Regular readers will know that I place the shifts in the distribution of national income (at the sectoral level) as one of the keys to understanding the current economic crisis and the what needs to be done to get out of it. I covered this early on in this blog – The origins of the economic crisis. The mainstream press is now finally latching on to this issue, which is good but sadly the media is still allowing itself to be captured by mainstream economists who have a particular and wrong view of what has been happening, why it has occurred and what the implications of it are for public policy. The fundamental changes that are needed to policy frameworks and societal narratives before the crisis is full resolved are still so far off the radar though. Until we start promoting discussions such as that which follows there will be only limited progress to a sustainable solution.

When the early neo-liberal governments in Britain, Australia and New Zealand wanted to craft the public debate so that we wouldn’t realise that privatisation was just selling wealth that we already owned collectively to enrich a few of us as well as all the parasitic lawyers and brokers who managed the sales, they pushed the idea that we were all shareholders now. The old idea of capitalists versus workers was dead because we were all basically capitalists and the wealth would grow accordingly. What a disaster that initial experience with the neo-liberal myth has been. Now, that governments are deliberately creating unemployment and undermining paid-work opportunities with fiscal austerity, the public debate is being bombarded with a variation on that same theme. Now we are being told that it is so passe to think in terms of workers and bosses because in reality we are all basically entrepreneurs. Even the most lowly-paid casualised worker who is unfortunate enough to have to eke out an existence via labour hire companies is cast gloriously as a profit-seeking entrepreneur. The rot is seeping into our educational institutions as well.

On Monday (January 7, 2012) – The culpability lies elsewhere … always! – I wrote about the unacceptably large forecasting errors from the IMF derived from models that informed their input into bailout packages etc, which in turn set the fiscal austerity agenda and as resulted in millions becoming unemployed. I was interviewed about this today by the ABC National Radio program – the World Today – and told the journalist that if errors of this size occurred in medicine, the practitioner would be jailed for professional negligence. A summarised transcript from the World Today programme is available here – Eurozone jobless rate hits record high. A few snippets from a 10 minute interview! I did another interview today about a paper that came out recently from the RBA, which largely admitted its forecasting record was inferior to what we might have gained from assuming a random walk (unemployment) or simple historical averages (real GDP growth). You have to see this incompetence not in terms of some technical boffins waxing lyrical in a research paper about a range of technical measures of their errors but rather, in terms of the damage that the policy that has been informed by these errors. Today we received more evidence of that damage in the form of the ABS publication – Job Vacancies, Australia (November 2011). The evidence is clear. Our economy is faltering because policy settings have been wrong. They have been wrong because the policy setting paradigm is wrong and this has led to the use of models which deliver predictions that cannot be sustained given the underlying dynamics of the monetary system that this ideology chooses to ignore.

The St Louis branch of the Federal Reserve Bank offers – FRED2 – which is an excellent repository of US statistics as well as a nifty graphical analysis tool. I use it regularly and even though it is just a collection of data available elsewhere it is very convenient. The same organisation also publishes what it calls its – PAGE ONE Economics Newsletter – (the so-called “back story on front page economics”) which is designed to be used by students as a means of educating them in economics. Any reasonable assessment of the material presented in these newsletter is that they are unadulterated nonsense. The most recent edition (published January 13, 2012) – “Choices Are Everywhere: Why Can’t We Just Have It All? – exemplifies how these major institutions choose to mislead those they seek to elucidate.

Two papers have come out in the first week of January that provide further evidential support for the argument that the majority of macroeconomics that is taught in standard university programs is worthless. The first (published January 3, 2013) – Growth Forecast Errors and Fiscal Multipliers – from the IMF attempts to explain why the planned fiscal austerity measures in advanced economies have been more damaging than mainstream economists predicted. It is an excruciating attempt at regaining credibility for the seriously wayward IMF. The problem is that its credibility is so far in deficit that it has a lot of consolidation to do before anyone should believe them again. The second paper (published January 2013) – A Boost in the Paycheck: Survey Evidence on Workers’ Response to the 2011 Payroll Tax Cuts – from researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York “presents new survey evidences on workers’ response to the 2011 payroll tax cuts”. The results of the survey? Much higher estimates of the consumption propensities than were predicated from mainstream economic theory. Implication? The standard theory taught to students is wrong and should be disregarded.