Remember, earlier this year, when the IMF admitted they had made errors in their modelling of expenditure multipliers. They had been tramping into countries with their jackboots telling all and sundry that fiscal austerity would promote growth because their multiplier estimates told them so. Millions of job losses later, they came clean. It turns out that when they revised their multiplier estimates exactly the opposite was the case. Now they acknowledge that spending multipliers are in range of 1.5 1.75, meaning that increasing government spending adds at least 150 cents in the dollar spent extra to the economy. Now, the darlings of the austerity cultists – Rogoff and Reinhart – has been exposed for poor research standards – to wit, errors in spreadsheet coding. Meanwhile, Cyprus is being driven into oblivion. Who is ever going to take responsibility for these travesties?

I know people like to dream and Latvians are apparently no exception. Their latest collective dream, or at least, those of the elites that fancy wining and dining in style in Brussels, is to join the Eurozone. The Latvian government has now formally requested the EU to undertake a “Convergence Report assessment” of the Latvian economy to facilitate membership by January 2014. The opinion polls do not necessarily support the intent of the Government. But the conservatives are out in force with supporting narratives. One such attempt at making the impossible argument was from on Anders Aslund, who is one of Peter Peterson’s stooges and has co-written a book with the Latvian Prime Minister. He wrote a Bloomberg Op Ed (January 8, 2013) – Why Austerity Works and Stimulus Doesn’t – which turned out to be a major revision of all the known facts and concepts that almost everybody else (apart from the pro-austerity spivs and their hangers-on) would by now have to share. I made a few graphs. Fiscal austerity is bad. There are no qualifications.

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.

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.

Today (December 19, 2012), the economics editor for the Sydney Morning Herald (Ross Gittins) wrote an Op Ed piece – It’s the weak recovery that worries, not surplus – which urged his readers to reorient their thinking about the Federal government’s obsession with achieving a budget surplus in the coming year. In that sense, it was welcome article from an influential journalist. But closer reading demonstrates that the writer is straddling the line between comprehension and myth-perpetuation. Many readers have asked me to pin-point the strengths and weaknesses of the article for their own edification. So lets proceed. The key point is that the budgets of currency-issuing national governments bear no relation to household budgets. If we do not jettison that myth then very little progress can be made on the more complex parts of the narrative that leads to the conclusion that such a government can never run out of money and all the negative consequences that are alleged to necessarily follow the use of budget deficits (higher interest rates, inflation, eventual insolvency) are lies, which aim to perpetuate a dominant paradigm rather than advance the welfare of all of us.

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.

Australia is in the grip of a group of mining oligarchs, who are spending enormous amounts of monety to shape the economic debate to suit their own very narrow interests. They are opposed to the mining tax (a resource rent tax) and have in the past denied the state (on behalf of all of us) owns the resources that they plunder for private profit. They have also sponsored national tours of leading climate-change deniers (such as Lord Monckton) who are known to trade on distortions of the truth. Overall, there personal resources guarantee them access to the daily media and they use it relentlessly. They also write books which get national coverage and have a record of suing peope who criticise their views. The result is that there is very little critical scrutiny of the propositions they advance to justify their claims. Some of the propositions are pure fantasy yet they have gained traction with the public who have been too easily duped by the promotional onslaught. Here is a little sojourn into the fantasy world on one such oligarch.

The British Prime Minister gave a – Speech – to the Confederation of British Industry Conference on November 19, 2012, where he outlined how tough his government had been in terms of imposing fiscal austerity. In other words, he was taking responsibility for Britain’s appalling dive back into (double-dip) recession, although it is hard to find that confession in his actual words. Over the English Channel, the EU is busily preparing the champagne and fine foods for its upcoming summit on the 2014-2020 EU Budget. The EU leadership is talking tough and proposing large cuts in EU-level spending not the least being harsh cuts in the Overseas Development Aid (ODA) budget. The cuts are, of-course, based on false premises – that the economies are broke and have to live within their means – even though millions of workers lie idle. The idiocy is exemplified though in the failure to understand that ODA, while perhaps provided for ethical reasons, actually improves the outcomes of the donor nation. So these so-called free marketeers cannot even identify self-interest when it is staring them in the face. So they busily go about cutting their noses off!