CONFESSIONS OF AN ECONOCRAT-WATCHER

Talk to ACT Economic Society Annual Dinner, Canberra

I’m very pleased to be invited to talk to you tonight, the biggest and best of the Economic Society’s branches. I should warn you, however, that I’m a follower of the Paddy McGuinness school of public speaking, which holds that it’s no fun talking to a group from any persuasion if you don’t say something to annoy them.

I imagine many of you are econocrats so, before I do, I want to say that I like econocrats. All journalists have “contacts” – people they talk to regularly in their search for stories – or, in my case, for explanations and opinions. In this, the contacts I speak to are overwhelmingly econocrats. I’m too old and proud to speak to ministers’ PR people, and I’ve never been able get much frankness from politicians. I should speak to academic economists more than I do, but these days I get my fill of academia by being an incessant reader of the excellent The Conversation website.

I feel comfortable talking to econocrats, for one main reason: they helped me correct one of the great mistakes of my life. When I was a student at Newcastle Uni in my late teens, I decided that accounting was really interesting, but economics was boring, theoretical rubbish that would be of no use to me in my dream career as a chartered accountant. It wasn’t until I gave up on my accounting career, washed up at the Herald as a graduate cadet, and was advised to become an economic journalist, that I realised I’d got it the wrong way round: it was accounting that was boring, whereas economics was interesting and vitally important in solving the nation’s problems.

My problem was that I’d forgotten most of what I was supposed to have learnt from the three years of economics in my commerce degree. It took me many, many hours on the phone to econocrats in the bureau, the bank, Treasury, the IAC and other agencies to relearn what I was supposed to know. So I’m forever grateful to the econocrats who spent so much of their time helping get me up to speed. I was deeply impressed by their dedication, their selfless desire to educate the public on matters economic by helping educate me. (Now, you may wonder why so many econocrats are willing to speak to me. It’s because they know I’m a columnist, not a reporter. I don’t want to quote them, I want to take those of their opinions I agree with, and make them my own. Opinion writers are in the plagiarism business.)

All this helps explain why I don’t regard myself as an economist, and don’t claim to be one. I used to say I was an accountant pretending to be an economist, but these days I say I’m a journalist who writes about economics. That’s exactly how I see myself, and where my loyalties lie. Because I’m not an economist, I’m not a member of the economists’ union, which means I’m under no fraternal obligation to defend economists and economics against all those terribly ignorant people who keep criticising us and pointing to our failings. I don’t have to believe what everyone in every occupation or industry believes: that if you’re not in our business, no criticism you make of us could possibly have merit.

Being a journalist who writes about economics, my obligation is to my readers. I see my role as similar to a movie critic. I’m an economics critic. I explain what the economists are telling the government to do and why, and then I tell my readers whether I agree with what the economists are saying. To put it more positively, I’ve spent my career trying to figure out how the economy works, then telling my readers what I’ve learnt. This means my views have evolved considerably over the decades. Hopefully, what I say today is closer to the truth than what I used to say.

When top econocrats give a very thoughtful speech about how the economy’s got to its present state, or what we need to do to improve its performance, the press gallery usually riffles through it looking for some particularly newsworthy remark – say, a hint that the cash rate’s about to rise – and then toss it aside. I see it as a big part of my job to rescue the speech from the gallery’s waste-paper basket, and use my column to make sure my readers get the benefit of the top econocrats’ thoughtful explanations and observations. Even when I don’t agree with their policy proposals, I try to give them a fair run before I register my doubts.

Partly because I’m a longstanding exponent of explanatory journalism, I write a lot about economic theory, more than most other economic journalists do. It was many years after I graduated that some economist took the trouble to explain to me the role of theory in our efforts to understand how the world works, to extract some mastery from the seeming chaos around us. About how “models” help us understand the real world by focusing on a few really powerful explanatory variables, and ignoring everything else. The neoclassical model is hugely useful, and hugely powerful in influencing the way economists think about how the economy works – and should work. This is why I keep writing about its assumptions and limitations. I think “behavioural economics” helps ensure our search for a better understanding of how the economy works isn’t held back by those assumptions and limitations.

But my interest in improving on the neoclassical model seems to bring out the defensiveness in academic economists – particularly on Twitter, where what I say is often dismissed as “simply wrong”. But what’s often not understood is that the neoclassical model I care most about is not the one written down in a set of equations, but the one lodged in the heads of econocrats. When I criticise “economists” I’m usually referring to econocrats and other economic practitioners. I care most about what practitioners think and propose because they’re the ones with most influence over policy – the ones with most influence over the economy my readers live in. But academics almost always take “economists” to be referring to them, not to their former students. Their self-absorption is revealing.

I became an economic journalist in 1974, which means I’ve been a professional watcher of the economy – and the econocrats providing economic advice – for almost 50 years. Tonight, I want to reflect on some of the conclusions I’ve reached in that time, the things I’ve learnt, and the way my views have changed. I guess I’ll be accused of being wise after the event, so let me get in first and plead guilty to exactly that. Being wiser after the event isn’t a crime, it’s a virtue. If you don’t learn from your mistakes, you’re not very bright.

When the era of “micro-economic reform” began in the mid-1980s under the influence of “economic rationalism”, I was a strong supporter. Over the 40 years since then, however, I’ve had growing doubts about many of the supposed reforms we’ve made. By now, it’s clear that governments’ enthusiasm for what came to be known as “neo-liberalism” has largely dissipated. Any number of policy changes by Liberal and Labor governments are clearly at odds with the principles of economic rationalism. But it’s not just the politicians who’ve lost their compass. I suspect that many econocrats have lost their John Stone certainty of what’s right and what’s wrong in economic policy.

I think we’re going through a period where econocrats and their fellow travellers are wandering in the wilderness searching for a new program of improvement to be working towards. Economic rationalism 2.0, if you like. Econocrats seem as reluctant as any other profession would be to publicly admit the mixed record of neo-liberalism. But I’m here to say I don’t think econocrats will get their mojo back until they’re willing to admit that many of the things done in the name of micro-economic reform turned out to make matters worse rather than better. We have to learn from our mistakes. I want to propose a couple of principles that should be at the centre of econocrats’ renewed sense of mission.

First, however, we need to think about what went wrong with that great reform push and why. Let’s be clear: the biggest of the reforms were necessary and have worked well: floating the dollar, deregulating the banks, ending import protection, ending centralised wage-fixing and, as Andrew Leigh has reminded us, introducing national competition policy.

The problem has mainly been with privatisation, outsourcing and “contestability” – “reforms” largely motivated by the belief that the provision of services will always be done better by the private sector than the public sector. This is an article of faith for the Liberal Party, but also for too many econocrats. It has succeeded in making the public sector a lot smaller – and very much smaller than it would otherwise have been – but too often this has come at the cost of higher prices (electricity), fewer services and, particularly, lower quality services, delivered by inadequately trained workers. This is true in aged care, child care and employment services. Contracting out to providers in “thin markets” – a Productivity Commission euphemism for pretending there’s a market where none exists - is a big part of the reason for the blowout in the cost of the NDIS. The states’ TAFE systems needed shaking up, but opening up to cherry-picking private providers, plus general cost-cutting, has left us with an utterly inadequate technical education system. Far too many privatisations – particularly in electricity and ports – have involved selling government-owned businesses with pricing power intact, maximising the sale price at the expense of establishing a competitive market.

None of these adverse outcomes were envisaged in the econocrats’ advocacy of these “reforms”. What went wrong when theory was put into practice? One reason is the use of privatisation, and of bureaucrats putting downward pressure contract prices, to reduce “debt and deficit” – which, when you examine it, is about politicians responding to the public’s growing demand for government services, but without asking people to pay for them with higher taxes. This was never going to add up.

But I place some blame on the naivety of our econocrats. They assumed that what works in the textbook would work just as easily in real life. Many econocrats have never worked in the private sector, but are painfully aware of the deficiencies of the public sector. This, plus the neo-classical model’s implicit assumption that markets are rational but governments aren’t, blinded them to the truth that private firms are hugely fallible. Econocrats believed in the profit motive, but didn’t understand its raw, even ruthless power. As we’ve seen from wage theft and the banking royal commission, among other examples, even our biggest, most respectable firms are perfectly capable of breaking the law in their pursuit of profit. Everyone wants to take a bite out of the government. When business people are invited to sell to the government, dollar signs appear in their eyes. They put both hands into the public purse and pull out as much as they can possibly carry away. They think the government’s always an easy touch – and too often they’re right. The bureaucratic regulators of private providers have proved no match for business people on the make.

The biggest reason so many reforms haven’t lived up to their billing, however, is the way the econocrats’ political masters have compromised the economic objectives by adding their own political objectives. Sometimes they’re trying to make the government’s finances look better than they really are. By moving debt off-balance sheet, for instance. But sometimes I suspect that the Liberals, being the party of the private sector, see moving businesses and workers from the public column to the private column as a clear win for their side of politics and loss for their Labor opponents.

There’s much more I could say about the crosses on the economic rationalist report card, but I need to get on with suggesting two key principles I think must be part of any revival of reformist zeal.

First, it’s become an empty cliché to say that policy proposals should be “evidence-based”, but it’s actually our beliefs about how the economy works that need to be more evidence-based. The great advance in academic economics in our time has been the way the information revolution has allowed it to become less theoretical and more empirical. The eternal temptation is to forget that models are just models. They’re not the economy, they’re a cardboard cut-out of the economy. They enlighten us in some circumstances, but mislead us in others. The great project in academia must be to test orthodox theory against the empirical evidence, to see what bits of the theory accurately describe the real world and what bits don’t. The classic example of this is the way empirical evidence has caused economists to change their tune on the role of minimum wages. If there’s one area of the economy where the simple neo-classical model – the one that economists carry in their heads – is an unreliable guide to how the economy works, it’s the labour market. Most econocrats have much to learn from labour economists about how the labour market ticks. Monopsony, for example.

My broader point is that economists who think the neoclassical model they memorised at uni is all they need to give wise advice on policy – whose views on how the economy works haven’t been changed by advances in industrial organisation, asymmetric information, incomplete contracts, behavioural economics and the rest – are setting themselves up for failure. The policies advocated by econocrats have been faith-based rather than empirical-evidence-based.

Second, economic rationalism 2.0 must accept the failure of the smaller-government push. The move to private providers of publicly funded care has not led to any noticeable improvement in the efficiency with which those services are delivered. Where governments have managed to hold down the growing cost of services, this has been achieved by reducing the quantity and particularly the quality of services. Where services have been delivered by for-profit providers, savings from genuine improvements in efficiency have been insufficient to make room for their necessary profit margin. The plain truth is that any savings made by outsourcing services have come simply from side-stepping the good pay rates and conditions of the original workers.

Turning the focus to general government and the budget, the quest for smaller government and its objective, lower taxes, has clearly failed – despite decades of trying. It’s failed because the growth in the public’s demand for more and better government services is inexorable. No government of either colour is prepared to make the big cuts to major spending programs that would make smaller government a reality. Some conservative politicians genuinely believed smaller government was desirable and possible. More of them saw the political attraction of claiming to be pursuing lower taxes while their opponents indulged in “tax and spend”.

Far too many econocrats believed in smaller government and lower taxes as a sure-fire way of increasing economic growth. They focused on the simple theory that taxing any activity always discourages it, while ignoring the absence of empirical evidence that lower company tax leads to increased investment, and lower marginal tax rates encourage work effort. They studiously ignored the evidence that only in the case of secondary earners (mainly mothers) are effective marginal rates likely to affect work effort.

But I think econocrats are guilty of a greater error: their commitment to smaller government – which sort of fits with their day job of using false economies to pare back this year’s embarrassingly high budget deficit – involves pursuing a will-o-the-wisp while ignoring the real challenge. Since big spending on government services is the public’s clearly revealed preference, their job is to use every opportunity to remind the public – not to mention their political masters – that demanding more government spending is fine, provided you’re prepared to pay for it with higher taxes. By omission, econocrats have played along with the delusion that higher taxes are unthinkable – both economically as well as politically – and settled for eternally struggling ineffectively to reduce budget deficits. They should have been doing all they could to stand against the demonisation of taxation for short-term and usually hypocritical political advantage.

Econocrats have spent too long struggling ineffectively to achieve smaller government, while doing little about what should be their real concern: not smaller government, but better government. Government in which the winners from globalisation and other structural change are required through the tax-and-transfer system to compensate the losers. The neglect of fairness toward the losers from micro-economic reform does much to explain why resistance to reform has grown and too many people have become susceptible to populist solutions.

Econocrats need to care more about how, for instance, assistance with housing costs can be more effective and better targeted to those needing it most. Econocrats – and particularly the accountants in Finance – have relied too heavily on crude annual percentage cuts in agencies’ budgets, and too little on building capacity to identify particular areas of waste. It takes no effort or understanding to barrack for small government or big government. What’s hard is knowing how government spending can be efficient and effective. Too often, econocrats have failed to promote and protect spending measures that should be seen as an investment in future cost reduction in return for immediate spending. Too often, the accountants have yielded to the short-term expedient of giving them the chop.

When it comes to regulation, the econocrat profession should be the repository of the nation’s knowledge of what works and what doesn’t, but it’s made little effort to become that. The new government’s commitment to an “evaluator-general” is good news. We need more rigorous evaluation of spending programs, with the results made public. This will always be resisted by ministers and department heads, but that’s all the more reason the econocrats should be unceasing in pushing for it.  Academic health economists worked for many years to build the information base that allowed governments to control their spending on public hospitals more effectively than just giving them 5 per cent more than they got last year. Eventually this “activity-based” funding model was adopted as part of the federal-state hospital agreement. To my knowledge, the econocrats did nothing to support this research effort, and were slow to realise its value.

It’s clear from all the discussion of the fiscal position inherited by the new government that we face a choice between bigger government with higher taxes, and a never-ending struggle with “debt and deficit”. Our econocrats should make sure they’re on the right side.

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If only Labor's wage changes were as bad as the bosses claim

Have you ever wondered why capitalism has survived for several centuries in the advanced economies? How a relative handful of rich families and company executives have been getting richer and more powerful for so long in countries where everyone gets a vote and could, if they chose, insist on something different?

It’s because the capitalists, counselled and coerced by politicians anxious to keep the peace, have made sure that the plebs, punters and ordinary working families have been given enough of the spoils to keep them reasonably content.

I remind you of this because, for 30 or 40 years in America, and now about a decade in Australia, the capitalist system – economists prefer calling it the market system – hasn’t been giving ordinary workers enough to keep them getting better off, while the few people at the top of the tree have been doing better, year after year.

If you wonder why so many Americans voted for a man like Donald Trump, and now delude themselves that he didn’t lose the last election, why the Yanks seem to be rapidly dismantling their democracy, a big part of their discontent is their loss of faith that the economic system is giving them a fair shake.

Fortunately, it’s nothing like that bad in Australia. Not yet, anyway. What’s true is that the average standard of living in Australia today is no better than it was a decade ago – something that hasn’t happened before in the more than 75 years since World War II.

Over the eight years before the pandemic, wages rose barely faster than inflation. We’ve had wage stagnation, now made a lot worse by the supply-chain disruptions of the pandemic, soaring electricity and gas prices caused by Russia’s war, and by the way floods keep wiping out our fruit and vegetable crops.

When Labor went to this year’s federal election promising to “get wages moving”, I think it struck a chord with many voters.

After we ended centralised wage-fixing by the Industrial Relations Commission in the early 1990s, we moved to collective bargaining at the level of the individual enterprise. Workers’ right to strike was hedged about with many requirements and limits.

At the beginning, more than 40 per cent of workers were covered by enterprise agreements. By now, however, some academic experts calculate that the proportion of workers covered by active agreements is down to about 15 per cent.

At the jobs and skills summit in September, all sides agreed that the enterprise bargaining system had broken down. Last week the government introduced its answer to wage stagnation, the Secure Jobs, Better Pay bill.

It would make a host of changes, many of which strengthen existing provisions of the Fair Work Act, and most of which the industrial parties agree would be improvements. It makes job security and gender pay equity explicit goals of the act, prohibits sexual harassment and requirements that workers keep their pay secret, and strengthens the right of workers with family responsibilities to request flexible working hours. More debatably, it abolishes the Australian Building and Construction Commission.

To repair enterprise bargaining, it clarifies the BOOT – better off overall test – requiring that agreements leave no worker worse off. This was the Business Council’s greatest complaint against enterprise agreements.

One reason such agreements now cover so few workers is that they’re expensive and complex for small and middle-size employers to organise. Hence, the proposal to widen the existing provision for “multi-employer bargaining”: workers in similar enterprises allowed to bargain collectively with a number of employers.

This would widen access to enterprise bargaining. It’s aimed particularly at strengthening the bargaining position of women in low-paid jobs in the aged care, childcare and disability care sector.

Ambit claims and exaggerated rhetoric are standard fare in industrial relations, but the cries of fear and outrage coming from the various employer groups are over the top.

It would “create more complexity, more strikes and higher unemployment,” said one. It was “so fatally flawed” it would “emasculate enterprise bargaining”, according to another outfit. It was “seismic” in its impact, claimed a third.

Methinks they doth … I’d be amazed if they actually believe that stuff. They’re probably still adjusting to the shock of having the unions back in the government tent. They know they won’t be able to stop the bill being passed, so they want at least to be seen opposing it with all their voice.

What changing the law won’t change is that the proportion of workers in a union has fallen from 50 per cent to 14 per cent. The small and middle-size businesses we’re talking about have even fewer union members than that.

No union members, no strike. No strike, no big pay rise. In any case, really powerful unions get big pay rises without needing to strike.

This is an attempt to make bargaining provisions that didn’t work last time, work this time. I doubt if these modest changes will do much to “get wages moving” again. More’s the pity. If I’m right, Australia’s capitalism will remain broken.

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Memo RBA board: Time to stop digging in deeper on interest rates

If, as seems likely, the combined might of the advanced economies’ central banks pushes the world into recession, the biggest risk isn’t that they’ll drag us down too, but that our Reserve Bank will raise our own interest rates too far.

That’s the message to us – and everyone else – from the International Monetary Fund’s repeated warnings about the unexpected consequences of “synchronised tighten” by the big economies – America, Europe and, in its own way, China, all jamming on the brakes at the same time.

Synchronised macro-policy shifts are a relatively new problem in our more globalised world economy. Until the global financial crisis of 2008, world recessions tended to roll from one country to the next. Since then, everyone tends to start contracting – or stimulating – at the same time.

When you were stimulating while your trading partners weren’t, much of your stimulus would “leak” to their economies, via your higher imports. But, as we learnt in the fight to counter the Great Recession, when everyone’s stimulating together, your leakage to them is offset by their leakage to you, thus making your stimulus stronger than you were expecting.

The fund’s warning is that we’re now about to learn that the same thing happens in reverse when everyone’s hitting the brakes – budgetary as well as monetary – together. Synchronisation will make your efforts to restrain demand (spending on goods and services) more potent than you were expecting.

So the fund’s message to us is: when you’re judging how high interest rates have to go to get inflation heading back down to the target, err on of side to doing too little.

But there are four other factors saying the Reserve should be wary of pushing rates higher. The first is Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ confirmation in last week’s budget that the “stance” of his fiscal policy has also switched from expansionary to restrictive, and so is now adding to the restraint coming from tighter monetary policy.

Chalmers has cut back the Coalition’s spending programs to make room for Labor’s new spending plans, while “banking” the temporary surge in tax revenue arising from the war-caused jump in world energy prices, and the success of the Coalition’s efforts to return us to full employment.

As a result, the budget deficit has fallen from a peak of $134 billion (equivalent to 6.5 per cent of gross domestic product) in 2020-21, to $32 billion (1.4 per cent) in the year to this June. The present financial year should see that progress largely retained, with the deficit rising only a little.

What’s more, the government’s already acting on its intention to force our greedy gas producers to raise their prices by a lot less than has been assumed in the budget’s inflation forecasts.

Second, the Reserve’s efforts to reduce aggregate (total) demand by using the higher cost of borrowing to reduce domestic demand, will be added to by the other central banks’ efforts to reduce our “net external demand” (exports minus imports).

What’s more, the expected further big fall in house prices will help reduce domestic demand by making home owners feel a lot less well-off than they were (the “wealth effect”).

Third – and this is a big point – the restrictive effect of the Reserve’s higher interest rates will be massively reinforced by the “cost-of-living squeeze” (aka the huge fall in real wages). Comparing the wage price index with the consumer price index, real wages fell by 2 per cent over the year to June 2021, and by an unbelievable 3.5 per cent to June this year.

Now the budget’s predicting a further fall of 2 per cent to June next year, with only the tiniest gain by June 2024.

This is an unprecedented blow to households’ income. It just about guarantees an imminent return to weak consumer spending. And it’s a much bigger blow than the big advanced economies have suffered, suggesting our central bank should be going easier on rate rises than theirs.

The final factor saying the Reserve should be wary of pushing rates higher is “lags”. As top international economist Olivier Blanchard reminded us in a recent Twitter thread, monetary policy affects the inflation rate with a variable delay of maybe six to 18 months.

This says you should stop tightening about a year before you see any hard evidence that inflation has peaked and started falling. Wait for that evidence, and you’re certain to have hit the economy too hard, causing the recession we didn’t have to have.

But to stop tightening before the money market know-alls think you should takes great courage.

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Budget will reduce need for increases in interest rates

When the economy’s needs have switched from stimulus to restraint, it helps to get in new economic managers, who can reverse their predecessors’ direction with zeal rather than embarrassment.

The need for economic policy to change course became clear only during this year’s election campaign, when the Reserve Bank’s concern about rapidly rising inflation prompted it to make the first of many rises in the official interest rate.

So this week’s second go at a budget for the present financial year was needed not just to accommodate a new government with different policies and preferences, but to change the budget’s direction from push-forward, to pull-back.

In just those few months, we changed from “gee, aren’t we roaring along” to “gosh, we better slow down quick”. One moment we’re seeing how low we can get the rate of unemployment, the next we’re jacking up interest rates in a struggle to get inflation down.

A drawback of living in a market economy is that it moves through a “business cycle” of alternating boom and bust. The role of the economic managers is to “stabilise” – or smooth out - the demand for goods and services, cutting off the peaks and filling in the troughs.

The problem with booms is that as demand (spending) starts running ahead of supply (production), it pushes up prices and the inflation rate. The problem with troughs is that as demand falls behind supply, businesses start sacking workers and unemployment rises.

The macro managers use two “instruments” to smooth the cycle’s ups and downs: the budget (“fiscal policy”) and interest rates (“monetary policy”).

With the budget, they increase government spending and cut taxes to add to demand and so reduce unemployment. They cut government spending and increase taxes to reduce demand and so reduce the rate of inflation.

With interest rates, the Reserve Bank cuts them to encourage borrowing and spending by households, so as to reduce unemployment. It increases them to discourage borrowing and spending by households and so reduce inflation.

So, which of the two policy levers should you use?

A new conventional wisdom has emerged among top American academic economists that, because of the two levers’ contrasting strengths and weaknesses – and because interest rates are so much closer to zero than they used to be - you should use fiscal policy to boost demand, but monetary policy to hold it back.

This more discriminating approach has yet to become the accepted wisdom, however. The old wisdom is that monetary policy is the better tool to use for both stimulus and restriction.

The budget’s “automatic stabilisers” (mainly bracket creep and unemployment benefits) should be free to help monetary policy in its “counter-cyclical” role, but discretionary, politician-caused changes in government spending and taxes should be used only in emergencies, such as recessions.

So expansionary fiscal policy did much of the heavy lifting during the pandemic – hence the huge budget deficits and addition to government debt.

But now the Reserve and monetary policy have taken the lead in slowing demand within Australia, so it doesn’t add to the higher prices we’re importing from abroad, thanks to the pandemic-caused supply chain disruptions and the Russian-war-caused leap in fuel prices.

The conventional wisdom also says that, whatever you do, never have the two policy tools pulling in opposite directions rather than together.

If you’re mad enough to have the budget strengthening demand when the independent central bank wants it to weaken, all you do is prompt the bankers to lift interest rates that much higher. This is the “monetary policy reaction function”. One way of saying the central bankers always have the trump card.

Which brings us to this week’s budget redux. How did Treasurer Jim Chalmers play his cards? He did what he thought he could to get the budget deficit as low as possible and so back up monetary policy’s efforts to reduce demand. He’s no doubt hoping this will reduce the need for many more interest-rate increases.

First, Finance Minister Katy Gallagher hacked away at the Morrison government’s new spending programs, so that Labor’s promised new spending could take their place with little net addition to expected government spending over this financial year and the following three.

This wasn’t particularly hard because most of the Coalition’s plans were politically driven, and most hadn’t got going before government changed hands in May.

Second, the same attack on Ukraine that’s causing household electricity and gas bills to rocket has also caused the profits of Australian gas and coal exporters to rocket, along with their company tax bills.

As well, the Coalition’s success in getting employment up and unemployment down has caused a surge in income tax collections.

This huge boost to government revenue isn’t expected to last, so Chalmers has decided to “bank” almost all of it rather than spend it. That is, use it to reduce the budget deficit.

The budget in March expected a budget deficit for the year to this June of $80 billion. Thanks mainly to the tax windfall, it came in at $32 billion, a huge improvement, equivalent to more than 2 per cent of gross domestic product.

The deficit for this year was expected to be $78 billion, but now $37 billion is expected, an improvement of almost 2 per cent of GDP. Next financial year, 2023-24, has gone from $57 billion to $44 billion.

So, the budget deficit is expected to fall continuously from a peak of $134 billion (6.5 per cent of GDP) in 2020-21 to $37 billion (1.5 per cent) this financial year.

That’s enough to convince me the “stance” of fiscal policy is now restrictive. I reckon it’s also enough to convince Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe that fiscal policy is co-operating in the effort to restrain demand and control inflation.

One small problem. After this year, the deficit’s projected to start drifting back up, and stay at about 2 per cent of GDP until at least 2032-33.

Oh dear. Why? Tell you next week.

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Join the dots: your taxes are heading up, not down

Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ “solid and sensible” budget is not so much good or bad as incomplete. It hints at “hard decisions” to be made but doesn’t make them. It tells us times are tough and getting tougher – which we already knew. What we don’t know is what the government plans to do about it. We were told some things, but one big gap remains.

Chalmers said the budget’s priority was to provide cost-of-living relief. No, not directly – its true focus is on reducing the budget deficit so that the Reserve Bank won’t have to raise interest rates as much to control inflation.

But the big fall in this year’s deficit – made possible by the greater tax revenue from higher export prices – isn’t expected to stop the deficit rising the following year.

And although the budget does include measures that will cut costs for some families – for childcare and prescriptions – these are election promises, not newly announced moves.

The budget’s biggest bad news is that the cost-of-living squeeze is now expected to continue for another two years, with price rises continuing to outpace wage rises. And even when the squeeze stops, real (inflation-adjusted) wages will be a lot lower than they were before the pandemic.

Strangely, the budget’s best news is that the economy’s rate of growth is forecast to slow to just 1.5 per cent in the year to June 2024.

What sounds bad is good when you remember the growing likelihood of a global recession. While most rich economies will go backwards, we should only slow down. Our rate of unemployment is predicted to rise just a bit from its near 50-year low.

World recessions mean we earn less from our exports. They don’t necessarily drag us into recession, as our earlier run of almost 30 years without a recession demonstrates.

Still, a forecast is only a forecast, not a guarantee. The main factor determining if we too end up with negative growth will be whether, in its efforts slow the rate of inflation, the Reserve Bank accidentally raises interest rates more than needed.

This is the BNPL budget – buy now, pay later. Labor bought an easy return to government by promising lots more spending on better government services, while also promising not to increase any taxes – apart from on wicked multinationals – and not to interfere with the already legislated stage three income tax cuts, due in July 2024.

This budget is Labor’s payment for the election it bought. But, as with BNPL schemes, payment comes in four instalments. This is just the first of the four budgets the government expects to deliver before the next election.

Chalmers says it’s “a beginning of the long task of budget repair, not the final destination”.

True. Another way to put it is that this is only the start of his Dance of the Four Veils. In the end, all will be revealed. But right now, we’ve been shown little.

Chalmers keeps saying he wants to “start a conversation” about what services we want government to provide, and how we should pay for them.

A few weeks ago, he got the conversation going by entertaining whether, in the light of all that’s transpired, the stage three tax cuts are still appropriate.

But his boss Anthony Albanese quickly closed the conversation down. No decision had been made to change the cuts, he said firmly.

Since the cuts aren’t due for 20 months, there’s no need for any decision to be announced in this budget, or in next May’s budget. Indeed, any decision could be held off until the third veil is removed in May 2024.

Albanese is waiting and manoeuvring until time and circumstance have convinced us it would be better for the promise to be broken. He’d like people marching the streets with banners demanding the tax cut be dropped.

Those hugely expensive and unfair tax cuts would be so counterproductive to all the problems Chalmers is grappling with, I don’t doubt that at a propitious time, a decision to reduce them will be unveiled.

This will set the stage for the final unveiling of the government’s plan to increase taxes after the next election.

Why am I so sure? Because everything the government is doing and saying points to the need for taxes to go up, not down.

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher has slashed away at the Morrison government’s spending on “rorts and waste”, to make room for Labor’s spending promises – not all of which escape a similar label.

But she has also exposed the way her predecessors were holding back spending on aged care, health, education and much else. Add the National Disability Insurance Scheme, defence, and the interest bill, and you see that strong spending growth in coming years will be unavoidable.

Except for the government’s reticence on tax issues, Chalmers is justified in his repeated claim that this is a “responsible” budget. His more debatable claim is that the budget’s first priority was to provide cost-of-living relief.

That claim came with a heavy qualification: that relief had to be “responsible, not reckless … without adding to inflation”. Yes, the adults are back in charge of the budget.

But the government reticence on tax issues is a big exception to its record on responsible budgeting. The huge increases in gas and electricity prices – mostly collateral damage from Russia’s war on Ukraine – that will do most to continue the cost-of-living squeeze on families this year and next are counterbalanced by the massively increased profits of our exporters of fossil fuel.

Labor’s irresponsible election promise to bind its hands on tax changes has stopped it giving hard-pressed households the consolation of seeing most of those windfall profits taxed, and so returned to other taxpayers for use on more deserving causes.

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Creative destruction: Even pandemics have their upside

There’s nothing new about pandemics. Over the centuries, they’ve killed millions upon millions. But economic historians are discovering they can also have benefits for those who live to tell the tale. Take the Black Death of the 14th century.

In October 1347, ships arrived in Messina, Sicily, carrying Genoese merchants coming from Kaffa in Crimea. They also carried a deadly new disease. Over the next five years, the Black Death spread across Europe and the Middle East, killing between 30 and 50 per cent of the population.

What happened after that is traced in a recent study, The Economic Impact of the Black Death, by three American academics, Remi Jedwab, Noel Johnson and Mark Koyama, and summarised by Timothy Taylor in his popular blog, the Conversable Economist.

The immediate consequences of all the deaths were severe disruptions of agriculture and trade between cities. There were shortages of goods and shortages of workers, so those who did survive had to be paid well. This will ring a bell: with shortages of supply but strong demand, inflation took off.

In England, the Statute of Labourers, passed in 1349, imposed caps on wages. It was highly effective during the 1350s, but less so after that. Similar restrictions were imposed elsewhere in Europe.

Over the next few decades, after economies had adjusted to the worst of the disruptions, the continuing shortage of workers resulted in many rural labourers moving to the cities, which had vacant houses as well as jobs. Farmers had to pay a lot to keep their workers, so real wages had grown substantially by the end of the century.

Since many noblemen had died, the distribution of income became less unequal. Ordinary people could afford better clothing. So, many countries passed “sumptuary” laws under which only the nobility were allowed to wear silk, gold buttons or certain colours. Nor could the punters serve two meat courses at dinner.

Sumptuary laws were an attempt by elites to repress status competition from below.

The authors say the economic effects of the Black Death interacted with changes in social and cultural institutions – accepted beliefs about how people should behave. Serfdom went into decline in Western Europe because of the fewer labourers available.

People became even more inclined to marry later and so have fewer children. Stronger, more cohesive states emerged and the political power of the church was weakened.

It’s widely believed that all these developments played a role in the economic rise of Europe, particularly north-western Europe.

Taylor notes that one of the great puzzles of world economic history is the Great Divergence - the way the economies of Europe began to grow significantly faster than the economies of Asia and the Middle East, which had previously been the world leaders.

This divergence began soon after the Black Death.

“Of course, many factors were at work. But ironically, one contributor seems to have been the disruptions in economic, social and political patterns caused by the Black Death,” he concludes.

Fortunately, advances in medical science mean our pandemic has cost the lives of a much smaller proportion of the population. And believe it or not, advances in economic understanding mean governments have known what to do to limit the economic fallout – even if we didn’t see the inflation coming.

Governments knew to spare no taxpayer expense in funding drug companies to develop effective vaccines and medicines in record time.

One consequence of our greater understanding of what to do may be that this pandemic won’t alter the course of world economic history the way the Black Death did.

Even so, it’s still far too soon to be sure what the wider economic consequences will be. Changing China’s economic future is one possibility. Come back in 50 years and whoever’s doing my job will tell you.

Even at this early stage, however, it’s clear the pandemic has led to changes in our behaviour. Necessity’s been the mother of invention. Or rather, it’s obliged us to get on with exploiting benefits from the digital revolution we’d been hesitating over.

Who knew it was so easy and so attractive for people to work from home – with a fair bit of the saving in commuting time going into working longer. And these days many more of us know the convenience of shopping online – and the downside of sending back clothes that don’t fit.

Doctors were holding back on exploiting the benefits of telehealth, but no more. Prescriptions are now just another thing on your phone. And I doubt if the number of business flights between Sydney and Melbourne will ever recover.

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The knowledge economy is behind the soaring price of land

Over the two centuries and more that people have made a serious study of how the economy works, economists have fallen in and out of love with land. At first, they thought it was at the centre of everything, then they decided it wasn’t terribly important. But the wheel may be turning again. In a major speech last month, the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates criticised his profession for its “longstanding intellectual neglect of the economics of land”.

You don’t have to think about housing affordability for long to realise it is not actually the high cost of building a house that’s the problem, it’s the high cost of the land it’s built on.

But why is the cost of land rising much faster than the economy is growing? And why don’t economists take more interest in why this is happening and what we could do about it?

Coates began the annual Henry George Lecture by summarising the history of economists’ waxing and waning interest in land as a resource used to produce goods and services.

The first economists – the Physiocrats – thought of almost nothing other than land, he says. Land was fundamental: agricultural labourers were the source of economic growth, while landlords simply commandeered what the workers produced and flowed it through to the rest of the economy.

The next generation of economists, the “classical” economists of the 18th century, broadened their focus to studying the complex interaction of three “factors of production”: land, labour and (physical) capital.

Adam Smith, a Scotsman known as the father of economics, argued that the “division of labour” – workers specialising in different occupations – and technological innovation were what drove economic growth. But land was still central.

David Ricardo, an English member of parliament, argued that landlords were simply the lucky beneficiaries of land’s natural scarcity (any country has only a fixed amount of it) and its productive capacity, to produce food and fibre and even valuable energy and minerals, Coates says.

And Henry George, the last great classical economist, argued that the rental income enjoyed by landlords must be socialised by taxing the unimproved value of all privately owned land.

Do that, and you wouldn’t need any other taxes. George campaigned hard, but never persuaded any government to follow his advice.

Coates says we “would have done well – possibly much better than we have done – if we’d heeded the lessons of Henry George and paid more attention to the economics of land”.

But in the 19th century the classical economists were replaced by the neo-classical economists, who were a lot less interested in land. And in 1956, the great American economist Robert Solow developed a theory of economic growth, which held that it was improvements in the efficiency with which labour and physical capital (machines and buildings) were combined that drove our standard of living.

The role of land in production - and in inequality - disappeared from the theories economists devised to explain the world, Coates says. Instead, land was treated as just another form of physical capital.

Coates says that “the shifting focus on land in the history of economic thought reflects the changing nature of the economies that economists were trying to explain”.

The Physiocrats observed a world dominated by agriculture. It was obvious that the ownership and use of land determined what got produced, in what quantities. And who got what.

The classical economists watched this world transition through the Industrial Revolution, and the neo-classical economists developed theories for a world that had made that transition.

Economic power started to gravitate towards those who owned capital (whether physical or financial) and away from those who owned land. Agricultural production made way for industrial production.

For most of the 20th century, the neglect of land was of little consequence. More important was the amount of capital invested (to make labour more productive) and the pace of innovation (ditto).

“But as the advanced economies of the world have transitioned again – from manufacturing to services – land is back,” Coates says. Economies powered by intangible capital – how much you know; how much information you can gather – strive or stagnate on the ability of individuals to come together and combine their knowledge and skills.

As any real estate agent will tell you, it’s about “location, location, location”. In Australia, it’s the Grattan Institute that’s done most to help us see that, these days, it’s big cities that drive the economy.

Eighty per cent of the value of all goods and services produced in Australia is generated on just 0.2 per cent of our land. Economic activity is concentrated in CBDs, with the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs accounting for 10 per cent of all economic activity in Australia – more than three times the contribution of agriculture.

This concentration reflects the rise in knowledge-intensive services, clustered together at the hearts of our major cities. The willingness of businesses to pay high rents to locate in the CBDs of our big cities shows the value they gain from access to high-skilled workers and proximity to suppliers, customers and partners.

Similarly, the willingness of workers to pay much higher prices for homes located close to those employment centres shows they, too, see value in being crammed in. Our experience of working from home during the pandemic has changed this a bit – three days in the office rather than five – but not a lot.

All this helps explain why house prices have risen about five times faster than average full-time earnings over the past 25 years. And it means the price of land is a much bigger factor in the economy than it used to be.

It’s leaving existing home owners seemingly much better off, but aspiring home owners much worse off. It’s the product of a clash between the rise of the knowledge economy and our longstanding attitudes towards the taxing and regulation of land.

It should not be beyond the wit of economists to come up with a better approach.

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Great Aussie Pipedream: rising house prices make us feel wealthier

I guess you’ve heard. Isn’t it great? Australians are now the richest people in the world. But if you find that hard to believe, congratulations. Your bulldust detector’s working fine.

According to Credit Suisse’s annual global wealth report, which tracks wealth in 20 countries, last year the typical adult Australian’s wealth – assets minus debts – reached almost $336,000.

Soaring property prices lifted our median wealth by $38,000, enough to put us just ahead of Belgium and New Zealand. Our residential property prices rose by almost 24 per cent during the year.

We had about 2.2 million millionaires – measured in US dollars – up from 1.8 million in 2020.

So, what’s the catch? Well, I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with the bank’s calculations. And there’s no denying we’re a rich country, whether by this you mean our annual income, or the value of the net assets, physical and financial, of our households.

No, the problem is that so much of our wealth comes from the value of our home. Do you believe our homes are so much bigger or better, or better located, than homes in North America or Europe?

I doubt it. If not, then what we’re really saying is that the land on which our homes are built is much better than the land on which the Americans and Germans – and Kiwis – have built their homes.

Really? We have better views? Better soil quality? Less chance of getting flooded or burnt out?

No. If the market price of our residential land is higher than their market price, it’s just because we’ve bid our prices up higher than they have theirs.

And how exactly does doing that make Australians richer than people in other countries? If it does, why don’t we keep bidding our prices up until we’re twice as rich as we are now?

See what I’m saying? It’s not something economists talk about much but, as former Reserve Bank heavy Dr Tony Richards explained in a speech many moons ago, the notion that the high prices we charge and pay each other for our homes makes the nation richer is an illusion.

“The increase in housing prices has been a mixed blessing for Australians. At one level, rising housing prices have made many people feel [note that word] wealthier and have contributed to higher levels of consumer spending than might otherwise have occurred. But they have also resulted in concerns about housing affordability,” he said.

“The difference in views reflects the fact that housing is not just an asset but also a consumption item. When housing is thought of purely as a consumption item, it would seem that in aggregate we would be better off if its price were lower.

“Because we all need to consume some level of housing services, either rented or purchased, a higher level of housing prices and rents allows less spending on other items.”

Get it? It seems that, as a nation, Australians value owning their own home, and making sure it’s a good one, more than the people in many other rich countries do.

In consequence, we devote more of our incomes to housing than they do, meaning we spend a smaller proportion of our incomes on everything else. So, to that extent, home ownership really is the Great Australian Dream.

It’s because, as a nation, we can never spend enough on improving our own housing position – although how much we can pay is held back by how much our income allows us to borrow – that house prices have become so sensitive to the rate of interest on home loans.

When rates come down a bit – even during a pandemic – our ability to borrow more prompts more aggressive bidding against other would-be owners, pushing prices up. When, as now, interest rates start going up again, thus reducing how much we can borrow, house prices fall back a bit.

Although there’ve been times when we’ve let our building of extra homes fall behind the growth in our population, over the longer term we’ve managed to keep the two pretty much in line.

So, house prices aren’t high because we don’t have enough houses to accommodate every household. They’re high because some houses are better than others – bigger, newer, flashier, or better located, nearer the beach, nearer other well-off people, or nearer the centre of the city – and we compete with others to get the best we can (barely) afford. And because many home owners want to own more than one, as an investment.

As well, prices in the most desirable parts of the city are higher because of government restrictions on packing in more households by building up rather than out.

But here’s the punchline. Just because higher house prices don’t make us wealthier as a nation, this doesn’t stop them making some Aussies wealthier than other Aussies. Which, for many of us, is what we’re after. Housing is one of the main things we’ve allowed to widen the gap between rich and poor.

And I thought we were supposed to be proud of our Aussie egalitarianism.

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Monetary policy is no longer fit for purpose

It’s an outstanding feature of the modern economy: the multitude of people who could do a far better job of running interest rates than the fool they’ve got doing it at the moment. Welcome to the inquiry into the performance of the Reserve Bank.

One small problem. About half governor Dr Philip Lowe’s critics complain he was too slow putting rates down, while the other half say he was too slow putting them up. Since interest rates are a cost to borrowers but income to savers, it’s hardly surprising that, whichever way the Reserve jumps, many will be complaining.

To be clear, it’s always a good idea to review regularly the performance of an institution with as much power over our lives as the central bank.

But equally, the inquiry needs to focus on the right question. Some critics just want someone to agree with them that the Reserve could have done a better job in recent years. Others – particularly academics specialising in monetary economics – want to argue about the mechanics.

Should we change the monetary target? Since the Reserve’s procedures aren’t identical to the US Federal Reserve’s, doesn’t that mean we’re doing it wrong? Why stack the Reserve’s board with business worthies when it would make much better decisions if you stacked it with academic experts like me and my mates?

Leaving aside those who just care about how much interest they’re paying or receiving, most of those who were pushing for the inquiry have a vested interest in monetary policy continuing to be the dominant instrument used in the year-to-year management of demand. They need monetary policy to stay dominant because their living depends on it.

But monetary policy’s role in the “policy mix” is the most important question. Just as much of the pomp and pageantry we’ve been watching isn’t as ancient as many monarchists imagine, monetary policy has been the main instrument used to manage demand only since the late 1970s.

Before then, fiscal (budgetary) policy was dominant, with monetary policy an afterthought, and the central bank a vassal of Treasury. The switch made sense then, but does it still?

And even then, we got off on the wrong foot, starting by trying to control the supply of money, which didn’t work. We didn’t switch the focus to controlling interest rates until the early ’80s. The inflation target came in the mid-90s, and it wasn’t until 1997 that the Reserve’s independence from the elected government was formalised.

It would be nice to imagine we’re gradually closing in on the one right way to manage the economy, but this would be a delusion. History tells us we keep changing the way we do it to better fit the particular problems of the era. Indeed, it wasn’t until the late 1940s that everyone agreed there was a macroeconomy that needed managing.

The two main “arms” of macro management (we abandoned the third arm, exchange rate policy, in 1983 when maintaining a fixed exchange rate became impossible) have different strengths and weakness.

The great advantage of monetary policy is that the econocrats who run it can ignore the electoral cycle. It can also be adjusted quickly and easily. But after acknowledging that, it’s otherwise inferior to fiscal policy. It can’t be targeted at particular regions or industries, and it takes longer to do what you need it to – with the notable exception of house prices.

Our present problem of sudden, high inflation – caused by disruptions to the supply (production) side of the economy being exacerbated by an overstimulated demand (spending) side – well demonstrates the bluntness, crudeness and unfairness of monetary policy.

This raises two questions. Did we need to use both arms of policy to respond to the pandemic? And how much of our present excess demand can be attributed to monetary policy?

The econocrats defend what, with hindsight, was clearly too much stimulus, by saying they didn’t know how much economic disruption the pandemic would cause, the medicos initially led them to believe it could be much worse than it turned out to be and, anyway, it’s better to err on the side of doing too much than too little.

But none of that says we had to overdo it on both barrels. With the official interest rate already down to 0.75 per cent before the virus arrived, it was clear the Reserve was almost out of ammo. I imagined it would have little more to contribute, leaving fiscal policy to do all the heavy lifting. As it did.

But no, the Reserve rode to the rescue as though it was the only knight that could find a horse. It slashed rates to near zero, offered cheap loans to the banks and, before long, joined the bigger central banks in buying government bonds with created money, to lower longer-term interest rates.

At the time, I wondered whether this was just institutional turf protection. It was the Reserve’s job to be the chief demand manager, and it wasn’t going to sit out the biggest crisis in ages just because it had run out of ammo. We’ll find something we can make into bullets.

Looking back, I suspect the Reserve’s determination not to be left out of the party has added greatly to our new problem and to the pain it’s inflicting on us to fix the problem. When you boil it down, one of the main “channels” through which monetary policy influences demand is by interfering in the cost of housing.

The Reserve is right to say interest rates aren’t the primary cause of high house prices, but because monetary policy is such a one-trick pony, it can only ignore all the pain it inflicts by causing prices to soar when it cuts rates and fall when it raises them.

Between the two arms, they’ve revved up the housing industry, only now to be hitting the brakes. They’ve caused surprisingly few extra homes to be built, but pushed up the price of new homes by 20 per cent, adding 1.8 percentage points to the 6.1 per cent inflation rate.

According to Professor Simon Wren-Lewis, of Oxford, the old consensus among academics that monetary policy should take the lead in demand management, has been replaced by one where interest rates are the favoured instrument to deal with inflation – as now – but fiscal policy should be the main weapon used to fight recessions. Or lockdowns.

Point is, had we followed that rule during the pandemic, we’d now have a much smaller inflation problem. Something the inquiry should ponder. And whether resorting to “unconventional measures” was ever a smart idea.

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How human psychology helps explain the resurgence of inflation

The beginning of wisdom in economics is to realise that models are models – an oversimplified version of a complicated reality. A picture of reality from a particular perspective.

I keep criticising economists for their excessive reliance on their basic, “neoclassical” model – in which everything turns on price, and prices are set by the rather mechanical interaction of supply and demand.

It’s not that the model doesn’t convey valuable insights – it does – but they’re often too simplified to explain the full story.

Sometimes I think Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe is like someone whose brain has been locked up in a neoclassical prison. But in his major speech on inflation two weeks ago, he showed he’d been thinking well outside the bars, looking at various models for a comprehensive explanation of how inflation could shoot up so quickly and unexpectedly.

He observed that another “element in the workhorse models of inflation is inflation expectations.” This relatively recent, more psychological addition to mainstream economics says that what businesses and unionised workers expect to happen to inflation tends to be self-fulfilling because they act on their expectations.

We’ve heard much about the risk of worsening inflation expectations, including from Lowe. It’s been the main justification offered for jacking up interest rates so high, so fast. But Lowe admitted it’s a weak argument.

“Inflation expectations have picked up a little, but...there is a high degree of confidence that inflation will return to target. This suggests that a pick-up in inflation expectations is not a primary driver of the sharp rise in inflation,” he said.

As Professor Ross Garnaut has observed - and recent Reserve research has confirmed – “the spectre of a virulent wage-price spiral comes from our memories and not current conditions”.

But, Lowe said, there’s something here that’s not easily captured in our standard models. That’s “the general inflation psychology in the community. By this, I mean the general willingness of businesses to see price increases and the willingness of the community to accept price increases.

“Prior to the pandemic, it was very difficult for a business person to stand in the public square and say they were putting their prices up. And a common theme from our liaison [regular interviews with business people] was that because most businesses had trouble putting their prices up, wage increases had to be kept modest. That was the mindset.”

Mindset? Mindset? That’s not a word you’ll find in any economics textbook. There’s no equation or diagram for mindsets.

Today, however, “business people are able to stand in the public square and say they are putting their prices up, and they can point to a number of reasons why.

"The community doesn’t like it, but there is a begrudging acceptance. And with prices rising, it is harder to resist bigger wage increases, especially in a tight labour market,” Lowe said.

“So, the psychology shifts. Or as the Bank for International Settlements put it in its recent annual report: when inflation is high, it becomes a coordinating mechanism for pricing decisions.

"In other words, people really start to pay attention to changes in costs and prices. The result can be faster and fuller pass-through of cost shocks and more frequent price and wage adjustments.

“There is some evidence that is already occurring, which is contributing to the strength of the pick-up in inflation,” Lowe added in his speech earlier this month.

To be fair, this is just the latest version of a thesis – a “model” – Lowe has been developing for years. And I think he’s on to a phenomenon which, when added to all the mechanistic, mathematised rules of the standard model, takes us a lot further in understanding what the hell’s been happening to the economy.

It’s taking the standard model but, contrary to its assumptions, accepting that, as the social animals that humans are, economic “agents” – whether consumers, bosses, workers or union secretaries – have a tendency to herding behaviour.

You can observe that in financial markets any day of the week. We feel comfortable when we’re doing what everyone else’s is doing; we feel uncomfortable when we’re running against the herd.

Anyone knows who has worked in business for a while – as many econocrats and academic economists haven’t – business behaviour is heavily influenced by fads and fashions. One role of sharemarket analysts is to punish companies that don’t conform to the fad of the moment.

The world’s economists spent much time between the global financial crisis and the pandemic trying to explain why all the rich economies had spent more than a decade caught in “secular stagnation” – a low-growth trap.

I think Lowe’s found a big piece of that puzzle. Business went through this weird period of years, when because no one else was putting up their prices, no one wanted to put up their prices.

The inflation rate fell below the Reserve’s target range, and stayed there for years. Businesses had no reason to invest much, so productivity improvement fell away, and economic growth was weak.

But then, along came the pandemic, lockdowns, huge budgetary and monetary stimulus, borders closed to immigrants, and finally a massive supply shock from the pandemic and the Ukraine war.

Suddenly, some big price rises are announced, the dam bursts and everyone – from big business to corner milk bars – starts putting up their prices. The spell has broken, and I doubt we’ll go back to the weird world we were in.

But the other side of the no-price-rises world was an obsession with using all means possible – legal or illegal – to cut labour costs. This greatly reinforced the low-growth trap we were caught in. But it was made possible also by the various developments that have robbed workers of their bargaining power.

It’s not yet clear whether the end of the self-imposed ban on price rises will be matched by an end to the ban on decent pay rises. If it isn’t, we’ll still be lost in the woods.

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A home of one's own: So good only the rich need apply

Slowly – but sooner than you may think – this country, so proud to be a nation of home owners, is turning into a nation of renters.

Perversely, it’s happening because we value home ownership so highly. And we’ve never much worried about what happens to those who don’t make it onto the home owners’ merry-go-round.

Historically, the reason we want so much to own the home we live in is security of tenure. We don’t want to be beholden to a landlord deciding whether we stay or must go.

We don’t want to live in a place where someone else decides if we can have a pet, whether we can knock a nail into a wall, whether the place needs a coat of paint, or when they’ll get around to fixing the leaky toilet.

That’s always been the chief reason for wanting to own the place you live in. What’s changed is that a second motivation has become more prominent in our minds: homes turn out to be a good investment, a good place to put your savings and watch them grow.

Whereas the value of shares goes up and down with the vagaries of the sharemarket, the price of homes just keeps going up and up. (As we’re seeing now, that’s not quite true, but we still believe it.)

And because home ownership is such a national priority, it comes with many exemptions. When we decided to start taxing capital gains in the mid-1980s, we exempted the family home. And, unlike other assets, the home you own is largely ignored when assessing your eligibility for the age pension.

Any savings I invest in making my principal residence bigger and better won’t be subject to gains tax, as most other investments would.

Actually, homes are such a good investment, why don’t I invest in more than one? I’ll have to pay gains tax when I sell, but this time I’ll get a tax deduction on the mortgage interest I pay.

And naturally, being a home owner with a big investment, I’ll make sure the local council knows how opposed I am to people building those terrible high-rises anywhere near my place.

See what happens? The more benefits we attach to home ownership and the more people want to own a house or three, the more they bid up the price of houses. That makes being on the home owners’ merry-go-round an ever-better investment, but that much harder for others to climb aboard.

The more we favour home owners, the more we disadvantage renters. The more we encourage multiple home owning by those who can afford it – which most rich countries stopped doing long ago – the more unaffordable buying your first home becomes.

But not to worry. I’ll just give my kids a leg up in putting a deposit together. Of course, this just keeps home prices high and makes those kids without well-off parents worse off. Tough.

The other thing it does is more sharply divide Australia by making home ownership something only the well-off can afford.

Why don’t the politicians do something about it? Because that would involve reducing the privileges of existing home owners, who’d fight it all the way, led by real estate agents and developers.

There’s always been a minority of life-long renters but, home ownership being the national obsession it is, we’ve never worried about them. Renters have much greater legal rights in other rich countries than they do here, but that’s never bothered us. Renters, we happily assume, are just youngsters on their way to their first home.

This was never true, but it becomes more untrue as each census passes. In a major speech last week, the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates said “home ownership rates are falling fast, especially among the young and poor”.

Over the 40 years to 2021, home ownership rates among 25- to 34-year-olds fell from more than 60 per cent to 40 per cent. Among the lowest-paid 40 per cent of that age group, it has more than halved, from 67 per cent to 28 per cent, Coates said.

Last year’s census shows we’ve started seeing accelerating declines among middle-income households too, with noticeable falls in home ownership at all age levels, including older middle-income households.

The proportion of people who reach retirement never having been able to afford a home is increasing, as is the proportion of home owners retiring with unpaid home loans.

I wouldn’t like to be in the shoes of the 70-year-old pensioner living in a small town, who told Tenants Victoria she had to work two days a week to afford the ever-increasing rent on a granny flat in an old house.

We can keep ignoring the poor treatment of renters because they’ll soon get a place of their own, or we can take the controversial measures needed to stop housing from becoming ever-more unaffordable.

But even if we put through all the necessary changes tomorrow, we’d still end up with many more people spending most of their life as a tenant. Time we cared about renters.

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Don't worry about inflation, the punters will be made to pay for it

Our sudden, shocking encounter with high inflation has brought to light a disturbing truth: we now have a dysfunctional economy, in which big business has gained too much power over the prices it can charge, while the nation’s households have lost what power they had to protecting their incomes from inflation.

It has also revealed the limitations and crudity of the main instrument we’ve used to manage the macro economy for the past 40 years: monetary policy – the manipulation of interest rates by the central bank.

We’ve been reminded that monetary policy can’t fix problems on the supply (production) side of the economy. Nor can it fix problems arising from the underlying structure of how the economy works.

All it can do is use interest rates to speed up or slow down the demand (spending) side of the economy. And even there, it has little direct effect on the spending of governments or on the investment spending of businesses.

Its control over interest rates gives it direct influence only on the spending of households. And, for the most part, that means spending that has to be done on borrowed money: buying a home. But also, renting a home some landlord has borrowed to buy.

Get it? The Reserve Bank of Australia’s governor’s power to manipulate interest rates largely boils down to influencing how much households spend on their biggest single item of spending: housing. Because no one wants to be homeless, using interest rates to increase the cost of housing leaves people with less to spend on everything else.

This means the governor has little direct influence over big business’s ability to take advantage of strong demand to widen its profit margins. He must get at businesses indirectly, via his power to reduce their customers’ ability to keep buying their products.

Get it? Households are the meat in the sandwich between the Reserve and big business (with small business using the cover of big business’s big price hikes to sneak up their own profit margins).

Join the dots, and you realise the Reserve’s plan to get inflation down quickly involves allowing a transfer of many billions from the pockets of households to the profits of big business.

On one hand, big business has been allowed to raise its prices by more than needed to cover the jump in its costs arising from the supply disruptions of the pandemic and the Ukraine war. On the other, the loss of union bargaining power means big business has had little trouble ensuring its wage bill rises at a much lower rate than retail prices have.

So, it’s households that are picking up the tab for the Reserve’s solution to the inflation problem. They’ll pay for it with higher mortgage interest rates and rents, and a fall in the value of their homes, but mainly by having their wages rise by a lot less than the rise in their cost of living.

The RBA’s unspoken game plan is to squeeze households until demand for goods and services has weakened to the point where big business decides that raising its prices to increase its profits would cost it so many sales that it would be left worse off.

It may even come to pass that households have been squeezed so badly big businesses’ sales start falling, and some of them decide that cutting their price to win back sales would leave them better off.

In economists’ notation, maximising profits – or minimising losses – is all about finding the best combination of “p” (price) and “q” (quantity demanded).

You don’t believe big businesses ever cut their prices? It’s common for them to “discount” their prices in ways that disguise their retreat, using special offers, holding sales, and otherwise allowing a gap between their advertised price and the price many customers actually pay.

But why would that nice mother’s boy Dr Philip Lowe, whose statutory duty is to ensure that monetary policy is directed to “the greatest advantage of the people of Australia”, impose so much pain on so many ordinary people, who played no part in causing the problem he’s grappling with?

Because, as all central bankers do, he sees keeping inflation low as his central responsibility. And he doesn’t see any other way to stop prices rising so rapidly. It’s a case study in just what a crude, inadequate and blunt instrument monetary policy is.

Lowe justifies his measures to reduce inflation quickly by saying this will avoid a recession. But let’s not kid ourselves. This massive transfer of income from households to business profits will deal a great blow to the economy.

After going nowhere much for almost a decade, real household disposable income is now expected to fall for two years in a row. And who knows if there’ll be a third.

Economists have made much of the extra saving households did during the pandemic. But during Lowe’s appearance before the parliamentary economics committee on Friday, it was revealed that about 80 per cent of that extra $270 billion in saving was done by the 40 per cent of households with the highest incomes. So, how much of it ends up being spent is open to question.

The likelihood that our measures to weaken household spending will lead to a recession must be very high.

Until Lowe’s remarks before the committee on Friday, his commentary on the causes and cure of inflation seemed terribly one-sided. The key to reducing inflation was ensuring wages didn’t rise by as much as prices had, so that rising inflation expectations wouldn’t lead to a wage-price spiral.

He warned that the higher wages rose, the higher he’d have to raise interest rates. He lectured the unions, saying they needed to be “flexible” in their wage demands. You could see this as giving an official blessing to businesses resisting union pressure and granting pay rises far lower than prices had risen.

Lowe could just as easily have lectured business to be “flexible” in passing on all the higher cost of their imported inputs, when these were expected to be temporary – but he didn’t. He’s always quoting what business people are saying to him, but never what union leaders say – perhaps because he never talks to them.

But on Friday he evened up the record. “It is also important to note that, to date, the stronger growth in wages has not been a major factor driving inflation higher,” he said. “Businesses, too, have a role in avoiding these damaging outcomes, by not using the higher inflation as cover for an increase in profit margins.”

That’s his first-ever admission that, when conditions allow, business has the market power to raise its prices by more than just its rising costs. Problem is, monetary policy’s only solution to this structural weakness – caused by inadequate competitive pressure – is to keep demand perpetually weak.

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The housing dream that became a nightmare - and isn't over yet

If you think the rich are getting richer, you’re right – but maybe not for the reason you think. It’s mainly the rising price of housing, which is steadily reshaping our society, and not for the better.

We know how unaffordable home ownership has become, but that’s just the bit you can see, as the Grattan Institute’s Brendan Coates outlined in the annual Henry George lecture this week, “The Great Australian Nightmare”, a magisterial survey of housing and its many implications.

But first, let’s be clear what we mean by “the rich”. Is it those who have the most annual income, or those who have the most wealth – assets less debts and other liabilities? The two are related, but not the same. It’s possible to be “asset rich, but income poor” – particularly if you’re living in your main asset, as many oldies are.

The Productivity Commission argues that the distribution of income hasn’t got much more unequal in the past couple of decades, though Bureau of Statistics’ figures for the growth in household disposable income over the 16 years to 2019-20 seem pretty unequal to me.

They show the real income of the bottom quintile (20 per cent block) grew by 26 per cent, which wasn’t much less than for the middle three quintiles, but a lot less than the 47 per cent growth for the top quintile.

Two points. One, the top one percentile – the chief executive class – probably had increases far greater than 47 per cent, which pushed up the average increase for the next 19 percentiles.

It’s CEO pay rises that get publicised and leave many people convinced the rich are getting richer – which they are.

The other point is Coates’: if you take real household disposable income after allowing for housing costs, you see a much clearer gradient running from the lowest quintile to the highest.

The increase in the bottom quintile’s income drops from 26 per cent to 12 per cent, whereas the top quintile’s growth drops only from 47 per cent to 43 per cent.

Get it? The rising cost of housing – whether mortgage payments or payments of rent – takes a much bigger bite out of low incomes than high incomes.

“People on low incomes – increasingly, renters – are spending more of their income on housing,” Coates says.

But it’s when you turn from income to wealth that you really see the rich getting richer. Whereas the net wealth of the poorest quintile of households rose by less than 10 per cent, the richest quintile rose by almost 60 per cent.

And here’s the kicker: almost all of that huge increase came from rising property values.

Other figures show that, before the pandemic, the total wealth of all Australian households was $14.9 trillion. Within that, the value of housing accounted for nearly $10 trillion.

Over the past 50 years, average full-time wages have doubled in real terms. But house prices have quadrupled – with most of that growth over the past 25 years.

Be clear on this: research confirms that the huge increases in home prices relative to incomes in advanced economies in the post-World War II period has mainly been driven by rising land values, accounting for about 80 per cent of growth since the 1950s, on average, with construction and replacement costs increasing only at the rate of inflation.

Coates reminds us that, within living memory, Australia was a place where housing costs were manageable, and people of all ages and incomes had a reasonable chance to own a home. These days, plenty of people even on middle incomes can’t manage it.

It’s obvious that the better-off can afford bigger and better homes than the rest of us. Many probably also have an investment property or three.

But it’s worse than that. Coates says the growing divide between those who make it to home ownership and those who don’t risks becoming entrenched as wealth is passed on to the next generation.

An increasing share of our wealth is in the hands of the Baby Boomers and older generations. The swelling of our national household wealth to $14.9 trillion – largely concentrated among older groups – means there's an awfully big pot of wealth to be passed on, he says.

“Big inheritances boost the jackpot from the birth lottery. Richer parents tend to have richer children. Among those who received an inheritance over the past decade, the wealthiest 20 per cent received, on average, three times as much as the poorest 20 per cent.”

In fact, one recent study estimates that 10 per cent of all inheritances will account for as much as half the value of bequests from today’s retirees, he says.

“And inheritances are increasingly coming later in life. As the miracles of modern medicine have extended life expectancy, the age at which children inherit has increased.

“The most common age to receive an inheritance is late-50s or early-60s – much later than the money is needed to ease the mid-life squeeze of housing and children.”

Coates says large intergenerational wealth transfers can change the shape of society. They mean that a person’s economic position can relate more to who their parents are than their own talent or hard work.

Coates argues that the ever-growing unaffordability of housing caused by present policies – which politicians on both sides keep promising to fix, but never do – is not just making our society increasingly divided between rich and poor, it’s also making the economy less efficient.

In modern, service-based and information-dependent economies, “economies of agglomeration” – benefits from firms and people living and working close together – mean productivity, innovation and wages are greatest in big cities.

But if we don’t pack in enough housing, and so cause house prices to go sky high, we don’t get all the benefits. Long commutes make it harder for both parents to work. The economy becomes less “dynamic”, and productivity is slow to improve. Not smart.

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Helping the disadvantaged find jobs is now the Hunger Games

Some injustices get huge publicity, others get little attention from the media because they’re not expected to arouse much sympathy from a hard-hearted public. But I was raised in a strange religious sect whose mission was to care for the down and out.

At a time when the official unemployment rate is down to 3.4 per cent, job vacancies are at a record high and employers are crying out for more immigrant labour, there are still about a million people on unemployment benefits – JobSeeker, to use its latest euphemism – of whom three-quarters have been on benefits for more than a year.

How could this be? Well, one explanation is that the world is full of people who, unlike you and me, prefer not to work for their living. While we’re slaving away at the daily grind, they’re at the beach surfing, or sitting at home with their feet up watching daytime television, living the life of Riley on $46 a day.

Actually, it’s just going up to $48 a day. Think of it. Almost $50 a day for doing precisely nothing. While you and I are struggling with the soaring cost of living, these people don’t have a worry. There are jobs going begging, but they aren’t interested. If only we were as bone idle as them, we too could live life free of care.

That’s one explanation – one many people believe, or want to believe. The world is full of people who prefer taking it easy, so they must be forced back to work by keeping the dole low and penalising them if they don’t even bother to apply for jobs.

An alternative explanation was offered in a little-noticed speech to the jobs summit by Dr Peter Davidson, an adviser to the peak welfare body, the Australian Council of Social Service, and in a recent report by Anglicare.

The alternative explanation is that most of those who stay unemployed for long periods face serious impediments to getting a job. They have health or family problems that make it hard for them to search for a job, or limit the times when they’re available to work.

Or they’re not particularly attractive to employers. They have limited education, skills or experience, they’re too young or too old, or they don’t live where the jobs are.

And here’s the worst of it: they’ve been without a job for so long because they’ve been without a job for so long. It’s a catch-22. The longer it’s taking you to find a job, the less willing an employer is to offer you one.

The good news is that, now we’re so close to full employment – now employers can’t be so choosy – we’ve started making inroads into the backlog of long-term unemployed. But it will take a long time to shift, especially if the businesses that taxpayers pay to help them find jobs find it more profitable to waste their time and trip them up.

We all have our own mental picture of who’s unemployed. Match your picture against what Davidson told the summit: of all the people on unemployment benefits, 57 per cent are 45 or older, 40 per cent have a disability, 20 per cent have what he calls “culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds”, 13 per cent are First Nations people and 12 per cent are sole parents, mainly women.

One reason there are a lot more long-term unemployed than there were in the old days is the decision that benefit recipients of working age – including widows, many sole parents and the less-than-fully disabled – should be on (the much lower and more tightly regulated) unemployment benefit.

At the time, those transferred to a lower benefit were to be given special help with training and job-finding. But after the Howard government abolished the Commonwealth Employment Service, and the provision of “employment services” was contracted out to charities and, increasingly, for-profit providers, their role became more about policing and punishing.

Davidson says the new Workforce Australia scheme – which is little better than the Jobactive scheme it’s replacing – is “more of an unemployment-payment compliance system than an employment service”.

It sends people out into the labour market and, when they don’t find jobs, tells them to search harder. People are told “it’s not our role to find you a job”.

It locks people into an endless cycle of make-busy activities like Work for the Dole and poor-quality training courses. It reaches less than 10 per cent of employers, and offers them little assistance.

This is confirmed by detailed research by Anglicare Australia. Director Kasy Chambers says they found that “private providers are being paid millions of dollars to punish and breach people”.

“Work for the Dole and Jobactive have repeatedly been shown to fail ... yet the people we spoke to also told us that they want to do activities that matter, and that lead them into work.”

Last word to Davidson: “This is supposed to be an employment services system, not the Hunger Games.”

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Labor's 'plan' to fix the economy has three big bits missing

If you think the jobs summit was stage-managed, you’re right. Anthony Albanese & Co got the tick for policy changes they’d always wanted to make. But the two top-drawer economists who addressed the summit – Professor Ross Garnaut and Danielle Wood, boss of the Grattan Institute – proposed three other vital matters for the government’s to-do list, which it had better get on with if it’s to manage the economy successfully.

Both wanted action on competition policy, immigration policy and fiscal (budget) policy. All of these could play an important role in making the economy less inflation-prone, achieving and retaining full employment, improving our productivity and ensuring workers get their fair share of the proceeds.

The major element in our inflation problem that no one dares to name – certainly not Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe who, in a long speech about the problem last week, didn’t find time to mention it – is the pricing power that our oligopolised economy gives our big businesses.

Much Treasury research has found that Australia’s businesses lack “dynamism”. To be blunt, they’re fat and lazy. Wood reminds us that lower levels of dynamism and innovation have been linked to a lack of competitive pressure in the economy.

“In competitive markets, excess profits should be dissipated over time as new and innovative competitors enter. But increasingly in Australia and elsewhere, we have seen the biggest and most profitable firms remain largely untroubled by new competitors,” she says.

“While being relaxed and comfortable may be profitable, it is not good for Australia’s long-term economic prospects.”

So, what should Labor do about it? “Making sure that Australia’s competition laws are fit for purpose is part of the response ... The former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, has argued that the current merger laws are failing to adequately protect competition. His warnings should prompt serious thought,” Wood says.

Garnaut agrees. He says we have to think about the increasing role of “economic rents” – the ability to earn profits exceeding those needed to keep you in the business. “Productivity is reduced and the profit share of [national] income increased by monopoly and oligopoly,” he says.

The answer? “Rod Sims has drawn attention to the increasing role of oligopoly in the Australian economy, and the competition policy reforms that would reduce it.”

The point for the government to note is that, if it leaves big business’s pricing power unchecked, but restores the unions’ bargaining power, that will be a recipe for a more inflation-prone economy – and a Reserve Bank using high interest rates to keep the economy comatose.

Both Garnaut and Wood gave the highest priority to urging a lasting return to full employment and the many social and economic benefits it would bring, if the jobs market was always about as tight as it is now.

But, as Garnaut says, full employment is hard work for employers. “Many prefer unemployment, with easy recruitment at lower wages.”

Which helps explain why they’re so desperate to get the immigration flood gates reopened and flowing. They talk about shortages of skilled labour but, in truth, they’re just as keen to have less-skilled labour. High immigration is just one of the instruments from their toolbox they’ve been using to keep their labour costs low, including the cost of training workers.

But we can’t keep our gates shut forever, so what should the government do to open up without losing the benefits of full employment (including a strong incentive to train our own youngsters)?

Garnaut says immigration is much more likely to raise, rather than lower, average real wages if it is focused on permanent migration of people with genuinely scarce and valuable skills that are bottlenecks to valuable Australian production, and cannot be provided by training Australians.

Wood says we need to fix “out-dated” skilled migration rules. “Targeting higher-wage migrants directly for both temporary and permanent skilled migration would improve the productivity of the migration system and the Australian workforce,” she says.

Which brings us to the budget. Wood says that although our response to the pandemic may now seem to have stimulated demand more than is helpful, these pressures will dissipate, “especially if the federal government and the central bank work in tandem to address strong demand, and do what is possible to boost supply”.

That’s her nice way of saying that, if the government fails to get its budget deficit down, the Reserve Bank will take interest rates higher than it would have. And she’s right, it will.

The deficit needs to come down despite Labor’s expensive – but welcome – promise to greatly increase the wage rates of the mainly female workers in aged care and other parts of the care economy.

How can this circle be squared? To Garnaut, the answer’s obvious. If the government has to do more and pay more – including on defence – it will just have to tax more.

He reminds us that “in the face of these immense budget challenges, total and federal and state taxation revenue, as a share of gross domestic product, is 5.7 percentage points lower than the developed-country average.”

And when it comes to what more the government could tax, Garnaut has some ideas. Disruption from the Russian invasion of Ukraine has given our fossil fuel companies record profits from higher coal and gas prices, while substantially lowering living standards by greatly increasing electricity prices.

Garnaut says the government shouldn’t kid itself that leaving this disparity unchallenged wouldn’t leave deep wounds in the public’s faith in government.

Introducing a tax on these windfall profits would be one solution, but I suspect he wants something more substantive. He says a significant part of the increase in the profit share of national income in recent years has come from mining.

One response would be for mine workers to get much higher wages. But, he says, miners are already paid much more than workers in other industries. So, the appropriate public policy response is a mineral rent tax – that is, a tax on the mining companies’ excess profits – which would share the benefits with all of us.

Finally, Garnaut rebukes those economists who rely on fancy calculations to tell them how low the unemployment rate can get before we have a problem with inflation. He says this is not an output from an econometric model, it’s “an observed reality”. That is, you have to suck it and see.

“Economics is less amenable than physics to definitive mathematical analysis because it is about people, whose responses to similar phenomena change over time. We build models in our minds or computers that fit observed reality at one point in time, and reality changes. Then we have to think harder about what’s going on.”

Economics is about the behaviour of people! Who knew?

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Consumers and Russians keep the economy roaring - but it can't last

They say never judge a book by its cover. Seems the same goes for GDP. This week’s figures showed super-strong growth in the three months to the end of June. But look under the bonnet and you find the economy’s engine was firing on only two cylinders.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ “national accounts”, real gross domestic product – the economy’s production of goods and services – grew by 0.9 per cent in the June quarter, and by 3.6 per cent over the year to June.

If that doesn’t impress you, it should. Over the past decade, growth has averaged only 2.3 per cent a year.

The main thing driving that growth was consumer spending. It grew by 2.2 per cent in the quarter and by 6 per cent over the year, as the nation’s households – previously cashed up by government handouts, and by most people keeping their jobs and others finding one, but prevented from spending the cash by intermittent lockdowns and closed state and national borders – kept desperately trying to catch up with all they’d been missing.

The other big contribution to growth during the quarter came from a 5.5 per cent jump in the “volume” (quantity) of our exports. Most of the credit for this goes to that wonderful man Vladimir Putin, whose bloody invasion of Ukraine has greatly disrupted world fossil fuel markets, thus greatly increasing our sales of coal and gas.

(It has also greatly increased the world prices of coal and gas and grains, causing our “terms of trade” – the prices we receive for our exports relative to the prices we pay for our imports – to improve by 4.6 per cent during the quarter, to an all-time high.)

But that’s where the good news stops. The other cylinders driving the economy’s engine have been on the blink. A marked slowdown in the rate at which businesses were building up their inventories of raw materials and finished goods led to a sharp slowdown in goods production.

Government spending took a breather, and an increase in business investment in new plant and equipment was offset by a fall in business investment in buildings and other construction.

And then there’s what happened to home building. Despite a big pipeline of homes waiting to be built, building activity actually declined by 2.9 per cent in the quarter and 4.6 per cent over the year.

Huh? How could that happen? Well, the builders say they couldn’t find enough building materials and tradies. Which hasn’t stopped them using the opportunity to whack up their prices. (I believe this is called “capitalism”.)

So, while we listen to lectures from the economic managers about the evil of inflation and how it leaves them with no choice but to slow everything down by jacking up interest rates, let’s not forget that the big jump in the cost of new homes and renovations has been caused by... them.

They’re the ones who, at the start of the pandemic and the lockdowns, decided it would be a great idea to rev up the housing industry, by offering incentives to people buying new houses, and by cutting the official interest rate to near zero. Well done, guys.

Speaking of higher interest rates being used to slow down the growth in demand for goods and services, the first two of the five rises we’ve had so far would have had little influence on what happened in the economy over the three months to June.

But don’t worry, they’ll have their expected effect in due course. Which is the first reason the strong, consumer-led growth we saw last quarter won’t last, even if we see more of it in the present quarter.

Another reason is that households are running on what a cook would call stored heat. During the first, national lockdown, the proportion of household disposable (after-tax) income that we saved rather than spent leapt to almost 24 per cent.

We’ve been cutting our rate of saving since then, and it’s now down to 8.7 per cent. This isn’t a lot higher than it was before the pandemic. And with the gathering fall in house prices making people feel less wealthy, it wouldn’t surprise me to see people feeling they shouldn’t cut their rate of saving too much further.

And that, of course, is before we get to the other great source of pressure on households’ budgets: consumer prices are rising faster than workers’ wages. This no doubt explains why our households’ real disposable income has actually fallen for three quarters in a row.

With businesses putting up their prices, but not adequately compensating their workers for the higher cost of living, it’s not surprising so many people are taking more interest in what the national accounts tell us about how the nation’s income is being divided between capital and labour, profits and wages.

ACTU boss Sally McManus complains that workers now have the lowest share of GDP on record. It follows that the profits share of national income is the highest on record.

What doesn’t follow, however, is that any increase in profits must have come at the expense of workers and their wages. Profits are up this quarter mainly because, as we’ve seen, our miners’ export prices are way up, and so are their profits.

No, the better way to judge whether workers are getting their fair share is to look at what’s happened to “real unit labour costs” – employers’ labour costs, after allowing for inflation and the productivity of labour (that’s the per-unit bit).

Turns out that, since the end of 2019, employers’ real unit labour costs have fallen by 8.5 per cent. If workers were getting their fair share, this would have been little changed.

Short-changing households in this way is not how you keep consumer spending – and businesses’ turnover – ever onward and upward.

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Why labour shortages can be good for you - and the economy

In Professor Ross Garnaut’s much-praised speech to last week’s jobs summit, he told a story about politicians desperately seeking workers. At about the time Anthony Albanese was in Fiji talking about recruiting nurses, the West Australian premier was in Ireland, also trying to recruit nurses.

He sought a meeting with the Irish minister for health, but without success. Why? Because the Irish minister was in Perth trying to recruit nurses.

Garnaut’s point was that, when a country underpays its nurses, it’s open to having them pinched by another, better-paying country.

But I drew a different conclusion. It’s all very well for the nation’s employers to go to Canberra complaining about the desperate labour shortage and demanding that the government lift its target for how many visas for permanent immigrants it will issue this year.

Albanese was persuaded to raise the target from 160,000 to 195,000. But when we’re short of skilled labour at the same time many other rich countries are also short, raising the target and achieving the target are two different things.

My guess is that we’ll be hearing complaints about labour shortages for years to come. And I’m not sure that will be a bad thing. Give me a choice between a jobs market that’s “tight” – as it is now – and one that’s “loose”, with high unemployment, and I know which I’d prefer.

Journalists are trained to be sceptical of claims people make. And when economists hear people complaining that they can’t get enough workers, or that there’ll be shortage of X thousand teachers/doctors/chicken sexers by the year Y, they’re more questioning than sympathetic.

For a start, some part of the worker shortages we keep hearing about is caused by people off work because of COVID. This, surely, must be a problem that will ease in coming months. For another thing, while shortages of skilled workers get the most publicity, many of the shortages are actually for relatively unskilled work as a waiter or behind a counter.

When economists hear businesspeople complaining they “can’t get the staff”, their first question is: have you tried offering a higher wage? What employers never say is “with the low wage and bad conditions I’m offering, I can’t get any takers”. Think fruit-picking.

When you hear of bosses so desperate that they’re giving their existing workers a “loyalty bonus” or offering new workers a “sign-on bonus”, remember this: paying any kind of once-off bonus is a way of avoiding granting a proper pay rise.

This means they’re not yet at desperation point. Sometimes I wonder if businesses are delaying improving pay and conditions while they increase pressure on the government to solve their problem the easier and cheaper way, by hastening the post-pandemic inflow of skilled workers on temporary visas, plus backpackers and overseas students.

But though employers have used high levels of immigration to keep wages low and reduce the need for educating and training our own young people, I doubt they’ll be able to return to that lazy, second-rate world.

Garnaut says immigration is much more likely to raise, rather than lower, average real wages if it’s focused on the permanent migration of people with genuinely scarce and valuable skills that are bottlenecks to valuable Australian production, and which cannot be provided by training Australians.

The other much-praised speech at the jobs summit came from the boss of the Grattan Institute, our top independent think tank, Danielle Wood. Garnaut and Wood had the same message: with the unemployment rate down to 3.4 per cent, we must seize this chance to return to the “full employment” Australia hasn’t enjoyed since Garnaut (and I) were growing up in the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s.

Wood wants achieving and maintaining full employment to be our “economic lodestar”. Already being so close to it “means that more people who want a job now have one. It means that some people otherwise at the fringes of the labour market – young people looking for their first job, people with a disability, older workers, and the long-term unemployed – are now seeing doors open in ways they haven’t in the past,” she said.

“When unemployment is low, it lowers the cost of leaving a bad job and finding a better one. This is good for productivity.

“Poor-performing businesses that survive, not on the strength of their products or services but off the back of exploiting their workers, are driven out. Investments and workers flow instead to better-run businesses.

“And when workers are harder to find, businesses have an incentive to invest in new equipment and processes, which ultimately boosts productivity and drives higher living standards,” she said.

Garnaut agrees. “Full employment is hard work for employers,” he said. “Many prefer unemployment, with easy recruitment at lower wages. Yet full employment has advantages for many employers. It brings larger and more stable demand for consumer goods and services for businesses selling in the Australian market.

“And for employers who identify as Australians, it brings enjoyment of a more cohesive and successful society.” Sounds good to me.

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Breaking news: unions play a central role, for good and ill

Welcome back to a tripartite world, where Labor has returned to power and its union mates are back inside the tent – and at last week’s jobs summit could be seen moving in their furniture. For those who don’t remember the 1983 glory days of Bob Hawke, Paul Keating, consensus, the Accord, and former ACTU secretary Bill Kelty as an honorary member of the cabinet, it will take some getting used to.

For those who’ve been watching only since the John Howard era, it may even seem unnatural. One of Howard’s first acts upon succeeding Hawke and Keating in 1996 was to delegitimise the unions.

He allowed the tripartite committees to lapse, and didn’t reappoint the ACTU secretary to the board of the Reserve Bank. I doubt if many even informal links between ministers and union leaders continued.

The Libs didn’t know the union bosses, and didn’t want to know ’em. They were the enemy – always had been, always would be. Big business bosses, on the other hand, would be privately consulted and were always welcome to phone up for a quiet word with the minister.

This, by the way, helps explain the Reserve Bank’s pro-business bias. Its board is loaded with business worthies - who are there to help keep the central bankers’ feet on the ground – and its extensive program of regular and formal “liaison” with key firms and industries, doesn’t include asking union leaders what they think’s happening.

If you wonder why Reserve governor Dr Philip Lowe’s remarks about wages can sometimes seem naive – even out of “boomer fantasy land” – it’s because he only ever hears the bosses’ side of the story. And I doubt if they ever shock his neoclassical socks by talking about how they exercise their market power.

It’s easy to justify the Liberals’ delegitimation of the unions by noting that, these days, only about 14 per cent of employees belong to a union. But if you find that argument persuasive, you’re revealing your ignorance of our wage-fixing institutions.

Most workers are subject to an industrial award, and there’s a union (and an employer or employer group) on one end of every award, and almost every enterprise agreement. In the Fair Work Commission’s annual wage review – which sets the wages of about a quarter of all employees – it’s the ACTU that stands against the employer groups arguing that times are tough, and they couldn’t possibly afford a rise of anything much.

So, to say the unions have what economists would call a giant “free-rider” problem – a lot of people happy to receive benefits without paying for them – is not to say they shouldn’t be given a seat at the table.

Liberals, business and their media cheer squad may be appalled by sanctification of the unions, but at least Labor’s making it clear it wants business to keep its seat at the table. It will be consulted. This too is Labor’s inheritance from the Hawke-Keating experience: to the extent possible, keep business on side.

The ACT’s second-biggest industry – lobbying – will be busier than ever. It’s third-biggest – consulting – not so much.

What all agreed at the summit is that Labor has taken over an economy with many structural problems that need fixing. Not the least of these is that the wage-bargaining system is broken.

What we learnt last week, from everything ministers said and from the 14-page “outcomes document” is that, in marked contrast to its predecessor, Labor does intend to fix things.

The whole summit, tripartite business is about giving all the key players a say in how things are fixed, giving them a heads-up on the government’s intentions, and an introduction to the minister. About winning support – or, at least, acquiescence – from as many of the powerful players as possible, to minimise the political risks of making changes.

Under Labor’s tripartism, the three parties aren’t equal. The government will, in the end, do what it decides to do. The unions start well ahead of business, because of their special relationship with a Labor government.

They have a further advantage over business: solidarity. The many unions are used to speaking with one, unified voice through the ACTU, whereas business fractures into big versus small, and rival employer groups. The unions know all about playing one business group off against another.

What business has to decide is whether it wants to stay in the government’s tent or walk out. Because, in business, pragmatism usually trumps idealism, my guess is that business will play ball for as long as Labor looks like staying in office.

After the summit ended, the ACTU’s statement said it had always “been clear that we need to get wages moving and increase skills and training for local workers in order for unions to support lifting skilled migration levels. We welcome that this summit has delivered those commitments.”

It was all a talk fest? No, a deal was done and that quote reveals just what the deal was. However, a big part of the business side didn’t support fixing the wage-bargaining system by returning to “multi-employer” bargaining.

What’s clear is that the government will be pressing on with some form of multi-employer bargaining. What isn’t yet clear is what that form will be. Until it’s finalised, business will be busy inside the tent pushing for whatever modifications it can get.

With Labor back in power and the unions back walking the halls of power, it’s important to understand the relationship between the two arms of the “labour movement”. Whereas the relationship between the Libs and business is quite informal, the relationship between Labor and the unions is highly formal. They’re not mates, they’re close rellos.

Historically, the unions set up the Labor Party to be their political arm. To this day, those unions that pay dues to the Labor Party still wield considerable influence over it and the members of the federal parliamentary caucus.

Labor parliamentarians are affiliated with particular unions, which gives some of the bigger unions considerable influence over preselections, on who gets to stay leader of the party, and on certain policy matters.

When Labor is in government, businesses in certain industries use their unions to get to the government. This explains why Labor governments haven’t done as much as they should to tighten up our competition law.

And whereas Howard left the Libs with a visceral hatred of industry super funds, Labor’s links with the unions – and the unions’ links with the ticket-clippers of the super industry – mean it can’t always be trusted to favour the interests of super members over super managers.

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