It is budget time in Australia this month. The federal government will release their Budget next Tuesday and the State and Territory governments all put them out around the same time. Yesterday, it was the turn of one of our larger states Victoria. I will come to that in a moment. The mania intensifies around May and every day and night on TV, radio and in the printed media there is a constant commentariat and an almost uniform message, which was summarised by one so-called expert last night – “the Budget is broken”. I remember this chap in the 1980s as a junior Treasury official aspiring to be important. I wondered about the analogy. There are lots of “black holes” (buckets) and “drunken sailors” (big spending) but “broken”. I guess the only thing is that broken is bad – using broken as an adjective. All the commentary is about how bad the deficit is given the terms of trade are slowing and undermining tax revenue. While the deficit is way to low, it is good that we have one. It is good that America and Japan and the UK have deficits. There is at least some net spending flowing each day to support the economy. Anyway, time to look into the glorious gouging of the public purse that only the neo-liberals can make look as though it is financial responsibility at its best.

The Australian government is demonstrating to all of us that they are mishandling fiscal policy. The background is simple. Australia saw its growth vanish and unemployment start rising in December 2008 as the financial crisis spread into the real economy. The government responded, mostly correctly, and introduced a swift and significant fiscal stimulus. The economy resumed growth, the rise in unemployment was pegged (although there wasn’t enough done to generate sufficient jobs growth), and the budget deficit rose. Before the private sector had demonstrated it could take up the spending slack and support the growth process, the Federal government became obsessed with “returning the budget to surplus”, erroneously thinking that this would separate them, politically, from the Opposition. They were wrong. The imposition of fiscal austerity has caused economic growth to slow and tax revenue growth to fall well below projections (declining world commodity prices have also not helped). First, the government abandoned their surplus promise realising that the revenue side was not going to improve sufficiently. Now, they are implying they need to hike income taxes to cover the “revenue shortfall”. If they ever had any credibility as responsible fiscal managers then it is safe to conclude they have none now. Their continued claims about maintaining a “strict fiscal policy” (read: procyclical fiscal stance) are not only moronic but they are also leading to policies which are killing growth and employment.

I have spent almost the entire time I have been in academic life – from the time I was a fourth-year student, onto Masters, then PhD and subsequently as an teaching and research academic – studying, writing, publishing, and teaching about the Phillips curve and the link between labour markets and inflation. I have published many articles on how full employment was abandoned and how it can be restored taking care to consider how an economy that approaches high pressure might cope with the increasing nominal demands on real output. I have advanced various policy options to resolve the problem of incompatible nominal demands on such output and provided the pro and con of each. I have published some very detailed papers on those questions and my recent book – Full Employment abandoned – went into all the tedious detail of how inflation occurs and what can be done about it. But, apparently, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) ignores “the dilemmas posed by Phillips curve analysis” as one of its many alleged sins. I wonder what the hell I have been writing all these years

I am researching a project at the moment on the role of humanities (and social sciences) in enhancing standards of living and rendering societies open, empathetic (to the disadvantaged) and dynamic. It is in the face of trends within Universities to concentrate funding and attention on the so-called STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and contract funding for the humanities (and social science). The funding cuts undermine the viability of these areas and whole departments have been closed – having been declared by the bean counters – as being uneconomic. This is reinforced by conservative neo-liberal political diatribes which seek to construct the humanities/social sciences as bastions of “left-wing” radicalism and post-modernist degradation (for example, eschewing studies in sexuality, gender, ethnicity etc). There is strong evidence available to show that studying the humanities is a socially transformative endeavour (for example, the Clemente program). But like all “individual” initiatives, there is a danger that the reasoning used to justify them will fall foul of compositional fallacies. We have to defend the humanities to enrich individuals. But we also have to use that empowerment to challenge the elites on the macroeconomics battleground. The two motivations are self-reinforcing. The former is not a sufficient condition for social transformation.

Last week (December 10, 2012), the Bank of International Settlements released a working paper – The financial cycle and macroeconomics: What have we learnt? – which not only recognised that the accepted mainstream macroeconomic theory is critically deficient but also implied that the response to that failure in the context of the global financial crisis is not likely to be satisfactory. Faced with a major credibility crisis at the onset of the GFC, there has been a mad rush by mainstream economists to add financial sector to their models. It might surprise you that the major models used to teach students and motivate research in macroeconomics didn’t even have financial sectors included, among other glaring deficiencies. Now there is a flurry of work to address that deficiency. The problem is that all this effort, which will produce countless papers at academic conferences, will not address the fundamental issue – the mainstream macroeconomics framework is rotten to the core. The BIS paper provides some insights into that issue. When it comes down to the fundamental question: What have we learn’t? If the we is referring to the dominant body of macroeconomists that teach in universities, publish research in the journals and occupy key positions in policy-making bureaucracies, then the answer is simple: Nothing! (thanks Roger). But we have also learn’t that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has demonstrated itself to be a credible framework.

A few weeks ago in this blog – So who is going to answer for their culpability? – I wrote about the IMFs latest “discovery” that their policy advice, which has caused millions to become unemployed and nations to shed income and wealth in great proportions and all the rest of the austerity detritus, was based on errors in estimating the value of the multiplier. They now admit the expenditure multipliers may be up to around 1.7, which means that for every dollar of government spending, the economy produces $1.70 of national income. Under their previous estimates of the multiplier, a dollar of government spending would translate into only 50 cents national income (a bad outcome). The renewed awareness from the arch-austerity merchants that they were wrong and that fiscal policy is, in fact, highly effective, has to be seen in the light of the continued obsession not only with fiscal austerity but also with discussions surrounding monetary policy. There have been many articles over the last few years expressing surprise that the vast monetary policy changes have had little effect. But as soon as the writers note this they launch into the standard arguments about inflation risk and the rest of the narratives that accompany discussions about central banks. Soon we will have to accept the fact that monetary policy is not a suitable tool to stabilise aggregate demand at appropriate levels. We will also have to acknowledge that the only way out of the crisis is via renewed fiscal stimulus.