The era of neoliberalism is ending and reversing

If there's some trend in the world that we don't much like but has been happening for ages, there's a human tendency to assume it will keep on forever and just get worse. Occasionally, however, this moment signals it won't be long before it starts going away.

I'm a great believer in the pendulum theory of history: trends in human activity go on and on until they reach an unacceptable extreme, and then one day they turn and start going back the way they came.

That's certainly the way fashions in economics and government policy work. Consider the story since the end of World War II, using Britain as our guide.

There was a great reforming spirit after the war, and much that needed fixing. The economy wasn't working well and ordinary people – who'd done their duty so selflessly during the war – weren't getting a fair share of the economic rewards.

So the Brits set about installing the welfare state – comprehensive social security payments and a national health service in which most doctors became government employees – and "nationalising" many troublesome but important industries.

This new trend of nationalisation was copied in other countries including, to an extent, Oz.

But as the years rolled by it became clear that Britain's economy wasn't working well. Eventually, a new Boudica rose up, name of Maggie Thatcher, to set things right.

The problem was obvious: too much of the economy owned and run by the government and all those civil servants. Too many rules and regulations. The economy was inflexible and unresponsive. The unions had too much power and were abusing it, always on strike until they got their way.

The answer was to "privatise" most of the nationalised industries and get the unions back in their box.

We need to unshackle the power of the market, with its much greater ability to respond to changing times, greater desire to satisfy customers' needs and motivation to root out inefficiency.

This new trend of privatisation and deregulation – also pushed by Ronald Reagan in the US – has been copied in many developed economies, not least here.

By the early 1980s our economy wasn't working all that well. In a world of floating currencies, we were still trying to fix our exchange rate, battling speculators who always won.

Our banks were a joke, never able to lend enough for a home loan, so you went to a building society or they fitted you up with an expensive second mortgage from their finance company.

We'd been trying to cut ourselves off from the world with high barriers against imports, but been left with an economy that was highly inflation-prone, with much higher unemployment to boot.

Paul Keating and Bob Hawke set about modernising the economy, opening it up to a rapidly globalising world. They didn't ape Thatcher so much as start listening to the advice Treasury had been giving governments for years.

You've detected history's pendulum at work, I trust. Look at it over the decades and you see the fashion in management of the economy swinging from one extreme to the other.

Why does it swing so far? Because the truth – the happy medium – is somewhere in the middle but, because it's some combination of market forces and government management, is devilishly hard to find.

Much easier and more satisfying to champion one extreme or the other.

Why bring this up now? Because, if you hadn't noticed, this particular pendulum has just started swinging back.

As no less an authority than The Economist magazine has judged, the "neoliberal consensus" has collapsed.

For almost 40 years in the English-speaking economies, both sides of politics have accepted that businesses and individuals should be allowed to go about their affairs with as little restriction as possible.

But now both sides are stepping back from that attitude, doing so under pressure from voters growing increasingly unhappy about the state of the economy – in Oz, low wage growth, high energy costs, a seeming epidemic of business lawlessness and a lengthening list of government outsourcing stuff-ups – and the special treatment accorded to business.

You can see it overseas in the electoral popularity of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, and the anti-establishment revolts in the Brexit vote and the election of Donald Trump.

It didn't do her any good, but you see it in Theresa May's Conservative Party election manifesto: "We do not believe in untrammelled free markets. We reject the cult of selfish individualism. We abhor social division, injustice, unfairness and inequality."

Here, you see it in Malcolm Turnbull's reaction to the failed reform of the national electricity market, with his willingness to impose export restrictions on gas companies, buy Snowy Mountains hydro back from the states and contemplate federal construction of new coal-fired power stations.

You see it in Bill Shorten's policy of curbing negative gearing and the capital gains tax discount, his opposition to cuts in the company tax rate and willingness to legislate to restore and protect weekend penalty rates.

I reckon there's a lot more government assertiveness to come. You don't fancy a lifetime of precarious employment in the "gig economy" for yourself or your kids?

Don't worry, before long governments will legislate to protect employees rights at work – just as they used to in the old days.

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Worsening school performance is everyone’s business

Amid all the uncertainty about where we'll be left by the many pressures bearing on us and our economy – climate change and digital disruption, for starters – there's one truth we can cling to: the more we enhance our natural capital and our human capital, the better placed we're likely to be.

Unfortunately, seeing the sense of this is a lot easier than ensuring it happens.

On natural capital – the preservation of species and physical resources, and the healthy functioning of the ecosystem – we've got one whole side of politics still struggling to get its climate-change deniers back in their box.

Even on human capital – the acquisition of knowledge and know-how – there's plenty of conflict, ranging from economic rationalists who think constraining the growth in government spending and taxation more important than accruing human capital, to people in the education system who think the adequacy of their present performance is no one's business but their own.

On the one hand, we've got the smaller-government brigade saying the performance of, say, school education can be fixed without spending an extra dollar.

On the other, we have teachers – some of them, anyway – arguing there's no problem that having taxpayers hand over a lot more bucks wouldn't fix.

How would the extra money be spent? That's for teachers and education departments to decide, and for everyone who isn't a teacher – and therefore knows nothing about schools – to mind their own beeswax.

The smaller-government brigade closes its eyes to the need to improve the performance of our schools and to the significant economic and social gains we stand to make by improving that performance.

The size of these gains can be demonstrated using the Fairfax-Lateral Economics index of Australia's wellbeing, compiled by Dr Nicholas Gruen and published every quarter upon the release of the national accounts.

The index overcomes the limitations of gross domestic product as a measure of economic progress by starting with the most appropriate modification of GDP – real net national disposable income – and adding to it estimates of the value of human capital, natural capital, the effects of distributional inequality, environmental amenity, health and employment-related satisfaction.

The measure of human capital takes account of early childhood risk, school performance, tertiary education, innovation (multi-factor productivity) and skills atrophy from long-term unemployment.

The indicator used to measure our progress in school education is the change in our score from the regular testing of our 15-year-olds' reading ability under the OECD's Program for International Student Assessment.

Our kids' reading score has fallen almost continually since 2000, from 528 to 503, or 4.7 per cent. By comparison, Canada's score has declined only marginally over the period, from 534 to 527.

The index's estimates suggest that, were we able to lift our score only to Canada's level, this would increase the value of our human capital by almost $17 billion a year.

That's equivalent to about 1 per cent of GDP – far more than promised by almost any other proposed economic reform, including cutting the company tax rate.

Putting it another way, had our 15-year-olds' performance not deteriorated since 2003, the estimated value of the human capital – know-how – in the heads of this year's 15-year-olds would be $17 billion greater than it is.

Our kids' academic performance in each of the areas measured in the PISA tests – reading, maths and science – has been deteriorating, though at differing rates. This is worse than the picture shown by successive NAPLAN test results, summarised as flat to down.

This is why teaching is a problem too important to be left to teachers. The more so because some teachers – a minority, I trust – have become hyper-defensive, refusing to acknowledge there's a problem, telling themselves that, if there is a problem, it's everybody's fault bar their profession's, and branding any non-teacher who dares to offer an opinion a "teacher-basher".

Julia Gillard's attempt to use the measurement (via NAPLAN) and publication (via the My School website) of students' and schools' academic performance to raise standards by fostering competition between schools was misguided – pseudo-economic – and has failed.

But too much of the resistance and criticism of NAPLAN and My School arise from some teachers' desire to continue avoiding public accountability for the quality of their work.

It should go unmeasured (because fault can be found with every form of measurement humans have tried) and, to the extent that performance information exists, it should remain confidential to insiders, because outsiders lack the expertise to interpret it correctly.

Sorry guys, but more money comes at the price of greater accountability to, and scrutiny by, the mug taxpayers who cough it up.

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Why global trade growth has slowed

One thing you can be sure of is that international trade grows much faster than the world economy. It's the classic proof of growing globalisation, and it's been happening for ages. Except that it seems to have stopped.

For two decades from the mid-1980s, world trade – measured as exports plus imports – grew at more than double the rate of growth in gross world product.

Between 1986 and 2007, the volume of trade grew at an average annual rate of 3.4 per cent of world real gross domestic product, meaning it went from being equivalent to almost 30 per cent of gross world product to almost 60 per cent.

But then it dipped sharply in 2008 and 2009, thanks to the fall-off in trade after the global financial crisis and the onset of the Great Recession.


It bounced back in 2010 but, since 2011, its growth has been only a little faster than world production of goods and services.

In the decades before 1986, the volume of trade grew faster than production, but at much slower rates than in the two decades that followed. That's how we know to date the modern era of globalisation – the breaking down of economic barriers between national economies – from the mid-80s.

So, why has trade growth slowed so noticeably, and is this merely cyclical (temporary) or is it structural (lasting)?

According to a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a fair bit of both.

The study estimates that about 40 per cent of the slowdown between 2011 and 2015, as compared with the period from 1991 to 2007, is explained by the weak growth of demand in the global economy.

In particular, the crisis saw a sharp fall-off in businesses' investment spending on new physical capital – which happens to be import-intensive – but it hasn't recovered all that much in the years since then.

But that leaves roughly 60 per cent of the slowdown explained by deeper, more structural forces, ones that won't just go away if we wait a few more years.

Part of the explanation is that, in the two decades before the crisis, certain factors contributed to making trade growth exceptionally strong, but these factors have now lost their force.

The biggest cause of this exceptional growth in trade was various measures to reduce tariff and non-tariff restrictions on trade.

In 1989, and partly at Australia's instigation, the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation partnership between 21 countries was established to promote free trade.

The European Union moved to a single market in goods, services, labour and capital in 1992, increasing trade between its members. Because Europe consists of a number of separate countries, it's highly (international) "trade intensive" in a way that America – composed of states rather than countries – or even Australia, isn't.

In 1994, the "Uruguay round" of multilateral negotiations – the biggest of the many rounds of reductions in protection organised by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade since World War II – was reached.

This round extended membership of the GATT from the developed countries to about 150 developing countries – thus doing much to increase trade between the two groups. It also reached trade agreements covering new areas such as textiles, agriculture, services and intellectual property.

And, for good measure, the round turned the GATT into the World Trade Organisation.

The North American Free Trade Agreement between the US, Canada and Mexico began in January 1994.

And also hugely important to the growth of trade, China – now the world's second-largest trading nation – joined the WTO, cutting much of its protection as a condition of entry.

A second factor promoting the growth of trade in the two decades before the crisis was the widespread development of "global value chains" – value as in "value-added" – under which manufactured goods (cars, for instance) are assembled in one country using parts from many countries.

As trade liberalisation measures slowed in about 2000, continued growth in trade was supported by China's rapid emergence into the world economy.

By the second half of the noughties, however, these structural sources of growth had waned.

In this century, the WTO's Doha round of multilateral negotiations, launched in November 2001, has ground to a halt. According to the study, this halt in liberalisation explains about a quarter of the slowdown in the growth of trade between 2011 and 2015, compared with 1991 to 2007.

Many bilateral and regional trade agreements have been signed since then, but the only really significant agreement, the Trans Pacific Partnership, signed in February 2016, has since been scuttled by US President Donald Trump.

Add to this, "creeping protectionism from myriad small measures" in various countries, which has put trade liberalisation into reverse.

The spread of global value chains seems to have reached its limit, even declined.

Meanwhile, China's period of export-led growth has ended, with its authorities now aiming for growth led by domestic demand.

So what happens next, and what should be done?

The study says some cyclical recovery in the growth of trade is likely but, without further trade liberalisation, a return to the glory days seems unlikely.

"Trade", it reminds us, "and the related expansion of global value chains, boosts [economic] growth through increased productivity, by improving resource allocation, increasing scale and specialisation, encouraging innovation, facilitating knowledge transfer, fostering the expansion of more productive firms and the exit of the least productive ones."

All true. But, as the study acknowledges, the benefits of increased trade aren't spread evenly between or within the countries involved.

As a consequence of this – and the politicians' failure to ensure the losers from globalisation were compensated by the winners – the electorate in many rich countries is "increasingly polarised into pro- and anti-globalisation groups".

We have a lot of ground to make up before much enthusiasm for further globalisation returns.

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Where to next with The Great Gonski

I was in Moscow, recovering from a 12-day train trip from Beijing via Mongolia and Siberia, when I heard that Malcolm Turnbull's Gonski 2.0 shift to needs-based funding of schools had been passed by the Senate in the early hours of the morning.

So forgive me for being late to the party, but I can't let this key economic and social reform – surely one of the Coalition government's greatest achievements – go without acknowledgement and explanation.

The new act seeks to allocate government funding to schools, public and private, on a rational basis – the needs of individual students – rather than on what you got last year and what special deals you've done with politicians.

It seeks to phase out the decades-long sectarian basis for funding, where how much government assistance a student gets varies with the denomination of the church – or religion, or secular state – running their school.

Remarkably, Turnbull's success was achieved against the implacable opposition of the very people who spent the past four years professing to want "the full Gonski" – Labor, the teachers' union and, in the end, the Greens.

I'm still deciding whether Labor and the Greens were subservient to the union, or the union was staying loyal to Labor in hope of future largesse.

That Turnbull and his capable Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, were nevertheless able to win sufficient support from the minor parties, tells us the Senate isn't as unworkable as many suppose.

And whereas efforts to win minor-party support usually involve watering down the proposed measures, this time they significantly strengthened them – paradoxically, thanks largely to the efforts of Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young.

These improvements included a new independent body to review the accuracy of the various measures of student disadvantage (as recommended by David Gonski's review, but rejected in Labor's "full Gonski") and shortening the phase-in from 10 years to six (so that all schools reach their proper funding levels long before they would have under the "full Gonski").

Because the act will unwind the special deals the previous Labor government did with particular state- and private-school systems, moving federal funding on to a uniform basis across the country, it produces both winners and losers among the states and religious school systems. Be sure we'll be hearing more special pleading from them.

To acknowledge the Turnbull government's achievement isn't to suggest its job is done.

For a start, although the amended act includes a mechanism that would claw back federal funding to the states should they fail to maintain their own funding, the states need to realign their own funding of public and private schools to fit with the new formula under which, by 2023, the feds will fund 20 per cent of the assessed needs of government schools and 80 per cent of the needs of private schools.

So the states should provide 80 per cent of the funding needed by their own schools and 20 per cent of that needed by their private schools. This will require increasing grants to some schools, but cutting them to others.

More importantly, ensuring public funding goes to schools on the basis of their students' needs is just the first step towards the ultimate objective of improving our schools' performance.

As we well know from the regular local NAPLAN and international PISA ratings of students' academic performance, our schools' performance hasn't improved, and in some respects has deteriorated from earlier years, while slipping back in comparison with other countries.

To me, however, the clearest evidence of our schools' poor performance is the shockingly high proportion of students – about a quarter – who leave school without an adequate education. That's a terrible failure rate.

Doing more to help our most disadvantaged students do better is almost certain to require more money. That's why basing our school spending on the needs of particular students is essential.

But it's just step one. If we could be certain the extra money going to needy students would be spent well without further intervention, our schools' performance wouldn't be as poor as it is.

No, the next step is to ensure the redirected money is spent as effectively as possible, on teaching techniques and interventions proven to be most effective.

There is, for example, a lot of evidence that "targeted teaching" – where teachers keep checking to ensure particular students have actually learnt what they've just been taught, and don't press on until they have – stops kids falling behind.

Similarly, there's evidence that using expert teachers to help younger teachers improve their teaching style, and to help introduce new teaching methods, works to lift performance.

The need to ensure taxpayers' money is being spent as effectively as possible is, of course, the object of the new inquiry Turnbull has asked The Great Gonski to perform.

It would be good to see him recommend setting up a national outfit to develop a body of evidence on the most effective teaching techniques, pass this to schools, and also conduct independent evaluations of new approaches tried in particular states or schools, making the results public.

And once we've lifted our schools' ability to teach conventional academic subjects, we should turn our minds to helping kids gain the softer skills – to communicate well, think critically, be creative and resilient – they'll need to survive in an ever-changing working world.

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How Treasury lost its way on economic reform

From the almost stony silence of the nation's economists, you'd never know that Malcolm Turnbull's successful move to needs-based funding of schools is the most significant economic reform in many a long year.

It's notable, too, that this reform seems to have been achieved with little or no involvement by the high priests of economics at Treasury and the Productivity Commission.

Only a few economic reform projects are more important than raising the efficiency and effectiveness of federal and state spending on primary and secondary education.

Allocating that spending according to student need is the necessary first step towards the ultimate goal of reducing the shockingly high proportion of students who leave school without an education sufficient to go on to further study – in a trade course, for instance – or even to a life in which the normal state is employment, not recurring periods of unemployment.

The Australian economics profession's slowness to see the economic – not just the equity – significance of "Gonski" is a sign it's yet to learnt the lessons leading economists in America and Britain are drawing from the populist revolt against the way developed countries' economies have been managed during the era of "neo-liberalism" – better called economic fundamentalism.

Consider how well needs-based funding fits with former US Fed chairman Ben Bernanke's list of the economic managers' "errors of omission" in recent decades:

They failed "to expand job training and re-training opportunities, especially for the less educated; to provide transition assistance for displaced workers, including support for internal migration; to mitigate residential and educational segregation and increase the access of those left behind to employment and educational opportunities; to promote community redevelopment, through grants, infrastructure construction and other means; and to address serious social ills through addiction programs, criminal justice reform and the like."

It needs to be said that the first decade or so of "micro-economic reform" in Oz – floating the dollar, financial deregulation, eliminating protection, reforming the tax system, decentralising wage-fixing and reducing intervention in a host of highly regulated industries – was necessary, often unavoidable given what was happening in the rest of the world, and on balance, of great benefit to the populace.

It's impossible to imagine returning to the bad old pre-reform economy. Treasury and the Productivity Commission's predecessor body must be given most of the credit for promoting and designing these reforms.

But it's equally impossible to avoid the thought that, sometime been then and now, Treasury lost the plot, allowing the reform push to degenerate and be captured by business rent-seekers, politicians with ulterior motives and other government departments that didn't understand what they were doing.

To a fair extent the present populist revolt is explained by Bernanke's errors of omission: governments' failure to help the victims of the structural change their policies promoted and to ensure most of the cost of that assistance was borne by the winners from the change.

How could Treasury forget such an obvious way to minimise popular resistance and resentment of government-promoted change in the structure of industry?

Because it was misled by the mistaken notion that economic efficiency and distributional fairness are always at daggers drawn, and by the dubious ethic that economists should stick to promoting efficiency in the allocation of resources and leave fairness for others to worry about.

But also because Treasury allowed itself to be seduced away from strictly economic objectives to the essentially political objective of "smaller government".

We've got an economy heavily affected by multiple forms of market failure – including huge areas with public goods characteristics – but our overriding goal must be less government intervention in markets, less government spending and lower taxes, particularly on high income-earners.

There's little empirical evidence that economies with large public sectors perform worse than those with small ones, and no evidence that high marginal tax rates do much to discourage economic activity among high-paid full-time workers.

But Treasury's embrace of the smaller government objective does much to explain the Abbott-Turnbull government's loss of interest in budget repair (because cutting government spending turns out to be politically impossible), the neglect of measures to assist the losers from structural change (because they would add to government spending) and the lack of interest in reform of spending on education (because the need to go easy on the losers from spending reallocation means greater spending during the transition to more rational, cost-effective arrangements).

In the new era of populist backlash against the mounting evidence of stuff-ups in the later years of micro-economic reform, Treasury will continue to flounder and its influence wane until it switches its goal from smaller government to more effective government.

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How economic neglect has fed the populist revolt

Recent political shocks – Brexit, Trump and the failure of Theresa May – are prompting much soul-searching and rethinking among the world's leading economists.

Last week, for instance, Ben Bernanke, former chairman of the US Federal Reserve, gave a speech to a forum of the European Central Bank in which he admitted that "recent political events" had "cast a bright light on some disturbing economic and social trends in the United States".

"Unfortunately, policymakers in recent decades have been slow to address or even to recognise these trends, an error of omission that has helped fuel the voters' backlash," he said.

"If the populist surge we are seeing today has an upside, it is to refocus attention on both the moral necessity and practical benefits of helping people cope with the economic disruptions that accompany growth."

It's true that the American economy's cyclical recovery has entered its ninth year and appears to have room to run, Bernanke says.

Although the Great Recession was exceptionally deep and the recovery was slow, real gross domestic product is now up about 12.5 per cent from its pre-crisis peak and real disposable income is up more than 13 per cent.

Since the trough in employment in early 2010, more than 16 million new jobs have been created – compared with a workforce of about 160 million – bringing the rate of unemployment down from 10 per cent to 4.3 per cent, its lowest since 2001.

Fine. But Bernanke's new insight is in the title of his speech, "When growth is not enough".

Americans seem exceptionally dissatisfied with the economy and have been for some time, he says. Those who tell pollsters that the economy is "on the wrong track" consistently outnumber those who believe that America is moving "in the right direction" by about two to one.

Bernanke highlights four "worrying trends" that help explain the sour mood. First, stagnant earnings for the median worker.

"Since 1979, real output per person in the US has expanded by a cumulative 80 per cent, and yet during that time, median weekly earnings of full-time workers have grown by only about 7 per cent in real terms."

And almost all of that tiny growth is explained by higher wages and working hours for women. For male workers, real median weekly earnings have actually declined since 1979.

So despite economic growth, the middle class is struggling to maintain its standard of living.

Second, declining economic and social mobility. One of the pillars of America's self-image is the idea of the American Dream, that anyone can rise to the top based on determination and hard work.

But upward economic mobility in the US appears to have declined notably since World War II. One study of census figures found that 90 per cent of Americans born in the 1940s would eventually earn more than their parents did, but only about 50 per cent of those born in the 1980s would do so.

The trend to increased inequality of income and wealth is worse in the US than other advanced economies. This tends to impede economic mobility by increasing the relative educational and social advantages of people in the upper percentiles.

Third, increasing social dysfunction in economically distressed areas and demographic groups. Studies show that rates of midlife mortality among white working-class Americans (those with only a high-school education) have worsened sharply relative to other groups.

These are often "deaths of despair" because of their association with declines in indicators of economic and social wellbeing and the important role played by factors such as opioid addiction, alcoholism and suicide.

Indeed, in 2015, more Americans died of drug overdoses than died from car accidents and firearms-related accidents and crimes combined.

Among the most worrying economic trends is the decline in labour force participation among prime-age men – 25 to 54 – from 97 per cent in 1960 to 88 per cent today. The fall has occurred across demographic groups (an American euphemism for racial groups).

Studies suggest most of these men are idle – neither looking for work nor caring for family members. One part of the explanation is that America's high rate of incarceration leaves many men, particularly African-Americans, with prison records, which hurts their employment opportunities for many years.

Fourth, greater political alienation and distrust of institutions, both public and private. Americans generally have little confidence in the ability of government, especially the federal government, to fairly represent their interests, let alone solve their problems.

"Stagnant median wages, limited upward mobility, social dysfunction and political alienation are a toxic mix indeed. The sources of these adverse trends are complex and interrelated. But at a fifty-thousand-foot level, they appear to be the product of some broad global developments ... together with the US policy response (or lack thereof) to those developments," Bernanke says.

Missing from the response was a comprehensive set of policies aimed at helping individuals and localities adjust to the difficult combination of slower growth and rapid economic change.

Whatever the reason for this failure, "it's clear in retrospect that a great deal more could have been done, for example, to expand job training and re-training opportunities, especially for the less educated; to provide transition assistance for displaced workers, including support for internal migration; to mitigate residential and educational segregation and increase to access of those left behind to employment and educational opportunities; to promote community redevelopment, through grants, infrastructure construction and other means; and to address serious social ills through addiction programs, criminal justice reform and the like".

Bernanke concludes that "the credibility of economists has been damaged by our insufficient attention, over the years, to the problems of economic adjustment and by our proclivity towards top-down, rather than bottom-up, policies.

"Nevertheless, as a profession we have expertise that can help make the policy response more effective, and I think we have a responsibility to contribute where we can."

That's putting it mildly.

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REFLECTIONS ON THE TEACHING OF ECONOMICS

Talk to Australasian Teaching Economics Conference, Sydney, Friday, July 7, 2017

When Justin Wolfers, the great white hope of Australian academic economists, spoke to the Australian Business Economists in February, he paid a special tribute to two of his economics teachers, whom he named, thanking them for instilling in him a “love of economics”. They were his school teachers at James Ruse High, not his lecturers at the University of Sydney.

There are two lessons from this. First, despite the contempt in which it is held by many economics lecturers, high school economics has long been the main recruiting ground for university economics. Some years ago in NSW, and much earlier in Victoria, the number of students studying economics at high school fell sharply, following the introduction of a more useful-sounding – and less intellectually demanding – course, business studies. If those of you from NSW are wondering why you’ve many fewer students wanting to study economics than in the good old days, I’m convinced that’s a big part of the explanation. That, plus the growing recognition that university economics is a subject which is generally badly taught, in which you do a lot of maths without seeing what it proves or how it might be useful to you in the working world.

Which brings me to the second lesson: Whether you teach at school or uni, perhaps the single most important test of your success is whether you instil in your students a “love of economics”. Whether you convince them it’s interesting, important and useful. In my experience, it turns on whether you can visually and aurally demonstrate your enthusiasm for the subject and somehow convey this enthusiasm to your students. If you can infect them with your enthusiasm – your love – for the subject, you’ve done them a huge service.

What are my qualifications for offering reflections on the teaching of economics? Well, although I make no claim to being an economist – my qualifications are in accounting, and I prefer to describe myself as a journalist who writes about economics – I did have three years of economics in the commerce degree I gained from the University of Newcastle in the second half of the 1960s, so I am qualified as a student of economics. And whether or not I’m qualified, I have 40 years of experience as a teacher of economics – partly in lectures to high school and, occasionally, uni students of economics, but mainly in my newspaper columns, which have always put a heavy emphasis on teaching. I was a part-time tutor in accounting at UNSW for two years, which helped me realise how satisfying it felt being a teacher. I’ve also had some experience over the years as a hirer and trainer of the product of your labours: economics graduates. My job gives me plenty of contact with economists – particularly with top econocrats, almost all of whom are sufficiently well-qualified to be academics, but also with academics themselves – and also with high school economics teachers, who also aren’t economists, but teachers whose topic is economics.

Throughout the five years of part-time and full-time study it took me to get my pass degree, I suffered under an appalling misconception: that accounting was really interesting, while economics was boring and pointless. I had my heart set on becoming a chartered accountant, did economics only because I had too, and it wasn’t until after qualifying as a chartered accountant, becoming disillusioned, and then washing up at Fairfax in 1974, where it was suggested I become an economic journalist (because “economics and accounting are pretty much the same thing, aren’t they?”), that I realised I’d got that exactly the wrong way round: accounting was boring and relatively unimportant, whereas economics was infinitely interesting and involved grappling with problems such as inflation and unemployment, which were of considerable importance.

I blame my lecturers – who included Brian Johns for micro and Warren Hogan for macro – for allowing me to retain the delusion that economics was boring and irrelevant to the real world of business. To my recollection, they made no attempt to put the theory they were teaching me in a wider context – to help me join the dots. I can remember wondering what a model was, and thinking that none of the businesses I audited in Hunter Street ever mentioned using a demand curve to determine their prices. It never occurred to me to wonder that one of the businesses I audited was actually a (in those days, still legal) cartel, setting the prices for the pipes and tiles made by half a dozen pottery works in the Hunter Valley.

No one paused from their exposition of diagrams and models to explain why economics relied on theories embodied in geometric or mathematical models in its attempt to explain how the economy works, why models were, of necessity, a simplified representation of reality, why a model as complicated as the real world would explain nothing, that the game was about identifying key causal relationships and not worrying about less important complications, why the test of a model was whether its choice of which factors to include and which to ignore was well judged.

It was many years before I realised that, in my late teens and even though I’d worked full-time for a couple of years in the commercial world, I was far too inexperienced in the “real world” to make sensible judgments about whether what I was being taught would or wouldn’t be of use to me in the rest of my working life. That if my lecturers thought it worth teaching me this stuff, I should give them the benefit of the doubt. It was even more years before I realised that theories about how the world works were the main thing universities had to offer and pretty much the only thing they should bother offering. Every profession has a body of knowledge that attempts to find order among the chaos in the aspect of the real world that it professes to know about, and university is pretty much the only opportunity practitioners get to learn about that theory in any systematic way. So, provided they’re teaching good theory, universities should never apologise for being theoretical. There’s not much theory in accounting, but what there is is what I’ve found most useful from what I was taught.  As a commerce graduate, no one taught me how to do a bank rec, but that’s the sort of practicality you can pick up in the first few weeks on the job.

Apart from not bothering to explain the role and rationale of seemingly unrealistic theories, I can’t remember my lecturers or tutors making much effort to demonstrate how those theoretical insights could be used to shed light on real world problems. My mate Jeff Borland at Melbourne has published a great little book of first year case studies – one I give to each of my new recruits to economic reporting – and it’s not hard to find books of case studies based on newspaper reports, if you’re not capable of finding your own. Lecturers who preside over courses that fail to link theory back to real world issues deserve to be shot. They just can’t be bothered making the effort to move from theory for its own sake to theory because it can actually be quite useful – and thus interesting.

One of the keys to being a successful explainer of economics in the media is to take the trouble to work out where your audience is coming from: what they know, what they don’t know, what their misperceptions are, which aspects interest them and which don’t. Successful lecturers do the same. I imagine students taking first-year courses fall into three main categories: those who’ll do economics for just a year or two, then take away whatever and what little they’ve learn to last them for a lifetime as a teacher, accountant, businessperson or lawyer – and a voting citizen. I imagine these would be most numerous. Next in size would be those who complete a full major in economics and go on to be economic practitioners, working in the public sector, the banks and financial markets, or eventually as self-employed economic “consultants”, or even the odd journo. Last comes the smallest group, those who’ll go on to be your successors as academic economists.

I think the great temptation you face as academics is to aim your lectures to those three groups in inverse proportion to their numerical significance. My guess is that, consciously or unconsciously, most courses – particularly those beyond first year – are aimed at educating potential academics. Why? Because not bothering to change gear is more intellectually satisfying for the lecturer and requires less effort. Where first year economics is a terminating course – say for those who’ve been conscripted by the Business faculty - the main thing students need to take away is a deep understanding of some version of Mankiw’s Ten Principles of Economics. If you’re not doing that you’re short-changing a lot of your customers.

But the student group I worry most about are the future economic practitioners. I suspect that most academics are so inward-looking and arrogant that they take little pride in what is their main practical task and contribution to economic welfare: training practitioners, many of whom will have much greater influence over the management of the macro economy and the efficiency of particularly industries than their teachers ever will. When I write columns criticising “economists” for some failing, I often get angry feedback from academic economists, indignantly rejecting my criticism. To many academics, economist equals academic economist. It never crosses their tiny minds that my criticism is directed at a far more socially significant group: their former students, economic practitioners. Sorry, their performance worries me far more than yours, even though the adequacy of your teaching must bear its share of responsibility for the adequacy of their performance.

I have two related worries about the adequacy of your teaching of future practitioners. First is the way I believe that, too often, your academic enthusiasm for exploring limiting cases and other intellectual fascinations crowds out the far more important task of giving students as much practice as possible in applying models to the solution of practical problems. This, after all, is just what economic practitioners will spend their working lives doing.

My second worry about the adequacy of your teaching of practitioners is my belief that you spend far too little explaining the limitations of the models you teach. All theories and models have limitations, and introducing models while failing to identify their key limitations is professional negligence. You don’t truly understand a model unless you understand its limitations. If you don’t understand its limitations, you’ve learnt from a comic, not a textbook. What are the assumptions on which the model is built? Which are the most significant assumptions? Which are the explicit assumptions and which the implicit? I had studied and written about mainstream economics for many years before Geoff Harcourt told me something I hadn’t realised: it’s based on an implicit assumption that the parties to economic transactions are of roughly equal bargaining power. That’s a hugely important assumption.

Practitioners who use models without fully understanding their limitations – and who draw policy conclusions which they publicise without warning politicians and public of the key assumptions on which they rest – are a menace to the nation, contributing to the disrepute in which economists are often held. Stuart Birks, a senior lecturer at Massey University, has written a little book called 40 Critical Pointers for Students of Economics, available via the World Economics Association, against which all of you could usefully assess the adequacy of your efforts to ensure your students understand the limitations of the models you teach them. https://www.worldeconomicsassociation.org/library/40-critical-pointers-for-students-of-economics/

Even worse, I worry that economics teachers don’t do nearly as much as they should to ensure their students understand that models are just models. I believe too many of your students walk away under the impression that some version of the neoclassical model actually is the economy. If so, you’re guilty of a terrible intellectual crime. Just this year someone who’s not an economist repeated to me the statistician George Box’s aphorism that “all models are wrong, but some are useful”. Is this what you tell your students? If not, why not? In Dani Rodrik’s recent book offering a critique and defence of conventional economics, Economics Rules, the main point he hammers is that “it’s a model, not the model. Economics is a collection of models; cherish their diversity.” I think it was Joan Robinson who advocated the “tool box” approach to economics: you assess a problem and its context, then reach into your tool box and select the particular model best suited to solving that problem. Is this what you teach your students?

I had intended to switch my critique from how you teach to what you teach, which I planned to kick off by saying that economics is half useful insights and half con job. But I’ve run out of time and if you want me to justify that assertion you’ll have to invite me back.

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Labor’s professed preference for policy purity is phoney

For the growing number of us who care more about good policy and effective governance than party loyalties, the news isn't good. With one main exception, Labor is allowing the supposed perfect to be the enemy of the good.

The exception is a good one: although the "clean [or low] emissions target" for the national electricity market recommended by the Finkel report is far from perfect as the chief means by which the Turnbull government seeks to reduce our carbon emissions in line with our Paris commitment, Bill Shorten has indicated that the opposition would be open to supporting a "well-constructed LET" in the Senate.

There aren't many issues more important than filling the policy vacuum left by Tony Abbott's abolition of the carbon tax three years ago. And, in the process, greatly assisting efforts to fix the ailing electricity market, reducing the risk of blackouts and further price rises.

Everyone bar the Coalition's crazy backbench climate-change deniers knows coal's days are numbered, which is why both sides of the electricity industry – fossil fuels and renewables – are desperate for greater certainty about how the government plans to manage the transition.

But it's not just that the government needs to make up its mind. It's also that the alternative government isn't planning to change the Coalition's arrangements.

This explains why pretty much all the adults involved have agreed that a CET or LET is the best way forward, given the aforementioned crazies' rejection of anything more sensible.

And why Labor deserves a tick for seeking bipartisanship by moving from its own, better policy for an "emissions intensity scheme" and accepting a LET, provided it isn't too badly compromised.

Now it's up to Malcolm Turnbull to get his troops' agreement to a "well-constructed" LET – which won't be easy.

Sorry, but it occurs to me to wonder whether, should Turnbull fail, Labor isn't positioning itself to claim the moral high ground on both climate change and a workable electricity market.

I wonder about Labor's motives because, on most other policy issues, Shorten is putting his electoral ambitions well ahead of the nation's interest in good policy and effective governance.

All in the name of more nearly perfect policy, naturally.

It's hard to avoid the suspicion that, though he wants to be seen as positive and co-operative, his true motive is to pay the Coalition back for the way Abbott tried to destabilise and neuter the Gillard government and to keep alive the policy differences – on health, education and budget fairness – that brought him so close to unseating Turnbull at last year's election.

Take Shorten's utterly unreasonable position on needs-based funding of schools, that because Labor's version is supposedly superior to the Coalition's, Labor should do all in its power to block the government's legislation in the Senate and leave needs-based funding in limbo until Labor's re-election.

Shorten professes to care deeply about disadvantage students, but it makes you wonder.

As Dr Peter Goss, of the Grattan Institute, has argued, "Gonski 2.0 is a precious opportunity to lock in fairer deals on school funding. It should be seized by all sides of politics.

"Australia's long and toxic funding wars must end so we can move onto other much-needed education reforms."

In any case, Goss's analysis suggests that most of the extra $22 billion over 10 years that Labor says should be spent wouldn't be directed to student need.

Next is Labor's opposition to covering the rising cost of the National Disability Insurance Scheme with a 0.5 percentage point increase in the Medicare levy, in two years' time.

Since such an increase would be roughly proportional – hitting high and low income-earners by a flat percentage increase – Shorten wants to impose the increase just on those earning more than $87,000 a year.

For good measure, he wants to continue the Coalition's temporary 2-percentage-point budget repair levy on income above $180,000 a year, beyond its promised expiry at the end of this month.

All very virtuous (and I wouldn't object to paying either impost). But not if it's used as an excuse to block the government's increase in the Medicare levy.

It's easy for those out of power to advocate making the tax scale more progressive, but this would be a first for Labor in office.

Should Shorten win the next election, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for him to reimpose the 2 per cent levy. And he doesn't want us to remember that funding the disability scheme with a 0.5 percentage point Medicare levy increase was perfectly fair enough for the Gillard government.

Somehow, I don't think these guys are fair dinkum.

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We've slowed a lot, but we're not about to go backwards

There's no denying the economy has slowed down, by far more than we were expecting. But don't conclude it's likely to subside into recession any time soon.

This week's national accounts for the March quarter, from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, show real gross domestic product grew by a pathetic 0.3 per cent during the quarter, and by just 1.7 per cent over the year to March. This compares with its "potential" annual growth rate of 2.75 per cent.

This time last year, the government's budget forecast was for growth averaging 2.5 per cent in the financial year just ending, accelerating to 3 per cent in the coming year.

So what's gone wrong? And why is it unlikely get a lot worse?

First point: don't think the economy's running down like a battery-powered toy. Looking back over the past four quarters, we see OK growth of 0.7 per cent in the June quarter of last year, then a contraction of 0.4 per cent, then super-strong growth of 1.1 per cent and now weak growth of 0.3 per cent.

This unnatural, saw-tooth pattern says some transactions may have been recognised in the wrong quarter. For instance, investment spending by federal and state public corporations leapt by 37.8 per cent in the December quarter, but then contracted by 20.9 per cent in the March quarter.

Neither figure should be taken literally.

Two major drivers of activity at present are home building and exports of coal and iron ore. Both have been disrupted by unusual weather that's not been smoothed away by normal seasonal adjustment. Climate change?

Home building has been growing strongly for several years, but it contracted by 1.2 per cent in September quarter and by 4.4 per cent in the March quarter. Most of this is explained by unusually wet weather in some parts of the country.

The volume (quantity) of exports was up 2 per cent in the June quarter, then slowed to growth of 1.4 per cent, then leapt by 3.7 per cent and now has actually fallen by 1.6 per cent.

Much of this volatility is explained by extreme weather disrupting shipping carrying coal from Queensland or iron ore from Western Australia.

We could expect the figures for the present quarter to be boosted by a catch-up from the weak March quarter – were it not for the further disruption in April and May we know has been caused by Cyclone Debbie.

Note that a sudden build-up in business inventories contributed 0.4 percentage points to growth in the March quarter. Much of this was a jump in mining industry stockpiles, suggesting a lot of coal was produced, but couldn't be shipped.

But to explain much of the quarter-to-quarter volatility in GDP growth in terms of misallocation and wild weather doesn't alter the fact that, when you add up the four quarters, you get only to utterly weak annual growth of 1.7 per cent.

One major component of growth that's unlikely to be affected by either factor is consumer spending. It's been unusually weak in all quarters bar December, growing by a pathetic 1.3 per cent over the year to March.

And this despite households cutting back their rate of saving from 6.9 per cent of household income to 4.7 per cent over the year.

This weakness in consumption ain't hard to explain: growth in household income has been held back by weak growth in employment and, more particularly, negligible growth in real wages, notwithstanding a 1.2 per cent improvement in the productivity of labour over the year.

Real labour costs per unit – a measure of the race between real wages and labour productivity – fell 1.7 per cent in the quarter and 6.3 per cent over the year to March.

Wanna know why the economy's growth is so weak? You won't find a more powerful explanation than that.

Remember, however, that the weakness isn't spread equally across the country.

State final demand is a poor substitute for gross state product, but the best we get each quarter. Across the whole economy, domestic final demand also grew by 1.7 per cent over the year to March.

But state final demand grew by 4.5 per cent in Victoria, 3.3 per cent in South Australia and Tassie, an above-par 1.9 per cent in NSW, and a below-par 1.6 per cent in Queensland.

Now get this: in Western Australia, final demand contracted by 6.6 per cent. So the West is still bearing the brunt of the bust in the mining construction boom. This explains a fair bit of the weakness in the national average.

The West's contraction in the March quarter was just 0.2 per cent, however, suggesting the inevitable end to its contraction phase isn't far off. That's the first reason things won't continue weakening nationwide.

As part of that, the long-running fall in mining investment spending must also be within a few quarters of ending. You need to be good at arithmetic to see that, when our focus is on rates of growth, "the removal of a negative is a positive".

The housing construction boom has a few more quarters to run, and strong grow in infrastructure spending is in the pipeline.

But much depends on what happens to real wages. Certainly, the government's forecast of economic growth returning to our potential growth rate of 2.75 per cent in 2017-18 as a whole, rests heavily on a resumption of real growth in wages.

To the extent the present weakness in wage growth is merely cyclical, wages will recover soon enough. This is hardly the wildly optimistic expectation that some, who've forgotten the economy moves in cycles, have claimed.

But to the presently unknown extent that the weakness in wage growth has deeper, structural causes, we won't get back to a decent rate of growth until the government acts to fix the problem.

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Turnbull must act on climate if he's not to be a Trumpette

We are trying – admittedly, without much success so far – to make our home a Tr*mp-free zone. It's just too depressing. Watching a great nation disgrace itself before the rest of the world.

The former proudly self-proclaimed leader of the free world suffering a loss of confidence and applying for early retirement.

A nation that every year scoops the pool of Nobel prizes, electing a crazy, ignorant, wilful old man, not so much Trump as Chump.

His latest stroke of genius – reneging on America's commitment to the Paris climate agreement – has been almost universally condemned, including by a great number of Americans, especially many business leaders.

But, congenital optimist that I am, I see some perverse comfort in all this. The American people are being brought face-to-face with what it means for their future when the world's second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases decides that the minor disruption of doing something to protect itself from the huge disruption of continuing global warming just isn't worth it.

This rational self-interest?

I'm prepared to bet that the next elected president will have climate protection at the top of his to-do list. Indeed, Donald Trump's becoming such an embarrassment to his compatriots I'd bet the next president's platform will be to do the opposite to Trump on 'most everything.

Then there's the band of American state governments – led by the two most powerful, California and New York – willing to step into the leadership vacuum their federal government has left. And the mayors of many cities.

Of course, as we know from earlier this year – when our federal government sought to use South Australia's blackouts for political point-scoring rather than a cue for policy correction, thus obliging the SA Premier to step in with expensive local interventions to a national problem – having states try to make up for a federal government's refusal to accept responsibility is far from ideal.

Which bring us to Malcolm Turnbull, whose statements and actions as Prime Minister contrast markedly with what every voter knows are his long-held views on climate change.

One thing to be said for Trump is that at least he's made an honest man of himself. He has no concern about global warming and isn't willing to do anything to combat it, but doesn't pretend otherwise.

Here, Turnbull professes eternal loyalty to the Paris Agreement and reaffirms our (inadequate) target to achieve a 26 to 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 from 2005 levels, without having any credible policy by which to achieve it.

Actually, we haven't had a credible policy to reduce emissions since Tony Abbott abolished Julia Gillard's carbon tax-cum-emissions trading scheme in July 2014.

Abbott's professed reason for doing so was the claimed huge increase in the price of electricity and gas the scheme caused, and the massive economic damage this would lead to.

Prices did come down a bit, but soon continued on their upward way. Truth is, the carbon tax – and the renewable energy target – were never a major part of the reason for the big increases in energy prices since the turn of the century.

Even so, concerns about climate change are at the heart of the problems we're having maintaining an energy system that avoids blackouts without costing the earth (in the earlier sense of that phrase).

That, plus the various problems that have emerged with that finest flower of micro-economic reform, the national electricity market (the greatest source of price increases).

Ancient coal-fired power stations are being closed down, while no business in its right mind would invest in new coal-fired stations that are unlikely to be used for much of their 30 to 50-year potential working lives.

At the same time, however, businesses are reluctant to invest in industrial-scale renewable energy when the Coalition government has displayed such hostility to renewables and created such uncertainty about their future.

Have you noticed how our response to climate change and our problems with electricity have morphed into the same issue?

There's little concern to limit emissions except from the generation of electricity. And there's no solution to reliable, reasonably priced power that doesn't involve controlling emissions.

On Friday the chief scientist, Professor Alan Finkel, will deliver his long-awaited report on "the future energy security of the national electricity market".

What's needed is a mechanism to regulate the transition from fossil fuels to renewables in a way that reduces emissions while providing certainty to both kinds of energy providers.

Last year all the key players agreed the best approach would be an "emissions intensity scheme". All bar the Turnbull government, which ruled it out the moment its climate-change denying backbenchers objected.

So now, we're told, Finkel has come up with a compromise, a "low emissions target", or LET, which sets the proportion of electricity production that must come from low-emission sources.

It's similar to the present RET – renewable energy target – except the list of low-emission sources would be expanded to include gas-fired power and "clean" coal-fired power with carbon capture and storage (should such a thing ever exist).

This compromise has been widely canvassed, and has a lot of support in business. Even the Labor opposition has indicated its willingness to accept some form of mechanism rather than continuing inaction.

The heat will now be on Turnbull to get his Trumpettes across the line.

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Radical policy change may be needed to fix wages

It's too early to be sure, but not too early to suspect that, if we and the other developed economies keep travelling the way we are, conventional wisdom about what constitutes good economic policy may soon need to be turned on its head.

We're living through very strange times. Each developed economy has its own story, but there are strong similarities. One is exceptionally low inflation, which doesn't seem temporary.

Another is surprisingly weak rates of measured productivity improvement, although our rate of improvement in the productivity of labour isn't too bad.

My guess is a fair bit of this is mis-measurement arising from our quite radical shift to a digital economy.

But the other explanation may be a decline in price competition in many industries, thanks to several decades of both natural and government-facilitated rent-seeking by big businesses, in ever-more concentrated industries.

Next, wages. It's too soon to conclude that wage growth – which in Oz has been slowing since mid-2012 and been pathetically weak for three years – is down for the count.

We don't yet know how much of the weakness is merely cyclical and how much is due to deeper, longer-lasting, structural causes.

Even so, it's hard not to suspect that a fair bit of the wage weakness is structural. My guess is that while we've been busy decentralising wage-fixing and removing all provisions thought to favour unions, globalisation and technological change have conspired to rob the nation's employees of any collective bargaining power.

This may sound like a dream come true for business and its high-paid executives but, if it's true, it's deeply destabilising overkill.

Wages are a key variable in the economy. Allow them to be either too high or too low and the economy gets out of kilter.

Allow the profits share of national income to keep continually expanding at the expense of the wages share and expect to pay a price economically, socially and politically.

And that's before you remember that wages are the chief source of governments' tax revenue. Not only personal income tax, but all the indirect taxes – notably, the goods and services tax – that households pay when they spend their labour incomes.

Low nominal wage growth isn't necessarily a worry if, at the same time, the rise in consumer prices is low.

What matters to working households and the rest of the economy (but not governments) is what's happening to real wages.

In a healthily functioning economy, real wages should rise pretty much in line with the improvement in the productivity of labour.

That way, both labour and capital get their fair share of the fruits of economic progress.

Trouble is, in the US this relationship broke down maybe 30 years ago, explaining why the top few per cent of households have captured most of the growth in the nation's real income over that time.

This doesn't just widen the gap between rich and poor. By directing so much income growth away from the high spenders at the bottom and middle to the high savers at the top, it slows growth in consumption and thus production.

It also adds to the disillusionment of ordinary voters, making them more likely to lash out and vote for the cunning wacko celebrity-de-jour candidate, such as Clive Palmer, Pauline Hanson or Donald somebody​.

Get this: there are tentative signs the relationship between real wage growth and labour productivity may be breaking down in Oz.

The relevant indicator, the index of real labour costs per unit, should hover around 100. It fell by 3.3 per cent during 2016, reaching 98.1, equal lowest since the series began in 1985.

If this weakness persists, it will raise the question of whether the formerly healthy relationship was a product of market forces, or the industrial relations system's achievement of a fine balance between employer and union bargaining power.

If it does persist, how could we return to a healthy relationship? By reversing the dominant wisdom of many decades, that governments must never do anything that adds to the regulatory burden on employers. By acting (very carefully) to strengthen the hand of union collective bargainers.

Final point: governments of all colours secretly rely on bracket creep to help tax collections keep up with the inexorable growth in government spending.

But bracket creep depends on both reasonable inflation and real wage growth to work its barely noticed fiscal magic.

What happens if inflation stays low and real wages stop growing? You have to junk your rhetoric about smaller government and keep doing what Malcolm Turnbull did in this budget: justify explicit tax increases.

Either that, or get wages growing properly.

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How and Why we've escaped recession for so long

When Glenn Stevens took over from Ian Macfarlane as governor of the Reserve Bank in September 2006, both men knew the new boy was being handed a poison chalice.

By the time of the deep recession of the early 1990s, Australians – like the citizens of most developed economies – had got used to enduring a recession roughly every seven years.

But Macfarlane had been governor for 10 years, and had been extraordinary lucky to get through all that time without a severe downturn.

It was obvious to both men that Stevens wouldn't be as lucky. We were overdue for a recession and it was bound to occur sometime during Stevens' term, probably early on.

Except that it didn't. When, after his own 10-year stint, Stevens handed over to his government-chosen successor as governor, Dr Philip Lowe, in September last year, he was leaving the job with his record unsullied.

This time there were no forebodings about a doomed inheritance, even though it's only natural to fear that each successive quarter of this world record run must surely increase the likelihood of it coming to a sticky end.

Certainly, there would be few economists so foolhardy as to predict that their profession had finally conquered the booms and busts of the business cycle. Most remember that such bouts of hubris had afflicted – and in the end, mightily embarrassed – the dismal scientists before.

No one wants ultimately to be caught having made that stupid mistake a second time. So, a commercial message sponsored by your local friendly economist: rest assured, we'll have another bad recession sooner or later.

Human nature being what it is, keeping in the forefront of their minds the very real risk of another recession is the best way the managers of our economy can avoid the negligent overconfidence that could bring our record run to an ignominious end.

Of course, the politician with the strength of character to avoid complacency and self-congratulation for a remarkably good performance has probably yet to be born.

That's why this story began, and will continue, as a story about the people who have most say over the day-to-day management of the economy: not the politicians, but the bureaucrats in our central bank.

It's important to remember that Australia's run without a severe recession became a personal best, so to speak, many years ago, and for many years has exceeded the records achieved in all other developed countries – bar the Netherlands, with its freakish record of 103 quarters, almost 26 years, of continuous growth. Until now, as the world record passes to us.

An obvious question to ask is how Australia managed to avoid serious damage from the global financial crisis of 2008, when almost every other advanced economy was laid so low by the Great Recession.

The short answer is first that, thanks partly to the bureaucratic bum-kicking Peter Costello did after the collapse of the HIH insurance group in 2001, our bank regulators kept our banks under a tight rein, preventing them from doing all the risky things the American and European banks were allowed to.

Second, the Reserve Bank positively slashed interest rates the moment it realised the severity of the crisis, while the Rudd government ignored the dodgy advice it was getting from then-opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull and sections of the media, and splashed around a lot of cash.

Both the rate cuts and the cash splash had the intended effect of steadying the badly shaken confidence of businesses and consumers, thus quickly arresting the self-reinforcing downward spiral of fear and belt-tightening that causes all deep recessions.

Third, whereas many employers had previously responded to a downturn in demand for their product by laying off staff, this time many of them, hoping the downturn would be temporary, limited themselves to putting all their staff on a period of short-time working.

This restraint on the part of business proved a much less damaging approach for everyone.

But remember this: most advanced economies have suffered not one, but two or three deep recessions since the world recession of the early 1990s.

So there has to be more to our 26-year record than just our deft response to the GFC.

The deeper reasons for our success start with the factor already alluded to: our politicians' decision in the first half of the 1990s to hand control of interest rates to the central bank, acting independently of the elected government.

Turns out moving interests rates up and down in response to the business cycle, as opposed to the proximity of elections, is a big improvement in keeping the economy chugging steadily along.

The other beneficial change was all the "micro-economic reform" undertaken mainly during the term of the Hawke-Keating government, often with bipartisan support from the opposition, led by John Howard and Dr John Hewson.

Deregulating the financial system, floating the dollar, rolling back protection against imports, decentralising wage fixing and the deregulation of many particular industries had the combined effect of making the economy more flexible, less inflation-prone and better able to reduce unemployment.

The era of micro reform didn't achieve the hoped for continuing improvement in productivity, and had various adverse side-effects, but it did make it much easier for the central bankers to keep the economy on an even keel.

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How Treasury hides big infrastructure spending

One of the most significant, but least remarked upon, features of this year's budget is Malcolm Turnbull's decision to greatly expand the federal government's involvement in the construction of public infrastructure.

He did so under unprecedented and sustained public pressure from the Reserve Bank, seconded by the International Monetary Fund and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

But how could the government be stimulating demand at a time when it still had a big budget deficit it needed to get back to surplus ASAP?

By distinguishing between the deficit arising from recurrent spending on its day-to-day operations, and the deficit arising from its investment in capital works, whose benefits to the community would flow for decades.

With the economy's downturn long past, the government should certainly be striving to get its recurrent finances – summarised by the budget's "net operating balance" – back to a healthy big surplus.

But no such stricture should apply to borrowing to improve the nation's infrastructure – always provided the money is well spent.

There's nothing new about this. The state governments have divided their budgets between operating expenses and investment in capital works for years. The national governments of New Zealand and Canada do the same.

So why haven't the feds been doing it? Because Treasury's never liked the idea. That's why, if you read the budget papers carefully, you find Treasury's found a way to do it and not do it at the same time.

The papers say they've always told us what the recurrent budget balance is, it's just that it's been buried somewhere up the back and called the net operating balance, or NOB.

But Treasury has had to admit that, for reasons that make sense only to accountants like me, the NOB regularly overstates recurrent spending by treating as an expense the cost of the feds' annual capital grants to the states to help with their infrastructure spending.

In the coming financial year, this overstatement is worth more than $12 billion, meaning the true recurrent deficit is actually quite small –  $7 billion – and expected to be back in balance in the following year, 2018-19.

So, no great worries there.

For the first time, Treasury has been obliged to reveal clearly exactly how much the feds have been, are, and expect to be, spending on capital works for the 14 years from 2007-08 to 2020-21 (see budget page 4.10).

In 2007-08, the last of Peter Costello's budgets, total federal capital spending was allowed to fall below $10 billion, but generally it's been between $30 billion and $40 billion a year. That's roughly 10 per cent of all the feds' spending.

But here's the big news: in the coming financial year, it's expected to rise to a (nominal) record of more than $50 billion, up from about $43 billion in the year just ending.

This will represent 12 per cent of total federal spending, and be equivalent to 2.8 per cent of gross domestic product.

Again for the first time, the budget papers give us the breakdown of the feds' total capital spending. First there's "direct capital investment" of $13.5 billion, which is mainly spending on defence equipment.

Next is "capital grants" of $14.2 billion. This is money given to other entities – predominantly, the state governments – to help them pay for their own capital works spending, mainly roads.

Last is an odd one, that Treasury usually prefers us not to notice: "financial asset investment (policy purposes)" worth $22.9 billion, up almost $6 billion on the year just ending, and the main cause of the coming big increase.

What's that financial asset investment thingy​? It goes back to 1996 and a loophole Treasury carefully built into the budget figuring at the time of the Charter of Budget Honesty (!) and the introduction of the "underlying cash balance" as the preferred measure of the budget's deficit or surplus.

Get this: if the government simply pays some private construction company to build some infrastructure for it, the cost is counted as part of the underlying cash deficit.

But if the government sets up its own company and gives it the same money, in the form of share capital or a loan, so the company builds the infrastructure (or pays another company to do it), the cost isn't counted in the underlying deficit.

Rather, it's tucked away in the "headline cash balance" that few people notice (see budget page 3.36). (The other big item stashed in the headline deficit is the net increase in the stock of HECS HELP student debt owed to the government, expected to be an extra $8 billion in the coming year.)

It's by this means that the Labor government was able to spend many billions constructing the national broadband network without a cent of it showing up in the underlying deficit.

In the coming year, the Turnbull government expects to buy $1.5 billion more in NBN shares and lend it $9.3 billion – all to finance further construction spending.

As well, it's setting up a company to own and build the second Sydney airport, and another to own and build the Melbourne to Brisbane inland freight railway.

Combined, these two new projects are expected to cost $1.8 billion in the coming year, rising to an annual $3.2 billion in 2020-21.

But if spending on infrastructure is now regarded as "good debt", why is Treasury still using this legal hair-splitting to conceal the cost of the new infrastructure spending push?

Because it's fighting a rear-guard action. Although it's agreed to give the NOB "increased prominence" in the budget papers, the underlying cash balance "will continue to be the primary fiscal aggregate".

And just to prove Treasury's lack of repentance, no modification has been made to the wording of the government's "medium-term fiscal strategy" to "achieve budget surpluses, on average, over the course of the economic cycle".

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