The role of literary fiction in perpetuating neo-liberal economic myths – Part 1

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog – Reflections on a visit to New Zealand – which began by summarising some research I am working on which will be presented (with Dr Louisa Connors) at the upcoming MMT conference in Kansas City. This specific paper will be examining the role that fictional literature plays in framing false economic concepts and, thus, promoting neo-liberal biases among the readership, even when the plot of the narrative is ostensibly about something other than economics. We show that fiction is a powerful tool for spreading ideological propaganda, often in a very subliminal or subtle way. The lesson we draw from this work is that to further advance Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) ideas, authors, who introduce economic concepts into their writing, should construct their narratives consistent with the MMT principles. This will help to counter the misconceptions that arise in literary fiction when authors engage with flawed neo-liberal arguments about the monetary system. This blog is in two parts and today is Part 1. Part 2 will come another day (soon).

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The Weekend Quiz – September 9-10, 2017 – answers and discussion

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.

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The Weekend Quiz – September 2-3, 2017 – answers and discussion

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.

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Reclaiming the State

On June 3, 1951, the Socialist International association was formed in London. It is still going. It is “a worldwide association of political parties, most of which seek to establish democratic socialism”. Its roots date back to the C19th (to the First International formed in 1864) when it was considered beneficial to unite national working class movements into a global force to overthrow Capitalism. Internal bickering among various factions led to various dissolutions and reformations over the last 150 odd years. In 2013, the membership split when the German SPD decided to set up an competing group, the Progressive Alliance, which saw a host of so-called social democratic parties (including the Australian Labor Party) join and desert the SI. Both bodies are dogged by internecine conflict and members who have fallen for the neo-liberal macroeconomic myths. More recently, DIEM25 has emerged to pursue a Pan-European vision of Left-wing politics. The more recent dynamics of these movements deny power of the nation state in a globalised economy and global financial flows. They are all failing because of this denial.

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The Weekend Quiz – August 26-27, 2017 – answers and discussion

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.

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Europe – the deliberate wastage of its youth continues

Earlier this month (August 11, 2017), Eurostat published the latest European Union data for – Young people in the EU: education and employment. This data now allows us to track the fortunes of three age cohorts – 15-19, 20-24 and 25-29 years since before the crisis to the end of 2016. So a teenager prior to the crisis (2007) would be transiting into the 25-29 years cohort in 2016. One of the disturbing trends shown in the data is the increasing number of young people in the older ‘youth’ categories that in 2016 we classified as being Neither in Employment, nor in Education or Training (NEET). Some will have been in that category for the entire duration of the crisis – that is, they dropped out of school early, are not receiving any skills development and are unemployed. Whereas in 2007, the proportion of NEETs in the 25-29 years cohort was 17.2 per cent, that figure has risen to 18.8 per cent by 2016 (although the peak of 20.7 per cent was reached in 2012). This suggests that the systems which provide transitions between education and employment are not working effectively because the demand-side of the labour market is deficient. That is, there is a lack of jobs available overall and the most disadvantaged youth workers are at the back of the queue along with the disabled and other stigmatised cohorts (for example, Roma people in the European context). There is an urgent need for a true Youth Job Guarantee, to replace the faux Youth Guarantee that was introduced in 2012. But then that would require abandoning the obsession with austerity and dysfunctional fiscal rules. The European Commission’s answer to the problem will be to have another ‘summit’ or two and issue plenty of statements replete with motherhood statements.

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Australian labour market – stumbling along with no definitive trend

The latest labour force data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Labour Force data – for July 2017 shows that total employment rose only modestly (27,900) while full-time employment contracted. Part-time employment rose by 48,200 reversing the decline from last month. As a result of a rise in the participation rate (0.1 points), unemployment rose by 1,100, and the official unemployment rate decreased by less than 0.1 pts to 5.6 per cent. Underemployment rose to 14 per cent as monthly hours of work declined with the fall in full-time employment. The broad labour underutilisation remains high at 14 per cent with unemployment and underemployment summing to 1,812.6 thousand persons. The teenage labour market showed a slight improvement but remains in a poor state. Overall, my assessment of the Australian labour market is that it remains in an uncertain state. There is no definitive trend yet.

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The Weekend Quiz – August 12-13, 2017 – answers and discussion

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.

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Falling enrolments in mainstream economics programs is a desirable outcome

If you have had the misfortune to study economics formally at university then you will recall sitting through endless and tedious lectures where the instructor asserted some superior knowledge about psychology and human behaviour. If you had combined the economics study with studies in psychology and sociology, you would have soon realised that what was being taught in your economics course was total nonsense. There was an article in the Fairfax press recently (August 6, 2017) – Crisis in high school economics a threat to national wellbeing – ruing the declining enrolments in secondary school economics programs. The point is that these courses are typically more damaging than useful and the contention of the journalist that we are reducing the quality of the economic debate as a result of less people studying economics is problematic. The typical economics program is simple indoctrination into a set of neoliberal principles that allow poor policy to continue despite it delivering disastrous outcomes. There is a crying need for more economic and financial literacy, but that requires an entirely different approach to be adopted rather than jamming more kids into the existing courses and having them come out dangerously brain dead.

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US labour market – improves again in July

Shonk is an Australian/NZ slang word to describe someone engaged in shonky behaviour, which the Oxford Dictionary describes as being behaviour that is “Dishonest, unreliable, or illegal, especially in a devious way”. So a shonk means a “dishonest person; swindler or con artist” and while intent is implied it doesn’t have to be conscious action (note the inclusion of the descriptor “unreliable”). It could just mean stupidity or ignorance that leads to shonky performance. I will come back to that topic soon. On August 4, 2017, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released their latest labour market data – Employment Situation Summary – July 2017 – which showed that total non-farm employment from the payroll survey rose by a relatively healthy 209,000 in July. The weak result for May now seems to have been a blip in the data. The Labour Force Survey data showed that employment rose by 345 thousand in July but was still not large enough an increase to offset the rise in the labour force (349 thousand), and as a consequence, official unemployment rose by 4 thousand. The official unemployment rate was stable though at 4.4 per cent. There are still 6.98 million unemployed persons in the US. There is still a large jobs deficit remaining and other indicators suggest the labour market is still below where it was prior to the crisis. Further, the bias towards low-pay and below-average pay jobs continues.

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Australian government employment plan – racist and in breach of our laws

Today’s discussion is about how employment policy becomes so corrupted by neo-liberal ideology (overlaid with some healthy racism) that the government causes damage rather than advances well-being. The examples I outline demonstrate the wider problem that neo-liberal inspired governments clearly understand the economy is not working yet they cannot bring themselves to introduce obvious solutions to the problems identified. Further, while they claim their policy choices are constrained by the ‘money’ they have to spend (limited according to their narrative), when they do spend ‘money’ they bias the benefits to corporate interests as a profit subsidy rather than providing sustainable income support for the most disadvantaged who just become pawns in the subsidy to capital. And then, they pretend, they are obeying ‘market’ dictates when the ‘free market (not!)’ was never in the picture anyway. The on-going hypocrisy of this neo-liberal era.

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Why haven’t any IMF officials been prosecuted for malpractice in Greece?

I have discussed the work of the IMF Evaluation Office before. The IEO “provides objective and independent evaluation” of the IMF performance and operates “independently of IMF management” and reports to the Executive Board of the organisation. It is an independent as one could imagine in this milieu. I have just finished reading the 474-page Background Papers that the IEO released in 2016 and which formed the basis of its June 2016 Evaluation Report – The IMF and the Crises in Greece, Ireland, and Portugal. It is not a pretty story. It seems that the incompetence driven by the blind adherence to Groupthink that the earlier Reports had highlighted went a step further in the case of Greece into what I would consider to be criminality. The scale of the professional incompetence notwithstanding, the IEO found that IMF officials and economists violated the written and constitutional rules of their own organisation and failed to supply relevant documents for audit. So why are all these economists and officials still walking free, given the scale of the disaster they created?

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The neo-liberal infestation – Australia’s broadband fiasco gets worse

I have written about Australia’s fraught venture into establishing a national broadband network (the so-called NBN) to apparently take us into the next era of communications, although it seems the lifespan of what they eventually will build will be short, in the sense, that it will need massive new investment almost immediately to make it workable. The current conservative (neo-liberal) government came into office not long after the NBN, which was commissioned by the outgoing Labor government, was in its development phase. It immediately altered the design to fibre-to-node (so optic fibre goes to boxes in suburbs and the final route relies on the dysfunctional copper wire), from fibre-to-home to apparently make it quicker to implement and require less government outlay. The changes and the ‘business model’ the government has forced on the NBN Company (the public monopoly constructor and wholesaler) have created such a mess with respect to our network availability and speed that it really serves as an ideal case study for students seeking to understand how the neo-liberal ideology stifles national interest and innovation. The latest dynamics being revealed about this disaster are simply staggering. We have moved so far away from an understanding of public infrastructure as the Government engages in its ideological crusade against innovation and government spending. Amazing really how all of us can be so stupid to tolerate it.

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Travelling to the land of the long white cloud today

I am travelling for most of today to New Zealand (Wellington) to honour some engagements promoting a new political movement that is keen to use Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) as a basis for a progressive political agenda in a nation that has been in the throes of a neo-liberal infestation for several decades now. In fact, New Zealand was one of the first to sink into neo-liberal oblivion. I wrote about the devastating consequences of this policy shift in this blog – The comeback of conservative ideology. It was a very sorry tale indeed. The sociopaths took over. You can see a rich portrayal of how the neo-liberals set about wrecking the social fabric of this wonderful nation by watching the documentary film – In a Land of Plenty – which runs for 1 hour and 44 minutes. It is compelling and worth the investment of your time. You will get angry. But maybe getting angry is the first step towards getting active and joining collective movements to do something about this nonsense. Indeed, that is what I am up to over the next few days – helping a new political movement develop narratives to counter the insidious dominance of the neo-liberals. Building a true oppositional Left is the imperative now for all activists.

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Germany fails to honour its part of the Greek bailout deal

In this blog – The fiscal role of the KfW – Part 1 – I recounted how the government-owned German development bank, KfW (Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau) – interacts with the German Finance Ministry to allow its fiscal balance to move into surplus without the commensurate level of fiscal drag that would normally be associated with that degree of fiscal withdrawal. The intent of the blog was to show how the Germans cleverly use their state-owned development bank to advance ideological positions not available to other states that have either privatised these type of institutions or never created them in the first place. It is ironic given the Germans insistence that countries like Greece privatise everything in sight. Today’s blog returns to the KfW, in part, because new information has emerged where we learn that the Greek crisis has allowed the German Ministry of Finance to run surpluses without melting their economy down. The KfW’s role in that regard is undoubted. It has been a source of bailout funds for Greece, on behalf of the German government, and has been pocketing handy profits ever since. This information shows that the popular claims that German taxpayers are bailing out Greece are clearly false and just political verbiage. Further, despite the understanding that the Member States (bailout partners) would remit any profits made on asset holdings associated with the Greek bailout, the Germans have reneged on that deal, in part, because it has channeled those profits through the KfW, which it claims is at hands length to the government, despite being 100 per cent government-owned.

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Australian labour market remains in an uncertain state

The latest labour force data released today by the Australian Bureau of Statistics – Labour Force data – for June 2017 shows that while total employment rose only modestly (14,000) the strong rebound in full-time employment from last month continued (up 62,000). Part-time employment fell sharply though (48,000). As a result of a rise in the participation rate (0.1 points), unemployment rose by 13,100, although the official unemployment rate was steady at 5.6 per cent after the ABS revised it upwards by 0.1 points from the May result. The broad labour underutilisation remains high at 13.9 per cent with unemployment and underemployment summing to 1,795 thousand persons. The teenage labour market also deteriorated further in June and remains in a poor state. Overall, my assessment of the Australian labour market is that it remains in an uncertain state. There is no definitive trend yet.

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British employers exhibit on-going greed but lie about it

One of the abiding and recurring trends, accentuated in the neo-liberal era, is the apparent ‘concern’ for the low-paid by the captains of industry. They continually warn against allowing pay increases for this cohort because they are – so the story goes – deeply concerned about the damage it will do to the employment prospects. What they really mean is that they know pay rises at the bottom end of the pay structure don’t alter employment levels significantly but have some impact on profitability. That is, they reduce profits a little. And that is the concern they are really expressing. The British Chambers of Commerce have called for a freeze on real wages for the lowest paid workers in Britain despite profitability soaring and the share of business profits in national income rising. The expression ‘where do these characters get off’ comes to mind. Although it is hardly surprising. British entrepreneurs tend to be lazy and take the easy way out when they can to further their own ends.

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The Weekend Quiz – July 15-16, 2017 – answers and discussion

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.

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EU clones itself in West Africa and then tries to ransack the region

In a recent blog – If Africa is rich – why is it so poor? – I considered the question of why the resources that make Africa rich have not been deployed to the benefit of the indigenous people who reside there. We saw that poverty is rife in Africa, when it is obvious to all and sundry that these nations possess massive resource wealth. The answer to that paradox is that the framework of development aid and oversight put in place by the richer nations and mediated through the likes of the IMF and the World Bank can be seen more as a giant vacuum cleaner designed to suck resource and financial wealth out of the poorer nations either through legal or illegal means, whichever generates the largest flows. So while Africa is wealthy, its interaction with the world monetary and trade systems, leaves millions of its citizens in extreme poverty – unable to even purchase sufficient nutrition to live. The ‘free trade agreement’ (EPA) between the EU and the West African nations is one such ‘vacuum’-like device. In fact, the West African states are still mired in post-colonial dependency not because they lack the resources available to set out their own development path, but, rather, because of the post-colonial institutions that have been set up to maintain control by the former colonialists of those resources. Not content to ruin the prosperity in the Eurozone, the EU is pressuring some of the poorest nations in the world to adopt the same sort of failed monetary and fiscal arrangements and then go further – and sign ‘free trade’ agreements with reciprocal access. The rest of the West African states should follow Nigeria’s example and abandon these arrangements.

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The Weekend Quiz – July 1-2, 2017 – answers and discussion

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.

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