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.

Read more >>

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.

Read more >>