Why governments should subsidise innovation

What can governments do to encourage innovation? Well, as we learnt this week, Malcolm Turnbull can think of $1.1 billion-worth of things to do.

His "national innovation and science agenda" involves 24 mainly small spending or tax concession programs, grouped under four headings.

Culture and capital, to help businesses embrace risk and to incentivise​ early-stage investment in start-ups.

Collaboration, to increase the level of engagement between businesses, universities and the research sector to commercialise ideas and solve problems.

Talent and skills, to train Australian students for the jobs of the future and attract the world's most innovative talent to Australia.

And government as an exemplar, to lead by example in the way government invests in and uses technology and data to deliver better quality services.

Will all those programs prove to be money well spent? Who knows? The safest prediction is that some will and some won't.

At present, the government is spending almost $10 billion a year on research and development. This involves about $2 billion on government research activities (mainly the CSIRO), almost $5 billion on grants to university and other research institutions (including medical research), and about $3 billion on tax breaks to business to encourage them to engage in R&D.

We do know a fair bit about the effectiveness of schemes to subsidise business R&D activity, whether in Oz or other countries.

And last week we saw the Australian Industry Report for 2015, produced by the chief economist of the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, which reported the results of a new study of the effectiveness of the government's R&D tax concession scheme.

But first things first. This week's innovation statement tells us "innovation and science are critical for Australia to deliver new sources of growth, maintain high-wage jobs and seize the next wave of economic prosperity".

Which is nice, but what exactly is it? "Innovation is about new and existing businesses creating new products, processes and business models."

Ah, so that means innovation is just the latest business buzzword for what economists have always called technological advance. That means we can believe the happy chat about how wonderful innovation is.

Economists have long known that most of the rise in our material standard of living over the decades and centuries has come from advances in technology, which include better knowhow as well as better machines.

R&D, the industry report informs us, is the main vehicle for innovation. You wouldn't know it from the cost-cutting efforts of Treasury and the Department of Finance over the years, but economists have long accepted that there's a good case for government spending on R&D and for government subsidy of business spending on R&D.

A business engages in R&D in the hope that it leads to new or improved products and processes which will allow it make more bucks. They don't do it because they're nice guys but, even so, the rest of us benefit from their contribution to technological advance.

This means R&D has the characteristics of a "public good" – a good (or service) that's "non-excludable and non-rivalrous". You can't exclude me from using it (which means you can't charge me for using it) and my use of it doesn't interfere with other people's use of it.

Trouble is, public goods are a major instance of "market failure". We obviously benefit greatly from public goods  – particularly because they're non-rivalrous  – and so would benefit from them being produced in large quantity.

But we can't rely on the market  – profit-motivated businesses  – to produce as much of them as we'd like. Why not? Because they're non-excludable. Because too many people can use them without paying.

Economists call this the "free-rider" problem. They also say public goods generate "positive externalities"  – benefits that go to people even though they weren't a party to the original transaction between seller and buyer.

Where market failure can be demonstrated, you've made the case for government intervention in the market to correct the failure by "internalising the externality"  – always provided the intervention doesn't end up making matters worse, which these days is called "government failure".

So economists have long accepted the case for government to subsidise private R&D because this will benefit all of us, not just the business that gets the subsidy.

Of course, this is just theory. It's worth checking to see if our government's R&D tax concession really does produce positive externalities. Does the knowledge generated by the subsidised firm really "spill over" to other firms? And, if so, what can we learn about how this works?

To answer these questions the Industry department made available to Dr Sasan Bakhtiari and Professor Robert Breunig, of the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy, data from its administration of the R&D program.

The program began in 1985, but the data used was from 2001 to 2011, during which time the number of participants grew from less than 4000 firms to more than 9000.

The program was open to firms in all industries, but the main industries using it were manufacturing, professional and scientific services, mining, and information media and telecommunications.

The researchers found evidence of significant spillovers of knowledge to particular firms from firms in the same industry, their suppliers, their client firms and from universities. Significantly, these spillovers came from outfits located within 10 km of the receiving firm, except in the case of suppliers, which were located more than 250 km away.

This leads the researchers to conclude, in line with other research, that knowledge spillovers from competitors and client firms mostly occur through face-to-face contacts between the R&D staff of the two firms.

So now you know why firms in the same business tend to cluster together, why that's a good thing and also, perhaps, why more and more of the nation's economic activity happens in or near the central business districts of our capital cities.

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The best economists know the market is flawed

As almost every economist will tell you, the market economy – the capitalist system, if you prefer – works in a way that's almost miraculous. All of us owe our present prosperity to it.

Think of it: each of us in the marketplace – whether we're buyers or sellers, consumers or producers – is acting in our own interests. A butcher sells us meat not to do us a favour, but to make a living. We, in turn, buy our meat from him not to do him a favour, but to feed ourselves.

That's how market economies work: everyone seeks to advance their own interests without regard for the interests of others. It ought to produce chaos, but doesn't.

Somehow the market's "invisible hand" has taken all our selfish motivations and transformed them into an orderly, smooth-working system from which we all benefit. The butcher makes her living; we get the meat we need.

Heard that story before? It contains much truth. But not the whole truth. Business people, economists and politicians often use it to imply that everything that happens in a market economy is wonderful.

Or they use it to argue that the best way to get the most out of a market economy is to keep it as free as possible from intervention by meddling governments. We should keep government as small as possible and taxes as low as possible.

But market economies aren't always orderly and smooth working. They move through cycles of wonderful booms but terrible busts.

And it's not true that "all things work together for good". A fair bit of the self-seeking behaviour of producers isn't miraculously converted into consumer benefit.

I've been reading a book called Phishing for Phools, a play on the online practice of phishing: posing as a reputable company to trick people into disclosing personal information.

The authors say that "if business people behave in the purely selfish and self-serving way that economic theory assumes, our free-market system tends to spawn manipulation and deception.

"The problem is not that there are a lot of evil people. Most people play by the rules and are just trying to make a good living. But, inevitably, the competitive pressures for businessmen to practice deception and manipulation in free markets lead us to buy, and pay too much for, products that we do not need; to work at jobs that give us little purpose; and to wonder why our lives have gone amiss."

You're probably not terribly surprised to read such sentiments. The surprise is that they're being expressed by two economics professors, George Akerlof, of the University of California, Berkeley (and husband of the chair of the US Federal Reserve), and Robert Shiller, of Yale University, who are held in such high regard by their peers that they're separate winners of the Nobel prize in economics.

They say they wrote the book as admirers of the free-market system, but hoping to help people better find their way in it.

If competition between business people too often induces them to manipulate their customers, why do we so often fall for it? Because though economists assume we always act in our own best interest, psychologists have convincingly demonstrated that people frequently make decisions that aren't in their best interest.

The market often gives people what they think they want rather what they really want. The authors point to common market outcomes that can't possibly be wanted.

One is a high degree of personal financial insecurity. "Most adults, even in rich countries, go to bed at night worried about how to pay the bills," they say. Too many people find it too hard to always resist the blandishments of marketers so as to live easily within their budgets.

It was all the phishing for phools in financial markets – people were sold houses they couldn't afford; people sold securities that weren't as safe as they were professed to be – that led to the global financial crisis and the Great Recession that hurt so many.

Then there's the way processed foods from supermarkets and food sold by fast-food outlets and restaurants come laced with the health-harming things they know we love: salt, fat and sugar.

The authors say a great deal of phishing comes from supplying us with misleading or erroneous information. "There are two ways to make money. The first is the honest way: give customers something they value at $1; produce it for less.

"But another way is to give customers false information or induce them to reach a false conclusion so they think that what they are getting for $1 is worth that, even though it is actually worth less."

Another class of phishing involves playing psychological tricks on us. According to the research of the American psychologist Robert Cialdini, we're phishable because we want to reciprocate gifts and favours, because we want to be nice to people we like, because we don't want to disobey authority, because we tend to follow others in deciding how to behave, because we want our decisions to be internally consistent, and because we are averse to taking losses.

There's no better way to organise an economy than by using markets. But market outcomes are often far from perfect and we need governments to regulate them as well as offset some of their worst effects.

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Competition does have its drawbacks

Competition is billed by economists as a wonderful thing, the invisible restrainer of a capitalist economy and essential to ensuring consumers get a good deal.

But many economists aren't as conscious as they should be that competition has costs as well as benefits.

It's true, of course, that monopoly is usually a terrible thing, allowing arrogant, inflexible behaviour on the part of producers, with little pressure on them to keep prices down or to provide much choice. Dealing with government departments shows you what monopolies are like.

Economists tend to assume the more competition the better and that customers can never get too much choice. But this shows how – despite their loud protestations to the contrary – their thinking is excessively influenced by their most basic, least realistic model of "perfect competition".

Psychological experiments show that when shoppers face too much choice, they tend to avoid making a decision. That's because the information they need to make informed choices isn't freely available and because the human mind hasn't evolved to be good at choosing between more than two items with differing characteristics.

Many real-world markets are characterised by oligopoly: a few large firms accounting for most of the sales. Oligopolies make economic sense because they're needed to fully exploit economies of scale (which are assumed away under perfect competition). So, in reality, competition and scale economies are in conflict.

In oligopolies and even in markets with a relatively large number of producers, competition is blunted by product differentiation, much of which is cosmetic. As with most advertising, product differentiation is intended to induce consumers to make decisions on an emotional rather than rational basis.

Phoney differentiation is also intended to frustrate rational comparison. It's not by chance that it's almost impossible to compare mobile phone contracts.

When economists speak of competition, they're usually thinking of competition on price. But though oligopolists watch their competitors like hawks, they much prefer to avoid price competition, competing rather via advertising, marketing, packaging and other differentiation.

Mackay's Law of competition states that the key to competition is to focus on the customer, not your competitor. But this is what oligopolists don't do.

In the real world – including the media – competitor-oriented competition is rife. This robs customers of genuine choice. It's a form of risk aversion: if I do the same as my competitor, I minimise the risk of him beating me.

It's what, in Harold Hotelling's classic example, prompts two ice-cream sellers to be back-to-back in the middle of the beach, regardless of whether some other positioning would serve customers better. It explains why business economists' forecasts tend to cluster, usually around the official forecast.

In his book The Darwin Economy, Robert Frank, of Cornell University, argues that lefties tend to see inadequate competition as the most prevalent form of market failure, whereas it's actually "collective action problems".

A collective action problem arises when the players in a market realise they're doing something mutually destructive, but no one's game to stop doing it for fear of being creamed by their competitors.

Usually in commercial markets the only answer is for the government to intervene and impose a solution on all players; for which they're grateful.

However, that's no help to our political parties, which have got themselves locked in a game of ever-declining standards of behaviour they don't know how to escape from. It's collective action problems that make it so easy for the politicians to manipulate the media.

The advocates of federalism believe it's good to have the states free to be different and competing against each other. In reality, the competition is mainly negative. The states compete to attract foreign investors with special tax concessions and the foreigners play them off against each other.

In the early 1970s, the McMahon government transferred its payroll tax to the states to give them the "growth tax" they needed to cover their growing spending. In the decades since then, they've done little but compete with the others by raising their tax-free thresholds and cutting their rates.

The huge increase in federal grants to private schools over recent decades was justified as increasing parents' choice and imposing competitive pressure on public schools. There's little evidence it's worked, nor much even that it's held down private school fees.

Similarly, Julia Gillard's My School website, with all its information about the academic performance of particular schools, intended to increase competition between them, has failed to produce any increase in the proportion of students achieving national minimum standards in reading, writing and numeracy over the five years to 2014.

Depending on circumstances, competition can make things better or worse – or little different.

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Mainstream economics remains highly useful

When Gigi Foster gave a radical speech to the Economic Society in Sydney last week – which soon had the audience interjecting and arguing among itself – she was careful to begin by saying her goal was to add to the standard economic model, not replace it.

She claimed the economists' model was the most successful model in all of social science, then listed what she considered to be its four most useful contributions.

By rights I should be telling you about her radical additions to the model, but I'll save that for another day because I, too, have been known to be fairly full and frank about the model's weaknesses and, like her, I don't want anyone thinking that means I regard it as a load of bulldust.

Just the reverse, in fact. It's been so useful and so influential that most of its insights will strike you as bleeding obvious. They are now.

Dr Foster, an associate professor at the University of NSW, is one of Australia's leading behavioural economists. Along with Professor Paul Frijters​, of the University of Queensland, she's the author of the ground-breaking book, An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks.

Her first "big hit" of conventional economics is its discovery that there are "gains from trade". And what's true within an economy – where we each specialise in producing something we're good at, then use money to trade with others – is equally true between economies.

It follows that countries preferring self-sufficiency to the interdependency of international trade will forgo much prosperity. One of economics' earliest discoveries is the benefit of "comparative advantage": countries do best when they concentrate on producing those things they can make at least opportunity cost relative to other countries' opportunity costs.

So you avoid erecting barriers to trade, follow your comparative advantage and import the rest from the cheapest suppliers.

Foster's second big win for economics is realisation of the benefits of competition – not just between producers but also between producers and their customers. So we prevent or regulate monopolies. We create markets when none exist – by, for instance, putting a price on carbon.

And we intervene in markets where we see that competition isn't sufficient to prevent them from failing to deliver the benefits we expect and where the intervention is likely to make the market work better.

Third, a natural role for governments is the provision of "public goods" – goods or services whose nature prevents private producers from capturing enough of the benefits to induce them to provide as much of the item as is in the community's interests.

Examples of public goods provided by governments are numerous: infrastructure, defence, education, the system of law and even the currency.

Foster's final example is the finding that monetary incentives matter. People respond to price changes – though their degree of responsiveness or "elasticity" varies under the influence of other factors. Taxation discourages economic activity, leading to a "deadweight loss" to the community.

That's Foster's list of insights we owe to economists and their model, but I can think of a few more. One is the aforementioned concept of opportunity cost. Because economic resources – including environmental assets – are limited, anything we choose to do comes at the cost of everything else we can't do with those resources.

Since these other things are endless, economists measure opportunity cost by looking only at the next most desirable thing we could have done. The moral of opportunity cost is: since you can't have everything, choose carefully.

Another insight is that anything we choose to do will bring costs as well as benefits. Moral: be sure to weigh the costs against the benefits before you jump.

Then there's our tendency to look only at the initial effect of particular developments. Economists know to ask the next question: but then what happens? It's usually the reaction to the initial effect – the "second-round effect" – that matters.

Say there's a big rise in the cost of electricity. The initial effect is to leave you with less money to spend on other things, which you hate. So you react to this by using power less wastefully, by buying a more energy-efficient fridge next time, or by investigating the costs and benefits of installing solar panels.

All this may seem obvious, but that's a measure of the economists' success in influencing the way we think.

Even so, it's surprising how often we forget these things. That's why we need economists as well as their model: to keep reminding us of the seemingly obvious and doing what they can to stop us wasting money.

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Uni economics declines at hands of accountants

If you think economists have too much influence in the halls of power - or that Australia would be better off if its accountants and business people knew less about how the economy works - or that the political debate would be improved if fewer citizens were economically literate - I have good news: academically, the economists are being cut down to size.

And it's the accountants who are doing it.

While business and management courses and departments are booming, many universities are cutting back, even abandoning their teaching of economics. Faculties of economics are becoming business schools.

At the University of Sydney, the economists have been ejected from their own faculty and - along with the political economists - consigned to the outer darkness of the arts faculty (where, as it happens, they're getting more customers).

It may not be long before, to be able to study economics at uni, you'll need an ATAR (Australian tertiary admission rank) high enough to get into one of the "sandstone" universities, the Group of Eight (Go8): Australian National University, the universities of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Queensland and Western Australia, plus Monash and UNSW.

Trouble is, the sandstone unis don't rate as well on teaching as do the newer, smaller metropolitan and regional unis. Their top priority is research - and don't believe anyone who tells you researchers make the best teachers.

The story of the decline of academic economics in Australia has been told in several papers by Dr John Lodewijks, of the University of NSW, and Dr Tony Stokes and Dr Sarah Wright, of the Australian Catholic University.

At La Trobe University in Melbourne, the school of economics has had to greatly reduce its staff, with fewer professors. Its stand-alone economics degree is no longer offered. Similar changes began at the University of Western Sydney in 2012.

Victoria University's department of applied economics has been broken up, with staff now teaching finance and international business. Economics is being subsumed within business at the University of Newcastle, University of New England, University of Tasmania and James Cook University in far north Queensland.

Griffith uni on the Gold Coast has reduced its offering in economics. Edith Cowan uni in Perth has discontinued the economics major within its bachelor of business. Its economics teaching staff has been slashed, with most of those remaining now teaching finance and quantitative methods. Curtin uni in Perth has also got rid of many economists. Even at the uni of WA a bachelor of economics is no longer offered.

As with Sydney uni, at the multi-campus Australian Catholic University economics has  been ejected from the business faculty and transferred to arts.

When I did a commerce degree at the uni of Newcastle in the late 1960s, three years of economics were compulsory. These days in business courses it's down to one year - or less.

It's clear the accountants would like to be rid of economics completely. What holds them back is that their degree would lose accreditation with the professional accounting bodies.

Over the period from 2002 to 2011, Australia's total student load grew by 40 per cent. The economics students' load rose by just 28 per cent.

From 2012, but with transitional arrangements starting in 2010, universities' enrolments of domestic students were deregulated, meaning unis could enrol as many students as they liked and also that the federal government could no longer influence the number of students studying particular subjects. Enrolments became "demand determined".

The objective of this was to ensure a higher proportion of school-leavers went on to uni. So it has involved a general lowering of ATAR cut-offs for entry into particular courses.

Despite the growth in student numbers overall as a result of the uncapping of places, the number of students studying economics actually declined between 2008 and 2013.

The overall increase in domestic undergraduate commencements was 34 per cent. Business and management numbers rose 38 per cent, and marketing and sales courses rose 39 per cent. But economics commencements fell by 7 per cent to fewer than 5400.

Between 2007 and 2014, the average ATAR cut-off for "business/commerce" (which would include economics) at non-Go8 unis fell by 7.8 points to 65.1, while the average for the Go8 rose fractionally to 89.1.

It seems that the sandstone unis are now capturing more of the able students who formerly would have gone to the newer, lesser-status metropolitan and regional universities.

And it seems all this has allowed a turning away from economics. It's likely  the subject is perceived by students as more intellectually demanding, with less well-prepared students preferring business studies. Many people think business studies is more practical and more likely to lead to a job.

University managers want to shift resources to the subjects in greatest demand from students and probably think they're more likely to get funding from businesses.

So the teaching of economics is contracting and concentrating in the group-of-eight unis. But while these are well known for their high quality research, they're not particularly noted for high quality teaching of economics.

Research has shown a negative relationship between research quality and student satisfaction with teaching. And studies of course-experience questionnaires show that the elite unis perform worse in student satisfaction with teaching than the other unis, particularly the newest ones.

It was two of the lowest ATAR unis, Australian Catholic and Western Sydney, which achieved the highest scores - 86 and 80 respectively - in the good-teaching category.

It's easy to blame an intellectually lazy younger generation. But, to some extent, the academics have brought this on themselves.

There are plenty of hard subjects at uni, but for decades economists have taught economics as though it's only the cultivation of future PhDs that matters to them, making little attempt to capture young imaginations by demonstrating the practical relevance of their dry, ever-more mathematical theories.

Trouble is, it's not only they who'll pay the price of their neglect.

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Jesus the great debt-eliminator

At this time of our greatest Christian holy-days, what does the Bible have to say about economics? A lot more than you may think.

That's according to the Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek, whose book, Economics of Good and Evil, I'll be heavily relying on in this column.

When God expelled Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden after they had disobeyed him, part of their punishment was that "by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food" – they'd have to work for their living.

But Jesus said, "Man does not live on bread alone". So we have to be concerned about making our living, but we also have to be concerned about more than that.

"We were endowed with both body and soul, and we are both spiritual and material beings . . . Without the material, we die; without the spiritual, we stop being people," Sedlacek says.

Christianity doesn't condemn the material, but it does condemn materialism. It's not money that's the problem, it's the love of money. Keep too much of it for yourself and you've probably crossed the line.

It's true Jesus chased from the temple "men selling cattle, sheep and doves, and others sitting at tables exchanging money", but he didn't chase them any further. His problem was not with their commerce but with their mixture of the sacred with the profane.

Jesus's teaching is often based on paradox, we're told. Jesus considers more valuable two mites that a poor widow drops on to the collection plate than the golden gifts of the rich.

Implicitly, this legitimises the role of money. But, to economists, it also shows Jesus understood the concept of marginal disutility. The widow's mite involved much greater sacrifice than the rich person's gold.

Sedlacek notes the New Testament's extensive use of economic metaphors. Of Jesus's 30 parables, 19 are set in an economic or social context: the parable of the lost coin; of talents (money), where Jesus rebukes a servant who didn't "put my money on deposit with the bankers"; of the unjust steward; of the workers in the vineyard; of the two debtors; of the rich fool, and so forth.

But get this: the most central concept in the Easter story of Christ's death and resurrection – redemption – originally had a purely economic meaning. You need to know that, in New Testament Greek, sin and debt were the same word.

People who were unable to pay their debts became debt slaves. Once you fell into slavery, the only escape was for someone to ransom you, to pay your bail. Jesus's role was to redeem us, purchase us at a price, buying us out of our debt of sins. The price was the shedding of his blood on the cross, just as the sacrificial lamb's blood was shed at Passover.

"In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace," St Paul said.

Western civilisation has been shaped by Christianity and Christian values, which means Christianity has also shaped economics. Sedlacek says the prayer "forgive us our sins", meaning "cancel our debts", could be heard from the West's leading banks in the global financial crisis.

Our modern economy cannot function without institutions that deliver the unfair forgiveness of debt. Bankrupts, for instance, are discharged even though they've paid back only a fraction of what they owe. When a company goes bust owing millions, the liability of its shareholders is limited to the face-value of their shares, paid long before by the original purchaser of the shares.

As for the GFC, Sedlacek says, "It would be hard to imagine the financial Armageddon that would follow if the government actually did not pay the ransom and redeem banks and some large companies".

"This, of course, goes against all principles of sound reason and of basic fairness. We also breached many rules of competition on which capitalism is built. Why did the most indebted banks and companies, which did not compete very well, receive the largest forgiveness?"

Why? It had to be done, in order to redeem not only these particular troubled and highly indebted companies, but also others that would fail if these few were not saved.

You've heard of "positive discrimination", but Sedlacek says Christian thought emphasises the concept of "positive unfairness": the more you've sinned, the bigger dollop of forgiveness you get.

"It doesn't matter how hard you try – everyone gets the same reward" (something the prodigal son's brother had trouble accepting).

"Christianity thus largely abolishes the accounting of good and evil. God forgives, which is positively unfair," he concludes.

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Economists shouldn’t be apologists for business

As the nation's economists gird their loins for a year of furious debate over economic management and reform, there's a soul-searching question they need to face.

This year's policy agenda will be dominated by economic issues. First is what's to be done about what wasn't done last year: the failure to get the budget on a credible course towards eliminating the structural deficit.

What can be done to reduce wastefulness in health spending that makes more sense than GP co-payments? Is it really a smart idea to partially deregulate government-owned and highly bureaucratic universities with their high degree of pricing power?

Apart from the government's response to last year's review of the financial system, there's the various inquiries being conducted this year: the review of the tax system, review of federal-state responsibilities and review of industrial relations.

In these things the government's big-business backers have very strong views about which reforms it should take for ratification at next year's federal election.

But while the economists are willing the politicians to "show leadership" there's a tough question they should be asking themselves: is conventional economics in reality just a rationalisation of the interests of business? Are economists spin doctors seeking to advance the greed of the rich and powerful?

That's certainly not what economics is supposed to be about. Its stated ethic is that the interests of consumers should always trump those of producers. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations carries a powerful condemnation of business people's propensity to engage in rent-seeking.

But that's just the theory. In practice these days, it's hard to find many economists pushing such a line in the public debate. One honourable exception is Professor Ross Garnaut, who has pointed to the way the push for economic reform has degenerated into rival interest groups striving for nothing more than sectional advantage.

Why are so few of his colleagues joining him in this cause? Why do so many economists stay silent while business interests distort the principles of economics to disguise their self-seeking? And, indeed, many economic consultants make their living by crafting such distortions - often through modelling - for whoever can afford their services.

One reason for the economists' silence is that most are employed by bosses who don't want them criticising business. The business economists may speak endlessly on whether or not the Reserve Bank will cut interest rates, but on little of lasting importance. Econocrats aren't supposed to express personal opinions and, in any case, their masters - of either colour - wouldn't want them offending business.

Even the academic economists enjoy less freedom to critique business behaviour in an era where the backdoor privatisation of universities has made them more dependent on business donors and where individuals are too busy publishing or perishing in journals with zero interest in Australian issues.

But the full explanation goes far deeper. Biases hidden in the neo-classical model of how markets work have caused "the economists' way of thinking" to be deeply suspicious of government intervention in markets and unthinkingly supportive of business behaviour.

One bias is the assumption that economic agents always behave rationally in pursuit of their self-interest. So individuals always know better than governments and any strange behaviour by businesses can be explained only by their rational response to distortions caused by interfering politicians.

Another bias arises from the model's unit of analysis: the individual firm or consumer. This leaves no room in the model for any kind of benefit from collective action. Rather, the market's "invisible hand" transforms agents' rational self-interest into the public good.

So economists keep mum while governments assume the budget can be returned to surplus only by reducing government spending, not by increasing taxation, and that all government spending is dubious, but distorting "tax expenditures" (which, purely by chance, heavily favour business and high income-earners) aren't a problem.

Even so, many economists are inclined to agree with business lobbies that the one exception to the fatwa against higher taxes could be an increase in the goods and services tax - provided the extra revenue is used to reduce the tax on companies or high income-earners.

As for industrial relations, conventional economic theory's primitive analysis of the labour market - which largely assumes away differences in the quality of labour, as well as assuming units of labour are no different from units of any commodity - leaves many economists happy to accept that the more bargaining power employers enjoy the better off all of us will be.

Many of these ingrained prejudices are being challenged by empirical research, but "evidence-based policy" that doesn't fit with business's perceived interests is being studiously ignored by most economists.

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War on drugs succeeding from economists' perspective

How goes the war on drugs? On the face of it, not well. But in thinking about the drug problem it helps to know a bit of economics. When you do, you see things aren't as bad as they seem.

Most people agree that the use of heroin, cocaine and amphetamines such as speed and ice can become highly addictive and, when they do, a lot of harm is done to users and their families.

So most of us agree that governments should be working to limit the use of such harmful drugs. The arguments come over how best to do it. The conventional approach is to make the production, importation, distribution, sale and consumption of such drugs illegal. Problem solved.

But we've been pursuing this prohibition approach for years, spending a fortune on policing, the courts and the high proportion of drug offenders in our jails. With all this has come a fair bit of police corruption.

And yet illegal drug use remains widespread, with still too many drug overdoses and drug deaths. The seizures, arrests and prison sentences roll on, seemingly to little effect. People may be using less heroin, but its place has been taken by ice which, if anything, seems worse.

If prohibition so clearly isn't working, shouldn't we try a different approach?

Last week the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research published research that seems to provide powerful support for the contention that the conventional approach is broken.

We've all seen TV news reports of police proudly displaying the seemingly huge quantity of drugs they've just seized after an intricate detection operation. We're told the "street value" of the seized drugs, with the implication that this success will put a hole in drug consumption.

The take-away message is clear. See? The tide has turned and we're winning the war after all.

But the study took the figures for seizures and arrests of suppliers of illegal amphetamines, cocaine and heroin, and compared them with the figures for two indirect measures of drug use: hospital emergency department admissions for drug overdoses and arrests for drug use or possession. The figures were for the whole of Australia, over the 10 years to June 2011.

The study found no evidence that increases in drug seizures and arrests of drug suppliers reduced the number of emergency department admissions or the number of arrests for use or possession.

The study also analysed three specific NSW police operations - named Balmoral Athens, Tempest and Collage - identified by the NSW Crime Commission as being so successful they had the potential to affect the market for cocaine.

It found that the operations did have the effect of reducing arrests for use or possession of cocaine, but that effect was only temporary.

In fact, the study found that increases in drug seizures were often associated with increases in hospital admissions and arrests of users. Huh? The likely explanation is that at times when there is a lot more of the drugs available, the police will be able to increase the amount they seize.

What more proof do you need? Prohibition isn't working and we should try something else. Many medical people would like to see less emphasis on criminalisation and more on harm reduction. Just imagine if we could take all the money poured into catching and punishing people and use it to help people get off drugs and sort out their lives.

But Dr Don Weatherburn and the other authors of the study argue strongly against using its findings to conclude that drug law enforcement is a waste of money.

Why not? Because, when you look at the issue the way an economist would, you realise there's more to prohibition than just attempting to stamp out all illicit drug use.

The other thing it does is force up the price of drugs. Research suggests the black-market price of cocaine in the US is between 2 1/2 and five times what it would be in a legal market. For heroin it was between eight and 19 times higher.

Economists, as you know, are great believers in the power of prices, and in using prices to change people's behaviour. There's little reason to doubt that the high price of illegal drugs hugely reduces the number of users and the amount each user uses.

Before we write off prohibition we need to consider what economists call the "counterfactual": what would the world be like if these drugs weren't outlawed? Far more people would be using them and the amount of harm needing to be reduced would be infinitely greater.

But the law enforcers need to remember what it is that's keeping the price of drugs so high. It's obviously not their success in greatly limiting the supply of drugs relative to the demand.

No, it's the high incomes drug producers and traffickers need to earn to induce them to run the great risk of imprisonment that working in this industry entails. As an economist would think of it, it's the big "risk premium" suppliers add to the prices they charge that keeps prices so high.

This suggests that rather than trying to maximise the size of the seizures they can parade on telly to prove how successful they are, law enforcers should maximise the risks of traffickers getting caught, thereby inducing them to charge a higher risk premium.

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The good news about ageing

Politicians and economists have been banging on about the ageing of the population for ages, but how much do we actually know about the likely economic consequences? Not much - until now.

We've been told incessantly that ageing spells bad news for the budget - greatly increased spending on pensions and healthcare - with ageing used to help justify the harsh spending cuts proposed in this year's budget.

In truth, it has suited the powers-that-be to exaggerate ageing's effect on the budget. And oldies are right to resent the way ageing has been presented as nothing but a terrible problem. If the fact that we're living longer, healthier lives is a "problem", it's the best kind of problem to have.

So let's ignore the budget and focus on ageing's other economic consequences, some of which are good. We'll do so with help from a speech given last week by Dr Christopher Kent, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank.

Kent says population ageing is driven by three factors: the boom in babies in the early years after World War II (1945 to 1960), the subsequent sharp drop in fertility rates that created a baby-boomer bulge, plus rising longevity thanks to decades of prosperity and advances in medical science.

The authorities have been warning about the coming consequences of ageing for so long - and how bad it will be by 2040 - that I suspect many people have given up waiting for it to start.

Well, get this: although it's got a long way to go, it's already started. The baby boomers have been retiring since the turn of the century, thus reducing the share of the population that's of usual working age (15 to 64).

Kent says that, taken by itself, ageing is estimated to have subtracted from the labour force participation rate by between 0.1 and 0.2 percentage points a year over the past decade and a half. This effect has increased a little in recent years as baby boomers have begun reaching 65.

Point is, ageing's biggest and most obvious effect is not on the budget, it's on the labour market. Everyone alive contributes to the demand for labour, but only those of us willing and able to work contribute to its supply.

So ageing constitutes a reduction in the supply of labour relative to the demand. That suggests we can expect it to cause unemployment to be lower than otherwise (which is not to say it won't continue to go up and down with the business cycle).

Since Australians have worried that there aren't enough jobs to go around ever since the middle of Gough Whitlam's reign, that sounds like good news to me. We're in the process of switching from not enough jobs to not enough workers.

(What I wonder is how long it will take for our mentality to shift. The perception that there's never enough jobs is now so deeply ingrained that any shyster with a profit-making scheme he claims will "create jobs" is greeted as a hero and demands that he be showered with subsidies.)

And with demand for labour stronger than supply, this implies upward pressure on wages. Again, sounds like good news to me. Kent adds that the converse of higher wage rates is lower returns to capital.

Kent points out that the pressure on labour supply will be felt most by industries that rely more heavily on labour, mainly service industries. Prominent among those industries will be aged care and healthcare, of course.

But, Kent adds, there's likely to be scope for labour to be reallocated among service industries, with a lower proportion of young people meaning we'll require fewer workers to care for and educate children.

There'll also be relatively less demand for workers to produce goods. That's for several reasons. First, because older people tend to devote less of their spending to goods and more services.

Second, because all of us tend to spend an increasing share of our rising incomes on services. There are limits to our consumption of food, wearing of clothes and how many TVs, fridges and cars we can cram into our house.

Third, because of its greater reliance on machines, the production of goods is more amenable to continuous improvement in labour productivity than is the production of services. As one economist famously observed, you can't improve the productivity of a quartet by reducing the number of players.

All this implies the prices of services are likely to rise relative to those of goods.

But now, gentle reader, if I've trained you well enough you'll have noticed a weakness in my argument so far. I've described only the immediate effects of ageing - what economists call the "first-round effects".

That's where most people's analysis stops, but economic analysis keeps going. One of the most important questions economists ask is: "And then what happens?" It's the second-round and subsequent effects economics is supposed to illuminate.

Seen from an economist's mindset, what I've described is a change in relative prices: the price of (or return on) labour relative to the price of (or return on) capital. The prices of services relative to the prices of goods.

Kent says it's important that these relative price changes not be prevented from occurring. Why? So market forces can go to work on them, adapting to them, modifying them and, to some extent, reversing them.

The higher relative price of labour should encourage more middle-aged people to take jobs and more oldies to delay their full retirement, thus reducing the upward pressure on wages a bit. The higher relative prices of services should encourage more people to acquire the education and training needed to work in the services sector.

And greater longevity should encourage workers to save more for their longer time in retirement.

That's what happens in market economies: things adjust.

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Science runs ahead of economists' model

The failings of economists - the bum forecasts and less-than-wise advice they give us about the choices we face - can usually be traced back to the limitations of the basic model that tends to dominate the way they think, the neo-classical model.

The thinking of economists began to ossify in the second half of the 19th century, at a time when the science of psychology was in its infancy. The model was thus consolidated at a time when our understanding of human behaviour was quite primitive.

Unfortunately, the past century of progress in psychology has revealed just how far astray are many of the economic model's assumptions about how humans tick. Although a minority of economists - "behavioural economists" - have sought to incorporate these findings into their thinking, the majority have ploughed on regardless. It keeps the maths simpler.

The model is often criticised, not least by me, for its key assumption that we are always "rational" - carefully calculating and self-interested - and never instinctive or emotional in the decisions we make, but there's another assumption that's equally unrealistic and likely to lead to wrong predictions about how we'll behave.

It's that consumers and businesses always act as isolated individuals in making their decisions, uninfluenced by the decisions those around them are making, except to the extent that the combined behaviour of others affects the prices the individual faces. In other words, the model's "unit of analysis" is the individual - the "representative consumer" or "representative firm".

In truth, humans are highly social animals and our behaviour is hugely influenced by those around us. We evolved to live in small groups, which has left us with a powerful - if often unconscious - motivation to fit in with the group and avoid being ostracised.

We feel most comfortable when we're doing what everyone else is doing; we feel distinctly uncomfortable when we're doing the opposite to everyone else. We feel great loyalty to the groups we belong to, and rivalry and suspicion towards groups we don't belong to.

This means humans - "economic agents" as economists say - are prone to herd behaviour. At the most innocuous level, this makes us heavily influenced by fashion. We like to wear what others are wearing, read what others are reading and watch the movies and TV shows that others are watching.

It's remarkable that the business world could be so conscious of the need to accommodate and, indeed, exploit our susceptibility to fashion while the economists seek to analyse our behaviour using a model that assumes it away.

More significantly, our tendency to herd behaviour affects the behaviour of markets - particularly financial markets - in ways that, though we've seen it happen many times before, almost invariably catch economists unawares.

It's our propensity for "group-think" that does most to explain booms and busts in the sharemarket, but also the upswings and downswings in the economy. We swing from overly optimistic to overly pessimistic, then back again, and we tend to all do it together.

A separate aspect of the model's exclusive focus on the individual is its overemphasis on competition and underemphasis on co-operation. It's actually the human animal's unmatched ability to co-operate in solving problems that has given our species its mastery over the planet.

Human behaviour is composed of competition and co-operation. We form co-operative groups so as to enhance their ability to compete with other groups. But the economists' model captures only one dimension of the process.

The classic example of group co-operation to facilitate competition is, of course, that bedrock of modern economies, the company. Companies - often very large, multinational companies - dominate our economy, but the model tells us nothing about what goes on inside them and economists don't have much to tell us about how the existence of big companies affects the behaviour of markets.

The final and perhaps most important twist that the economic model's focus on individuals imposes on economists' thinking is an inbuilt bias against intervention in markets by co-operation at its highest level, government.

The market of individual consumers and individual (tiny) firms is assumed to be self-sufficient and self-correcting, thus making intervention by government something alien and more likely to make things worse than better.

The reality, of course, is that governments not only need to "hold the ring" - provide the protection of property rights and legal enforcement of contracts - they also need to impose rules that protect the market, and the rest of us, from the consequences of its own herd-driven excesses.

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How economists changed their tune on minimum wages

When the Fair Work Commission announced a 3 per cent increase in the national minimum wage to more than $640 a week - or almost $16.90 an hour - from last week, employers hinted it would lead to fewer people getting jobs and maybe some people losing theirs.

And to many who've studied economics - even many professional economists - that seems likely. If the government is pushing the minimum wage above the level that would be set by the market - the "market-clearing wage" - then employers will be less willing to employ people at that rate.

That's because market forces set the market rate at an unskilled worker's "marginal product" - the value to the employer of the worker's labour.

Almost common sense, really. Except that such a conclusion is based on a host of assumptions, many of which rarely hold in the real world. And over the past 20 years, academic economists have done many empirical studies showing that's not how minimum wages work in practice. They've also developed more sophisticated theories that better fit the empirical facts. It's all explained in the June issue of the ACTU's Economic Bulletin.

As a result, there's been a big swing in academic thinking on the question of the minimum wage. Last year, researchers at the University of Chicago asked a panel of economists from top US universities whether they agreed with the statement that "the distortionary costs of raising the federal minimum wage to $US9 per hour and indexing it to inflation are sufficiently small compared with the benefits to low-skilled workers who can find employment that this would be a desirable policy".

Fully 62 per cent agreed and 16 per cent disagreed, leaving 22 per cent uncertain.

Earlier this year, more than 600 US economists - including seven Nobel laureates - signed an open letter to Congress advocating a $US10.10 minimum wage. They said that, because of important developments in the academic literature, "the weight of evidence now [shows] that increases in the minimum wage have had little or no negative effect on the employment of minimum-wage workers".

The first such study, published by David Card and Alan Krueger in 1994, compared fast food employment in New Jersey and Pennsylvania after one state raised its minimum wage and the other didn't. They did not find a significant effect on employment.

Since then, many similar US "natural experiments" have been studied and have reached similar findings. In Britain, the Low Pay Commission has commissioned more than 130 pieces of research, with the great majority finding that minimum wages boost workers' pay but don't harm employment.

There's been less research in Australia, but one study by economists at the Australian National University, Alison Booth and Pamela Katic, suggests that the facts in Australia seem to fit the "dynamic monopsony" model of wage-fixing.

Under the simple textbook, "perfect competition" model of the market for labour, individual firms face a horizontal supply curve: each firm is so small that its demand for labour has no effect on the price of labour. It can buy as much labour as it needs at an unchanged price.

In the dynamic monopsony model, however, each firm faces an upward-sloping labour supply curve. This is because more realistic assumptions recognise the existence of "imperfections" or, more specifically, "frictions".

Such as? Workers may not have perfect information about all the alternative jobs they could take and this could make them cautious about moving. Searching for a job may involve costs in time or money. Workers and jobs may be mismatched geographically, so changing jobs may involve greater transport costs. Workers - being humans rather than inanimate commodities - may not have identical preferences about the jobs available.

In other words, there are practical reasons why it takes a lot for a worker to want to leave their job.

These frictions, or "transaction costs", are assumed away in the simple model. But their existence can result in employers having market power, which they can take advantage of to pay workers less than the value of what they produce (their marginal product).
Economists call such power "monopsony" power. Just as a monopolist is a single seller, so a monopsonist is a single buyer. But don't take that word too literally. An employer with monopsony power doesn't need to be a monopolist in the market for its product (the "product" market), nor the sole buyer of labour in the region or the industry.
"A single employer in a market with many employers can have monopsonistic power if workers bear costs of job search," the article continues. In other words, it possesses a degree of monopsony power.

The point is, if a firm is facing an upward-sloping labour supply curve and wants to hire more workers, it may need to pay a higher wage than it is paying its existing workers. So, if it goes ahead with hiring, it will need to increase the wage rates of its existing workers.

And this means the firm's profit-maximising level of employment and wages will both be lower than they would be under perfect competition.

In such a model, if the minimum wage rate is set at or below the marginal product of labour, this won't cause employment to fall and may cause it to rise. Monopsonistic models don't have an unambiguous prediction for the employment effect of a minimum wage.

A paper by Bhaskar, Manning and To, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2002, concluded that "a minimum wage set moderately above the market wage may have a positive effect or a negative effect on employment, but the size of this effect will generally be small".

It will be interesting to see how long it takes those many Australian economists who don't specialise in studying the labour market to catch up with this change in their profession's thinking.

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Economists face criticism over poor ethics

Are economists ethical? Short answer: no more than most. Long answer: well, it's not something they think about much.

The question of ethics is starting to raise its head among economists, both overseas and in Australia, particularly in NSW. It's an issue the Sydney branch of the Economic Society is likely to start debating in the next few months.

The issue is arising as more economists find ways to sell their services to big business for big bucks. Business is attracted by the status, expertise and authority economists bring, and is willing to pay for it.

Various aspects of conventional economics make economists susceptible to such transactions. Almost all economists believe in the market system and believe that the bigger the economy grows the better off we are. So they have an inbuilt sympathy with business and its objectives.

They believe self-interest is a good thing because it's what motivates a market economy. It should never be a bad thing because it's held in check by countervailing market forces.

And there's a belief among economists that their discipline is "positive" rather than "normative". It's a "value-free" description of how the economy actually works, not a statement of opinion about how it should work.

It's because of this belief that, for example, many economists take no account of the implications of their recommendations for the way income is distributed between rich and poor. That's a "value" question they aren't qualified to comment on and so leave to others, such as politicians.

That's what they say when challenged. When they're not challenged they usually give the impression that distributional issues don't arise and economic efficiency is the only issue worth considering.

In truth, the neo-classical model is loaded with values, the most important being that individualism is superior to communitarianism.

So you see why ethics isn't something economists think much about. And this is reinforced by the profession's lack of organisation. Economics is unregulated; anyone can call themselves an economist (I don't, by the way).

Economics has no true professional body. The Economic Society is the closest they come, but it's essentially a discussion group that anyone can join. Its other function is to sponsor the academic economists' annual conference and the main Australian economic journal (which the academics don't rate highly because it's only Australian).

Without a proper professional association you could argue economists aren't a profession, just an occupation. Most are employed by governments and, these days, by banks and other financial services firms, which means they're not free to express opinions at variance with those of their employer. Academic economists are free, but often don't bother.

The question of economists' ethical standards arose in the US after the global financial crisis, when impertinent journalists pointed out that academic economists were writing articles posing as independent experts, without disclosing the financial firms they were affiliated with or for whom they had done consultancy work.

In Australia the spur is the rise of the new breed of economic consultancy firms, which are paid to provide allegedly independent modelling to private interests seeking to lobby governments. Sometimes even governments commission private modelling to provide evidence supporting some policy the pollies are pursuing.

For some reason, when the independent consultants run their models they invariably reach conclusions that support their paying customer's proposal. Remarkable.

These carefully contrived conclusions are then used to bamboozle the public, politicians and even judges who don't know enough economics to know how dodgy many modelling exercises are and how easily models can be tweaked to produce whatever answer you're seeking.

The issue has reached a head in NSW, where Dr Richard Denniss, of the Australia Institute, has appeared as an expert witness in a couple of court cases disputing the "independent" modelling being used to claim the development of a new mine will bring huge economic benefits to the district.

One judge was scathing in his condemnation of the use of an "input/output model" to exaggerate the indirect job creation from a project. A report by the independent Planning Assessment Commission on another project criticised the NSW Department of Planning for its uncritical acceptance of estimates of the project's economic benefits that had been challenged and were "not credible".

Last week the department's new minister, Pru Goward, announced that it would commission separate expert economic analysis of all future major mining projects. Good luck.

Issues of independence and conduct will be discussed during the NSW Economic Society's forum on cost-benefit analysis on July 18. And a later meeting of the society is expected to debate whether economists need a code of ethics. I'd start with an ethical code for modellers.

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Business self-interest and economic ideology a good fit

We will hear a few toned-down echoes of the report of the National Commission of Audit in Tuesday's budget but, apart from that, the memory of its more extraordinary proposals is already fading. For most Coalition backbenchers, that can't come soon enough.

But I think the audit commission has done us a great service. It has been hugely instructive. The business people and economists on the commission offered us a vision of a dystopian future.

It's a view of what lies at the end of the road the more extreme economic rationalists are trying to lead us down. If you've ever wondered what life would be like if we accepted all their advice, now you know.

It would be a harsher, less caring world, where daily life was more cut-throat, where the gap between rich and poor widened more rapidly and where the proportion of households falling below the poverty line increased every year.

Ah, but think of the advantages: we would have fixed the budget problem and started getting the public debt down without having to pay any more tax. And that's not all: we'd be left with a much more efficient economy.

Are the report's proposals the product of self-interest or ideology? Fair bit of both. To oversimplify, the business people would be motivated mainly by self-interest. They don't tend to be big on ideology - at least, not the sort that's internally consistent.

The economists, on the other hand, would be driven mainly by ideology. When you study economics you're taught a simple model of the way the economy works. It's supposed to be just a useful analytical tool, but it tends to take over the thinking of those who get jobs as practising economists. Those who become convinced the simplest version of this "neo-classical" model holds an equally simple answer to most economic problems, come up with policy recommendations just like those in the report.

The self-interest in the report is easily seen: it would fix the budget problem - and, don't be in any doubt, there is a problem - by taking money from low income-earners and middle income-earners, but not high income-earners.

The report fits perfectly with a wry observation from John Kenneth Galbraith, as paraphrased by the late John Button: "The rich need more money as an incentive and the poor need less money as an incentive."

But if you want to understand the ideology behind the report - what prompted the economists on the commission to advocate the harsh measures they did - you need to know a little about the strengths and weaknesses of the simple neoclassical model that fundamentalist economists take as their infallible guide.

It assumes that pretty much all you need to know about the economic dimension of our lives is that markets work by allowing prices to adjust and thereby bring the demand for and the supply of particular goods or services into balance. Except in rare cases, the main thing that would stop this process keeping the economy in balance and working well is government meddling in the market.

So the model predisposes those who take it literally to believe the less governments do the better. Government needs to be as small as possible, so if government spending exceeds its revenue from taxes, the only acceptable answer is to cut spending to fit. To solve the problem by increasing taxes would damage the economy.

The model is built on various assumptions. One is that all of us are "rational" (hard-headed, with perfect self-control), so we don't need governments stopping us doing destructive things (such as smoking or becoming obese) or even using payments to nudge us in the right direction. Indeed, we'd all be better off if governments gave us more freedom (and thus didn't need to make us pay so much tax).

Two other key assumptions are that we all operate as individuals and that what makes the economy work efficiently is competition between us. So the model casts aside the possibility that we're social animals who identify with groups and like acting in groups, even groups as large as "the community". Nor does it have any place for the possibility that sometimes co-operation between us gets better results than competition between us.

It assumes the notion of "shared responsibility" - of using the budget to require the well-off to subsidise the less well-off - could only discourage the poor from standing on their own feet and so make things worse on both sides of the deal.

This explains why the report's main savings come from making even tighter the already very tight means-testing of access to government benefits. It would abandon Medicare's most fundamental principle of universality - treating everybody equally and paying for the system via general taxation - to introduce co-payments and means-testing.

The model further implies that the more aspects of our lives that are run on market principles the better off we'll be. So it advocates greater competition between public and private schools, public and private hospitals, private health funds, universities and private education providers (as well as among big and small unis) and between rich states and poor states (South Australia and Tasmania).

It's change that would move us from one person, one vote towards one dollar, one vote. For those of us who have lots of dollars, what a paradise it would be.

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Badly taught economics has high opportunity cost

Is it possible the discipline of economics is becoming so mathematical it's in the process of disappearing up its own fundament?

While you're thinking about that, let me take the opportunity to ask you a quiz question (it's a holiday weekend, after all).

You've won a free ticket to see an Eric Clapton concert (which has no resale value). Bob Dylan is performing on the same night and is your next-best alternative activity. Tickets to see Dylan cost $40. On any given day, you'd be willing to pay up to $50 to see Dylan. Assume there are no other costs of seeing either performer.

So what is the ''opportunity cost'' of seeing Clapton? Is it $0, $10, $40 or $50? Take your time (especially if you fancy yourself as an economist).

The opportunity cost of a decision is the value (benefit) of the next-best alternative. So the right answer is $10. When you go to the Clapton concert you forgo the $50 of benefit you would have received from going to the Dylan concert. But that's the gross benefit. You also forgo the $40 of cost, so the net benefit you forgo is $10.

If you didn't get the right answer, don't feel too bad. When two economists at Georgia State University, Paul Ferraro and Laura Taylor, asked that question of almost 200 economists attending a professional conference, almost 80 per cent got the wrong answer.

The answers they gave were spread across the four possible answers, with more than a quarter saying $50, apparently believing it was only the ''willingness to pay'' of $50 that was relevant.
The next most popular answer was $40, apparently because people thought the cost of a Dylan ticket must also have been the opportunity cost. Those who answered $0 must have concluded there could be no opportunity cost if the Clapton concert was free.

This left fewer than 22 per cent of respondents getting the right answer. And if that (along with your own failure to get it right) doesn't shock you, it should.

Opportunity cost is probably the most fundamental concept in economics. One introductory textbook lists it along with ''marginalism'' and ''efficient markets'' as three of economics' most fundamental concepts. Opp cost seems a pathetically simple concept, but non-economists keep forgetting to consider it - meaning they don't always make the best decisions about how to spend the limited time and money available to them.

And it seems the concept isn't as simple as we assume. If about 80 per cent of non-economists got the question wrong, that would be a pity, but not too surprising. But the respondents to the survey were, in the authors' words, ''among the most well-trained economists on the planet''. Two-thirds of the respondents had PhDs, with the remainder studying for their PhD.

What's more, more than 60 per cent of them had actually taught introductory economics courses. Those who'd taught the course were no more likely to get the right answer than those who hadn't, nor were those who'd attended one of America's top-30 graduate schools, nor those who'd graduated before 1996 rather than after it.

The only significant differences were in the economists' field of specialisation. Only the tiny number specialising in micro-economic theory got a halfway respectable score, followed well back by those doing applied micro. Worst were those doing macro or international economics.

The first reason for concern is what these results say about the quality of the teaching of economics at postgraduate level. After surveying students in seven top-ranking US graduate programs in 1987, David Colander, a leading researcher of the economics profession, concluded the programs emphasised mathematics to the detriment of empirical content and economic reasoning.

A commission on graduate education in economics in 1991 found that it generated ''too many idiot savants, skilled in technique but innocent of real economic issues''. This survey suggests little improvement since then.

Does it matter for economic research if economists can't identify opportunity cost? ''Obviously,'' the authors say, ''it matters for PhD economists who take jobs in the private or government sectors, in which opportunity costs are the fodder of daily decisions …

''Theoretical research rarely requires that an individual calculate an opportunity cost in the form of a word problem. Empirical research tends to focus more on appropriate techniques to make inferences about parameter values in models.

''But can economists be relevant in the world of ideas and policy if we cannot answer simple … opportunity cost questions?''

But whatever the failings of post-graduate teaching, there's also failure at the undergraduate level. The authors say the concept of opportunity cost is usually covered in the first week of introductory undergraduate classes and often deemed so straightforward as to not require further teaching time.

A Nobel laureate complained that ''the watered-down encyclopaedia which constitutes the present course in beginning college economics does not teach the student how to think on economic questions. The brief exposure to each of a vast array of techniques and problems leaves the student with no basic economic logic with which to analyse the economic questions he will face as a citizen.'' That was George Stigler, writing as long ago as 1963.

The authors say that ''if we are not able to instil in our students a deep and intuitive understanding of one of the most fundamental ideas that the discipline has to offer (and the idea whose frequent application could do most good in peoples' private and public lives) then we wonder what we can claim as our value-added to the college curriculum''.

It makes me wonder whether, in its preoccupation with using maths to make itself more ''rigorous'' and thus academically respectable, economics has lost its way.

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Many economists don't get the labour market

The world is full of economists who, though they know little of the specifics of labour economics, confidently propose policies for managing the labour market based on their general knowledge of the neo-classical model. All markets are much the same, aren't they?

I fear this is the best we'll get from the Productivity Commission's inquiry into regulation of the labour market. So a test of the commission's report will be whether it displays knowledge of advanced thinking on how labour markets actually work or is just another neo-liberal rant about free markets.

In their efforts to bone up on the topic, the commissioners could do worse than start with a quick read of Nobel laureate Robert Solow's 90-page classic, The Labor Market as a Social Institution.

Since the book was published in 1990, it should be old hat to economists, but I doubt it is. If so, it shows how little effort most economists - even academic economists - have put into studying the labour market.

Solow starts by reminding economists of a glaring problem they prefer not to think about: if the market for labour is just a market like any other market, and so is capable of being adequately analysed by the economists' standard tool kit of demand and supply - prices adjust until demand and supply are equal and the market "clears" - how come the labour market never clears?

How come we always have high unemployment, which shoots up during downturns and stays very high for years before falling only slowly?

To put the puzzle another way, if the labour market works like any other market, making wages just a price like any other price, why don't wages fall and keep falling as long as the supply of labour exceeds the demand for it?

Why do nominal wages almost never fall? Why is it the closest we ever get is nominal wages not rising as fast as ordinary prices, so wages fall a bit in "real terms"?

In a country with Australia's history of many minimum wages, carefully specified in awards and agreements, it's easy for economists to claim wages can't fall because they're being held up by legal minimums. But this doesn't wash. In reality, many if not most wages are well above the legal minimum, meaning the minimum isn't "binding" and so isn't stopping actual nominal wages from falling back to the minimum. But they don't - and nor do they in the US, where the minimum wage is kept so low it's almost never binding.

Overseas, some extreme neo-classical economists have tried to escape this problem by arguing most unemployment is voluntary rather than involuntary. It just so happens that, when economies turn down, a lot of people decide now's the time to take unpaid holidays and stay on them for many months. Yeah, right.

Solow says a more credible line of explanation is to admit the obvious: there must be something about labour markets that makes them different from other markets (such as the market for cars, or the market for bank loans) and so renders economists' usual analytical tools inadequate.

And it's not hard to think of what that something could be. Other markets are for the purchase and sale of inanimate objects, whereas every unit of labour bought or sold comes with a real live human attached. Every human is different - some are smart, some aren't; some work hard, some don't; some are co-operative, some aren't - and bosses turn out to be humans, too.

The thing about humans is they have egos and feelings and moods. One apple doesn't care about the other apples in the barrel, but a human cares about how they're being treated by their human boss, as well about how they're being treated relative to all the other humans working for the boss.

Hence the title of Solow's book. Unlike other markets, the labour market is also a social institution. Only an economist could imagine you could analyse the labour market successfully without taking account of the human factor.

So maybe it's the social dimension of labour that explains why wages are inflexible and the labour market doesn't clear. Solow uses the work of some woman whose name seems vaguely familiar, a Janet Yellen, and her Noble-prize-winning husband, George Akerlof to outline one possible explanation of the conundrum, "the fair-wage-effort hypothesis".

The "efficiency-wage theory" says that in the modern economy workers often have some control over their own productivity. They produce more when they are strongly motivated to do so. "One way for an employer to provide more motivation is by paying more than other employers do; another is to threaten to fire the excessively unproductive if and when they are detected," Solow says.

If that sounds obvious, note the radical implication: a firm's physical productivity depends not just on how much labour (and capital) it uses, but also on how well the labour is paid. If so, wages won't fall just because unemployment rises.

Yellen and Akerlof's version of efficient-wage theory says workers who believe they're being paid "a fair day's wage" feel a social obligation to deliver "a fair day's work" in return.

A different approach is "insider-outsider theory". This says the people already working for a firm (the insiders) are likely to be more productive than those who aren't (the outsiders) because they understand how the firm works. If so, the insiders are helping to generate "economic rent" for the firm and thus are able to share this rent by negotiating higher wages.

An outsider may be prepared to work for the firm for a smaller wage, but the boss won't want to risk reducing his productivity by switching from insiders to outsiders.

Whichever of those theories you find more persuasive, the point is the workings of real-world labour markets are far more complicated than most economists realise. Let's hope the Productivity Commission does.

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Who's paying the rent are are you getting any?

What is rent? You don't make it past the elementary economics class unless you know that's a trick question. In economics there are two kinds of rent: common or garden rent and "economic rent".

Obviously, ordinary rent is what you pay for the use of a building or land. By contrast, economic rent (also called quasi rent) is the amount paid for any "factor of production" - land, labour or capital - in excess of the amount it needs to be paid to keep it in its present use (which is its "opportunity cost").

If you think you've never heard of economic rent before, you're probably wrong - unless you haven't heard of the minerals resource rent tax or of "rent-seeking".

It doesn't get talked about a lot, but economic rent is widespread in every real-world economy, making it something worth talking about. You never know, you may be getting a bit yourself (I'm getting loads).

Economic rent isn't a cost of production that contributes to the selling price of the factor - the land, the physical capital or the labour. Rather, it's earnings to the owner of the factor determined by the selling price.

Economic rent is equivalent to "producer surplus" in the market for goods and services. When it's received by a business it's also known as "above-normal profits" or "super profits" (does that term ring a bell?).

Economists define profit differently to accountants. To an accountant, profit is sales revenue minus actual costs. To an economist, costs involve actual costs plus the opportunity cost of the financial capital invested in the business - that is, the most the capital would earn in a different industry with an equivalent degree of risk. (For unincorporated businesses, the opportunity cost also includes the highest wage the proprietor could earn in a different job.)

The opportunity cost of the capital invested in the business is what economists call "normal profit". Any actual profit in excess of actual costs plus normal profit is above-normal profit and likely to be the consequence of economic rents.

What is it that allows some factors of production to earn economic rent - higher returns than those needed to keep them in the business? Scarcity or, better, exclusivity. The factor possesses some highly desirable characteristic that means there's not enough of it to go around, so people fight over it and, in the process, bid up its price.

In a textbook economy such a situation wouldn't last long because the market would have an incentive to increase the supply of the desirable factor to meet the high demand. In real-world economies, economic rents can persist because they're not easily replicated. The supply of harbourside land, for instance, is fixed.

The exclusivity of factors may be natural or contrived. Governments often create economic rents by limiting the number of licences they're willing to issue to participants in particular industries - taxi plates, for example.

Patents and copyright are designed to allow creators to enjoy economic rents for a fixed time. This implies monopoly profits are a form of economic rent, although rents can be enjoyed by multiple firms in an industry.

And don't forget many workers benefit from rents. Unions may be able to limit the supply of a particular occupation and so force wages above what they would otherwise be. In this, however, trade unions are amateurs compared with the colleges of medical specialists.

But some rents aren't contrived. If I were prepared to do my job for $60,000 a year but my boss paid me $100,000, I'd be enjoying economic rent of $40,000 a year. Why would he pay me more than my "reservation wage"? Because if he didn't, a rival employer would.

Of course, the people who do best in the rent stakes are film stars, sports stars and the like. Such people have far more talent than the rest of us, but they also have a name - are a brand - that attracts more customers than other actors or players do.

The point of all this is that, from a social (community-wide) point of view, economic rent is a waste. It's a price customers pay that does nothing to increase the production of goods and services. If we could eliminate it - say by taxing it away - it wouldn't reduce production, just the incomes of the owners of scarce resources.

This, of course, is the justification for the minerals resource rent tax. There is a lot of economic rent associated with the exploitation of mineral deposits, particularly in Australia, because world reserves of certain minerals are relatively limited and because much of our supply is high quality and easily won.

Since these resources belong to us, not the mining companies we permit to extract them, we'd be mugs not to tax much of that rent rather than letting largely foreign companies walk away with most of it.

I hope by now you understand why the Abbott government's talk of all the damage the mining tax is doing to the economy is tosh, intended to mislead the economically undereducated. (Which is not to say Labor's tax was well designed - it wasn't.)

It is rational for workers to be "rent-seekers" in the sense that they equip themselves with scarce skills and work hard at being the best in their field. Similarly, it is rational for firms to seek out niches where prices far exceed costs.

But that's not what the term "rent-seeker" - which comes from the libertarian "public choice theory" - is usually taken to mean. It refers to groups that lobby the government for tax, spending or regulatory policies that benefit the lobbyists at the expense of taxpayers or consumers, or their rivals.

As The Economist magazine puts it in its business dictionary, it means "cutting yourself a bigger slice of the cake rather than making the cake bigger".

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Economist proposes a socio-economic model

What can economists tell us about love and power, why people are loyal, how groups form and how they get their members to abide by the group's norms of acceptable behaviour? Not much.
Everyone knows conventional economics is built on a stick-figure conception of humans and the way they work.
 
Until now. An economics professor at the University of Queensland, Paul Frijters, has attempted the remarkably ambitious project of developing a unified theory of human behaviour, turning the mainstream model of the economic system into a model of the socio-economic system.

With help from Dr Gigi Foster, of the University of NSW, he's set it all out in the book An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups and Networks. We'll find out soon enough what the rest of the economics profession makes of it.

He starts with the principles of mainstream economics, then adds and integrates selected ideas his research has determined have considerable power in explaining human behaviour.

The bit he starts with, which comes straight from the mainstream, is the assumption that humans are carefully calculating maximisers of their personal benefit. Or, as Frijters prefers to put it, ''humans are mainly motivated by greed''.

This conception of ''homo economicus'' - economic man - emerged in the Enlightenment period. In the early Middle Ages, by contrast, materialism was seen in society as strongly immoral, Frijters explains.
Even so, it's a quite one-dimensional conception of human behaviour. We're a lot more complicated than that. This assumption accounts for much of the criticism of conventional economics (including from yours truly).

So the ''core concepts'' Frijters adds to the conventional assumption of ''greed'' aim to broaden the model's explanation of human motivations and behaviour.

The first concept he adds is ''love'', by which he means love for other humans, but also love for one's beliefs. ''Love is defined as a form of unconditional loyalty, and will be said to be present whenever a person would be willing to help advance the interests of the object of his love, even if the object of his love would not notice the help and even if the loving person would receive no observable reward,'' Frijters says. So love includes the ideas of altruism and loyalty.

''Selfish materialism is extremely powerful in explaining many of our laws, our customs, our politics, and our choices as consumers. Yet selfish materialism alone cannot lead to the kind of human organisations we see in reality.

''I expect to see love as a major player involved in almost every facet of an individual's decision making ? Love within companies should be an integral part of how teams of people actually get things done within organisations.''

Another major criticism of the simple model of conventional economics is its assumption that each of us acts only as an individual, unaffected by the behaviour of those around us. This means no ''economic actor'' has more power than another.

In truth, humans are a group animal whose self-image is inextricably linked to the groups of which they are part. And the reality is that the dominant power relations in modern societies aren't between one individual and another, but rather between individuals and groups.

So the second feature Frijters adds to the mainstream view is groups and the power they generate. Each of us is a member of any number of groups, affecting our family life, social life and working life. Beyond that, our religion, ethnicity and nationality make us members of more, often powerful, groups.

It's because groups generate and exercise power that they need to be added to the model. Power is the ability to influence the behaviour of others. Part of this power comes from the development of norms of acceptable behaviour within the group. Many of us feel considerable loyalty to the groups we're in, which partly explains why we confirm to group norms.

Frijters argues there are five basic types of social groups: small hierarchies, with a clear leader, a few of high rank and a group of underlings totalling no more than a few dozen individuals in all; small circles of reciprocity, with people who are equals and share a common goal; large hierarchies, where members don't know each other; large circles of reciprocity; and networks.

Networks are his third addition to the mainstream view. They are facilitators of exchange - of goods and services, or just information. They exists because of the need to overcome ''frictions'' in markets arising from the information and transactions costs the simple mainstream model assumes away.
Individuals search for goods, buyers and suppliers within networks of small size or large anonymous networks such as the internet.

So how does Frijters' model improve on the answers to questions from the mainstream model? What questions does it answer that the mainstream can't?

On the common questions of whether international trade should be encouraged or protected against, what governments should do about monopolies and how to discourage firms from polluting, his model doesn't much change the conventional answers.

But it can answer some questions the conventional approach can't. With its assumption of calculating, self-interested behaviour, the old approach can't explain why people go to the bother of voting when the chance one vote will change the outcome is minuscule.

Frijter's model says people vote because they're idealistic and identify with the group that is Australian voters.

Nor can the old approach explain why people don't avoid or evade paying tax a lot more than they do. Rates of ''voluntary compliance'' are, in fact, surprisingly high (though not as high as in the old days).
Frijter's model says people feel loyalty to the group of fellow Australians and conform to the social norm that paying taxes is a form of reciprocity that's reasonable to expect of members of the group.

And this is no idle question. He says getting people to pay taxes is probably the single most important ingredient supporting our system of governance.

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Death of man who inspired the emissions trading scheme

The man who first thought that governments should auction off rather give away the rights to such things as broadcast spectrum or taxi licences, and who started the thinking that led to the invention of emission trading schemes, died last week at the age of 102.

He also inspired the joke economists tell each other as a warning against reading too much into statistics: "If you torture the data long enough, it will confess."

He was British-American economist Ronald Coase (rhymes with rose), of the University of Chicago, who in 1991 was awarded the Nobel prize for his trouble.

The first of his discoveries came in 1937 and launched a whole sub-field of economics, but now seems pathetically obvious. He asked why firms exist. Why do capitalists employ people to make or do lots of things for them, when most of those things could be bought from the market?

Why are many of the things produced by a "market economy" actually produced inside firms - some of them employing many thousands of people - where employees have to do as they're told by the boss and the rules of the market don't apply?

His answer was that buying things from others in the marketplace involved hidden costs, which he dubbed "transaction costs" - the cost of finding the best deal, checking quality, negotiating a price, writing a watertight contract and then, if necessary, enforcing that contract.

Business people would do things "in house" whenever this was cheaper than incurring all the transaction costs involved in buying from the market. (But once you start thinking like that, it eventually occurs to you that there will be times when it's cheaper to "outsource" the provision of services you formerly provided in-house.)

In a paper on the US Federal Communications Commission, written in 1959, Coase argued that the transaction costs faced by the commission in deciding which of the many applicants for a broadcast licence would make the greatest contribution to the economy were impossibly high.

But this did not justify the commission continuing to give away licences to whomever it saw fit. It would be better to replicate market conditions by auctioning the licence to the highest bidder. This way, the licence would go to the firm most likely to put the licence to its "highest-valued use".

Do you see how this led to the invention of the tradeable permit? Say the government is trying to limit to a certain level the catching of a particular type of fish, or limit emissions that cause acid rain, or those that cause climate change.

It issues permits for firms to catch or emit up to that level. Because this level is lower than the market would otherwise produce, it has thereby increased the item's "scarcity value", allowing firms with permits to get away with charging a higher price.

If it gives the permits away to firms, it's effectively allowing them to levy a tax on their customers. If it auctions the permits, it's ensuring the proceeds of the disguised tax are collected by the taxman.

The firms that get the licences by bidding highest can be expected to pay no more than allows them to continue profitably producing whatever it is. They'll also have a monetary incentive to find ways to continue producing their product while generating fewer emissions.

And by allowing firms to trade their permits - say, to sell any they discover they don't need - you increase their incentive to find ways to reduce their emissions, as well as ensuring the burden of reducing emissions is shifted to those firms that can do so at the lowest cost.

But Coase's greatest claim to fame came from a paper he wrote in 1960, The Problem of Social Cost, which became the all-time most cited paper by other academic economists and made him the darling of libertarians and free-market conservatives.

Social costs - also known as "negative externalities" - are costs imposed on third parties by transactions between people in the marketplace. Say I run a factory that imposes a lot of noise on my neighbours, emits fumes and puts gunk into the local river. Since this polluting costs me nothing it represents costs borne by the community, not by me and my customers. It's a cost that's "external" to the market.

What should governments do about this problem? The traditional answer was for them to protect the victims of this action by imposing restrictions or obligations on the perpetrator.

But Coase argued that, simply by clarifying the property rights involved, governments could leave it to the affected parties to negotiate a satisfactory solution. Again, the solution could be left to the market.

What's more, this ability to reach a privately negotiated solution meant it didn't matter to which side the government awarded the property rights. The libertarians loved this so much they called it the "Coase theorem".

What they liked was that it appeared to justify a greatly reduced role for governments in solving environmental problems. That it would also favour the rich and powerful was, of course, purely coincidental.

Over the years, however, Coase made it clear the libertarians had taken him out of context. For one thing, he'd argued that to whom you awarded the property rights made no difference from the perspective of economic efficiency. Obviously, it made a big difference from an equity or fairness perspective.

And his theorem had been based on the explicit assumption that the transaction costs involved in negotiating a solution were negligible. Not surprisingly, the man who had discovered transaction costs thought that, in the real world, transaction costs would be significant and often prohibitive.

Is it easy for all the people affected by a factory's pollution to get together and negotiate a satisfactory solution with a rich factory owner? Sounds to me like a case for government intervention.

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