Gross Flows analysis of Australian labour market – some improvement – August 2017
Today, I am writing from the Brighton, UK and today the first event of the British part of our Reclaim the State tour is to be held. See below for details. Last week, I attended the first International Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) conference, which although there have been many MMT-focused workshops or conferences in the past, was truly a gathering of the clan. The large number who attended (over 200 I believe) shows we are making progress. There is a snowball rolling and it will inevitably get bigger. The only danger of these focused events is that the ‘group’ can easily get trapped into thinking that the views expressed are the norm, which is the first step towards Groupthink. They are clearly not the norm and further work is required, but the fact that we can hold such a large conference focused exclusively on MMT is a significant step forward. I will write more about the MMT conference another day. Today, I want to focus on some statistics analysis – I had time on the plane journey across the Atlantic (Kansas City to London) to delve into the latest Gross Flows data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Gross flows analysis provides a different way of viewing the labour force data and often reveals some interesting trends that are hidden in the net analysis of labour market data.