Do you think much about the process involved when you decide to buy something some seller is offering you? If you're like most consumers, probably not. But the businesses doing the selling do, which ought to be a warning.
And the study of exchange – the buying and selling of goods and services – is the central element of economics. Economists long ago concluded they had it all figured.
Trouble is, the digital revolution is...
Wednesday, October 7, 2015
Wednesday, September 9, 2015
OBSERVATIONS ON MACRO MANAGEMENT
Talk to Economic Society, Victorian branch, Wednesday, September 9, 2015I want to draw on a few themes from my new book, Gittins: A life among budgets, bulldust and bastardry, particularly some observations about macro management, recessions and, what I consider to be my special subject, the politics of economics.Don Stammer, the veteran business economist, says you need to have seen four recessions before you’re fully qualified....
Monday, September 7, 2015
Depressed economists lose faith in capitalism
The nation's practicing economists are working themselves into a state over the future of the economy, convincing themselves the prospects for growth are dismal and the only answer is more "reform".
They're being rallied by former Treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson.
He told the National Reform Summit that Australia risked sacrificing as much as 5 percentage points of economic growth over the next 10 years, the equivalent...
Saturday, September 5, 2015
Contrary to reports, economy battles on
Joe Hockey is right. The economic news is hardly wonderful, but the media's attempt this week to convince us the economy was perilously close to recession was sensationalist nonsense.
What set them off was news from the Australian Bureau of Statistics' national accounts that real gross domestic product grew by just 0.2 per cent in the June quarter. What they forgot to mention was that in the previous quarter it had grown by...
Wednesday, September 2, 2015
The game pollies play rather than governing
It came to me while I was lying awake the other night: the business, union and community worthies at last week's National Reform Summit thought the way to make progress was to hammer out a compromise proposal most people could agree to. You hand it to the government, the opposition agrees, they whack it through parliament and problem solved.
But that's not the game Tony Abbott is playing.
He doesn't want agreement, he wants...
Monday, August 31, 2015
How high-paid men have hijacked tax reform
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his after-tax salary depends on him not understanding it, to misquote Upton Sinclair.
This may explain why there's a glaring weakness in the thinking of business people, economists and politicians who see countering bracket creep and cutting the top tax rate as the key "reforms" needed to "reward hard work" and increase participation in the labour force.
Joe Hockey's...
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Try a little compromise to fix the budget
It was easy to miss, but a proposal with much practical potential arose from this week's meeting of the great and good at the National Reform Summit. It was an idea that could break the budget impasse.
Australia is seen to have so many economic problems at present that the participants at the summit from business, union and community peak bodies got to four of them before later remembering one I would have had at the top of...
Friday, August 28, 2015
Talk to VCTA Teachers Day, Melbourne,
Talk to VCTA Teachers Day, Melbourne, Friday, August 28, 2015Since it’s an important part of the course, I thought it might be useful if I give you an update on recent facts, figures and trends in the key indicators of what’s happening in the labour market, to help you keep up-to-date. I’ll be relying heavily on an article by professors Roger Wilkins and Mark Wooden, both of the Melbourne Institute, Two Decades of Change: The...
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