Sunak – (bad) comedian of the year

It’s Wednesday and I load up other things to do on this day and thus write less here. I also am in the process of moving offices at the University – and after some 18 years in different locations, I am now returning to the Social Sciences Building where I first had an office when I came to the University from Adelaide. Which feels sort of okay, given by opposition to economics being treated as a business discipline. But thanks to a deal I made with the University in 2007, my research centre left the ‘business faculty’ and went out on our own. Hence, my office doesn’t have to be with the other economists, which I am happy about. This morning, I read the most stupid thing I think one could ever read about economics. It came from a UK Guardian article (December 14, 2021) – Sunak warns over multibillion cost of booster programme – where the Chancellor basically disqualified himself from office. Once we get through the trauma of that sort of news, I promise there is some great music to finish with.

Read more

Teaching disadvantaged adults about child development is an effective way to reduce inequality

Some recent research highlights the point I have made in the past that who your parents are matters for your future prospects. We all make choices as we emerge into the adult world, but the constraints that are dished up to us by our parents are in many cases more important in determining our future outcomes than the choices we make. The mainstream neoclassical explanation for income differentials focus on the choices – for education, training, and other career development pathways. From a policy perspective, I think it is more sensible to focus on the constraints as they are in many cases fairly easily altered by sensible government intervention. However, in the real world, not only are the constraints that individuals face conditioned by the circumstances that they are born into, but those circumstances also influence the choices the individuals make. Recent research has found that educational programs for parents in disadvantaged situations to show them what determines child development not only improves the lives of the adults involved but also delivers much better outcomes for their children. They are able to make better decisions which, in turn, improve the environment in which they are learning and building their skills. The policy implications are clear.

Read more

Central banks are resisting the inflation panic hype from the financial markets – and we are better off as a result

Regular readers will know that I think the current inflationary phenomenon is transitory. They will also know that I see the continual claims by financial market economists that central banks have to increase interest rates now to avoid an accelerating inflationary episode as having little economic content and lots of self interest content. If rates go up, they win their bets and the more they can bully authorities to do their bidding the more certain their bets become profitable. I am glad that central banks around the world are resisting that game of bluff. In previous periods, they have not resisted and have handed the financial speculators (the top-end-of-town) massive and unjustified profits and forced millions of workers to endure joblessness. It is also interesting that the mainstream press is starting to work that out too. Some progress.

Read more

The NAIRU should have been buried decades ago

In 1983, I started a PhD at the University of Manchester working within the Phillips curve framework. At the time, all the talk was Monetarist – eschewing the use of fiscal policy to reduce unemployment. Unemployment was high after the OPEC oil shocks and governments were abandoning their responsibilities to reduce it because they had drunk the Monetarist Kool-aide. The Monetarists invented a concept – the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) or the ‘natural rate of unemployment’, which became part of the dominant macroeconomic approach and influenced policy makers to pursue microeconomic reform (deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing etc) and obsessing about fiscal surpluses. My work was an attempt to show this shift in thinking – away from a commitment to full employment was based on a lie. The whole NAIRU story was a fraud. I was largely ignored along with other progressive economists who were also producing credible research that refuted the main propositions. Some 40 years later, the ECB has produced a research paper which now supports the position I took back then. Millions of jobless people later!

Read more

New German finance minister thinks (27 per cent slump in GDP) Greece is Germany’s new role model for reform

It’s Wednesday so not much today. I offer some comments on the latest data release from Germany (not good) and the probability that the new German finance minister will be anything other than a dangerous dud. An announcement about the edX MMTed course (coming back). And then Blind Willie Johnson serving up Great Depression angst.

Read more

The same erroneous logic that created the social housing shortage is apparently the solution

Australia has a dire housing crisis, particularly in the low-income or social housing end. Since the 1990s, successive federal governments, who fund the social housing, have abdicated from their responsibilities citing a lack of funds and the need to run fiscal surpluses in order to save money for the future. While it has been starving the social housing sector, it has been investing billions of dollars in its Future Fund, ostensibly to cover future liabilities. So instead of spending funds on hospitals, education, housing and other important infrastructure needs, the government has been spending on speculative financial assets in global markets, some of which have been scandalous (see below). The whole narrative has been based on the falsehood that the government is like a household and has to save to expand its future spending possibilities. That logic has killed off many valuable initiatives, including maintaining adequate social housing stocks such that now low income Australians are increasingly becoming poor or homeless due to the high cost of private-provided housing at market rents. Today, a new proposal was launched by a think tank advocated that the Australian government should borrow to build the Future Fund so it can deliver speculative returns to help fund the dramatic shortfall in social housing. That is, they are using the same logic (the government is financially constrained) to solve a problem the logic created. It would be hard to make this stuff up.

Read more

Governments should not ‘cool’ an economy or cut deficits when there are millions unemployed still

It’s Wednesday and only a few items today. It seems that the mainstream economists are emerging again and making all sorts of claims that fiscal policy has to target lower deficits and monetary policy needs to tighten (interest rates rise) to stop our governments going broke and inflation going wild. It really is like a tired broken record, isn’t it. They have sort of gone underground during the crisis and more are thinking it is time to reassert the nonsense of the past. And so it goes. But at least Wednesday brings music to this blog – and what a treat we have today.

Read more

Australian government invokes ‘can-do capitalism’ to save us from climate change – disaster awaits

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. Today, he follows on from my previous post – The financial markets should be kept away from the climate crisis solution (November 10, 2021) – and discusses the failure of the Australian federal government to produce a workable net-zero emissions plan. So, it’s over to Scott.

Read more

UK Office of Budget Responsibility demonstrating the well-trodden GIGO format

I have finally been able to read the latest fiscal statement – Autumn Budget and Spending Review 2021 – from the H.M. Treasury, which was released on October 29, 2021. That 202 page document is not something anyone should spend time reading but in my job one has to in order to stay abreast of what is happening around the world. It also took me down the Office of Budget Responsibility snake hole to read their latest – Fiscal risks report – July 2021 – which obviously conditions the way the fiscal statement is framed. That is a really bad document. And as it happens, footnotes in that document take us further into the pit of New Keynesian fiction, where we find modelling that OBR relies on, that has the temerity to model fiscal shocks where labour markets always clear and households choose the unemployment rate, which is constructed as ‘leisure’, as they maximise their satisfaction. I suppose that is okay in a world where we assume households live to infinity. That is, nothing remotely like the world we live in. I don’t plan to analyse in detail the fiscal statement. Rather, here are some reflections on some of the material that the Treasury think is useful in framing the statement. Which helps to explain why these sorts of statements become lame quickly.

Read more

The financial markets should be kept away from the climate crisis solution

It’s Wednesday and today, apart from presenting some great music, I am commenting on the ridiculous notion, that even progressive greenies propagate that we need to harness the financial resources of the markets (Wall street types) to help governments decarbonise their societies. The narrative that has emerged – that the financial CEOs with “trillions in assets” (all at COP26 because they could smell lucre) are a key to solving the climate challenge – is as ridiculous as progressives saying we need to tax them to fund schools and hospitals. Both narratives reflect the dominance of mainstream macroeconomics which has convinced us that currency-issuing governments are like big households and can ‘run out of money’. That is fiction but is part of the reason we have a climate crisis. Read on.

Read more
Back To Top