Digital disruption is stopping retail prices from rising

I’ve heard of the gap between perception and reality, but this is ridiculous. According to the experts, increased competition among supermarkets, department stores and other retailers is holding down prices in a way we’ve rarely seen before.

This fits with the consumer price index, which showed prices rising by just 2.1 per cent over the year to June. Over the past three years, the annual increase has averaged even less: 1.8 per cent.

What it doesn’t fit with are the complaints we keep hearing about the high cost of living. I read it’s got so bad parents are raiding their kids’ piggy banks to help make ends meet.

How can the experts’ reality be reconciled with the people’s perceptions? It’s simple. With a few glaring exceptions – electricity prices, for instance – the cost of living isn’t rising much.

No, the reason many people are having trouble making ends meet is because their wages aren’t growing much either. We’re used to wages rising a bit faster than prices, but that hasn’t been happening for the past four years.

Modern politicians seek popularity by reinforcing our perceptions, whether they’re right or wrong. If you doubt that, just listen to the soothing noises Prime Minister Scott Morrison will be making between now and the election.

Unfortunately, our tiresome econocrats remain committed to determining the reality and correcting misperceptions. Last week Reserve Bank deputy governor Dr Guy Debelle gave a speech which departed from the official talking points and revealed a truth which must not be spoken: the digital revolution is squeezing many retailers’ profit margins and forcing them to cut costs so rising prices don’t cost them customers.

Debelle says that, since 2015, the price of the typical food basket (excluding fruit and veg, and meals out and takeaway) has actually fallen a fraction. Fruit and vegetable prices have risen, but by only a third of their average rate over the past 25 years.

The prices of alcoholic drinks have risen more slowly since 2015, and non-alcoholic drink prices have fallen a bit.

The prices of consumer durable items, including fridges and furniture, have been falling since 2015, meaning they’ve hardly increased over the past 25 years.

The prices of audio-visual equipment – including TVs, computers and phones – have fallen significantly over the past 25 years and particularly the past three.

If you’re finding this hard to believe, there are two main explanations. The first is that, because bad news interests us more than good news, big price rises stick in our minds, but small price falls don’t. Nor do we notice when prices stay unchanged for long periods.

The second is that every new TV, computer or phone does better tricks than the previous model. The new model may cost more than old one, but when the official statisticians allow for the value of the improvement in quality, they almost always find that the underlying price has fallen. Again, this is something we should notice, but usually don’t. Our perceptions play us false.

If we’re having trouble affording the new whiz-bang, big-screen, digital, internet-connected TV, that’s not the higher cost of living, it’s us straining for a higher standard of living.

When we confuse the two we’re deluding ourselves. We’re not getting better off, we’re just having to pay more.

Debelle says changes in the cost of imported goods used to be passed straight on by wholesalers and retailers. But over the past decade or so retailers have become reluctant to pass on higher import prices.

This is only partly because consumer spending hasn’t been growing as strongly as it used to. Debelle finds evidence that net retail margins have been declining.

Cost-cutting means the productivity of labour in retail is rising faster than in other industries, with the savings used to keep prices down rather than fatten profits.

What’s been happening in recent years is intensifying competition between retailers. One cause is the advent of “category killers” such as Bunnings, Officeworks and JB Hi-Fi. These are giving department stores and smaller retailers a hard time.

The buying-power of the many chains of liquor stores now owned by Coles and Woolworths is keeping prices down and putting great pressure on independent stores.

We’ve also seen large foreign retailers setting up bricks-and-mortar operations in Australia. In clothing, these include H&M, Zara, Topshop and Uniqlo.

The biggest bricks-and-mortar disrupter, of course, is Aldi supermarkets. Aldi seems to have taken market share from independent IGA stores, while forcing Coles and Woolies to avoid losing customers by lowering their prices.

Then there’s online shopping, which exposes our retailers not just to competition from big overseas businesses but between themselves.

Online sales still make up only about 5 per cent of total retail trade, but they’re growing rapidly, increasing by 50 per cent over the year to June.

Last year local retailers trembled over the impending arrival of Amazon, but so far it hasn’t had a big impact. Not directly, anyway. Maybe the locals have taken evasive action by keeping their prices low.

Smart phones have made it easier for people to comparison shop – even while in someone else’s store.

And I believe the internet increases the emphasis on price competition, rather than the emotive advertising and marketing big business prefers.

Digital disruption is bad news for the workers in disrupted industries – including journos – but don’t let anyone delude you: it’s almost always good news for consumers.

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Weakening dollar looks a lot worse than it is

Oh dear. While the pollies have been playing their games, the dollar has been falling and there’s even talk in the market of it going below US70¢. Is this a worry? Short answer: naah.

At the local close on Friday the Aussie was at US72.8¢. That’s down from a recent peak in January of almost US81¢. Is that a bad thing?

Depends who you ask. You can find plenty of people who’ll tell you a low dollar is bad and a high dollar is good. But most manufacturers, farmers and miners will tell you the opposite. The lower the better, they say.

Truth is, a fall in the dollar has some advantages and some disadvantages; a rise in the dollar has the opposite set.

A lower dollar has the disadvantage of making imported goods – and overseas holidays – more expensive. It will add to inflation. But it has the advantage of making our export and import-competing industries more internationally competitive on price.

An Australian item priced in Aussie dollars will be cheaper for foreigners to buy; an Australian item priced in US dollars will now bring more Aussie dollars to an Australian exporter. And overseas-produced goods and services will be more pricey relative to locally produced.

Since our inflation rate is unusually low, and our economy should be growing faster, that doesn’t sound like a bad deal to me.

But that’s just the first part of the story. Because a fall sounds bad and a rise sounds good, many people assume a falling dollar must be happening because we’ve stuffed up.

As we’ve seen, wrong on the first count. And most likely wrong on the second. The exchange rate is a relative price – the value of our currency relative to the value of another country’s currency. In this instance, the Yankee dollar.

Any change in that rate of exchange could be explained by happenings on either side of the Pacific – or a bit of both.

At present, however, all the action’s on the American side. The US economy is growing strongly, with President Trump stimulating an economy already close to full employment by cutting company and personal taxes.

So higher inflation is a significant risk. The US Federal Reserve has already raised the US official interest rate from about zero to about 2 per cent (significantly, higher than our 1.5 per cent), and may well raise it further if it gets more concerned about inflation.

A strongly growing economy, with rising interest rates attracting more capital inflow, is an economy with an appreciating currency. In recent times the greenback has been rising in value not just against the Aussie but almost all currencies.

A fact too few people realise is that, though the Aussie has fallen against the greenback (and the currencies of a few developing countries that shadow the greenback), it hasn’t changed much against most other currencies.

We don’t realise that because we’ve long had the bad habit of regarding the Aussie’s value against the greenback as the exchange rate rather than just one of many.

Economists, however – and particularly those at the Reserve Bank – know not to take such short-cuts. They focus on our “effective” exchange rate – the rate against a basket of our trading partners’ currencies, with each country’s currency weighted according to its share of our two-way trade (exports plus imports).

This is the trade-weighted index, or TWI (pronounced “twy”). Since our trade with the US is less than most people assume, the US dollar’s direct weight in the basket is just a bit over 10 per cent.

So whereas since January the Aussie has fallen by almost 10 per cent against the greenback, it’s fall against the TWI has been a more modest 4.4 per cent.

Which is why the country’s economic managers are neither greatly worried nor greatly excited by the dollar’s movements in recent times.

They see the TWI as simply as being around the bottom of the band in which it’s been moving for the past few years. No biggie.

For someone planning an overseas holiday, it’s not good news if you’re off to the States. But doesn’t make much difference if you’re going to Britain, Europe, N’Zillund or Bali.

But could the Aussie fall a lot further against the greenback? It could, and that’s what economic theory would lead you to expect. But I don’t recommend making currency bets on the basis of economic theory.

As a Reserve Bank assistant governor admitted recently, if she knew how to forecast the exchange rate with any accuracy she wouldn’t be here, she’d be on her private island.

Even so, should the dollar end up falling below US70¢ in coming months, I can’t see the Reserve getting too worried. As I say, a bit more inflation would do little harm and a boost to our export industries would be handy.

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“Lags”: one reason economists keep getting it wrong

I’m compiling a short-list of the main things economics teaches us. One is: economic developments take longer to affect the economy than you’d expect. Economists call these delays “lags”. That there are so many of them – and their lengths keep changing – does a lot to explain why economists’ forecasts are so often wrong.

Last week Dr Luci Ellis, an assistant governor of the Reserve Bank, gave a prestigious lecture at the Australian National University devoted solely to the problem of lags.

Ellis says a lag occurs in any instance where time passes between when an activity is initiated and when it has its impact. “Almost all economic phenomena involve lags,” she says. And she’s divided them into three types.

The first is “process lags” – the time it takes for any production process to be finished. The time it takes to build a house, for instance.

This includes the time it takes to make a decision (say, about whether to build the house). Particularly where decisions are made by governments or big businesses, this can take some time. You may have to gather information, do analysis, prepare documents, convene meetings and complete review processes before you’ve decided.

Economists often compare the strengths and weaknesses of the two main instruments they use to manage the macro economy: monetary policy (the manipulation of interest rates) and fiscal policy (the manipulation of government spending and taxation in the budget).

An important difference between the two is that decisions to change interest rates can be made quickly and easily. The Reserve Bank board meets monthly, decides, has lunch and then announces its decision.

By contrast, decisions to change taxes or government spending require a lot more preparation and debate by the cabinet. Then there can be a delay of weeks or months before legislation is passed by parliament and put into effect. Sometimes the firms affected have to be given notice to prepare for the change.

The trick is, once decisions have taken effect, changes to taxes and government spending usually affect the economy more quickly than do changes in interest rates, for which the lags are “long and variable”. The full effect of a rate change could take up to three years.

Another example of decision lags is the local government approval process for building projects, which can take months.

An important case of process lag is known as the “hog cycle”. A farmer takes his pigs to market, discovers prices are high, so decides to grow more pigs.

Trouble is, this takes a few years. And pork prices have fallen back long before the pigs are ready. But when they are, the farmer still has to sell them – which depresses prices even further.

Hog cycles occur in many industries where the long delay between deciding to produce something and getting it finished means demand and supply for the product are never in sync. This causes prices to boom when demand exceeds supply, then bust when supply exceeds demand.

It’s happening now with new apartments. Demand has fallen off, but buildings begun a year or two ago are still adding to supply, putting downward pressure on prices.

The hog cycle – the long lag between rising mineral commodity prices on world markets and our new mines and gas plants finally coming on line – does much to explain the wringer the resources boom and bust has put our economy through over the past decade and a half.

Ellis’s second category is “stock-flow lags”. A stock is the amount of something at a particular point in time – say, the money in a bank account at June 30. A flow is the amounts flowing in and out of the account during a period of time. The difference between the stock at the start of a year and the stock at the end of the year will be the flows in and out.

This is important in housing, where the number of newly built homes in a year is a small fraction of the stock of all existing homes (especially after you allow for the homes that were knocked down during the year).

So if the stock of homes has fallen far short of the number of homes needed, it can take longer than you’d expect to make up the gap.

Historically, macro-economics has tended to focus on flows and ignore stock levels. But Ellis says “if you aren’t taking stocks and flows seriously you probably don’t have a realistic model of the economy”.

Her third category is “learning lags”. This is the time it takes individuals – or the whole economy – to realise economic relationships have changed and to change their behaviour accordingly.

These lags can vary because some people are quicker on the uptake than others. But also because how long it takes before you can conclude a change has occurred depends on many factors: the “noisiness of the data” (the way monthly or quarterly statistics jump around for no apparent reason) and how open you are to changing your views about how things work.

This takes us to the common case of economists having to decide whether some problem is “cyclical” (temporary) or “structural” (lasting).

Ellis says our knowledge that lags often vary in length should make us slow to conclude that the economy’s structure has changed, but human nature seems to push us the other way. It’s too easy to convince ourselves “this time is different” when usually it isn’t.

The big debate between economists at present fits this pattern: is the weakness in wage growth just the product of longer lags than we’re used to in the recovery phase, or has there been some change in workers’ bargaining power that needs correcting?

Whatever the answer, you see how ubiquitous lags are in the economy, how their length can change, how they contribute to the ups and downs of the business cycle, and how hard they make it to be sure where we are now, let alone where we’re headed.

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THE DISRUPTED ECONOMY

Uni of Newcastle Boardroom Lunch, Sydney Business Chamber, Thursday, August 23, 2018

I’m pleased to be invited back with fellow alumni of the university to talk about the disrupted economy. But though, as someone working for a newspaper, I’m only too well aware of just how disruptive digital disruption can be to whole industries and the people working in them - with, no doubt, much more disruption to come – if you’ve come today hoping for confident, detailed, spine-tingling predictions about which industries are next and how many thousands of jobs will be lost, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Rather, I’m going to do roughly the opposite and give you the antidote to all the frighting predictions about how our world will be turned upside down and how disastrous it’s going to be. I’ll give you seven things to beware of.

First is, beware of futurists – supposed experts who speak with great confidence and specificity about what the future holds. Their forecasting record is even worse than economists’. Humans have an insatiable desire to know what the future holds, which gives us an unquenchable appetite for the output of all manner of soothsayers and witchdoctors. We keep forgetting the simple truth: no one, but no one, knows what the future holds. It follows that people who claim to know should be viewed with scepticism. If they’re genuine experts – scientific experts - their predictions will be hedged about with qualifications. Practitioners of futurology, however, are part of the entertainment industry. There’s great demand for their product and they know that the more confident they sound about their predictions, the more they’ll please their audience.

Second, beware of believing that “this time is different”. It’s always possible that this time really will be different, but just remember that people say that every time – during every boom in the economy or the sharemarket or the property market – and it almost never is. This is relevant to the proposition that digital disruption will be bigger and faster and more devastating to employment than we’ve ever seen, because the installation of labour-saving technology has been occurring continuously since the start of the Industrial Revolution more than 200 years ago, and in all that time we are yet experienced technology-caused mass unemployment. This time it may be different, but a betting man or woman would say the greatest likelihood is it won’t be.

Third, beware of believing urban myths. Futurology teems with confidently asserted, seemingly scientific predictions that are so widely repeated they take on the status of accepted facts. In the 1980s, when I first joined the debate about the employment effects of computerisation and the future of work, one of the assumed facts was that each word-processor that firms installed would replace the jobs of, I think it was, 12 typists. But where did this factoid come from? A Harvard study? A presidential report? Few of the people who repeated it ever knew – or bothered to inquire. But someone traced it back to an advertising claim made by a firm selling word-processors.

One current widely quoted factoid is that 40 per cent of Australian jobs are at high risk of automation in the next 10 to 15 years. Hear that one before? The origins of this one have been traced. CEDA commissioned some engineers to take the figures in a study of the American job market and simply modify them for Australia. The American study was made by some entrepreneurial academics at Oxford. But when economists examined the Oxford study – as some Australian and OECD economists did – they found the methodology rough and unconvincing. The OECD study said a more believable estimate for Oz was not 40 per cent but 13 per cent.

Another widely quoted factoid is that “today’s 15 year-olds will likely navigate 17 changes in employer across five different careers”. Heard that one before? I’ve seen it quoted in formal reports and footnoted, without being able to trace its supposedly academic origins. People who tell us how dramatically the world of work is going to change and how much education and training need to change in anticipation of that change say our youngsters need to be taught, among other things, the skill of “critical thinking”. I agree. So let’s apply a little critical thinking to that factoid. Did you note how remarkably numerically specific it is? That’s suspicious. Next, ask yourself how easy it is to believe those remarkable numbers? 17 different employers; five different careers. But the key question we should always ask of futurology is: how would you know? Do you have a time machine? I find it impossible to imagine how you could take all the children born 15 years ago, peer into each of their working lives over the next 55 years and decide how many jobs and careers they’ll have. And do it with such accuracy it could be summarised in two numbers, 17 and five. It’s literally in-credible. The one thing to say for it is that cramming that many employers and careers into just 45 years wouldn’t leave much time for unemployment.

Fourth, beware of assuming that whatever machines can do for us, we’ll want them to do for us. Futurists make themselves expert on what’s coming next from such things as artificial intelligence. What they don’t know much about is human nature. But leave out the human factor and your predictions about how our world will change stand a high chance of being off-beam. Take the confident predictions a decade or two back that, by now, we’d all be working from home. It’s certainly technologically possible, even cheap and easy to organise. But it’s happened to only a limited extent. Why? Because it doesn’t suit many bosses, and it doesn’t suit many workers.

Or, take the long-established move to online financial markets for shares, bonds and currencies. In principle, this means financial traders could be spread around all the cities and towns of Australia with decent internet links. In practice, almost all the traders remain crammed into two or three streets of the Sydney CBD. One of the unexpected features of the knowledge economy is that more and more of the nation’s GDP is being produced in the CBDs of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and maybe Perth. Why? Because knowledge transfers better when people are face-to-face.

To take a more prosaic example, it will soon be technologically possible for cafes and restaurants to be manned by robots rather than people. But I don’t see much of it happening. Why not? Because few people would enjoy eating in such impersonal circumstances. Let me make my own futurist prediction. I think it won’t be long before many firms bring their overseas call centres back on shore. Why? Because so many of their customers hate it.

Fifth, beware of assuming that what you see is all you get. What everyone sees with computerisation, automation, digitisation and the rise of AI (artificial insemination) is all the jobs being destroyed. Non-economists assume that’s the end of the story. Economists earn their living by knowing that it’s not. You have first to remember that some new jobs – not all that many - are created by the workers needed to sell, distribute, maintain, replace and modify all the robots. Much more significantly – but much harder to see – is the realisation that the instillation of labour-saving equipment – including robots – doesn’t destroy value, it increases it. That’s why it happens. It doesn’t reduce productivity, it increases it. And increased productivity equals increased income. Ideally, that increased income is manifest in higher wages for those who remain in the industry and lower prices for the industry’s customers. Failing that, the extra income stays in the hands of the owners of the firms in the industry. But wherever the gains from higher productivity end up, when they are spent somewhere in the economy they create new jobs. This is why economists say that new technology doesn’t destroy jobs, it “displaces” them. It reduces employment in the industry applying the new labour-saving technology, but increases employment in many other, often utterly unrelated industries – usually in the services sector and, if our experience over the past 30 years is any guide, particularly jobs suitable for women. This is why 200 years of labour-saving investment have yet to create significant levels of technological unemployment and why overall employment has continued to grow almost every year.

Sixth, beware of forgetting what economists, in their pompous way, call the “policy reaction function”. This is just a fancy way of saying there’s what the market does, and then there’s what the government does in response to what the market’s done. If it doesn’t like the outcomes the market has produced – or, more likely, if too many voters don’t like those outcomes - it will intervene to correct those outcomes.

Finally, beware of assuming from all I’ve said to put future technological disruption into a more realistic context that I think nothing much will change, or that there’s nothing to worry about. I think a lot will change and there’s a fair bit to worry about.  But these are things you can ask me about now.

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Our concern about the drought isn’t fair dinkum

It’s taken him too long, but public concern and the looming election have finally obliged Malcolm Turnbull to do the right thing by our farmers struggling with severe drought.

In Forbes on Sunday, Turnbull announced a further $250 million in assistance to farmers and communities, including initial grants of $1 million each to 60 drought-affected councils in NSW, Queensland and Victoria, bringing Canberra’s direct handouts to $826 million.

Add a further $1 billion in concessional loans and the total outlay comes to $1.8 billion.

Well, about time.

Is that what you think? I don’t.

I think most of it will be a waste of taxpayers’ money. You’ve heard of being cruel to be kind, but the way we carry on every time there’s a drought is being kind to be cruel. Our sympathy, donations and taxpayer assistance just prolong the agony of farmers unable or unwilling to face the harsh reality of farming in a country with one of the most variable climates in the world.

We may not be able to predict their timing or their length, but we can be certain that, before too long, this drought will be followed by another. And the scientists tell us climate change is making it worse.

And yet we keep pretending no one could have predicted or prepared for the next drought. Nonsense.

Our attitude to drought is all soft heart and soft head. I have two objections. The first is the way our collective concern about drought and its consequences is always media-driven.

When I visited the country in mid-May, my host complained that no one in the city seemed to know or care about the drought that was ravaging the countryside.

But when, a few months later, the first media outlet got the message, it started the usual flood of heart-rending drought stories.

The media love drought stories because they know how much they stir their customers’ emotions. Most people like having the media give their heart-strings a regular workout. I don’t.

And the trouble is, our concern about the drought – or the tsunami or earthquake or bushfire – lasts only as long as it takes the media’s attention to shift to some newer source of concern.

It’s already happening. Turnbull’s big announcement in Forbes got little media coverage because the threat to his leadership was far more exciting.

My more substantial objection to the recurring carry-on about drought is that it makes the problem worse rather than better. We give the bush a fish to feed it for a day when we should be helping it learn better fishing techniques.

In their efforts to tug our emotions, the media invariably leave us with an exaggerated impression of the severity of the drought and the proportion of farmers who are suffering badly. They show us the very worst farms and the worst-off farmers.

To be blunt, they show us the bad managers, not the good ones. I can’t remember ever seeing a story where someone whose farm was in much better shape than his neighbours’ was asked how he did it.

The exception that proves the rule? Don’t be so sure. On average over the six years to 2007-08 – the Millennium drought – nearly 70 per cent of Australia’s broadacre and dairy farms in drought-declared areas managed without government assistance.

Many, maybe most, farmers prepare for drought. Some don’t. They’re the ones the media want us to feel sorry for. The ones who’ve overstocked their now badly degraded properties hoping it will rain before long or, failing that, the government and guilt-ridden city-slickers will give them a handout.

The trouble with our emergency assistance approach to drought is that it encourages farmers not to bother preparing for the inevitable. It encourages farmers whose farms are too small, or who lack the skills or spare capital to survive, to keep struggling on when they should give up.

And it does all that to the chagrin of the wise and careful farmers who’ve made expensive preparation for the next drought with little help from other taxpayers.

Australians have been leaving the farm and moving to the city for more than a century. They’ve done so because continuous advances in labour-saving technology have made small farms uneconomic and decimated the demand for rural labour. All while the nation’s agricultural production keeps growing.

This is my own family’s story. I was raised mainly in cities, but my father grew up on a dairy farm near Toowoomba and my mother on a cane farm in North Queensland.

Meaning that, were it not for my brush with economics, I too would share the city-slickers’ sense of guilt at having deserted the true Australian’s post on the land for a cushy life in the city. Would $50 be enough, do you think?

We are perpetrators of what Americans have dubbed the “hydro-illogical cycle”. As Dr Jacki Schirmer and others at the University of Canberra describe it, this occurs when “a severe drought triggers short-term concern and assistance, followed by a return to apathy and complacency once the rains return.

“When drought drops off the public and media radar, communities are often left with little or no support to invest in preparing for the next inevitable drought.”

Every government report on drought concludes the best response is for farmers to improve their self-reliance, preparedness and climate-change management. We could help them with their preparations, but we get a bigger emotional kick from giving them handouts when droughts are at their worst.

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We could increase bank competition if we wanted to

Would you like to put your savings in a super scheme presently reserved for public servants? Would you like your bank account or mortgage to be with the Reserve Bank?

Impossible to imagine such a crazy idea? Well, that’s what the Productivity Commission thinks, but it’s neither as impossible nor as crazy as it may sound.

Everyone says they believe in innovation, but when we’re used to thinking and doing things one way and some bright spark argues we should be doing it the opposite way, they’re more likely to be dismissed than grappled with.

And our econocrats are no more receptive to innovative ideas than the rest of us, it seems.

The bright spark in question is Dr Nicholas Gruen, principal of consulting firm Lateral Economics. The Bank of England and Martin Wolf, of the Financial Times, think he’s worth taking seriously, but in the Productivity Commission’s final report on competition in the financial system his ideas are brushed off as though he’s a nut job.

So let’s have a look at them. In his submission to the commission’s inquiry, Gruen argued we needed to give a twist to a widely accepted principle of micro-economic reform, established in 1996, called “competitive neutrality”.

In those days there were a lot of (mainly state) government-owned businesses. Sometimes they had a natural monopoly over some network, sometimes it was an “unnatural” monopoly granted by legislation, sometimes it was a bit of both.

The reformers’ concern was that, being monopolies, these government businesses weren’t terribly efficient. They tended to be overstaffed and do “sweetheart” pay deals with their unions because they knew they could pass the cost straight on to their customers.

Clearly, it would be much better for customers if these outfits could be exposed to competition from private firms, to force their prices down. But this competition would emerge only if the public businesses were robbed of any special advantage arising from their government ownership.

Fine. Almost a quarter-century later, most of those businesses have been privatised – many of them with their anti-competitive advantages intact or restored, so as to boost their sale price.

Today, of course, the big problem is the lack of competition in, say, the oligopolised national electricity market or, as the commission’s inquiry acknowledged, in oligopolised banking. With super, the big problem is workers’ reluctance to engage with all those boring comparisons.

This is where Gruen’s twist on competitive neutrality comes in. If what we needed back then was to increase private competition with government businesses, surely an answer to our present problem of inadequate competition between private players is increased competition from public businesses.

In the case of banking, he asks why, in these days of online banking, the significant benefits of being able to bank with the central bank should be restricted to producers (the commercial banks) and denied to consumers (households and other businesses). What’s competitively neutral about that?

In the case of superannuation, why should savers be prevented from giving their money to funds managing the super savings of public servants? Surveys show public sector funds achieve returns to members even higher than the non-profit industry funds, let alone the for-profit “retail” funds run by banks and insurance companies.

Gruen notes that public sector funds would offer only modern, defined-contribution super and involve no subsidies – that is, they’d be competitively neural. (More radical reformers would say, so what if public providers had a government-related advantage they could pass on to customers? If the government can give the public a better deal, why shouldn’t it?)

Sometimes public providers would have an advantage because they were so big. But that’s not an unfair advantage. It’s exploitation of economies of scale that mean so many private industries are dominated by only a few firms. Only problem is insufficient price competition between them to ensure the cost savings are passed to customers, not owners.

In response to Gruen’s idea of opening up access to central banks, the commission raised practical objections that could be solved if you really wanted to.

In brushing off the idea of public super providers, the commission quoted the case of the Swedes doing something similar. Bad idea, apparently. More than two-thirds of new contributors defaulted into the public fund – perhaps because it earned better returns than the private sector funds.

Of course, you wouldn’t expect privately own banks or super funds to welcome reform that could cost them customers or force down their profit margins. Perhaps this explains the commission’s lack of interest in the idea – it knew the proposal wouldn’t appeal to a Coalition government.

But it's more likely the econocrats are just stuck in an ideological rut. Economic reform was always about reducing public and increasing private. Going the other way is so obviously wrong it doesn’t need thinking about.

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