Deliberately creating mass unemployment now would be the work of vandals and New Keynesians

Last week, the New York Times published the latest Paul Krugman article on inflation (which is behind its paywall). It is syndicated elsewhere and you can access it here at The Berkshire Eagle (April 13, 2022) – Paul Krugman: Inflation is about to come down – but don’t get too excited. I wondered whether the author had offered his services cheaper to the NYTs and elsewhere given his concern for inflation, and, apparently, his assertion that wages are a critical factor in sustaining it. What this article highlights is mainstream New Keynesian macroeconomics – the dominant paradigm in our teaching, research and policy circles. What it also highlights is how different the mainstream is to Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), despite characters like Krugman and his fellow New Keynesians trying to tell the world that there is nothing particularly different about MMT and the way they do economics. It also provides another chance for me to add nuance to the Job Guarantee.

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Exploring the essence of MMT – Part 1

Today, I am reflecting on the evolution of the body of work known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) and responding to many E-mails I get seeking clarification about things and some that keep getting things wrong. Some of the things I write today might introduce some dissonance, which just means that those feeling that have not really got to the bottom of the matter before and thought they knew what isn’t. This blog post also forms part of my – MMT Provenance – series where I trace the development of MMT in historical terms – who said what, who were there, who weren’t etc. And it is good sometimes to reflect on your work to see where it has gone and to wonder why. So, a bit of a different post today as we wait for tonight’s fiscal statement from the Australian Treasurer.

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The Weekend Quiz – March 26-27, 2022 – 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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Contrary to what you may have heard – governments can always reduce poverty if they choose to

For years, students have been taught that fiscal policy is an ineffective policy tool to regulate fluctuations in national income derived from changes in spending and saving decisions in the non-government sector. This narrative justified the austerity purges that we have become accustomed to pre-pandemic. The elevation of the fiscal surplus to some desired goal has been instilled in our minds and we have voted to support governments that record these surpluses because we have thought they were being fiscally responsible. The GFC, and, more recently, the pandemic has helped undermine that narrative as people have realised that the only thing between them and hunger has been government spending. The ‘market’ hasn’t helped them. The evidence that government spending has reduced poverty and created opportunities for families that were not previously possible is strong. One such measure is the – Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) – which was first published by the US Census Bureau in 2011. This blog post records my notes on that data release.

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Some thoughts on a five-year development plan for Timor-Leste

Some years ago, I did some work for the Asian Development Bank on Pakistan and Central Asia. It was a really interesting experience because it taught me a lot about the challenges facing poorer regions who have dependencies on imported energy and food and limited export opportunities. Since then I have been studying a number of countries and am convinced that development strategies have to fundamentally change if the poorer nations are to achieve any hope of sustainable development. At present, I am working on the development of such a framework, which will incorporate the best-practices proposed by scholars who similarly reject the traditional IMF/World Bank development model. Specifically, I am focusing on Timor-Leste, which is about to stage a presidential election (March 19, 2022). Xanana Gusmão’s party – National Congress for Timorese Reconstruction (CNRT) – has backed former president Jose Ramos-Horta against the incumbent Fretilin President, Francisco Guterres and the third candidate Martinho Gusmão (United Party for Development and Democracy – PUDD). It appears that if Jose Ramos-Horta is elected, there will be a dissolution of parliament and early elections will be held after a period of political turbulence following the 2017 election. Early indications are that Ramos-Horta is well placed after the conduct of Guterres in recent years. The new government must consider a new development strategy and so I am working to provide some structure to that goal from a Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) perspective.

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Income support for children improves brain development

When I first came up with the idea of a buffer stock employment approach to maintain full employment and discipline the inflationary process (back in 1978), the literature on guaranteed incomes was still in its infancy. The idea of a basic income guarantee was still mostly constructed within the framework Milton Friedman had laid out in his negative income tax approach, which I first came across when reading his 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, while I was an undergraduate. I wasn’t taken with the idea and the preferred an approach to income security that not only integrated job security but also had a built-in inflation anchor. When I developed that idea, inflation was still conceived of the main problem and governments were fast abandoning full employment commitments because mainstream economists told them TINA. I thought otherwise. However, as I developed the buffer stock approach further in the 1990s as part of the first work that we now call Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), nuances about additional cash transfers became part of our approach. I refined those ideas in work I did developing a minimum wage framework for the South African government in 2008. I was reminded of all this when I read a report in New Scientist last week (January 24, 2022) – Giving low-income US families $4000 a year boosts child brain activity. Some might think this justifies the BIG approach, whereas it strengthens the case for a multi-dimensional – Job Guarantee.

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The NAIRU should have been buried decades ago

In 1983, I started a PhD at the University of Manchester working within the Phillips curve framework. At the time, all the talk was Monetarist – eschewing the use of fiscal policy to reduce unemployment. Unemployment was high after the OPEC oil shocks and governments were abandoning their responsibilities to reduce it because they had drunk the Monetarist Kool-aide. The Monetarists invented a concept – the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) or the ‘natural rate of unemployment’, which became part of the dominant macroeconomic approach and influenced policy makers to pursue microeconomic reform (deregulation, privatisation, outsourcing etc) and obsessing about fiscal surpluses. My work was an attempt to show this shift in thinking – away from a commitment to full employment was based on a lie. The whole NAIRU story was a fraud. I was largely ignored along with other progressive economists who were also producing credible research that refuted the main propositions. Some 40 years later, the ECB has produced a research paper which now supports the position I took back then. Millions of jobless people later!

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The Left has failed during the pandemic but not because they supported restrictions

I usually use Wednesday to write less here. But because sometimes a data release is on Wednesday, Thursday then becomes my lighter day. And I also have to travel a lot today. But there is a relatively important issue to address. I have been receiving a lot of E-mails over the last several months that question me about my position on government restrictions with respect to the Covid pandemic. Apparently, it has seeped into the debate that the mainstream Left have been silent while governments around the world have imposed draconian social control on their citizens, which have been targeted against the workers. The questions all seems to suggest that I have been silent on that issue, which is indicative that I have adopted the ‘woke’ Left position. I beg to differ.

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When ‘new’ is really old and doesn’t get us very far – latest BIS paper

It takes a while for the mainstream organisations in economics, banking and finance to start to realise that the framework they use cannot explain the actual events in the real world, without serious revision. The problem though, is that the overall framework is flawed and the typical ‘response to anomaly’ approach, which changes a few assumptions to get ‘novel results’ is inadequate because it leaves one blind to all the possible policy solutions. The latest example is the Bank of International Settlements paper – Indebted Demand (released October 19, 2021) – which was written by three economists from Princeton, Harvard and Chicago Booth, respectively. They now recognise that rising inequality and massive household debt is a major problem for economic growth and macroeconomic stability. But, in maintaining ‘conventional’ assumptions about the government sector, they miss the vital linkages in the story, that Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) economists have been providing for the last 25 or so years. Whether these responses to anomaly represent progress or different variations in a flawed ‘chess’ strategy is a matter of opinion. My thought is they are a largely a waste of time, although marginally, they demonstrate that elements of mainstream macro theory that were considered core elements a decade ago are no longer sustainable.

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Marx’s dream does not justify ignoring day-to-day human suffering

One of the recurring criticisms I face when presenting at events comes from those who say they are ‘socialists’ or ‘Marxists’. They accuse me in various ways of being an apologist for capitalism, for offering palliative solutions to workers, which will delay the break down of the system and the revolution to socialism and communism. These critics proudly announce they follow Marx’s solutions and that they reject Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) because it is just a stooge for capitalism. The problem is that Marx had no real vision of how we would transit to Communism. A recent book referred to Marx’s philosophical position on this as a ‘dream’ (more later). And MMT is not specific to any mode of production, by which I mean, who owns the material means of production. It is applicable to any monetary system, and I cannot imagine any modern, technologically-based society functioning outside of that reality – socialist, capitalist or otherwise. But, moreover, the critics seem to be displaying a lack of basic humanity where they exercise reasoning that Noam Chomsky regularly refers to as belonging in a philosophy seminar. Even progressives (and socialists) have to be aware of humanity – as they plot and scheme for the revolution.

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NSW fails to control Covid (incompetence) and the labour market contracts sharply across the nation

There were two significant data releases from the Australian Bureau of Statistics this week that provide information about the state of the labour market – both in the short-term and also in terms of longer-term trends. The first release (September 8, 2021) – Labour Account Australia – June 2021 – is a quarterly dataset that allows us to tie together information about employment, persons, hours and payments. The second release today (September 9, 2021) is the – Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia – Week ending August 14, 2021 – which is Australian Tax Office data that provides a much more current view of how the labour market is performing. That snapshot is especially valuable given the on-going tight lockdowns in Sydney and Melbourne and the impact they are having on employment and wages.

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The ideology of neoliberal ‘freedom’ ends up damaging all of us – NSW Covid outbreak

It has been a while since I updated my commentary on the new bi-weekly dataset using Australian Tax Office payroll data that the Australian Bureau of Statistics started publishing in March 2020, in order to provide more updated information on the state of the labour market during the pandemic. The Monthly Labour Force survey comes out in the third week of each month and relates to data collected around the second week of the previous month. With ongoing state government lockdowns being imposed with little warning having a significant impact on employment, this more frequent dataset was welcome. We are now in a situation where around 13 millions Australians are in tight lockdowns (over half the population), principally in Melbourne and Sydney. The latter, due to the incompetence of the conservative state government in NSW, has been in lockdown for weeks now and as the largest state, the reverberations are clearly going to be felt across the nation. Last week (August 5, 2021), the ABS released the – Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, Week ending 17 July 2021 – which provides the first glimpse of what the impact of the extended lockdown in Sydney (in particular) is having on the labour market. Employment in NSW shrunk by 5.1 per cent in the 3 weeks since June 26, 2021 (the start of the restrictions). Overall, employment has slumped by 2.4 per cent nationally. And the virus is spreading into regional NSW and things will get worse. The damage is being borne largely by our youth, given the occupation segregation in the ‘closed down’ sectors. The Federal government is demanding we all get vaccinated but due to its trying to ‘save money’ last year, there is insufficient vaccine available to supply the demand. Both the NSW and Federal governments have demonstrated their incompetence in the decisions they have taken in the name of ‘freedom’ and ‘fiscal surpluses’.

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Booming growth in Britain (Brexit?) but child poverty rises (austerity)

It’s Day 14 today and later this afternoon I am to be released from my stint in quarantine as a result of shifting myself from Newcastle to Melbourne 2 weeks ago. NSW (where Newcastle is located) is now an area of extreme risk according to the Victorian government, given the growing COVID outbreak in Sydney, and any resident travelling back into Victoria was required to do the 14 days in strict Iso. So today is my ‘freedom day’ after being stuck inside my residence for 2 weeks. Woo! Given my extensive CPI report yesterday, I am not treating today as my normal Wednesday work pattern and so apart from some great music, I offer a few observations on things that have come to mind recently.

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Australian labour market – slow employment growth but unemployment continues to fall as population growth remains weak

Today (July 15, 2021), the Australian Bureau of Statistics put out the latest – Labour Force, Australia – for June 2021. The data shows that the trend where even relatively weak employment growth is driving the unemployment rate down because the growth in labour supply, is continuing. Employment increased by 29,100 or 0.2 per cent (which is weak), monthly hours worked decreased by 1.8 per cent, the participation rate was stable, yet unemployment fell by 22,000 (which is excellent), and the unemployment rate fell 0.2 points to 4.9 per cent. But underemployment rose sharply (0.5 points) to 7.9 per cent. So it is a good outcome for unemployment to be falling but the quantity and quality of employment growth is not desirable. The drop in working hours is due to the two-week lockdown in Victoria recently. Next month, the current extended lockdown in Sydney will show up as a negative in the July result. The labour market is still 232.9 thousand jobs of where it would have been if employment had continued to grow according to the average growth rate between 2015 and February 2020.

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Intergenerational Report – the past is catching up with the government and the game is up

It’s Wednesday, and I have been filming most of the day some of the material that will appear in the next set of course material offered by – MMTed. We hope to offer some new courses later in September. But progress is slow (see below). Today, I provide some brief comments on my response to the Federal government’s latest – 2021 Intergenerational Report – which is one of the ridiculous, smokescreen-creating exercises that allow the government to avoid political responsibility for its fiscal surplus obsession. They come out every five years and are usually jam-packed with scaremongering about unsustainable fiscal deficits and the need for spending cuts. The only difference this time is that the damage caused by the years of following the austerity path – to health care, to aged care, to skills development, etc, have changed our attitudes. We have also seen that the government can spend what it likes without taxes going up and without bond markets declaring the government insolvent. We have now lived with large deficits as a result of the pandemic and the game is up on the deficits are bad and the sky will crash down story line. Our changing view on what we now demand from the Government is reflected in this latest effort.

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Australian government fiscal statement 2021-22 – a largely missed opportunity

Last night, the Federal Treasurer released the annual ‘fiscal statement’ (aka ‘The Budget’) and everyone is jumping up and down at the size of the spending proposed. Yes, the deficit and debt hysteria has been abandoned for the time being – but only because this is an election year (presumably). This is an announcement government (with little action) and the actual bigger spending initiatives are not next year but in the hazy forward years which means we can largely disregard them. Further, what most commentators are ignoring is that the Government is proposing a record fiscal contraction next year (2021-22) and is relying on (unrealistic) growth in household consumption expenditure over a period they project real wages will fall. If their projections are to be believed then household debt will rise significantly beyond its already record levels. But I don’t believe the projections anyway. In terms of my wish list, the fiscal strategy fails – no funding for carbon retrenchment, little for social housing, nothing for higher education and lots of handouts for their business mates who will pocket the funds and pay themselves very well in the process.

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Australian labour market struggling with significant sectoral disparities

Tonight, the Federal Treasurer releases the annual ‘fiscal statement’ (aka ‘The Budget’) and we already know that the Government is now in a period of fiscal contraction despite all the big expenditure numbers being touted in the press. I will write more about that tomorrow. But it is now 6 weeks since the Government abandoned the JobKeeper wage subsidy program and today’s ABS release of the – Weekly Payroll Jobs and Wages in Australia, Week ending 24 April 2021 – might give us some guidance as to the impact of the fiscal withdrawal in terms of job loss. The problem though is that the period in question was also a school holiday period, which confounds things somewhat. Suffice to say that the labour market is definitely not booming. It has gone backwards since the end of March but how much of that is due to the withdrawal of the wage subsidy is difficult to say at this stage. Some sectors are still enduring major job losses with Accommodation and hospitality sector 10.3 points below its March 14, 2020 employment level. Manufacturing is still 2.1 points down, Transport, postal & warehousing is down 6.8 points, and Information media & telecommunications is down 6.7 points. The sectors that have gained the most employment are Electricity, gas, water & waste services (up 3.3 points), Financial & insurance services (up 7.7 per cent), Public Administration (up 10.4 per cent) and Health care & social assistance up 4.9 per cent. Anyway, I have been using my spare time to get up to speed on all the various data trends so I can better understand what tonight’s statement is likely to do.

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The Weekend Quiz – April 17-18, 2021 – 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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Week 2 of the MOOC Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century starts today

Its Wednesday and only a short blog post day – well a collection of items I accumulate during the week. Week 2 of our MOOC – Modern Monetary Theory: Economics for the 21st Century – begins today and you can find enrolment details below. We also have some culture today – a beautiful poem which inspires optimism and some music that inspires past memories.

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