Wednesday, December 8, 2010

OUTLOOK FOR POLITICS & GOVERNMENT 2011

Talk to Australian Business Economists Annual Forecasting Conference Sydney, December 8, 2010

Just as Glenn Stevens starts each appearance before the House economics committee by reviewing the fate of the forecasts he made at his previous appearance, so I have to start by reviewing the fearless forecasts I made this time last year. Usually Stevens can say his forecasts turned out pretty well, but I can’t. Since I know you guys like people to make a clear ‘call’, I gave one. And as a well-trained journo I put it in the lead: ‘it now seems clear the next federal election will be a double dissolution held not much earlier than normal - late September - with climate change and Work Choices as its main issues. It also seems likely that Kevin Rudd will win in a landslide’. Later, I referred to Tony Abbott, elected to be opposition leader just the previous week, as ‘unelectable’.

Whoops. Every one of those judgments proved wrong. My key miscalculation was in assuming Rudd couldn’t and wouldn’t abandon his commitment to achieving his emissions trading scheme. The other errors I made flowed from that. Labor insiders tell me I was among the first outsiders to detect Rudd’s feet of clay, but as it turned out even I overrated him. Had Rudd not lost his nerve on the ETS he would have had to hold a double dissolution, but the one he considered and eventually decided against would have been held early in the year, not later as I predicted. His about-face on the ETS started his precipitous decline in the polls which, combined with his difficulties over the mining tax, prompted his overthrow. But his brutal replacement by Julia Gillard did little to revive Labor’s electoral standing. Clearly, I and other smarties greatly underestimated Abbott’s powers as a politician, including his ability to largely defuse Work Choices as an election issue.

I’ve known for many years how foolhardy it is to make long-term political predictions - that is, predictions of events more than a year away - because events and attitudes can change so easily between now and then. But, for the sake of a fearless call (and also because the earlier you make your forecast the more time there is for people to have forgotten it), let me break my rule: I predict the Gillard government will run full term but, though that ought to give it plenty of time to lift its game, will lose the next election. I’ve come to the conclusion this generation of Labor is terminally incompetent.

Federal Labor’s achievement this year has been nothing short of extraordinary. To quote Wayne Swan: ‘We came within a whisker of losing government despite the best performing advanced economy in the world, despite substantially increasing the pension, despite fairer workplace laws, despite record investments in human capital, and despite cutting income taxes three times.’

I’m going to devote a fait bit of this talk to trying to explain why Labor stuffed up so badly, before looking to the future for politics and government.


The Demise of Rudd

The man who emerged from relative obscurity to become Labor’s saviour in 2007 turned out to be deeply flawed. Matched against the ageing John Howard, he looked appealing - young, good looking, well spoken, well educated and articulate - and unthreatening. At the same time, he promised to end the unfairness of Work Choices and was judged the more credible of the two in his promise to take decisive action on climate change. But he didn’t look particularly ‘Labor’.

He didn’t look it because he wasn’t. He hadn’t had to fight his way up through the party or the union structure, even though he - like almost everyone at the top of modern Labor - had cut his teeth working for state Labor, in his case as a politically appointed senior bureaucrat working for the Goss government. Labor’s egalitarian ethos hadn’t rubbed off on him, he held the unions in disdain, he was in a faction but not of one, he had little personal support within the parliamentary party and no mates. The main things that got him into the opposition leader’s job were his sponsorship by the NSW Right and his deal with Gillard of the Left. He did deals with many party people, most of whom he stopped talking to after he’d attained the exalted heights of prime minister. He burnt up much goodwill by giving jobs for the boys to boys from the other side - something Howard would never have dreamt of doing. He failed my acid test for Labor ministers: his staff didn’t love him (as most do).

He turned out to be all ambition and little principle. His overriding goal was to maintain his own popularity. He had little courage and was part of a cabinet that almost universally lacked courage. Everything started falling apart when he, after a long period of indecision, took the fatal decision to abandon the ETS because it had become too hard. To be fair, he took a lot of persuading to give up the ETS, but eventually those urging him to stick with it - Lindsay Tanner, Penny Wong and John Faulkner - were overwhelmed by those urging him to drop it: initially, Sussex Street (Mark Arbib and Karl Bitar) and then Gillard and Swan - the two whose careers benefited most from that fatal miscalculation, which in one blow destroyed the credibility of both Rudd and his government.

Despite his reputation as a policy wonk, Rudd turned out to be a hopeless administrator. He couldn’t set priorities or delegate (meaning he had no intrinsic feel for opportunity cost). He moved from one enthusiasm to the next, wanting everything he touched to be the biggest and best ever (he was addicted to superlatives), but had great trouble making up his mind and would delay a decision by demanding more options and the answers to more and more questions. His personal staff and senior bureaucrats were treated very badly. People would work all night to have a response to his queries on his desk next morning, only to discover he hadn’t found time to read it. They’d be summoned to a meeting with him several days later, where he’d flick through their paper, asking questions to which the answer was often ‘on the next page, prime minister’. Papers piled up in his in-tray, everything ran late and often had to be thrown together at the last minute to meet some deadline. Bureaucrats who needed something ticked by the PM would save it till he was out of the country and then submit it to Gillard, who would turn it around in no time. Government decision-making became chaotic.

Rudd was also an autocrat. He didn’t consult - not the unions, business, the backbench, the outer ministry or even the cabinet. Key decisions were made by the kitchen cabinet or Gang of Four, the strategic priorities and budget committee - Rudd, Gillard, Swan and Tanner - and even then there’ve been suggestions the other three were consulted rather than allowed to decide. After Rudd was deposed because the government had ‘lost its way’, Gillard and others were often asked whether they’d done anything to warn or remonstrate with Rudd. The honest answer is: No, not really. People were afraid to speak frankly to Rudd for fear of incurring his (frequently displayed) displeasure and being cut out of the loop. Rudd lacked the courage to sack people, but would just stop talking to those - even those within his office - who’d lost his confidence. By the end, pretty much his only confidants were a couple of inexperienced 30-year-olds in his office. His fatal mistake was to stop talking to Mark Arbib.

Rudd returned from his failed attempt to broker an agreement at Copenhagen exhausted and dispirited. He seems to have gone into a funk of indecision. He baulked at calling a double dissolution, then sought to distract himself with health reform, visiting about 40 hospitals around the country to ‘consult’. Senior bureaucrats and ministers followed him around, hoping he’d make decisions and reach their agenda item.

Rudd’s obsession with always trying to dominate the daily news cycle proved a snare and a delusion. His insistence on having ministers and departments come up with an unending stream of minor ‘announceables’ wasted their time and annoyed them while distracting them from more important matters. Worse, it deluded the government into imagining it was communicating effectively with the electorate. Labor’s small army of young PR punks manhandled the press gallery more than it was used to, meaning the media were ready to turn on Rudd as soon as his dominance slipped. The notion that if you could dominate the news cycle every day for three years the election would be a pushover proved to be wrong. As soon as the decision to drop the ETS destroyed Rudd’s credibility - among people who didn’t fancy the idea, as much as those who did - all those days of media dominance counted for nought.

Rudd’s backdown on the ETS weakened him for the next big battle, over the resource super profits tax. It emboldened the big three miners to seek to destroy the government rather than bargain with it, while reducing the government’s creditability in defending the tax to the public and making the notion of reaching a significant compromise with the miners unthinkable. (What isn’t widely known is that the big three’s resistance was heightened because the tax would have cost them more than twice what Treasury had estimated it would.)

Rudd’s losing fight over the RSPT proved the last straw for the spurned Sussex Street, which patched up its relations with the parliamentary Right in other states, gathered the numbers in caucus and made a last-minute offer to Gillard she couldn’t resist. The former Hawke minister Neal Blewett has expressed surprise at how quickly the party panicked. All successful governments go through periods of being behind in the polls. The explanation is partly that modern Labor is more committed to power than principle, but also that, by then, the entire party was so fed up with the chaotic, authoritarian Rudd. The night the bureaucrats learnt Rudd was being replaced by Gillard there would have been dancing in the streets.

The unlosable election (just)

It’s remarkable that a first-term federal government - particularly one that had performed so well in managing the economy - failed to win the election and went so close to losing it. We’ll never know whether Labor would have done better at the election had Rudd been allowed to stay on. We do know the election would have been held in October rather than brought forward to August. It’s clear the brutality of Rudd’s overthrow would have cost Labor votes - more than the conspirators ever bothered to imagine it might. But it’s doubtful Rudd would have been able to reach a compromise with the big miners over the resource tax, so one imponderable is how well he would have withstood the continued onslaught, including a massive ad campaign and funding of the Liberals.

On the other hand, Rudd’s overthrow robbed Labor of the ability to boast about its various achievements (paid parental leave is one Swan didn’t mention in that earlier quote). How could you justify Rudd’s ousting as necessary because the government had ‘lost its way’ and then praise his performance? Thus did Labor forfeit much of the benefits of incumbency - another price I doubt the conspirators thought about before they acted. But most Labor insiders are saved from worrying about what might have been by their conviction that, one way or another, Rudd had to go.

I think it’s now clear Gillard’s strategy of reaching a quick fix on the government’s three most pressing problems - reaching a compromise on the mining tax, doing something about asylum seekers and filling the vacuum on climate change - then rushing to an early poll while Gillard was still enjoying her honeymoon with the electorate was a costly miscalculation. The honeymoon quickly evaporated, leaving a woman with blood on her hands rushing to the polls before the dust had settled and people had got a chance to get to know her. Unsurprisingly, they weren’t greatly impressed.

The campaign was surprisingly badly run, and was marred by several damaging leaks, which party insiders are convinced came from Rudd. Before the election we were told a uniform swing of just 1.7 per cent against Labor would be sufficient to tip it out, but it actually suffered a two-party preferred swing of 2.6 per cent and still ended level pegging with the coalition on the number of seats. Why? Because the swing was far from uniform, varying greatly between states: down 5.6 per cent in Queensland, 4.8 per cent in NSW and 3.2 per cent in Western Australia, but up 4.4 per cent in Tasmania, 1 per cent in Victoria and 0.8 per cent in South Australia. And because swings aren’t uniform even within states, they don’t translate evenly to seats. In net terms, Labor loss seven seats in Queensland and one each in NSW, WA, Tasmania and the Northern Territory, gaining a net one seat in Victoria, to lose 10 seats in total, eight to the coalition, one to the Greens and one to an independent in Tassie.

On first preference votes, Labor lost 5.4 percentage points, though only 1.5 percentage points of this went to the coalition, leaving almost 4 percentage points going to the Greens. The Greens’ two-party preferred vote in the Reps rose to 11.8 per cent (with 79 per cent of their preferences going to Labor). This was Labor’s fourth lowest primary vote since the beginning of the two-party system in 1910.

Breaking up Labor’s vote by region, its two-party preferred vote fell by 3.3 percentage points in inner metropolitan seats, by 3.1 points in rural seats, but by only 1.8 per cent in outer metropolitan and provincial seats.

On a depressing note, both sides judged it easier to scare people into rejecting the other side than to inspire people to support them. On an encouraging and remarkable note, because both sides were so anxious to claim they’d be better at eliminating budget deficits and debt, both felt they had no choice but to nominate offsetting savings to cover the cost of their election promises (although the Liberals’ costings were deceptive).

Gillard’s strengths and weaknesses

As Peter Hartcher has pointed out, Gillard has one thing in common with Abbott: both seized their party leadership as part of a reform panic. Abbott: the coalition’s panic over Malcolm Turnbull’s commitment to the ETS; Gillard: Labor’s panic over the opposition to the mining tax. Not an auspicious beginning for either of them. I don’t believe Gillard undermined or plotted against Rudd but, even if she didn’t, it looked bad and she has had no honeymoon with the electorate.

She isn’t able to appear warm and likable on television, which means she lacks charisma. She isn’t disliked, but she isn’t liked either. A substitute for likeability (eg Bob Hawke) is being respected - seen as a strong and capable leader (eg Howard, Malcolm Fraser), but she doesn’t have that either. Since the election she and Labor have been flat-lining in the polls, making no progress from their perilous position at that time. You can see this as a sign she’s failed to impress the electorate or that it’s suspending judgment - both, probably.

One of her strengths is she’s a highly capable administrator (notwithstanding the exaggerated problems with the schools halls building program). She’s smart, she works hard, turns the paper around and chairs a very disciplined meeting. Another great strength - much in evidence in the 17-day period between the election and Labor’s confirmation it had the number to continue in government - is her ability as a negotiator and deal-maker. She can give you little, but send you away happy. A third great strength is her willingness to listen, consult and include. All leaders learn from the mistakes of their predecessor, but she would have been inclusive anyway. Cabinet is back to functioning normally. Even if her polling doesn’t improve, it will be a long time before the caucus can be roused against her. And she has had the sense to abandon Rudd’s obsession with dominating the daily news cycle.

Her great weakness is her lack of belief. She’s hugely ambitious, but doesn’t seem to have a deep commitment to Labor’s traditional preoccupation with fairness and redistribution, equality of opportunity, social justice and compassion. She came to power via the Left faction, but shows no sign of having left-wing values. Indeed, I suspect she’s trying to live down her left-wing label by erring on the conservative side. She does keep saying what her values are: she believes in hard work, a fair go through education, and that we’re all equally worthy of respect. That’s fine, but it doesn’t get us far. And though she and her cabinet colleagues keep stressing their belief in ‘a strong economy’, that doesn’t mean she’s an economic rationalist - just a politician who’s concluded a growing economy is essential to staying in office.

Laurie Oakes says Howard made every mistake in the book in his first term, but he only made them once. My big question about Gillard is the steepness of her learning curve. If you learn from your stuff-ups, your chances of survival and success are greatly improved. I concluded Rudd didn’t have a learning curve, so wasn’t sorry to see Labor bundle him out. Gillard was at the fore in persuading Rudd to abandon the ETS, which proved a disastrous mistake, but her decision to fill the vacuum with a citizen’s assembly suggests she was very slow to see the error and start getting back into the carbon-price game.

One of Rudd’s failings was his hankering after the biggest and best in everything, regardless of whether all his grand projects were consistent with his (utterly genuine) commitment to returning the budget to surplus ASAP. This says Gillard should have seen the gold-plated national broadband network coming and taken quite steps to tone it down, but she didn’t.

Tony Abbott and the Libs

Abbott has proved a far more disciplined and successful politician than I ever imagined he could be. He got the job because of his willingness to switch to implacable opposition to a price on carbon (that is, to a policy on climate change that’s less rational that the Greens’), but also because the Libs, expecting a drubbing in the election, wanted him to minimise the loss of their base vote. He not only held the base, he gained almost enough of the middle ground to win. He just kept punching away during the election campaign, kept his foot out of his mouth, and did far better than anyone expected.

Abbott is a contradiction: intensely personable in the flesh, but capable of coming across as a crazed zealot in the media. But after a rocky start he kept all his zealotry well controlled. He can say stupid things (eg that this was the worst Labor government ever) but also things that are charming and disarming (eg that Gillard’s success with the independents showed her to be a talented negotiator).

The Libs are the natural home of economic rationalism, starting with Bert Kelly, The Modest Member, John Hyde and the Dries, and the pre-PM Howard, who once fairly dubbed himself the father of economic rationalism. But rationalism is out of fashion today; Abbott’s not interested in economics and is happy to argue that putting a price on carbon is crazy and pretend that ‘direct action’ will fix climate charge rather than just waste money. There are no rationalists left in the party bar Turnbull (and maybe Joe Hockey), though Hockey is regarded as lazy and has two people after his job (Andrew Robb and Turnbull). But Robb’s credibility has been damaged greatly by the disclosure after the election that his policy costings - which he refused to submit to Treasury and Finance - were flawed to the point of fraudulence.

It took Abbott too long to realise he’d lost the election and that the government was unlikely to fall any time soon. He should assume the election will be in three years’ time. If so, it doesn’t follow that just because he almost won this time he’s sure to win whenever the next election’s held. As I’ve been reminded to my cost, the political world can change dramatically within a year, let alone three. One thing that could change is that three years of Abbott’s unrelenting opposition to everything - punch, punch, punch - could wear very thin with an electorate that gets terribly tired of seeing politicians perpetually arguing with each other. You get the feeling Abbott would oppose the Second Coming if it was Labor policy. Smart oppositions avoid appearing excessively negative by being more selective in what they oppose and drawing attention to the things they support. Abbott has indicated he understands the Libs’ need to do more to articulate their own positive policies, but whether he can force himself to be more positive and less relentlessly negative remains to be seen.

Labor and the economy

The more loudly Labor proclaims its fealty to ‘a strong economy’ the more you realise there’s something amiss. These days, it’s virtually compulsory for governments to claim to be committed to economic reform, though they have considerable latitude in what they define as reform. With the retirement of Tanner, Labor’s down to just one avowed economic rationalist, Craig Emerson, who’s sidelined in Trade. It will take some time for Labor’s new economics professor, Andrew Leigh, to progress from the backbench to the front. I don’t regard Swan as a true believer, though I have hopes for Wong. She did, after all, spend Labor’s first three years trying to introduce market pricing to carbon emissions and water. No, these guys are just politicians, first and foremost, who realise the political importance of good economic performance, but don’t have a deep understanding of, respect for and belief in the power of market forces. They are dogged by an inferiority complex in the economic area, born of their knowledge that they’re only faking it as economic rationalists and of Peter Costello’s decade-long success in reinforcing the electorate’s instinctive belief that the party of the workers couldn’t be any good at managing the economy, whereas the part of the bosses obviously would be.

Rudd and Gillard happen to have done particularly well at macro management, as well as it’s reasonable to expect flesh-and-blood politicians to do. They’ve left the Reserve Bank alone and uncriticised as it’s done its job; they stimulated the economy vigorously at just the right moment, they managed business and consumer expectations brilliantly, and they’ve imposed budgetary strictures on themselves from the off (starting with the requirement that all stimulus spending be temporary and moving to the restrictions on tax cuts and real spending growth till the surplus is back to 1 per cent of GDP). I have no doubt they’ll do ‘whatever it takes’ to get the budget back to surplus in 2012-13. I don’t regard this performance as having been seriously marred by the problems with insulation and school building. It has suited the opposition and sections of the media to leave us with a greatly exaggerated impression of the extent of waste, and to deny the very real trade-off between macro-economic timeliness and value-for-money.
It’s on the micro side that Labor’s performance has been weak, with its wasteful spending on industry assistance, cash-for-clunkers and the like, its inadequate rollback of Howard’s extensive middle-class welfare, its excessive compensation to polluters under its ETS and then its abandonment of that scheme when the going got tough, and finally its mishandling and ultimate butchering of the minerals resource rent tax.

Throughout its life the government has exhibited three related deficiencies: a lack of values, a lack of courage and a lack of skill in managing its relations with the electorate. It’s mainly because of Labor’s lack of deep belief in rational policies that it lacks the courage to fight for them when an unprincipled opposition exaggerates their cost to the electorate. And it’s the same lack of genuine belief and understanding that leaves ministers unwilling or unable to explain and defend policies whose short-term costs will be outweighed by longer-term benefits.
Labor’s explanatory powers and its belief in its own ability to exercise those powers have atrophied through lack of use. It’s relied too long on spin doctors, whose stock in trade is to conceal, confuse and distract rather than explain. People who should be being paid to find effective ways to explain complex and unfamiliar concepts put their effort into trickery, such as announcing backdowns late on Friday afternoons, or bullying journalists. Ministers agree to the public’s self-pitying misconceptions rather than explain complex truths. We didn’t have a recession because we didn’t have two successive quarters of negative growth - what a way to denigrate your own success! Any change in mortgage interest rates not in lock step with changes in the cash rate is profiteering. If power prices have risen a lot the cost of living has gone through the roof and you’re right to feel impoverished.

Why do ministers perpetually attack the opposition rather than explain and defend their policies? Because they’re politicians doing what politicians do, not economic believers doing what believers do. You’ve got to build support for reform - even if only among opinion leaders - but you don’t do it by attacking your political opponents, you do it by unceasing explanation and persuasion.

Why Labor’s so bad at it

In watching the government’s performance over the past three years - but particularly over the past year - I’ve come to the startling conclusion that federal Labor has lost its race memory of how to govern. The Hawke/Keating government knew how to do it, but after 11 years in the wilderness Labor has lost the knack. These guys are amateurs. Many of the ministers and their advisers had experience in government at the state level, but it hasn’t successfully translated to the federal level.

One sign of amateurism is that Labor is still talking and acting like an opposition. Not being in power, oppositions do little other than criticise the other side, leaving it until close to the election to produce positive policies. Sensible governments ignore their opponents as much as possible, exploiting the advantage of incumbency to deny them air. Responding to opposition criticism gives that criticism legitimacy in the eyes of the media and the public. Labor spends all its time attacking its opponents. The electorate finds this far more alienating and confusing than convincing. Those who aren’t one-eyed for one side or the other don’t feel equipped to adjudicate the debate and so are likely to conclude ‘they’re all liars’. In other words, attacking the opposition isn’t persuasive. It’s a sign Labor is confusing scoring points inside parliament house with scoring in the electorate. But the other disadvantage of perpetually disagreeing with the opposition is that it crowds out what the government should be doing: explaining its policies and expounding on their many virtues.

Another sign of opposition thinking is the way Labor keeps expressing sympathy for punters’ complaints that it picks up from its focus groups eg the cost of living, the greedy banks, executive salaries. Oppositions can get away with this, but governments can’t because they’re expected to act on their expressed concern. Governments are unable to do much to fix most of these complaints, many of which are ill-founded. By sympathising with these whinges rather than making the counter points, governments foster the belief that they can and should solve all the problems of individuals, a recipe for voter disenchantment.

If there’s one thing you’d expect Labor politicians to understand it’s the need to ‘do the numbers’ - make sure you have enough support for a proposal before you make it public and risk losing face if you then have to seriously modify or even abandon it in the face of vigorous opposition. Partly this is about pre-marketing controversial ideas to find small modifications that could significantly reduce opposition, without any loss of face. Partly it’s about conditioning people’s expectations and also allowing the leaders of key interest groups to condition their supporters’ expectations. Everyone appreciates a heads-up; no on enjoys being caught by surprise. Consulting before announcement rewards and encourages loyalty among natural supporters eg the unions, and builds trust with non-supporters eg business.

The sad story of the resource super profits tax is a case study. The tax was intended to be no more burdensome than the miners would reluctantly accept, but in the event the big three objected so strongly they declined the opportunity for post-announcement consultation and set out to bring about the government’s electoral defeat. The miners had signalled their willingness to accept a profits-based tax, but seem to have been expecting an extension of existing petroleum resource rent tax (which is roughly what they ended up with). The only warning the miners had was being told of the government’s plan the day before it was announced. The proposed tax was in a highly sophisticated form unfamiliar to the miners (and their financiers), but the bigger problem was Treasury’s gross underestimate of the revenue the tax would raise. When, after weeks of public battling, the government finally realised the extent of this miscalculation, it soon agreed to change the tax in ways that reduced its revenue-raising potential to about what had been originally intended. This was seen by the public as a huge backdown in the face of opposition from a powerful foreign interest group. But worse, in the process the tax was butchered, greatly reducing its intended efficiency benefits. Had the government known the tax’s true revenue-raising power beforehand, it would merely have halved the rate at which it was imposed, from 40 per cent to 20 per cent. Had that happened, the miners’ opposition would have been greatly reduced and no one would have thought any the worse of the government. And the government would have been much better informed in advance of any announcement had it released the Henry report for public comment soon after receiving it, rather than releasing it simultaneously with the announcement of its response. The miners would have known what was being proposed, could have done their sums as to its effect on them and privately warned the government about their misgivings. Taking another example, I believe the controversy over the government’s reservations about the budgetary cost of equal pay is another case where pre-consultation could have saved the government a lot of skin.

This government lacks the confidence that should come from incumbency, that should embolden it to take calculated risks in support of good policy and should, in turn, foster the electorate’s confidence that the country is in safe and competent hands. This is a circular process: acting confident makes the electorate confident in you, which justifies and reinforces your own confidence. Instead we find a government with an economic inferiority complex, always trying to hide behind the authority of others: the allegedly ‘independent’ Treasury, the Henry report, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, the NBN business case etc. Rudd would also have co-opted the Reserve Bank to his management team had the (genuinely independent) Reserve not politely declined.

Because of the human fallibility of the electorate, politics abounds in paradoxes. But Labor has no instinctive understanding of paradox. When you’re not conscious of paradox - when you don’t realise the public is perfectly capable of holding logically inconsistent attitudes - you’re easily misled by focus groups. One paradox is that though voters don’t welcome hip-pocket pain, they want to be led by someone with the strength and confidence to inflict pain when he or she believes it to be in the nation’s best interests. This explains why even those who feared the hip-pocket cost of the ETS reacted with disillusionment to Rudd’s decision to ditch it. From all he’d said, we really needed it, but he was willing to shirk his leadership responsibility to avoid unpleasantness. What’s particularly worrying is that none of those still at the helm of the post-Rudd Labor Party foresaw the price this expediency would extract. By contrast, Howard pressed on with his far more unpopular ‘great big new tax on everything’, the GST, and (narrowly) survived. What got him over the line was the public’s grudging confidence that he must be doing this unpleasant thing because the country really need it to be done.

Another paradox is that the more concessions you make to interest groups, the more you stimulate rather than satiate the demand for concessions. Show me you’re a soft touch, and I come back for more. Let me see rival interest groups getting in for their cut and I’ll hasten to join the queue. But let me see that nobody else is getting much and I won’t feel bad about getting little myself. The Hawke-Keating government had an objective of trying to stamp out the rent-seeking culture. It wasn’t always honoured, but it served the government - and good policy - better than what we have now.

Another paradox is that the public will overlook individual bad practices for a long time, but eventually the smell will reach a point that registers with the electorate and causes it to turn away in disgust. Individual controversies over conflicts of interest - failure to declare interests; politicians taking jobs with interest groups soon after leaving parliament - don’t excite much interest in the electorate, but if there’s sufficient controversy over time to convince people a government is merely feathering its own nest, it’s in trouble. Politicians devote much time to crafting arguments - often using statistics - designed to mislead without actually lying. People haven’t the knowledge, time or interest to get to the bottom of arguments of this type. They just conclude both sides are lying. It took a long time for politicians to break sufficient promises for the public to conclude that all politicians break almost all promises. I doubt it’s possible for governments to keep a high enough proportion of their promises for sufficient years as to turn that perception around.

One paradox most politicians do understand is that, in this big and complex world where no one has the time to pay the attention they should, voters’ perceptions about things are more important than the reality of those things. Indeed, as the pollies say, ‘the perception is the reality’. There’s much truth to this. But you can push it too far. Neglect the underlying reality of effective service delivery badly enough for long enough and no amount of effort to manipulate perceptions will hide the unacceptable reality. Once you reach that point, nothing you say will be listened to and nothing you do to remedy the situation will help you. This is the story of the long demise of the NSW Labor government.

A final paradox is that when you’re surrounded by risks whichever way you turn - when you’re a minority government, for instance - and are most inclined to proceed cautiously, that just when you need to be bold. Why? Because the public’s reaction to leaders is instinctive and unconscious. They’re impressed by confidence and courage and unimpressed by uncertainty and timidity. They can tell when you’re faking it.

Gillard says she must ‘govern from the centre’ if she’s to win sufficient votes to hold government. This attitude is based on the notion that each side has core support of about 40 per cent, leaving them battling to attract a majority of the remaining 20 per cent of uncommitted, swinging voters in the middle. Market research reveals the uncommitted middle to be social conservative, uninterested in politics and very hip-pocket in its attitude to economics.

But in this, too, Labor is showing signs of amateurism - and being a slow learner. It’s true you can’t get too far from the centre, but it’s not true you should be right in the centre. If you’re Labor you have to govern from left of centre just as, if you’re Liberal, you have to govern from right of centre (as Howard did). You can’t get too far from the Left (or, for the Libs, the Right) or you’ll lose too much of your base, your core support. If you’re right in the centre - neither Left nor Right - you lose your identity, your defining characteristics. Apart from your party name, you don’t look like anything in particular and who wants to vote for you? Not a lot of your base vote and not a lot of the swinging middle.

This, of course, is the story of Labor at this year’s election. It lost a lot of its base to the Greens, but at the same time failed to attract many in the middle, meaning its primary vote fell 5.4 percentage points to 38 per cent - as we’ve seen, federal Labor’s fourth lowest primary vote since the beginning of the two-party system in 1910. In Western Australia its primary vote got down to 31 per cent, in Queensland, 34 per cent. NSW was a fraction below the national average. Humans are meaning-seeking animals. They want to know what leaders and their parties stand for and be able to put them in one box or another. Particularly because of its inferiority complex on economic management, Labor tried to turn itself into a pale imitation of the Liberals and, unsurprisingly, not enough people wanted to vote for it. If that short of thing appeals, why not vote for the real thing?

Particularly because of its decision to abandon the ETS, Labor lost a lot of its primary vote to the Greens, and also Tanner’s seat of Melbourne. Does this matter if it all comes back in preferences? Yes. Not all of it comes back and, in the Senate, it doesn’t come back. In those state elections with optional preferential voting it may not come back. In a growing number of inner-city seats it doesn’t come back if the Greens come second, the Libs come last and the Libs preference the Greens. The Libs didn’t do that in the recent Victorian election, but this just puts Labor at the mercy of the Liberals’ goodwill. It’s clear that, had the Libs preferenced the Greens, Labor would have lost three seats in Victoria. It may well lose some at the coming NSW election.

Experienced politicians know that first you hold your base vote, then you attract enough of the middle. Howard was always rewarding the Liberal heartland with baubles: a tax rebate for private health insurance, a school grants formula biased in favour of elite private schools, concessions for self-funded retirees and so forth. As Costello has said of Labor, ‘a party that can’t hold its base is heading for long-term decline’. One of the great lessons of economics is that we rarely face either/or choices. Rather, the trick is to find the best trade-off between conflicting objectives. To say Labor has no choice but to govern from the centre is to pick one extreme over the other. Labor needs to look like Labor and do enough to satisfy its base while also finding policies that will attract sufficient of the swingers.

Howard has said, ‘you have to spend political capital on reforms’. Labor ministers often decline to adopt worthwhile but difficult policies, privately telling supporters ‘we can’t sell that’. My response is: Then when are you moving to a profession to which you might be more suited? Politicians who can’t sell good policy can’t do their job.

The year ahead

Right now, five out of nine parliaments in Australia are hung. Someone has calculated that 15 of the 16 minority (state) governments in Australia since 1989 ran their full term. The reason for that isn’t hard to discover: the independents who prop up those governments have no desire to risk bringing their positions of prominence and power to an early end. So I think it’s reasonable to assume there’ll be no federal election in 2011.

Gillard would no doubt like to be able to put her own stamp on the government’s agenda, but she’ll have quite a wait before she can because Rudd left her with a long list of unfinished business. She says 2011 will be ‘a year of delivery’ and ‘a year of decision’. Anything she wants to put through the Senate before July 1 will need the support of Fielding and Xenophon and the Greens if it’s opposed by the opposition; anything after then will just need the support of the Greens.

Gillard needs to resolve the ambiguity in her deal with the big three miners on the minerals resource rent tax concerning whether the feds will cover the miners for future increases in state royalties (which would be equivalent to writing the states an open cheque) and also decide on any modifications to accommodate the smaller miners excluded from the election-eve deal. Enacting the mining tax will allow the government to legislate for the rest of the tax package: the phasing up of compulsory super contributions to 12 per cent by 2019, cutting the company tax rate by 1 percentage point to 29 per cent, and so forth.

The tax summit will be held in the middle of the year, but I’ll be surprised if much comes of it. The Henry report was commissioned before the global financial crisis, when the government believed it would have a big budget surplus and plenty of spare revenue to compensate the losers from reforms to be announced before the 2010 election. The budget deficit has put paid to all that, with the government committed to bank all revenue growth and avoid tax cuts until the budget surplus is back to 1 per cent of the GDP. If the economy is booming at that time it will be under pressure to continue avoiding measures that could make fiscal policy pro-cyclical. This greatly reduces its scope for significant reforms.

The more health economists and others have studied Rudd’s reforms to health and hospital funding the less enthusiastic they are. The growing number of Liberal premiers is also unenthusiastic about giving up 30 per cent of their GST revenue, but Gillard will have to get on with legislating the deal that the feds take over 60 per cent of hospital funding, which is supposed to start in July.

The government will keep working on its decision about the plan for the Murray-Darling Basin. The early signs are that it won’t have the courage to adequately increase environmental flows. It will also keep working on the search for a regional solution to its asylum-seeker problem.
Ross Garnaut will release his updated report on climate change in May and the Productivity Commission will publish its advice on the measures being taken by our trading partners and on the impacts of a carbon price on our international competitiveness. Gillard announced recently that the government will decide by the end of the year on the way it will price carbon. This is likely to be a carbon tax - at least initially - rather than an ETS.

Looking further into the future, if the Gillard government runs full term she’s likely to find that, by 2013, the present coalition governments in Western Australia and Victoria will have been joined by coalition governments in NSW and Queensland. This may make COAG meetings more difficult, but it’s likely to improve federal Labor’s chances of re-election. Many voters like the idea of an each-way vote between federal and state, just as many like the idea of federal governments not having a majority in the Senate. Even so, Labor will need to become a lot cannier and a lot more courageous if it’s to win re-election. From her performance so far, I’m not confident Gillard will pull it off.

Observations on monetary policy

It’s been another bad year for business economists and markets in their attempts to second-guess the Reserve Bank’s rate adjustments. I said that last year but - though I haven’t counted up - this year has been a lot worse, with the ratio of misses to hits way up. It’s become a lot harder for you guys to predict now the nation’s economics editors have retired from the prediction game. But that’s the way the more loud-mouthed of your brethren seem to have wanted it.

I should say, however, that market economists’ predictions have been closer to the mark - or less far off the mark - than market pricing. Why? Because the markets are still too focused on what’s happening in the US, whereas the economists have twigged to how heavily the Reserve’s thinking is influenced by developments in the Chinese economy.

I’ve said many times that monetary policy is as much an art as a science and that it’s set in the governor’s gut. All I’d add this year is that this governor’s gut decides which way it’s jumping at the last possible moment. So if he has so much trouble making up his mind, it’s hardly surprising you guys have trouble second-guessing him.

You guys generally get the direction of changes right, and you seem to have figured out that, in all but exceptional circumstances, the size of moves is 25 basis points, but you have a lot of trouble picking at which meeting the change will be made. I guess because you rely on fundamentals rather than chartism, you don’t seem to have explored one potential guide to the timing of moves: bureaucratic neatness. This idea occurred to me when I realised we’d had a Melbourne Cup day rate change for five years in a row. Could this be purely by chance? I decided to do some arithmetic. Over the past five years the Reserve has changed rates 20 times. Since there are 11 meetings a year, if decisions to change rates occurred at random, each month would have a 9 per cent chance of being chosen for a rate change. The four meetings a year that are preceded by the release of the CPI and followed immediately by the release of the statement on monetary policy, would account for just over 36 per cent of random chances. But, in fact, the SoMP months - February, May, August and November - accounted for 65 per cent of rate changes, with November alone accounting for 25 per cent. The point is that the Reserve has set up a pattern in which the SoMPs come soon after the meeting that comes soon after the CPI release, and two of the SoMPs come not long before the Reserve’s twice-yearly appearance before the parliamentary committee. Remember, too, that the release of the CPI is a key influence on the revision of the Reserve’s inflation forecasts, which are published in the SoMP and which heavily influence decisions about rate changes. The SoMP serves as the main vehicle the Reserve uses to explain and defend its rate decisions. Is it surprising that, having carefully set up the timing of its key publication and parliamentary appearances, the Reserve is more inclined to fit its decisions into that timetable?

But why in the past five years has the November pre-SoMP meeting had more than twice the hits that the other three pre-SoMP meetings have had? Perhaps because of an unconscious desire to get the books straight before the end of the year and the knowledge that what you’ve done has to tide the economy over until February.

Glenn Stevens offered some cryptic clues to his thinking and behaviour in his recent parliamentary testimony. He noted that decisions at particular meetings are often finely balanced. When you’re moving in baby steps of 25 points, it’s hard to believe that going now or waiting a month for more data will make much difference to ultimate macro outcomes. If the decision isn’t finely balanced - if it’s quite clear what you need to do - it’s a sign you’ve got behind the curve.

Stevens tacitly admitted that monetary policy isn’t as forward-looking and pre-emptive as it should be. He couldn’t think of any time when it later became clear the Reserve had tightened too soon, but he could think of ‘several times’ when it should have tightened earlier. This is a reference to the first half of 2007, when the Reserve should have tightened further but didn’t because of two successive CPI results that were falsely reassuring, and ended up having to tighten before and during the election campaign. The proposition is that the more timely your tightening, the less you end up having to do. The lesson from this episode is that you have to trust to your judgement of the big picture - which embodies your core beliefs about how economies behave - and not be too swayed by bits of data than don’t fit.

I think Stevens’ remarks alluded to two different circumstances: when you know you’re behind the curve and when you know you’re not. When you’re not behind the game - which should be most of the time - increases are likely to be ‘only fairly gradual and not very close together’. (Say, before each quarterly SoMP?) When you believe you are behind the game, however: ‘I think it is better really to move in a reasonably timely fashion to a point where you might be able to rest for a while. That is a better position to be in.’ I think this explains Stevens’s behaviour between October last year and May this year. He kept saying he was going to move ‘gradually’ towards ‘normal’ (neutral), but in fact he moved at six meetings out of seven (with only two of them SoMP meetings). Why? Because he knew he was behind the game: he’d cut like mad fearing a severe recession but the recession was proving to the remarkably mild so he was anxious to get back to neutral without delay. He eventually decided the banks’ extra rate rises had shifted neutral down from 5.5 per cent to 4.5 per cent, and once he reached that point in May this year, he rested for six months before deciding it was time to start gradually tightening into the restrictive range.

Looking to the monetary policy outlook for 2011, at the parliamentary hearing Stevens gave a lot of hints about the timing of his next move. Quote: ‘What it means is that for the period we are going into in the near term I think this is about the right level. At the moment most commentators do not anticipate and market pricing does not anticipate any further near-term change by us for quite some time. I think that is probably a reasonable position for them to have based on the information we have now.’

But exactly how long is ‘in the near term . . . for quite some time’? I think it’s a guarantee that’s already expired: it applied only to the December meeting - and so, of course, will carry us through to the February meeting. But it leaves the February decision an open question. So if you rule out a February rise you’re doing so on the basis of your own judgment, not a clear indication from the boss.

My call for next year is that, assuming the economy continues to strengthen as forecast but there’s no rapid build-up of inflation pressure, we’ll see another two or three tightenings, well spaced over the course of the year.



Ross Gittins 2011 Outlook

Read more >>

Creating jobs not the be-all and end-all

I reckon I've had only about half a dozen job interviews in my life and only one - with the Financial Review - where I wasn't offered a job. When I was leaving school in Newcastle in the mid-1960s a local chartered accountant needed a youngster to be a junior audit clerk. He approached the school careers adviser, who recommended me.

I was pleased to take the job, but left after two years to go full-time at uni. Nearing the end of my course but not being worldly wise, I left it too long before lining up a job for the next year. The interviews were over.

Not to worry. I caught the train to Sydney and went to the office of the Institute of Chartered Accountants, which gave me a list of the big city accounting firms. In what was left of the day I managed to visit four of them, walking in off the street to ask for a job.

I retired to my sister's house to consider the four offers, choosing the one that offered slightly higher pay: $4000 a year.

The point of the story is not that I was a great catch, but that in those days finding a job was never hard. In the 30 years of the golden age following World War II, the Australian economy was almost continuously at "full employment", defined as an unemployment rate well under 2 per cent.

Occasionally economists would worry that the economy had hit "over-full employment", meaning job vacancies far outnumbered job seekers, a quite inflationary situation.

But the golden age ended in the mid-1970s with the first OPEC oil shock (just after I'd landed a job at the Herald) and the advent of "stagflation", which plunged Australia and the developed world into a protracted period of economic dysfunction, with high inflation and high unemployment.

It took until the early 1990s to get inflation back under control and until the mid-noughties to get back to full employment, which by then economists were defining as unemployment of about 4.75 per cent.

(Why so high? Perhaps because these days more unemployment is "structural" - people with skills who aren't the ones in demand, or people with needed skills who don't live in the cities where they're needed. In any event, the economists who manage our economy are convinced that if unemployment falls much below 4.75 per cent, shortages of skilled labour will become widespread, employers will start bidding up wages, then pass their higher cost on in higher prices, causing inflation to take off.)

The point is that we went for about 30 years with high unemployment, a period in which the economy was seen to be "demand-constrained" - the demand for labour was insufficient to take up the available supply of labour.

So we had a period of three decades in which to engrave on our minds the assumption that there is always a shortage of jobs; that every new job is an extra job and every extra job - no matter how menial or poorly paid - is a good thing.

It followed that any new project that could be claimed to involve the creation of jobs (which all of them can) was obviously a good thing, worthy of government approval and maybe some sort of concession.

Now, however, with the economic downturn over and the resources boom resuming, it won't be long before the present unemployment rate of 5.4 per cent falls a lot further and labour shortages become widespread.

And adding to this will be the effect of population ageing. The first baby boomers turn 65 this year and, though many will delay their full retirement by continuing to work a few days a week, by the end of the decade most of them will have left the workforce. But there won't be all that many young people joining the workforce.

Population ageing means you have plenty of people consuming - and thus adding to the demand for labour - but a lower proportion of people wanting to work and thus contribute to the supply of labour.

In other words, we're returning to a '60s-style economy in which the demand for labour exceeds the supply, and all our now deeply ingrained thinking about a perpetual shortage of jobs is no longer correct and needs to be abandoned.

When, for all practical purposes, pretty much everyone who wants a job already has one, it is no longer true that a project that will create 200 jobs will increase total employment by 200. Rather, the workers who fill those jobs will have to be attracted from their existing jobs, and it may well be necessary to bid up wages to attract them.

Certainly, it no longer follows that saying a new project will create jobs means governments should applaud it and subsidise it. Nor does it follow that saying a particular industry will have to shed many jobs because it has struck difficulties of some sort obviously obliges governments to step in with subsidies to protect those jobs. Most of the workers involved shouldn't have much trouble picking up jobs elsewhere.

Senator Stephen Conroy recently listed among the national broadband network's many virtues the claim that it would "stimulate the economy". But when the economy is at full employment, the last thing governments should be doing is adding stimulus.

Conroy had no idea he was mounting a good argument against the government spending so much to build a gold-plated broadband network at this time. It will take economists and economics teachers many years of explanation and education to break the public's mindset that creating new jobs is an unmitigated virtue.

Read more >>

Monday, December 6, 2010

REGULATING FOR SUSTAINABILITY

Talk to forum on Evidence-Based Regulatory Reform
Monash University Law Chambers, December 6, 2010


Some of the most important ideas are deceptively simple. Who, for instance, could dispute that the practice of medicine, the making of government policy or the reform of government regulation should be ‘evidence-based’? I have a mate who’s an academic neurologist and when we’re at our holiday homes and getting our daily exercise toiling up and down a mountain he often tells me about the advent of evidence-based medicine. I was surprised to learn that many of the cures prescribed by doctors often aren’t chosen on the basis of hard, scientific evidence, but rather on the doctor’s habits, on what he was taught at med school, on the doctor’s impression of what other doctors do, on years of casual observation as to what works and what doesn’t, on what might minimise the doctor’s ‘medico-legal’ risk, on what the doctor remembers reading in a medical journal, or even what the doctor was told recently by a visiting drug company rep. In place of this, the medical profession is slowly and painstakingly assessing what it knows from high-quality empirical studies about the efficacy of particular treatments, with treatments and tests graded, starting with the ‘gold standard’ and working down. Doctors who follow these guidelines can expect to avoid much criticism should things go amiss. The role of professional judgment is reduced, but the effectiveness of treatment is greatly enhanced.

Now, who among us could doubt that making medicine more ‘evidence-based’ is a great step forward? I was pondering the idea of writing a radical column advocating that economists and econocrats follow the doctors’ example and make their policy recommendations more evidence-based - less reliance on theory, more on empirics - when I was amazed to see the chairman of the Productivity Commission had given a long speech advocating ‘evidence-based policy-making’. The boss of the most notoriously theoretically pure economic institution is preaching sermons about the need to take more notice of the actual evidence? And I have no doubt that, in his own mind, his commitment to taking more notice of evidence was completely genuine.

The point I want to make is that, while no one could disagree with the proposition that everything we do ought to be more evidence-based - perhaps even choosing our spouse - in practice it ain’t that simple. What I regard as evidence may not be what you regard as evidence. And the conclusions I draw from the evidence may not be those you draw from the same evidence. It may transpire that your response to the evidence was sound and mine wasn’t. But both of us will be able to claim our decisions were evidence-based. So making evidence-based decisions may improve the quality of those decisions on average, but it offers no guarantee that decisions are correct. And even the expectation that paying more attention to evidence will generally improve the quality of decisions should itself be subject to evaluation once we have more evidence about the effectiveness of evidence-based decision-making.

‘Evidence’ is a word with a wonderful air of certainty and assurance. Who could doubt the evidence? Who could argue with the evidence? Yet we know from watching telly that this is just what barristers are paid to do: argue about different interpretations of the evidence. And far more lowly paid juries have the last word on what the evidence proves. We need to think more clearly about what evidence is. I think it’s just facts. In the case of economic questions it’s often statistical facts - the statistical composition of some population; the movement in some variable over time. Maybe the movement in two variables over time, the degree of correlation between them and whether we can be sure that one caused the other, or whether both are caused by some third variable.

But the world abounds with facts, far more than we can assimilate. Some facts (and some statistics) are relevant to the question at hand and some are irrelevant. How do we decide which facts are pertinent and which aren’t? We apply our judgment. The judgment of a professional has been schooled by her professional education; she’s been trained to think along certain lines, her thinking is guided by a ‘model’. A model - which can just as easily be called a theory - is an attempt to understand a complex reality by simplifying that reality: excluding all those factors considered to be of little importance so as to focus on those factors believed to be most important in explaining how things work. All models pick and choose between the facts, all professions rely on models, and each profession’s model tends to be quite different from the others, so that, for example, a lawyer and an economist can draw quite different conclusions from the same set of facts, the same evidence. How successful each profession’s model is at explaining and predicting the way the world works depends on whether it has avoided excluding from its model factors that end up being important in explaining behaviour. In practice, all professions suffer from what I call ‘model blindness’ - a tendency to underrate factors that aren’t in their model, but turn out to be important explanators. I doubt if more emphasis on evidence will overcome the endemic problem of model blindness.

Let me make a quite different point. One reason policy-makers don’t make more use of evidence is that the evidence - particularly statistical evidence - doesn’t exist. And often it doesn’t exist because evidence is expensive to collect. So any genuine push to make decision-making more evidence-based would involve spending a lot more taxpayers’ money on collecting evidence. And collecting more evidence would annoy lots of people. Much valuable potential evidence is possessed by government agencies, but they’re often quite resistant to requests to make it available, lest they provide outsiders with a stick to beat them. Other evidence has to be collected by government agencies from business, but business greatly resents having to fill in forms for the government. It’s likely that, in the mind of business, a fair bit of the push for ‘evidence-based regulatory reform’ involves getting rid of ‘red tape’ otherwise known as evidence.

But I’m supposed to be talking about regulating for sustainability, so let me take a case study and consider the extent to which evidence could throw light on the regulatory decisions to be made. Most of us are agreed that we need to greatly reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases in the next few decades. Economists are agreed that the least-cost way to achieve this is not by prohibiting certain undesirable behaviour or by subsidising certain desirable behaviour, but by ‘putting a price on carbon’. Is this judgment evidence-based? Probably not. It’s such a new area that there isn’t a lot of evidence available, and what evidence there is would be mixed. No, this conclusion comes straight from the economists’ conventional model, which assumes that prices are always the main influence over people’s economic behaviour and that changing prices is always the least-cost way to achieve policy objectives.

But as you probably realise, there are two different ways we could put a price on carbon. We could take the cap-and-trade, emissions trading scheme approach of the Rudd government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme, and limit the quantity of carbon dioxide permitted to be emitted, thus forcing up the price of emissions. Or we could impose a tax on emissions, thus increasing their price and thereby encouraging businesses and households to reduce the quantity of their emissions. As you can see, the two approaches are essentially mirror-image and, in theory, either way should achieve the same result. From about the time the Rudd government committed itself to the trading-scheme approach, the balance of opinion among economists swung in favour of the carbon tax approach. And now with the abandonment of the Rudd scheme, but the recommitment to putting a price on carbon, the nation is facing the choice.

Was the swing in economists’ opinion in favour of a tax evidence-based? I doubt it. Could it have been? Not really; as I say, there isn’t a lot of evidence available. It does seem clear the European Union’s trading scheme has not worked well - but it’s easy to say we can see what the Europeans did wrong and will make sure we avoid making the same mistakes. So on what basis do economists divide between supporting a trading scheme and supporting a carbon tax? Because the model says they’re essentially equivalent, I think it boils down to differing judgments about their political and administrative feasibility.

We should gather more evidence and take more notice of the evidence we have, but don’t imagine this will greatly reduce the role of subjective judgment in the way governments regulate the economy.

Read more >>

Gillard indulges the mendicants at her peril

It's just as well Julia Gillard and her purse-string ministers are so committed to "a strong economy" because that's just what they're about to get. And let me tell you: an economy as strong as we're getting requires a strong government - something this lot hasn't been noted for.

Contrary to last week's silliness over the national accounts, we have everything going for us. Our terms of trade - export prices relative to import prices - are the most favourable they've been in a century and are pumping an extra 12 to 15 per cent of gross domestic product into the economy.

Then there are the tens of billions the mining companies are planning to spend building mines and gas facilities. This mining construction boom could run for a decade.

The labour market is particularly strong and unemployment hasn't far to fall to reach the 4.75 per cent rate economists regard as full employment.

So the problem won't be keeping the growth going but holding it down because the demand for labour and capital will soon be outstripping the supply.

This is a problem mainly for the Reserve Bank. And it knows exactly what to do: raise interest rates whenever it fears inflation is headed up out of its 2 to 3 per cent target range.

But Gillard and her ministers have to do as little as possible to add to demand and as much as lies within their power to subtract from it.

How? By running the tightest budget they can manage. They need to let the boom push up their revenue and avoid cutting taxes. They need to control the growth in their spending as tightly as possible, getting the budget back to surplus as soon as possible.

They are, of course, committed to do just this by their deficit exit strategy and also by Gillard's promise (not just forecast) of achieving a surplus in 2012-13. The strategy requires them to stay in this fiscal chastity belt until the surplus is back to 1 per cent of GDP.

But the point Glenn Stevens of the Reserve made last week is that the government will need to maintain the budgetary discipline long after the budget's back to surplus and even after it's eliminated the net public debt.

If it follows the logic of Costelloism and starts cutting taxes and spending freely once the surplus is back to 1 per cent of GDP, fiscal policy becomes "pro-cyclical" - it adds to demand rather than restraining it - as it was in the sainted Howard government's last years.

In other words, for as long as the economy's booming you have to let the surplus get bigger and bigger every year. And to help make that easier politically, you probably need to put the surplus into some sort of stabilisation fund or sovereign wealth fund.

The hardest part, however, is resisting the temptation to splash taxpayers' money on every group with a hard-luck story. Take all the sympathetic noises the government's been making about the high cost of living.

Last week's national accounts told us the household saving rate is now at 10 per cent of disposable income. It's probably not really that high but it is clear people's incomes have been growing a lot faster than their consumer spending. Don't sound hard-up to me.

Another bad sign is the way the government's started echoing complaints about "the two-speed economy". Last week Gillard alluded to this as the "patchwork economy".

And the Treasurer, Wayne Swan, said: "We don't want to in any way inhibit the speed of the mining sector, but we also have to do everything we can to help all of those that are in the slower lane."

Sorry, but that's quite wrong headed. Anything "we do" to help those people via the budget will add to demand and, hence, put further upward pressure on interest rates and the exchange rate.

What's more, this talk conveys an exaggerated impression of the extent to which the rest of us will suffer as a consequence of the expansion of the mining sector in Western Australia and Queensland. The government should be trying to educate and correct this misperception, not pander to it.

The notion that there is, or will be, a wide and enduring gulf between the mining states and the rest is wrong. It's wrong because, in industry terms, it's not a two-speed economy it's a three-speed.

Top speed is mining and associated industries. Low speed is the non-mining tradeables sector - agriculture, manufacturing, education and tourism. But in between is the non-tradeables sector.

And get this: the non-tradeables sector accounts for about three-quarters of the economy. So the great majority of us work in neither the fast lane nor the slow lane. What's more, the non-tradeables sector benefits from the high dollar because that makes imported parts and equipment cheaper.

Note, too, that the non-tradeables sector accounts for the great majority of production and employment in all states. And though Queensland has a lot of mining, it also has a lot of tourism. This is why, when you look at the figures, you don't see the wide disparity the two-speed contention leads you to expect.

For 2009-10, WA's gross state product grew by 4.3 per cent, but Queensland's grew by 1.6 per cent - less than Victoria's 2 per cent and NSW's 1.7 per cent.

But a lot of that growth came from increased population. Look at GSP per person (to get a measure of changed material living standards) and WA's growth drops to 1.6 per cent, while Queensland's was minus 0.8 per cent. That was worse than all the other states.

A strong economy requires a government with the strength to stare down all the whingers trying to touch it for a handout.

Read more >>

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Keep your shirt on, life could be worse

Oh! No! The economy was roaring along in June quarter, growing by 1.1 per cent, but now it has almost come to a halt, up just 0.2 per cent in the September quarter. What's more, take out a leap in rural production and we actually went backwards.

It made a great story this week - thrills and spills in econoland - but I wouldn't believe it. Why not? Because in real life economies don't soar and dive in the space of six months without there being a very big and obvious reason - the introduction of the goods and services tax, for instance, or the collapse of Lehman Brothers and its aftermath scaring the pants off businesses and consumers.

You need to know that both the financial markets and the media have a vested interest in statistical volatility.

It gives them something to bet on or write stories about and makes their lives more interesting. So it suits them to take economic statistics literally, ignoring their well-known limitations.

Sensible people, however, always take them with a grain of salt, knowing the economy is far more stable than the stats - especially quarter-to-quarter changes - show it to be.

The making of the ''national accounts'' - the bottom line of which is gross domestic product - is like the making of sausages: you're better off not knowing what goes into them. They're pulled together using bits and pieces from thousands of different sources.

Often, inferior sources are used because the more reliable information isn't yet available. Sometimes no information is available, so the statisticians take a guess. When the better information does come along, the figures are changed. Since the better data come along at different times, the figures for a particular quarter are constantly being changed, for at least the next two years.

The original figure for growth in the December quarter of 2008 - the quarter when Lehman Brothers collapsed - was minus 0.5 per cent. It was then revised down each quarter until it reached minus 0.9 per cent. Then it was revised up each quarter, reaching minus 0.7 per cent three months ago.

This week it was revised down to minus 1 per cent. So we're now being told the contraction was twice the size we were originally told. And there were people at the time imagining that figure had been written by God on tablets of stone.

Or, let's try another one. Three months ago we were told real GDP grew by 3.3 per cent over the year to June. Now we're told it grew by 2.7 per cent over the year to September.

Why the sudden slowdown? Well, not primarily because of the alleged virtual cessation of growth in the September quarter, but because revisions shifted 0.4 percentage points of growth out of the December quarter of 2009 and into the September quarter of 2009 (which dropped out of the annual calculation).

The Bureau of Statistics acknowledges the ropiness of its figures, which is why it tries to direct users to its ''trend estimates'', which simply average out the quarterly ups and downs. But for good reasons and bad, economists, the markets and the media invariably ignore the trend figures and focus on the more volatile unsmoothed ones.

The point is that much of the quarter-to-quarter volatility in the growth figures isn't real but just ''statistical noise''. You have to ignore the noise to hear the true ''signal'' underneath it.

Remember, too, it's easy to be bamboozled by quarterly changes. If some big transaction is accidentally put into the wrong quarter, this distorts the quarterly change for three successive quarters.

Because a big thing such as a national economy - or an ocean liner - is actually quite hard to speed up or slow down, when the figures show it rapidly speeding up in one quarter, the greatest likelihood is that the figures for the following quarter will show it rapidly slowing down.

And that's just what the past two quarters' figures show. Logical deduction: the economy didn't really grow that fast in the June quarter and didn't really slow that much in the September quarter.

There's an old trick Treasury used to reduce the statistical noise and get a clearer signal: add the last two quarters together and take an average. That says the economy has probably been growing at a quarterly rate of about 0.65 per cent over the past six months ([1.1 + 0.2] ÷ 2).

That makes more sense, but even it seems too low. How can I say that? Because we have an independent (and less volatile) set of stats to measure the national accounts against: the employment figures.

These show employment growing fairly steadily over the past year, growing particularly strongly in the September quarter and increasing by 3.2 per cent for the year. That's not an economy that's suddenly run out of juice.

So when we peer through the statistical haze, what do we see in the national accounts? First, we see that the pick-up in business investment spending - particularly in the mining sector - is occurring, in line with what the companies have long been telling us about their plans for huge spending over the coming year and longer.

Second, despite strong growth in household disposable income (fed by strong growth in employment and rising real wages), consumer spending isn't growing nearly as strongly, meaning households are saving a lot more. (The figures say the household saving rate was 10 per cent of disposable income - which is too high to believe, but undoubtedly saving is high.)

This is bad news for retailers but good news for the economy generally because it postpones the time when, with the economy nearing full employment, the economic managers are struggling to cope with a massive mining investment boom and a consumption boom.

The way they'll cope with a double boom is simple: they'll jack up interest rates (which will also add upward pressure to the exchange rate) to discourage consumer spending. So the longer households keep thinking now's a good time to get on top of their debts, the better off we'll be. The bad news in the accounts, however, is the continuing weakness in the building of new homes and also in commercial (as opposed to industrial) construction.

This suggests inadequate supply will soon be pushing up rents and thus increasing inflation pressure.

So a literal reading of this week's accounts sends us just the opposite message to the true position.

Read more >>

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

As Labor spouts its values, gap rich poor gap widens

Why do I get the feeling that, after their just-short-of-disastrous showing in the August election, Julia Gillard and her ministers aren't so much engaged in soul-searching as in trying to improve their PR. They're all giving speeches about Labor's reason for existence, and they're all saying much the same thing, as though they were all briefed by the same spin doctor.

Their central message is that Labor stands for a "strong economy". Well, sure. Which party stands for a weak economy? Anything else?

Gillard says Labor's values are "a strong economy - and opportunity for all". Wayne Swan says Labor's core purpose is "prosperity and opportunity". Neither says much about what "opportunity" means. Maybe it means whatever you'd like it to mean.

Fortunately, Penny Wong is a little more explicit. She says Labor stands for "a fair go, a just society, a strong economy. A fair go encompasses Labor's tradition of fairness, of equality of opportunity and the aspiration for equity in outcome or worth.

"A just society references our social, legal and institutional frameworks, the principles that govern

our community and the relationships within it. Our rights and shared responsibilities."

Well, that's sounding more like Labor. But if Gillard Labor still stands for Labor's tradition of fairness it's got a fair bit of work to do, as I ventured to suggest when invited to deliver the ACTU's Whitlam Lecture in Melbourne last night. And so far its record has been mixed.

Every few years the Bureau of Statistics measures the distribution of disposable income between Australia's households. It's too soon for us to have any clear evidence on what's happened to equity under the Labor government, but we do know that, after changing little between 1995 and 2004, the gap between rich and poor widened markedly between 2004 and 2008 - essentially the Howard government's last years.

If disposable income was equally distributed between households, the bottom 20 per cent of households would have 20 per cent of total income and the top 20 per cent of households would also have 20 per cent of total income.

In fact, the latest figures show that the bottom fifth has just 7 per cent of the income, whereas the top fifth has more than 40 per cent. And over just the last four years the shares of the four bottom fifths fell by about 0.5 percentage points each, allowing the share of the top fifth to rise by 2 percentage points.

Why this sudden deterioration? No one can say with any certainty. Various factors could have contributed: the resources boom and the booming sharemarket before the global financial crisis, the continued rise in executive and finance-sector salaries and maybe the succession of income tax cuts that benefited people on high incomes.

One factor that seems to have limited the rise in inequality throughout most of John Howard's reign was his large and repeated increases in family benefits. But there was a lot less of that in his later years.

But the bureau's practice of lumping together the top 20 per cent of households almost certainly conceals the extent to which the incomes of a relative handful of households at the very top have risen inordinately (and it may well be the incomes of households in the second highest 10 per cent rose at much the same rate as for the bottom 80 per cent).

Though they're not strictly comparable, and are no more recent than 2002, income tax statistics show that the top 0.05 per cent of individual taxpayers accounted for about 2 per cent of total taxable income. The top 1 per cent accounted for 9 per cent, the top 5 per cent for 21 per cent and the top 10 per cent for 31 per cent. (This last is up from 25 per cent in the early 1980s.)

These figures laugh at the notion of Australia as the great egalitarian paradise. But they only put us somewhere in the middle of the developed country pack: much more unequal than the Nordic countries, but not as bad as the other English-speaking countries: Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, Britain and the United States.

Were Labor to want to reduce inequality in Australia, the conventional starting place would be with taxation. Had Labor had its "tradition of fairness" at the top of its consciousness in the 2007 election campaign, it wouldn't have promised to introduce essentially the same three years' worth of tax cuts as those designed by Peter Costello to advantage people on incomes well above the average.

Admittedly, Labor's minerals resource rent tax will even things up a little, but it could be doing more to make the taxation of superannuation less heavily biased in favour of high income earners. The same goes for the concessional taxation of capital gains.

Remember, however, that much of the budget's redistribution of income from the rich to the poor comes from the way means-testing is used to restrict social security payments to those who are genuinely needy.

The Howard government took steps to bypass means-testing and introduce middle-class welfare. Labor has rolled back some of this, but could do more. It gave generous one-off increases in pensions, but excluded the unemployed from this munificence and limited the benefit flowing to sole parents.

One institution central to the goal of equality of opportunity is public schools. Gillard claims to have doubled funding for all schools, but so far she's done nothing to reform John Howard's biased funding formula in favour of better-off private schools.

One trend that's worked against a fair go is the many means by which employers have transferred risk from their own shoulders to those of their employees. These range from the casualisation of the workforce and making workers supposedly independent contractors to the risks of superannuation accumulation.

It would be nice to see the Gillard government doing more to act on its values rather than talk about them.

Read more >>

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

IS AUSTRALIA THE LAND OF THE FAIR GO?

ACTU Whitlam Lecture, Melbourne, Tuesday, November 30, 2010

In writing and talking about equality and inequality, I always feel myself at a disadvantage.

Everyone thinks they know more about it than I think I know. Just about everyone has it firmly fixed in their mind that the gap between rich and poor is growing - the rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer. This trend, they know, has been running for decades, perhaps forever. My disadvantage is that when you express your opinions in a respectable newspaper rather than the pub, you’re supposed to base them on actual evidence. And when I recount the evidence, it’s never as bad as everyone knows to be the case.

Even so, let me try to summarise the evidence about the distribution of income....

Is Australia the Land of the Fair Go
Read more >>

Monday, November 29, 2010

Professed reformers spin lazy line on cost of living

Julia Gillard and her ministers are expressing their undying commitment to the economy and economic reform, but the way they pander to and even incite the punters' irrational whingeing about the cost of living gives the lie to their profession of economic faith.

For obvious reasons, the government has been saying a lot lately about Labor's values and vision for Australia. According to Gillard: "A strong economy - and opportunity for all. That's really it in a nutshell."

Wayne Swan said last week the Labor Party's "core purpose" had always started with two words: "prosperity and opportunity". (The more he said the clearer it became that, to him, Labor's reason for existence is solely materialistic: every worker should have the opportunity to own a Beemer.)

Penny Wong was a little broader in her view of what Labor stands for: "A fair go, a just society, a strong economy." (Note that none of the three saw fit to mention reconciling the economy with the environment as a priority.)

Get the message? Labor = a strong economy. So does this mean they're all economists or economic rationalists? No, it means they're politicians who've concluded that only good economic managers get to stay in office (and whose secret fear is that they aren't good economic managers).

They're pollies who've learnt to mind their economic P's and Q's - they know not to promise to control prices or re-regulate interest rates - but they haven't internalised "the economic way of thinking".

How can I be sure? Because of the way the politician in them leads them to pander to the public's complaints about the rising cost of living. And because anyone who thought like an economist wouldn't be able to resist the desire to explain to the whingers a few facts of life.

The punters are complaining about big rises in water and electricity prices. Do the pollies explain why these rises are occurring and why they're justified? Not that I've noticed. They just keep saying "I feel your pain".

Do they explain that, though water and power prices have increased a lot, other prices haven't risen much and some have actually fallen, meaning the overall cost of living hasn't been rising all that rapidly? Hell no.

The consumer price index rose by 2.8 per cent over the year to September. Over the previous year it rose by 1.3 per cent.

Behavioural economists understand how people develop exaggerated perceptions of what's happening to their cost of living. It's because people don't weight price rises according to the item's share in the basket of goods and services they buy.

Big price rises stick in their minds (with no allowance made for any improvement in the quality of the item), whereas small price falls are soon forgotten and items whose prices don't change get a weight of zero.

If economics is to be useful it should help people overcome their irrational misperceptions. But our self-proclaimed economic-reform obsessed leaders don't see a need to educate the electorate.

The obvious fact is the cost of living is always rising. That's not news. What matters is whether people's incomes are at least keeping up with the cost of living. And they are - easily. While consumer prices rose by 2.8 per cent over the year to September, the wage cost index rose by 3.6 per cent.

While prices rose by 1.3 per cent over the previous year, wages rose by 3.1 per cent. Over the five years to September, prices rose by 15.7 per cent, while wages rose by 20.8 per cent. So real wages have been rising by about 1 per cent a year.

It's because the cost of living is always rising that pensions are always being increased. They're actually indexed not to prices but to average income, meaning they grow in real terms. And last year the government gave pensioners (but not people on the dole) a big one-off increase.

So the rising cost of living is being outstripped by the rising standard of living. But still they whinge. And what do our piss-weak pollies say? "I feel your pain."

A pollie ought to understand that, because the cost of living is always rising, people complain about the cost of living when they haven't got anything more serious to complain about.

And what cause for complaint is there? Inflation is under control, employment has been growing very strongly, unemployment is a lot lower than we got used to, real wages are growing and the dollar's at parity with the greenback.

Do our pollies ever say any of this? Gosh no. Wouldn't dare.

Of course, interest rates are rising. And though far more people benefit from this than the one-third of households that have mortgages (many of them longstanding and thus quite small), the pollies compete to carry on about how iniquitous it is.

The government must think itself smart to have transferred the punters' ire from itself to the banks (aided by the carry-on of Joe Hockey). It knows the banks' double-dipping merely means one less official rate rise, but does it calm the punters with this news? Wouldn't dare.

When it comes to rate rises the government doesn't just feel your pain, it incites you to imagine it's the end of the world. This is smart? It's storing up trouble for the future.

Rate rises are the primary instrument we use to limit inflation pressure when the economy booms. And we're about to enter a mining construction boom that could run for a decade or more.

Do you reckon the strong-economy brigade has any notion of how many more rate rises we're likely to see before the next election?

Read more >>

Saturday, November 27, 2010

We're all paying a high price for hiding our debt

IT DOESN'T seem to have occurred to Julia Gillard that her resolve to make this the "decade of infrastructure" - with a gold-plated national broadband network as its centrepiece - doesn't fit with her core promise to return the budget to surplus in 2012-13 and eliminate government debt ASAP.

Indeed, the two policies laugh at each other. Both Gillard and Kevin Rudd succumbed to Costelloism - a brand of fiscal populism holding that all government debt is bad - as did various state Labor governments.

The upside of this abhorrence of budget deficits and obsession with the elimination of debt is it left the Rudd government perfectly placed when it needed to spend big to counter the impact of the global financial crisis.

The downside is it led to more than a decade of inadequate spending on infrastructure. Labor made much of the neglect of infrastructure while in opposition and this explains its resolve to give it a high priority. But Labor has also embraced the very mentality that caused the problem.

As Dr Nicholas Gruen, of Lateral Economics, has written in a report for Western Sydney councils, the obsession with debt may have got rid of the budget deficit, but it exchanged it for an infrastructure deficit. In truth, only some government debt is bad. It's not bad when it arises from deficits incurred during recessions. And it isn't bad when it arises from capital spending - provided those capital works are worthwhile. It is bad when it arises from the failure of governments to ensure their recurrent spending is covered by revenue during normal years.

I'm a great believer in the (Peter Costello-introduced) "medium-term fiscal strategy": to "maintain budget balance, on average, over the course of the economic cycle".

You'd never know it from the way Costello and his successors carry on, but that strategy is carefully worded to permit the budget's "automatic stabilisers" to push the budget into deficit during major downturns and also permit governments to use the budget to stimulate the economy during recessions.

So the addition of the words "on average over the cycle" makes the strategy - shock, horror - a Keynesian formulation. (Clearly, it was crafted by someone a lot wiser than Costello.) But the words "on average" make it a strictly symmetrical Keynesianism: once the recession passes you have to get the budget back to surplus and keep it there until the next recession.

There's just one weakness in this enlightened strategy: its failure to distinguish between capital and recurrent spending - that is, its failure to permit the federal government to borrow to fund infrastructure.

If Labor had a deeper understanding of economics and genuine belief in it, rather than a mere desire to portray itself as a "fiscal conservative", it would have had the courage to add that qualification to the strategy.

So how does Gillard expect to square the circle of tackling the infrastructure backlog without being able to borrow? I bet I know. She intends to use "public-private partnerships" to get the borrowing done by the private sector. Hey presto! Problem solved.

But hey presto is right. This is just creative accounting. The government initiates the need to borrow - and, directly or indirectly, guarantees the borrowing - but gets the debt put on someone else's balance sheet.

Unfortunately, the drawbacks of PPPs - which so far have been used mainly by state governments for all manner of infrastructure assets, from highways and railway stations to hospitals and desalination plants - are much greater than this.

As Gruen explains, these assets have been built at a higher cost to the public than would have been the case had they been built the way they used to be, as government-owned assets funded by borrowing.

The first cause of increased cost is the "artifice" needed to get private investors interested. They have to be reassured that some future action by the government - say, the building of a competing road or hospital - won't leave their asset stranded.

So the government has to tie its hands, promising not to do certain things and cutting off options for the future that may have been in the public's interest. And we've all seen how governments shore up private toll roads by "traffic calming" (making it harder for motorists to avoid the toll road).

But the bigger reason PPPs are so much more expensive is that government - being the government and thus having the power to raise taxes to cover its debts - can borrow a lot more cheaply than private businesses can. This is true even after you allow for the risks involved in specific infrastructure projects.

To illustrate the extra costs involved in PPPs, Gruen calculates that, had the NSW government chosen to fund the toll roads that now encircle Sydney, the state would have acquired ownership of a stream of revenue with a net present value of about $12.8 billion, at the cost of increasing its borrowings by $7 billion.

In other words, by taking on a little more risk, the state would have increased its net worth by about $5.8 billion. After allowing for that extra risk, its net worth would still be $4.6 billion higher.

By today, more than 60 per cent of the original borrowing would have been paid off, leaving a net cash flow to the budget of $380 million a year, after allowing for the interest payments on the extra debt and even after providing for further repayments of principal. And get this: in the unlikely event of the government's taking on of the extra debt prompting the ratings agencies to downgrade the state's AAA credit rating - which would increase the interest rates it had to pay on its borrowings - the budget would still be ahead on the deal.

Bottom line: the public is paying dearly for the efforts of governments to hide the debt they're responsible for.

Although we're not paying as much public debt interest as we would have been, we're paying inflated tolls on roads (as Gruen's calculations show). We're also paying heavy repayments on our mortgages partly because of governments' failure to release sufficient land and their loading of up-front infrastructure charges on the land they do release.

And we're paying with our time as we wait at peak hour in traffic that has slowed to a crawl or crowd into late trains and buses. All thanks to the demonising of government debt.

Read more >>

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Punters well aware of economic case against more immigration

The Big Australia issue has gone quiet since the election but it hasn't gone away. It can't go away because it's too central to our future and, despite Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott's rare agreement to eschew rapid population growth, the issue remains unresolved.

This year Rebecca Huntley of Ipsos, a global market research firm, and Bernard Salt of KPMG, a financial services firm, conducted interviews with business people and discussions with 13 groups of consumers, showing them two markedly different scenarios of what Australia could look like in 2020.

In the "measured Australia" scenario, governments limited population growth, focused on making our activities more environmentally sustainable and limited our economic links with the rest of the world.

In the "global Australia" scenario, governments set aside concerns about the environment, promoted rapid economic and population growth, and made Australia ever more a part of Asia.

Not surprisingly, the business people hated measured Australia and loved global Australia. But even though global Australia was described in glowing terms - ignoring the environment apparently had no adverse effects - ordinary people rejected it. And although measured Australia was painted in negative terms - all downside and no upside - there were aspects of it people quite liked.

The message I draw is that if governments keep pursuing rapid growth to please business they'll encounter increasing resentment and resistance from voters.

Considering the human animal's deep-seated fear of foreigners, it's not surprising resentment has focused on immigration. It's clear from the way in the election campaign both sides purported to have set their face against high migration that they're starting to get the message.

But at the moment they're promising to restrict immigration with one hand while encouraging a decade-long, labour-consuming boom in the construction of mines and gas facilities with the other. And this will be happening at a time when the economy is already close to full employment and baby boomers retire as the population ages.

Their two approaches don't fit together. And unless our leaders find a way to resolve the contradiction there's trouble ahead.

Business people support rapid population growth, which really means high immigration; there's little governments can do to influence the birth rate, because they know a bigger population means a bigger economy. And in a bigger economy they can increase their sales and profits.

That's fine for them, but it doesn't necessarily follow that a bigger economy is better for you and me. Only if the extra people add more to national income than their own share of that income will the average incomes of the rest of us be increased. And that's not to say any gain in material standard of living isn't offset by a decline in our quality of life, which goes unmeasured by gross domestic product.

The most recent study by the Productivity Commission, in 2006, found that even extra skilled migration did little or nothing to raise the average incomes of the existing population, with the migrants themselves the only beneficiaries.

This may explain why, this time, economists are approaching the question from the other end: we're getting the future economic growth from the desire of the world's mining companies to greatly expand Australia's capacity to export coal, iron ore and natural gas, but we don't have sufficient skilled labour to meet that need and unless we bring in a lot more labour this episode will end in soaring wages and inflation.

Peter McDonald, a leading demographer at the Australian National University, argues that governments don't determine the level of net migration, the economy does. When our economy's in recession, few immigrants come and more Aussies leave; when the economy's booming, more immigrants come and fewer Aussies leave. Governments could try to resist this increase, but so far they've opted to get out of the way.

To most business people, economists and demographers, the answer to our present problem is obvious: since economic growth must go ahead, the two sides of politics should stop their populist pandering to the punters' resentment of foreigners.

But it seems clear from the Ipsos discussion groups that people's resistance to high immigration focuses on their concerns about the present inadequacy of public infrastructure: roads, transport, water and energy. We're not coping now, what would it be like with more people?

And the punters have a point. In their instinctive reaction to the idea of more foreigners they've put their finger on the great weakness in the economic case for immigration.

As economists know - but don't like to talk or even think about - the reason immigration adds little or nothing to the material living standards of the existing population is that each extra person coming to Australia - the workers and their families - has to be provided with extra capital equipment: a home to live in, machines to use at work and a host of public infrastructure such as roads, public transport, schools, hospitals, libraries, police stations and much else.

The cost of that extra capital has to be set against the benefit from the extra labour. If the extra capital isn't forthcoming, living standards - and, no doubt, quality of life - decline.

If we don't build the extra homes - as we haven't been doing for some years - rents and house prices keep rising, making home ownership less affordable. To build the extra public facilities, governments have to raise taxes and borrow money. But they hate raising taxes and both sides of federal politics have sworn to eliminate government debt.

The interviews and discussion groups revealed both business people and consumers to be highly doubtful about the ability of governments - particularly state governments - to provide the infrastructure we need. As well they might be.

At present, our leaders on both sides are heading towards a future that doesn't add up.

Read more >>

Monday, November 22, 2010

NBN plan has the signs of a historic stuff-up

I am starting to get a really bad feeling about Labor's plan for a national broadband network. The more it resists subjecting the plan to scrutiny, the more you suspect it has something to hide.

I fear Julia Gillard is digging herself in deeper on a characteristically grandiose scheme her swaggering predecessor announced without thought to its daunting implications, when she should be looking for ways to scale the project down without too much loss of face.

Advertisement: Story continues below
The obvious way to start that process would have been to accede to calls for the Productivity Commission to conduct a cost-benefit analysis. The determination of governments to keep their schemes away from the commission is always prima facie evidence they know the scheme's dodgy.

But as each day passes the issue is becoming more politicised, with too much of the government's ego riding on pretending the plan is without blemish. Part of the problem is the role the plan played in winning the support of the country independents.

The independents and Greens are doing the government no favours in using their votes to allow the plan to escape scrutiny. Are they, too, afraid it wouldn't withstand scrutiny?

This is not to support the inane demands from the opposition and the media for the government to release its ''business case'' immediately rather than in a week or two's time. Mere impatience is no virtue in the eternal quest for good policy.

But by the same token, the government's implication that we can't delay the broadband rollout by pausing to check whether it's a good idea, or is being done as cost effectively as possible, is insupportable. If it's a flawed idea, better to know now rather than after the money's spent.

It's no doubt true the Liberals are being quite hypocritical in demanding the release of a government report when the Howard government refused to release so many reports, and in demanding a cost-benefit analysis when John Howard never bothered with them.

But such objections make sense only to those more interested in party-political point scoring than achieving good policy.

The case for a thorough cost-benefit analysis needs no stronger argument than that, at $43 billion, this is the most expensive piece of infrastructure this country has seen.

It's true the plan has a lot of attractions. Top of the list is the structural separation of Telstra's network from its retail business so its retail competitors get fair access to the network. This is something the Howard government should have seen to before it privatised Telstra.

I accept that, if city people are going to continue cross-subsidising the bush - as they will; it's clearly the electorate's ''revealed preference'' - there's no more sensible way to do it than ensuring the bush has access to high-quality telecommunications, thereby doing what we can to reduce the tyranny of distance.

I don't have an in-principle objection to a network with natural-monopoly characteristics being owned publicly rather than privately, provided governments don't use their powers to shore up or abuse that monopoly in a way any private owner would and should be prevented doing.

And I admire the government's consciousness of the need for us to be ready to adopt and exploit the opportunities for benefit that future technological advance will make possible.

The Productivity Commission could be required to ensure its cost-benefit analysis ranged far more widely than a mere commercial evaluation, taking account of present and potential ''social'' benefits (''positive externalities'') and acknowledging those whose value it can't quantify.

But there are three aspects of the plan that worry me. They're things economists are trained to see but to which non-economists are often oblivious.

The first is the mentality that says we've got a lot of messy and inadequate telecom arrangements at present, so let's scrap 'em all and start afresh. Copper wire to the home - make Telstra turn it off. Telstra and Optus's existing rival optical fibre-coaxial cables to many capital-city homes - close 'em down.

This Ruddish approach would be fine if resources were infinite, or if getting a brand spanking new broadband network was the Australian public's only desire.

But resources are finite, both sides of politics have sworn to eliminate all government debt and we have an infrastructure backlog as long as your arm. In two words: opportunity cost.

Second is the idea of building a gold-plated broadband network up to eight times faster than any present application needs, so we're ready for anything that may come along some time in the future.

If you think that shows vision and foresight, you're innocent of ''the time value of money''. Every dollar you spend now rather than later comes at an extra cost: the interest you have to pay between now and when you start using the idle capacity.

True, it's false economy to build something today without allowing for reasonable growth in your use of the item. But there comes a point where allowing for more growth than you're likely to see in ages becomes a waste of money.

Private businesses that do this - such as home owners who overcapitalise their properties - do their dough. Government businesses survive either by overcharging their customers or falling back on the taxpayer.

The final worry is the way that - notwithstanding the break-up of Telstra - the plan involves deliberately reducing competition from other networks in the telecommunications market. Why's that a good idea?

And why would the government plan to do it? Because it knows its network will be hugely over-engineered and the only way of charging consumers the high prices needed to recoup that excess cost is to turn broadband into a monopoly.

If Gillard had any sense of self-preservation she'd be using the Productivity Commission to get herself off a nasty hook.

Read more >>

Saturday, November 20, 2010

At your service, our economy's a work in progress

THE structure of our economy is set to change over the 2010s, creating winners and losers and plenty of complaints. So it's worth remembering the economy's structure has been changing continuously since the gold rush.

An article by Ellis Connolly and Christine Lewis of the Reserve Bank reminds us that, over the past 80 years or so, the economy has been transformed from one centred on the production of primary products to an urbanised economy mainly producing services.

In the 19th century, agriculture accounted for about a third of our total output of goods and services (gross domestic product), but from about the 1930s its share started declining and today is down to a mere 3 per cent.

Why? Well, not because we're producing less agricultural stuff. We're producing more than ever. No, it's just because other parts of the economy have grown a lot faster than agriculture, thus reducing its share of the total.

While we've been producing more rural stuff we've been doing it using progressively more machinery, with fewer, bigger farms to capture the machines' potential economies of scale. So agriculture has become steadily more "capital intensive", releasing workers, who've moved to the city.

As agriculture's share started to decline, the manufacturing industry's started to increase. At the beginning of last century it accounted for roughly 15 per cent of total output, but by the 1960s it had reached a peak of 25 per cent.

From that point its share began to decline, halving to about 12 per cent today, even though it too is producing more than ever. And it, too, has become more capital intensive and less labour-intensive over the years.

This brings us to the sector that was growing much faster than agriculture and manufacturing and thus reducing their shares of the economy: services. Even in the 19th century, service industries accounted for about half the economy. By the 1960s the services sector accounted for 60 per cent of output and today it's up to 80 per cent.

I have to say that, particularly among older Australians, the growing share of the services sector - something that's happened in every country - is a bit of a worry. Agriculture and manufacturing produce physical goods - goods that can be exported or used to replace imports. Can Australians really make a living performing services for each other?

Yes we can - and we do. Quite a good living. "Services" may sound ephemeral, even servile, but they're not. Do you regard the work of doctors, nurses, carpenters, plumbers, journalists and TV stars, truck drivers, bank managers, firemen, teachers, professors and prime ministers as insubstantial or inconsequential?

A lot of people aren't quite sure what "services" includes, so let me give you the list (deep breath): construction; distribution services and utilities (electricity, gas and water, wholesale and retail trade, transport, postal and warehousing, information media and telecommunications); business services (financial and insurance, rental, hiring and real estate, professional, scientific and technical, administrative); social services (public administration and safety, education and training, health care and social assistance); and personal services (accommodation and food, arts and recreation).

By their nature, service industries are generally labour-intensive rather than capital-intensive, meaning they account for a larger share of total employment - 85 per cent -

than of output.

All these are old trends. The big news is the mining industry's growing share of output: it has gone from 2 per cent in the 1960s to 8 per cent today. And since mining's share of business investment spending has shot up to 19 per cent, we can be sure its output share will go higher.

Mining is the ultimate capital-intensive industry, so its share of total employment is just 1 per cent. But if it creates so few jobs, what's the point of it? It earns lots of income, and when that income is spent, jobs are created. Where? Mainly in service industries.

Another thing that has changed with the structure of industry is the composition of our exports. In the 1960s, agriculture accounted for 62 per cent of total exports of goods and services. Today it's 18 per cent.

Then, mining's share was 15 per cent; today it's 42 per cent - meaning primary commodities account for 60 per cent of our exports. We're a commodity-exporting economy and there's no getting round it. Always have been; probably always will be.

Manufacturing's share of total exports has increased by 8 percentage points to 17 per cent and services' share has gone from 14 per cent to 23 per cent. What services do we send abroad? We don't, really. Foreigners come here to buy tourism and education.

Why does the structure of the economy keep evolving? Connolly and Lewis identify four main drivers. First is the rising demand for services. As our real incomes grow over time there's a limit to how much more we can eat, wear, drive and watch - our demand for goods, in other words.

But there's no limit on the services we demand. We're spending ever more on health, education, recreation and financial services. Since 1960, the proportion of consumer spending going on services has increased from 40 per cent to more than 60 per cent.

Second is the industrialisation of east Asia. Over the past 50 years, Asia has exploited its low cost of labour to become a big global producer and exporter of manufactures (with the main location of that production slowly migrating from Japan to South Korea and Taiwan to China, as labour costs have risen with economic success).

The Asians have needed primary commodities as raw materials for their manufacturing, and we've been nearby. Their "comparative advantage" and ours have been a great fit.

Third is economic reform.

Reductions in trade protection of manufacturing contributed to its declining share, whereas deregulation has help to increase the share of various service industries, particularly banking and finance.

The final driver of structural change is technological advance. Computerisation has made primary and secondary industries more capital-intensive while increasing the size of computer-related service industries.

Improvements in business practices (including just-in-time production and out-sourcing) have contributed to the service industries' rising share of total output and employment.

The main thing to remember is that 200 years of efforts to increase productivity by means of "labour-saving" technology haven't led to ever-rising unemployment, as people always fear it will.

That's because higher productivity leads to increased real income and as that income is spent new jobs are created elsewhere in the (services) economy.
Read more >>

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Others doing more than us to cut emissions

To adapt an old saying, bad news is halfway round the world before good news has got its boot on. The media love bad news because they know their customers find it more interesting. But when the news is mixed, ignoring the good bits can leave you with a false impression of reality.

You already know the latest bad news on action to limit climate change: the loss of a Democrat majority in the House of Representatives has obliged Barack

Obama to abandon his efforts to get an emissions trading scheme through Congress.

Many have taken this as further evidence - on top of our own Senate's refusal to pass a trading scheme and the failure of countries at the Copenhagen conference to agree to binding emissions-reduction targets - that action on global warming is getting ever less likely.

The sceptics keep pointing out that, since greenhouse gas emissions are a global problem, if all the major countries can't agree on action it's pointless for any individual country to bother doing anything. That's true even for the United States or China, let alone a small country like Australia, which is responsible for just 1.2 per cent of the world's emissions.

To this we get the familiar refrain from the small-minded: why should we be the first to do the right thing? Why not let someone else make the sacrifice this time?

So what's the good news? There's a weakness in the logic that, unless we all agree, it's not worth anyone doing anything. We don't actually have to reach an explicit agreement.

There's nothing to stop each of the major emitting countries from acting unilaterally in the hope that, this way, a tacit agreement to act could be formalised later. Perhaps this was always the smartest way to achieve an agreement.

Wishful thinking? Don't be so sure. Contrary to popular impression, Copenhagen wasn't a total failure. The countries did reach an accord and one thing they agreed on was to each submit a pledge of the targets they were prepared to agree to.

Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at the Australian National University, has studied those pledges and been encouraged by what he found.

He looked at 13 major countries that between them account for about two-thirds of global emissions. Among the developed countries he took the US (accounting for 14 per cent of global emissions), the European Union (11 per cent), Russia (4 per cent), Japan (3 per cent), Canada (2 per cent) and Australia.

Among the developing countries he looked at China (15 per cent), Brazil (6 per cent), Indonesia (4 per cent), India (4 per cent) and Mexico, South Korea and South Africa (each with 1 per cent).

All the targets to which the countries committed themselves were for their emissions in 2020. On the face of it, they varied greatly. The developed countries pledged to reduce their emissions by some absolute amount relative to their emissions in an earlier base year, whether 1990, 2000 or 2005.

China and India pledged to reduce their "emissions intensity" by a certain percentage - that is, the amount of emissions per dollar of their gross domestic product. The other developing countries pledged to reduce their emissions by a certain percentage below what they would otherwise have been in 2020.

What Jotzo did was to put all the targets onto various comparable bases, using certain assumptions. When compared in terms of absolute reductions in emissions the pledges varied widely, with emissions by China and India continuing to grow - but reductions in all other countries, developed and developing, bar Russia.

When compared on the basis of emissions intensity, however, remarkable similar percentage reductions were pledged, with the developing countries targeting bigger reductions than the rich countries. China, for instance, is targeting a reduction of 40 to 45 per cent over 15 years.

And when compared on the basis of reductions from what emissions would otherwise have been, the targets reveal a similar degree of effort.

Because we haven't done much - and because Obama's promise to continue working to achieve emissions reductions by other means received little attention - we happily assume other countries haven't done much.

Not true - especially not for China. It is actively pursuing the target it reported to Copenhagen. It has ordered the shutdown of inefficient and high-emitting coal-fired power stations and their replacement with high-efficiency coal-fired generators. It has imposed energy performance standards for emissions-intensive industries and vehicle emission standards, is offering various incentives for clean energy and is spending bucketloads on developing renewable energy.

You can use trading schemes or a carbon tax to impose an explicit price on emissions of carbon dioxide. That's the best way to do it. But government subsidies and other measures can do the same thing indirectly.

A study sponsored by Australia's Climate Institute has sought to measure the implicit carbon price in various countries. It's $29 a tonne in Britain because its participation in the European trading scheme is backed up by various domestic measures.

It's $14 a tonne in China thanks to the measures I've mentioned and it's even $5 a tonne in the US because of federal subsidies to clean energy sources and state renewable energy targets.

And what do our bits and pieces add up to? A princely $1.70 a tonne.

Two conclusions. All the key countries - even the US - have pledged their willingness to take significant action and some, including the biggest single emitter, China, are getting on with it. As other countries see this, they'll become more active themselves.

Far from being the country that's leading the way and making sacrifices while others hang back and marvel at our naivety, Australia - a country with more to lose than most - is dragging the chain.

Read more >>

Monday, November 15, 2010

Canberra's delusion: the budget is the economy

Notice anything strange about the release of the midyear budget update last week? Just about all the talking was done by politicians and political commentators, not economists and economic commentators.

Why? Because from an economic perspective the update isn't such a big deal. It is just a six-monthly update. Treasury revises its economic forecasts, but the changes usually aren't big and they're always old news because they're never very different from the Reserve Bank's forecasts, which are revised quarterly.

The revisions to the budget estimates cover the present financial year plus the next three years, but no one with any sense takes much notice of the last three. Why not? Because, with forecasting being so inaccurate, how could you take seriously mechanical "projections" about the state of the economy and the budget balance up to 3 years hence?

But if the update is of little economic significance, why did the political types get so excited? Although the midyear update is rarely used to announce new measures, this one was sharply criticised for its failure to include "deeper cuts to government spending".

So why? At the most obvious level, because some bright spark in the government had told the press gallery to expect such cuts. Robbed of this much bigger story, the media wrote it up as yet another failure of will from a weak government, whereas spin doctor incompetence is a more likely explanation.

But I think the explanation runs deeper. The denizens of the House with a Flag on Top have never really accepted that, at least since the the Reserve was made independent in the 1990s, the macro economy is no longer managed from Canberra.

Monetary policy - the manipulation of interest rates - has long been the main instrument for the management of demand, with the budget playing a much lesser role. It does get wheeled out to stimulate the economy during recessions but is then reeled back in during the recovery.

The main responsibility of the elected government and its Treasury is for micro-economic policy: combating climate change, water policy, education and training, tax reform, making particular markets more competitive and much else.

It's a vitally important role - carrying more than enough challenge for the Rudd/Gillard government to cope with - but still everyone in Canberra yearns to be back in the centre of the daily macro-management limelight.

The treasurer and Treasury want to be seen at the economy's helm. The press gallery wants in on the always prominent economy story. And there's no joy for the opposition in criticising the Reserve governor; it wants to blame every economic problem on the government.

So how does Canberra cope with its relevance deprivation syndrome? By exaggerating the economic significance of the budget. This is apparent when you see non-economists referring to the budget balance as "the economy's deficit". Whoops.

Essential to exaggerating the significance of the budget is exaggerating its relevance to the Reserve Bank's decisions about interest rates.

Since movements in the budget balance are one of many factors affecting the strength of demand, and since the strength of demand is the main factor influencing the Reserve's decisions about rates, there is a link between the two but it's much weaker and more attenuated than many in the political debate imagine.

For the opposition to blame every rate rise on the government rather than the unelected Reserve, it has to demonise rate rises as unnatural and excruciating, ignoring the millions of Australians who benefit from higher rates.

It also has to pretend that the multibillion-dollar-a-year cuts in government spending required to be sure of removing the need for just one 0.25 percentage-point rate rise could be easily and painlessly achieved, with no adverse economic consequences.

The other truth the fuss over the midyear update demonstrates is the full extent to which the government has lost control of the economic debate. Its success in limiting the effect of the global recession is the envy of governments around the world, yet the opposition has succeeded in portraying its performance as disastrous.

Even the press gallery is buying the Libs' propaganda about excessive, wasteful spending and the need for swingeing spending cuts to get the budget back on the rails. Nonsense. The real story is how amazingly responsible the government's been.

Every government spends big during recessions, but this is the first to force itself to make every spending measure temporary. In consequence, its task in returning the budget to surplus is much easier than in past recoveries. For instance, real government spending is set to fall by 1.1 per cent next financial year as the stimulus spending ends.

From the start, the government adopted a "deficit exit strategy" to bank all revenue growth and limit real spending growth to 2 per cent a year until the budget was back in surplus. No government has ever voluntarily donned such a chastity belt.

Yet it tightened the belt in last year's budget. And in the election campaign raised the status of the return to surplus in 2012-13 from a projection to a promise.

There's no reason to doubt Julia Gillard's resolve to keep that promise.

It requires a turnaround in the budget balance over three years of 4.5 per cent of gross domestic product - equivalent to about $63 billion a year - "the fastest budget turnaround on record". D'ya reckon that might have a helpful effect on interest rates?

And yet the political cognoscenti have been convinced the government is a profligate spender that isn't really trying to pull in its belt and is leaving home buyers to be tortured by central bankers.

It's not policy that's the problem, it's Labor's amateurish exposition of that policy.

Read more >>

Saturday, November 13, 2010

How economists forgot much of what they knew

When I started as an economics writer in the mid-1970s, the Keynesian ideas that had guided macro-economic policy through the postwar Golden Age were judged a failure and economics was in crisis.

But now, as Professor John Quiggin of the University of Queensland reminds us in his new book, Zombie Economics, the global financial crisis and the Great Recession have revealed the ideas that replaced simple Keynesianism as failures that plunged economics back into crisis.

The end of the Golden Age and the loss of faith in Keynesianism were brought about by the advent of "stagflation" - high inflation despite a stagnant economy. Keynesian theory said you could have high unemployment or high inflation but not at the same time. It could fix one or the other but not both together.

There aren't many new ideas in economics, just old ideas tarted up. Keynes's ideas were new, however. The "neo-classical" orthodoxy of his day said recessions couldn't happen, so it couldn't explain the Great Depression of the 1930s and had no policies to end it.

Keynes identified various market "imperfections" that explained the economy's malfunctioning and advocated government spending to stimulate the economy and get it growing again. When economists lost faith in Keynesianism they turned back to the discredited neo-classical orthodoxy. Milton Friedman's "monetarism", for instance, was based on the old "quantity theory of money".

Government policymakers soon gave up on monetarism's targeting of growth in the supply of money - it didn't work - but a lasting consequence of that episode was to switch the primacy in macro-management from fiscal policy (the budget) to monetary policy (interest rates).

Keynesianism was criticised because its approach at the macro (top-down) level didn't fit with the bottom-up approach of micro-economics. Its conclusions about how the whole economy worked didn't fit with the standard conclusions about how individual markets worked.

Building models of the macro economy based on neo-classical micro-economic foundations had various attractions. Giving up Keynesianism's more realistic assumptions about how the world worked made the models more rigorously logical and amenable to mathematics.

Assuming everyone was rational and in possession of perfect information got economics back to its libertarian roots, creating a presumption against government intervention in markets and favouring small government and lower taxes.

One development on the old neo-classical foundation was the "efficient market hypothesis", which Quiggin says is the central theoretical doctrine of the "market liberalism" that replaced Keynesianism.

It says financial markets are the best possible guide to the value of economic assets and therefore to decisions about investment and production. And coming after the collapse of the Keynesian Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, it provided a rationale for the era of finance-driven capitalism that's ended so badly.

In its "weak form", the hypothesis says movements in the prices of assets such as shares can't be predicted from their past movements as claimed by "technical analysts". Like a drunk, share prices move in a "random walk" in reaction to whatever good or bad news next comes along.

In its "strong form", the hypothesis says the market price of an asset is the best possible estimate of its value, incorporating all the available information.

If this is true, bubbles can't develop in asset markets, causing them to crash when finally the bubble bursts.

You can see how this faith - an amazing triumph of hope over centuries of experience - encouraged the excessive deregulation of banks and the financial system, which had formerly been heavily regulated in response to the banks' key role in the Depression.

At the level of macro-economic theory, monetarism was soon superseded by "new classical" economics, incorporating mathematically (and ideologically) convenient propositions such as "rational expectations" and "Ricardian equivalence".

Rational expectations assumes people's expectations about future events will always be right; everyone has the same views about how the economy works as the economics professors who built the model.

Ricardian equivalence - named after David Ricardo, the classical economist who first thought of the idea, then dismissed it - assumes that when governments engage in deficit spending during recessions this has no stimulatory effect on the economy because everyone knows taxes will eventually have to rise to pay off the debt, so they start saving.

Between them, these ideas rendered ineffective government efforts to manage the macro economy. In practice, the academics were less damning of monetary policy. Predictably, new classical economics was never popular with politicians and treasuries, but it fed the general mood that the less governments intervened in the economy the better.

These "new classical" academics developed "real business cycle" theory to explain why economies move in cycles of boom and bust, even though simple neo-classical theory says they don't and many conservative economists had argued that all unemployment was voluntary. Under this theory all fluctuations in economic activity are caused by "exogenous shocks" (developments outside the economic system) such as changes in technology, the terms of trade or workers' preferences for leisure.

Eventually academics - including those in the "new Keynesian" school, which retained remnants of the old Keynesianism - coalesced around the "dynamic stochastic general equilibrium" model. This did allow for the possibility that wages and prices might be slow to adjust, and for imbalances between supply and demand, but moved the model only a short way towards the real world.

The fact that, following the malfunctioning of the 1970s, the main economies seemed to settle down after 1985 - with inflation back under control and unemployment lower - led many economists to conclude this Great Moderation proved economics was now on the right track and the business cycle had been tamed.

Famous last words. The US housing boom proved to be a giant bubble that eventually burst, we realised what crazy games the global financial markets had been playing, the sharemarket crashed, the banking system tottered on its foundations and the developed world entered by far the worst recession since the Depression, which looks likely to linger for the rest of the decade.

And the people whose unrealistic theories helped to bring the calamity about had no idea it was coming because they were playing "rigorous" mathematical games at the time.

I haven't done justice to Quiggin's book, so if you're interested in a readable exposition of the exploits of academic economists over the past 35 years I recommend it highly. It's the story of how economists forgot much of what they knew. Please, guys, don't do that again.

Read more >>