to rise to an expected almost $1 trillion (43 pc of GDP) by June 2023. Despite its own promises of further government spending and tax cuts, the new Albanese government will try to reduce prospective budget deficits and limit further growth in the debt in the budget it will announce in October.

Turning to monetary policy, low world interest rates and weak growth in our economy had the cash rate already down to 0.75 pc before the pandemic. In March 2020 the RBA cut the rate to 0.25 pc and, some months later, to 0.10 pc. It began engaging in unconventional monetary policy – “quantitative easing”, QE – by buying second-hand government bonds so as to reduce government and private sector interest rates on longer-term borrowing. Since it paid for these second-hand bonds merely by crediting the exchange settlement accounts of the banks it bought the bonds from, this had the effect of creating money. Note that the resulting increase in the RBA’s holdings of government bonds meant that about $350 billion of the government’s gross debt of nearly $1 trillion has been borrowed not from the public but from the central bank that is owned by the government.

The RBA’s most recent forecast is for real GDP to grow by a super-strong 4 pc this calendar year, but slow to a relatively weak 2 pc in 2023. But this prospect has been upset by the emergence of a new problem. For about six years before and during the pandemic, the problem was that the rate of inflation was too low, falling below the RBA’s 2 to 3 pc inflation target. But by the end of last year, 2021, the annual inflation rate had risen to 3.5 pc and by March 2022 it had risen to 5.1 pc. It’s expected to rise further over the rest of this year, reaching a peak of about 7 pc before starting to fall back slowly towards the target rate next year.

The first thing to note is that the rise in prices has been a global problem, with largely global causes. Inflation has risen in all the advanced economies, and by more than it has in Australia. In the US and many European countries, it’s up to about 10 pc, the highest rate in decades.

There are three main causes of this sudden reversal in inflation. Two of the three are “imported inflation” and all three involve problems and price rises coming from the supply side of the economy, rather than price rises caused by excessive demand. The first and most important is the major interruptions to global supply chains caused by the pandemic and, in particular, by the spending of locked-down households switching from services to goods. The increased demand for goods led to shortages of container ships and containers themselves, shortages of computer chips and many many other things, including timber and other building supplies. When the demand for goods exceeds their supply, business tend to increase their prices. These effects are temporary, however, and many supply bottlenecks are easing. But the problems China is having in coping with the pandemic suggest there may be further supply disruptions to come.

The second major global and imported source of higher prices is Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which has caused major disruptions to the global markets for energy and food. But recently world oil, wheat and other commodity prices have fallen somewhat.

The third major, but little-noticed source of higher prices is also global and on the supply side: climate change. This is true even though its effects are specific to Australia. Restock of herds following the end of the most recent drought has seen beef prices rise by 12 pc over the year to March and by about 30 pc over the past three years. Lamb prices rose by 7 pc over the year to March and by 30 pc over the past four years. All the recent talk of paying $10 for an iceberg lettuce is a product of all the flooding in Queensland and NSW this year.

To these three causes the RBA adds a fourth factor, coming from the demand side of the economy: the strong demand for goods during the pandemic has allowed businesses to pass any rise in their costs on to customers, without fear of losing business. There has also been some increase in wage rates but, as yet, there is little sign employees have sufficient bargaining power to achieve wage rises of more than 3 pc or so, meaning wages are likely to continue falling in real terms.

In response to the rise in inflation, the RBA began a series of rate rates during the election campaign in May. In three months it has lifted the cash rate from 0.1 pc to 1.35pc, and is expected to continue raising it until it has reached “more normal levels” of at least 2.5 pc. It is moving the “stance” of monetary policy from the pandemic’s emergency levels of stimulus to a “neutral” stance – that is, a rate that’s neither expansionary nor contractionary. In other words, it is taking its foot off the monetary accelerator, not jamming on the brakes. Its goal is to ensure that excessive demand in the economy doesn’t cause temporary inflationary pressure coming from the economy’s supply side to become entrenched, rather than having inflation fall back to the 2 to 3 pc target range over the next year or two. It hopes to achieve this without causing a recession – which won’t be easy.

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Business volunteers its staff to take one for the shareholders' team

An increase in wages sufficient to prevent a further fall in real wages would do little harm to the economy and much good to businesses hoping their sales will keep going up rather than start going down.

It’s hard enough to figure out what’s going on in the economy – and where it’s headed – without media people who should know better misrepresenting what Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe said last week about wages and inflation.

One outlet turned it into a good guys versus bad guys morality tale, where Lowe rebuked the evil, inflation-mongering unions planning to impose 5 or 7 per cent wage rises on the nation’s hapless businesses by instituting a “3.5 per cent cap” on the would-be wreckers, with even the new Labor government “bowing” to Lowe’s order that real wages be cut, and the ACTU “conceding” that 5 per cent wage claims would not go forward.

ACTU boss Sally McManus was on the money in dismissing this version of events as coming from “Boomer fantasy land”. What she meant was that this conception of what’s happening today must have come from the mind of someone whose view of how wage-fixing works was formed in the 1970s and ’80s, and who hadn’t noticed one or two minor changes in the following 30 years.

No one younger than a Baby Boomer could possibly delude themselves that workers could simply demand some huge pay rise and keep striking – or merely threatening to strike – until their employer caved in and granted it.

Or believe that, as really was the case in the 1970s and 1980s, the quarterly or half-yearly “national wage case” awarded almost every worker in the country a wage rise indexed to the consumer price index. Paul Keating abolished this “centralised wage-fixing system” in the early ’90s and replaced it with collective bargaining at the enterprise level.

John Howard’s changes, culminating in the Work Choices changes in 2005, took this a lot further, outlawing compulsory unionism, tightly constraining the unions’ ability to strike, allowing employers to lock out their employees, removing union officials’ right to enter the workplace and check that employers were complying with award provisions (now does the surge in “accidental” wage theft surprise you?) and sought to diminish employees’ bargaining power by encouraging individual contracts rather than collective bargaining.

Julia Gillard’s Fair Work changes in 2009 reversed some of the more anti-union elements of Work Choices but, as part of modern Labor’s eternal desire to avoid getting off-side with big business, let too many of them stand.

As both business and the unions agree, enterprise bargaining is falling into disuse. On paper, about a third of the nation’s employees are subject to enterprise agreements. But McManus claims that, in practice, it’s down to about 15 per cent.

All these changes in the “institution arrangements” for wage-fixing are before you take account of the way organised labour’s bargaining power has been diminished by globalisation and technological change making it so much easier to move work – particularly in manufacturing, but increasingly in services – to countries where labour is cheaper.

In the ’80s, about half of all workers were union members. Today, it’s down to 14 per cent, with many of those concentrated in public sector jobs such as nursing, teaching and coppering.

All this is why fears that we risk returning to the “stagflation” of the 1970s are indeed out of fantasy land. Only a Boomer who hasn’t been paying attention, or a youngster with no idea of how much the world has changed since then, could worry about such a thing.

The claim that Lowe has stopped the union madness in its tracks by imposing a “3.5 per cent cap” on wage rises misrepresents what he said. It ignores his qualification that 3.5 per cent – that is, 2.5 per cent as the mid-point of the inflation target plus 1 per cent for the average annual improvement in the productivity of labour – is “a medium-term point that I’ve been making for some years” (my emphasis) that “remains relevant, over time,” (ditto) and is the “steady-state wage increase”.

Like the inflation target itself, it’s an average to be achieved “over the medium term” – that is, over 10 years or so – not an annual “cap” that you can fall short of for most of the past decade, but must never ever exceed.

Supposedly, it’s a “cap” because of Lowe’s remark that “if wage increases become common in the 4 to 5 per cent range, then it’s going to be harder to return inflation to 2.5 per cent.”

That’s not the imposition of a cap – which, in any case, Lowe doesn’t have to power to do, even if he wanted to – it’s a statement of the bleeding obvious. It’s simple arithmetic.

But it’s also an utterly imaginary problem. It ain’t gonna happen. Why not? Because, as McManus “conceded”, no matter how unfair the unions regard it to force workers to bear the cost of the abandon with which businesses have been protecting their profits by whacking up their prices, workers simply lack the industrial muscle to extract pay rises any higher than the nation’s chief executives can be shamed into granting.

While we’re talking arithmetic, however, don’t fall for the line – widely propagated – that if prices rise by 5 per cent, and then wages rise by 5 per cent, the inflation rate stays at 5 per cent. As the Bureau of Statistics has calculated, labour costs account for just 25 per cent of all business costs.

So, only if all other, non-labour costs have also risen by 5 per cent does a 5 per cent rise in wage rates justify a 5 per cent rise in prices, thus preventing the annual inflation rate from falling back.

In other words, what we’re arguing about is how soon inflation falls back to the target range. Commentators with an unacknowledged pro-business bias (probably because they work for big business) are arguing that it should happen ASAP by making the nation’s households take a huge hit to their real incomes. This, apparently, will be great for the economy.

Those in the financial markets want to hasten the return to target by having the Reserve raise interest rates so far and so fast it puts the economy into recession. Another great idea.

Meanwhile, Lowe says he expects the return to target inflation to take “some years”. What a wimp.

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Nobbling Afterpay would stifle competition and protect bank profits

There’s nothing new about buying now and paying later. You can do it with lay-by or a credit card. But the version of it invented by Afterpay, and copied by so many rivals, is so different and so hugely popular it’s not surprising it’s raised eyebrows.

The most obvious reaction is to see it as a new way of tempting young people, in particular, to overload themselves with debt and make their lives a misery. The government should be regulating its providers to limit the harm they do.

But to see Afterpay as purely a matter of “consumer protection”, as I used to, is to miss the way this prime example of “fintech” – the use of digital technology to find new ways of delivering financial services – is subjecting the banks and their hugely overpriced credit cards to strong competition from a product many users find more attractive.

And not just that. When you think it through – as I suspect the politicians and financial regulators haven’t – you see that this new approach to BNPL – buy now, pay later – is also threatening the big profits Google and Facebook are making from their stranglehold on online advertising.

The man who has thought it through is Dr Richard Denniss, of the Australia Institute. With Matt Saunders, Denniss has written a paper, The role of Buy Now, Pay Later services in enhancing competition, commissioned by ... Afterpay.

Normally, I’m hugely suspicious of “research” paid for by commercial interests, but Denniss is one of the most original thinkers among the nation’s boring economists.

Buying something via Afterpay allows you to receive it immediately, while paying for it in four equal, fortnightly instalments over six weeks. Provided you make the payments on time, you pay no interest or further charge. The fortnightly payments fit with most people’s fortnightly pay.

If you’re late with a payment, you’re charged a late fee that varies from a minimum of $10 to a maximum of $68, depending on how much you’ve borrowed. If you don’t pay the late fee and get your payments up to date, Afterpay won’t finance any more BNPL deals until you have.

If you never get up to date, you’re not charged interest or any further late fees. Eventually, Afterpay ends its relationship with you and writes off the debt.

The individual amounts people borrow are usually for just a few hundred dollars. You can have more than one loan running at a time, but only within the credit limit Afterpay has set, and only if your existing payments are up to date.

Afterpay sets a fairly low limit initially, but increases it as you demonstrate your payment reliability.

So, what’s in it for Afterpay? It charges the shop that sold you the stuff a merchant fee of about 4 per cent of the sale price. I used to suspect they made a lot from their late fees, but these remain a small part of their total revenue, almost all of which comes from merchant fees.

Despite its huge expansion, Afterpay has yet to turn a profit, putting it in the same boat as Uber, Twitter and other digital platforms. Of late, the BNPLs have had greatly increased bad debts and the sharemarket has fallen out of love with them. This doesn’t affect Afterpay, which has been taken over by a big American fintech, Square, which has many other irons in the fire.

Obviously, Afterpay and its imitators are offering a way to BNPL that’s an alternative to a conventional credit card, which involves charging merchants a fee of a couple of per cent, and offering interest-free credit - provided you pay your balance on time and in full each month.

If you can’t keep that up – as the great majority of credit-card holders can’t – you get hit with interest on your purchases of an extortionate 20 per cent-plus. These rates haven’t changed in decades while other interest rates have fallen. That’s a sign the banking oligopoly has huge pricing power in the provision of consumer credit.

It seems clear from the declining growth in credit-card debt and the amazing popularity of Afterpay and its imitators that people are jack of credit cards and keen to shift to a less onerous form of BNPL.

Many young adults, in particular, seem to have sworn off credit cards because they’re just too tempting. Behavioural economists call this a “pre-commitment device”. The best way to ensure you don’t end up deep in ever-growing debt is not to have a credit card in the first place.

These people regard Afterpay & Co as a much less risky way to BNPL, a ubiquitous practice economists sanctify as “consumption smoothing”.

Those who want to regulate the new BNPL by stopping providers from prohibiting merchants from charging users a surcharge – the way they stopped Visa and Mastercard from banning surcharging – see this as levelling the competitive playing field between the two different forms of BNPL.

But Denniss’ insight is to point out that the two merchant fees are quite different. The credit-card merchant fee can be regarded as a transaction fee – that is, merely covering administrative costs – but in Afterpay’s case it covers much more than that, to justify its much higher cost.

What Afterpay offers is something marketers understand, but economists have yet to: better “customer acquisition”. Being able to offer free credit is one aid to acquiring customers, but Afterpay does much more to attract customers to those merchants who offer its BNPL service.

Younger consumers like the new BNPL so much they search the internet for sellers of the item they want to buy that also offer Afterpay. Afterpay uses a directory of stores on its website – and also its mobile app – to direct potential customers to participating merchants.

Afterpay also sends messages to its users advertising its merchants’ special offers and the like.

So Afterpay’s merchant fee also provides its merchants with a new form advertising, thus reducing their need for online advertising through Google or Facebook.

Afterpay is genuinely disruptive, offering users what they may justifiably regard as a better product. Regulators should think twice before they seek to discourage it by presenting customers with a misleading comparison: a merchant fee of 4 per cent versus 2 per cent.

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Why interest rates are going up, and won't be coming down

It’s time we had a serious talk about interest rates. And, while we’re at it, inflation. Someone in my job knows it’s time to talk turkey when the man in charge of rates, Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe, decides to go on the ABC’s 7.30 program to talk about both.

There’s much to talk about. Why are interest rates of such interest to so many (sorry)? Why do some people hate them going up and some love it? How do interest rates and the inflation rate fit together? Why do central banks such as our Reserve keep moving them up and down? When rates go up, they normally come back down – so why won't that happen this time?

Starting with the basics, interest is the price or fee that someone who wants to borrow money for a period has to pay to someone who has money they’re prepared to lend – for a fee.

Legally, the “person” you’ve borrowed from is usually a bank, while the person with savings to lend deposits them with a bank. But economists see banks as just “intermediaries” that bring borrowers on one side together with ordinary savers on the other.

The bank charges borrowers a higher interest rate than it pays its depositors. The difference reflects the bank’s reward for bringing the two sides together, but also the risk the bank is running that the borrower won’t repay the debt, leaving the bank liable to repay the depositor.

You see from this that interest is an expense to borrowers, but income to savers. This is why there’s so much arguing over interest rates. Borrowers hate to see them rise, but savers hate to see them fall. (The media conceal this two-sided relationship by almost always treating rate rises as bad.)

Now we get to inflation. Economists think of interest rates as having two components. The first is the compensation that the borrower must pay the saver for the loss in the purchasing power of their money while it’s in the borrower’s hands. The second part is the “real” or after-inflation interest rate that the borrower must pay the saver for giving up the use of their own money for a period.

This implies that the level of interest rates should roughly rise and fall in line with the ups and downs in the rate of inflation – the annual rate at which the prices consumers pay for goods and services (but not for assets such as shares or houses) are rising.

This explains why, when the inflation rate was way above 5 per cent throughout the 1970s and ’80s, interest rates were far higher than they’ve been since.

Now it gets tricky. Central banks have the ability to control variable interest rates by manipulating what’s known confusingly as the “overnight cash rate”. This “official” interest rate forms the base for all the other (higher) interest rates we pay or receive.

The Reserve Bank uses its control over this base interest rate to smooth the ups and downs in the economy, trying to keep both inflation and unemployment low.

When it thinks our demand for goods and services is too weak and is worsening unemployment, it cuts interest rates to encourage borrowing and spending. When it thinks our demand is too strong and is worsening inflation, it raises interest rates to discourage borrowing and spending.

The pandemic and the consequent “coronacession” caused the Reserve (and all the other rich-country central banks) to cut the official interest rate almost to zero.

The economy has bounced back from the lockdowns and is now growing strongly, with very low unemployment and many vacant jobs. But now we’ve been hit by big price rises from overseas, the result of supply bottlenecks caused by the pandemic and a leap in oil and gas prices caused by the war on Ukraine, plus the effect of climate change on local meat and vegetable prices.

As Lowe explained to Leigh Sales on 7.30, these are once-only price rises and, although he expects the inflation rate to reach 7 per cent by the end of this year, it should then start falling back toward the Reserve’s target inflation rate of 2 to 3 per cent.

His worry is that the economy’s capacity to produce all the goods and services being demanded is close to running out – and already has in housing and construction. This raises the risk that the rate of growth in prices won’t fall back as soon as it should.

This is why Lowe’s started raising the official interest rate from its pandemic “emergency setting” near zero – zero! – to a “more normal setting”. Such as? To more like 2.5 per cent, he told Sales.

Why 2.5 per cent? Because that’s the mid-point of his inflation target.

Get it? Interest rates are supposed to cover expected inflation plus a bit more. Once Lowe’s able to get them back up to that level without causing a recession, they won’t be coming back down until the next pandemic-sized emergency.

A base interest rate of zero was never going to be the new normal. The nation’s saving grandparents would never cop it.

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