Welcome to The Weekend Quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention or not to the blog posts that I post. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
The latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Labour Force, Australia, November 2020 – released today (December 17, 2020), shows that the labour market has improved largely due to the recent easing of the lockdowns in Victoria after its devastating second virus wave. Employment increased by 0.7 per cent (90,000) in the month (which is a fairly strong result) and outstripped the growth in the labour force (0.5 per cent), which means that unemployment fell (0.1 points) or 17.3. Underemployment also fell by 1 point and the broad labour underutilisation rate (sum of unemployment and underemployment) fell by 1.2 points. But the recovery is still too slow and more government support by way of large-scale job creation is required given total employment is still 233 thousand below the level in March 2020 and unemployment is 245 thousand higher.
It is Wednesday, so just a few snippets and some music. My main comment today is on the report released yesterday (December 15, 2020) by the national body Infrastructure Australia. The report – Infrastructure beyond COVID-19: A national study on the impacts of the pandemic on Australia – once again demonstrates the way in which mainstream macroeconomics, which has restricted government investment in essential instrastructure over the last three decades or so, has created poor outcomes and has failed to prepare the nation for the future. This sort of myopia just repeats itself across all nations. Hopefully, the fiscal response to the pandemic, even though in many countries it has been inadequate, is demonstrating that the mainstream approach is deeply flawed and provides no guidance for the way policy should be conducted into the future.
Today, we have a guest blogger in the guise of Professor Scott Baum from Griffith University who has been one of my regular research colleagues over a long period of time. He indicated that he would like to contribute occasionally and that provides some diversity of voice although the focus remains on advancing our understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its applications. It also helps me a bit and at present I have several major writing deadlines approaching as well as a full diary of presentations, meetings etc. Travel is also opening up a bit which means I can now honour several speaking commitments that have been on hold while we were in lockdown. Anyway, over to Scott …
Many progressives are claiming that the EU has seen the light as evidenced by their relaxation of the harsh Stability and Growth Pact rules during the pandemic. There are even papers coming out advocating a ‘Post Third Way’ revival of social democratic forces in Europe to further integrate and reorient it along the lines of the social Europe narratives. I think this enthusiasm misrepresents what is going on in Europe at present. The hard-core, neoliberal DNA has not morphed. There has been no relaxation of the SGP rules given that a thorough knowledge of the legal basis of the Pact shows that there is scope in the rules for what is going on at present. Further, there is evidence that even though the temporary provisions in the SGP are being exercised, the European Commission is resorting to blackmail by imposing conditionality on Member States who want access to the stimulus funds. It seems that to get the funds, Member States have to fast track structural reforms, which means the stimulus funds are not stimulus funds at all, but, rather offsets, partial or otherwise, for the damage that cutting pensions etc will cause. Europe’s neoliberal DNA is still at work!
Here are the answers with discussion for this Weekend’s Quiz. The information provided should help you work out why you missed a question or three! If you haven’t already done the Quiz from yesterday then have a go at it before you read the answers. I hope this helps you develop an understanding of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and its application to macroeconomic thinking. Comments as usual welcome, especially if I have made an error.
Welcome to The Weekend Quiz. The quiz tests whether you have been paying attention or not to the blog posts that I post. See how you go with the following questions. Your results are only known to you and no records are retained.
This post is a followup to a blog post I wrote a few weeks ago – ABCD, social capital and all the rest of the neoliberal narratives to undermine progress (November 12, 2020) – where I discussed the trends in government policy delivery and regional and community development thinking, which have emerged in the neoliberal period and attack the idea of government. These approaches claim that
only through the development of social capital and a reliance on local initiatives, free of government interference, can communities reach their latent potential. These ideas have led to the scrapping of regional development planning (replaced by new regionalism), outsourcing of welfare policies (replaced by social entrepreneurship) and other madcap approaches (like ABCD). Our public service bureaucracies have bee converted from service delivery agencies into contracted brokering and management agencies (to oversee the outsourcing and privatisation of public service delivery) and have, often, been filled up with characters who are borderline sociopaths. The point is that it is not the ‘state’ that is at fault but the ideologues that have taken command of the state machinery and reconfigured it to serve their own agenda, which just happen to run counter to what produces general well-being. Today, I continue to analyse that theme and outline what needs to be done to rebuild our damaged public sectors.
It is Wednesday and so just a few snippets before we get funky. Yes, jazz-funky. That should do it. In the last week, a credit ratings agency downgraded the rating of the state of Victoria to AA from AAA claiming that the the state was in fiscal trouble. They also downgraded the credit rating for the NSW government credit from AAA to AA+. You might wonder how the hell these corrupt and irrelevant organisations managed to survive the GFC, given the sectors complicity with the financial frauds and overreach that drove the world to near financial ruin? Well they survive because people still believe in the fictions that lie behind the whole concept of government debt ratings. Should anyone be worried about these changes in Victoria and NSW? Not at all. The announcements were just noise and tell us, in part, how far we have to go in expunging these fictions from our understandings.
I guess if mainstream economists use Milton Friedmanesque smears they think that will be sufficent to discredit Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). There have been a few critiques in the financial media recently along those lines. The authors tell their readers that they get the impression that MMT is just about a free lunch. Throw in Zimbabwe or Weimar are few times during the article and there you have it – rather tawdry attempts at maintaining mainstream thinking when the world has entered a new era of fiscal dominance as policy makers discard their reliance on monetary policy to stabilise economies. This policy shift is diametric to what mainstream macroeconomists have been advocating for decades as they repeatedly warned that high deficits and public debt levels and large-scale central bank bond purchases would lead to disaster. However, their predictions have been dramatically wrong and provide no meaningful guidance to available fiscal space nor the consequences of these policy extremes for interest rates and inflation. The world is leaving them behind and it is interesting to see how they are trying to reposition themselves.