Don't jump to conclusions on big bad Trump

Keep your shirt on. The world as we know it may be ending, but if so it won't be for a while. And maybe things won't change as much as feared.

Yesterday the experts were confidently predicting Hillary Clinton would be president. Today they are predicting Donald Trump's presidency will be a disaster with equal confidence. How do they know?

I find it hard to imagine Trump's ascendancy won't end up being bad for our economy, for the rest of the world and the Americans themselves.

But that's a long way down the track and lots of unexpected things could happen between now and then. Maybe even a few good things.

The thing of which I'm most certain is that the election of a climate change-denying president will further delay a serious response to the challenge by America and, through its bad influence, the rest of us.

But, hey, we are probably too late already. So no (extra) harm done. And Donald, you and I will be dead long before it gets really bad.

Sorry, back to the present. Don't forget the guy doesn't even get the job until January. And even then he may not yet have assembled the full range of his thousands of appointees.

Not that there is likely to be any shortage of volunteers. They won't be America's finest, but there will be plenty of people keen to be the president's friend.

The delay will give Wall Street and the world's share markets plenty of time to change their mind about Trump - several times.

Remember, share markets took no time to decide Brexit was the end of the world and only a little more to decide it wasn't.

And every new presidency starts with a honeymoon, in which all the people who voted him in rejoice - a new start for America! - some of the people who didn't wish they had, and everyone is glad to be shot of the last lot and all their failings.

Nothing very bad will happen in the honeymoon.

If one of the first new policies to go forward is Trump's plan to end decades of neglect by renewing America's public infrastructure, that would be a good thing of itself, would boost the US economy and spread a little growth on to the rest of us.

At the other extreme, should Trump lose no time in starting a trade war with China, everyone would lose - the US, China and the rest, with Australia prominent among those last.

This is where we must trust that America's celebrated "separation of powers" comes to the rescue, allowing other, wiser heads to prevent Trump from being as foolhardy as he said he would be.

Of course, the one prediction every Aussie voter can make made with confidence is that Trump, being a politician, will fail to keep most of his promises. Good.

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Maybe the end of economic growth draws near

If you think the possible ascension of Donald Trump is our one big worry you haven't been paying attention. Some climate scientists are worried sick over the possibility that climate change may be passing the point of no return while we procrastinate over controlling it.

Meanwhile, the nation's – nay, the world's – economists worry that the wellsprings of economic growth are drying up in the developed countries. Think of it – an economy without growth!

On Monday the Productivity Commission issued a discussion paper exclaiming that there is "justified global anxiety" that improvements in productivity and the growth in national income they cause have "slowed or stopped".

In my job I'm not supposed to say it but, sorry, I'm a lot more worried about inaction on climate change than the feared end of economic growth – if for no other reason than that going backward must surely be worse than not going forward.

Why can't most economists see that? Because climate change is not their department. They're meant to be experts on how to make economies grow, and that's all they want to talk about.

Most economists I know never doubt that a growing economy is what keeps us happy and, should the economy stop growing, it would make us all inconsolable.

They can't prove that, of course, but they're as convinced of it as anyone else selling something.

I'm not so sure. I'm sure a lot of greedy business people would be unhappy if their profits and bonuses stopped growing, but I often wonder if the rest of us could adjust to a stationary economy a lot more easily than it suits economists and business people to believe.

And get this: there is a fair chance we may get to find out if I'm right.

The economy – the amount of economic activity, measured as annual production of goods and services – grows as the population and, more particularly, the amount of work being done, grows.

The economy also grows when we save some of our income from producing goods and services and invest it in additional productive equipment – machines, buildings, infrastructure – thus making our workers capable of producing more goods and services with each hour they spend.

But here's the bit many scientists and others don't get: the secret sauce of economic growth is our ability to produce more goods and services this year than we did last year even with the same quantity of labour and capital equipment.

This is the pure essence of economic growth: improved "productivity" – productiveness. How is it possible? Mainly by giving workers not just more machines, but better machines; machines that do better tricks. By technological advance.

And also, these days, by using further education and training to make our workers capable of doing fancier tricks – including working with more sophisticated machines – and organising work in better ways.

This essence of productivity – which economists call "multifactor" productivity – is what seems to be drying up. In Australia, according to the eponymous commission, it hasn't improved since 2004.

But it's much the same story in all the developed economies. Many economists are starting to accept Harvard professor Lawrence Summers' revival of the theory of "secular stagnation" – that we've entered a lasting period of little or no growth in national income (gross domestic product), especially income per person.

What's helping to persuade them is the argument of another American economist, professor Robert Gordon, perhaps the world's leading expert on productivity.

His contention – which no young person would believe – is that the slowdown in measured productivity improvement has occurred because there is now much less innovation than we became used to over the past century.

Despite the unending wonders of the digital age, and the digital disruption of industry after industry, they just don't compare with the life-changing and economy-transforming technological advances of the past: electricity, the internal combustion engine, even underground water and sewerage.

We spent all of last century fully exploring and exploiting the potential just of electricity – from light bulb to production line to dishwasher to the computer and all it has spawned.

But there's more to Summers' secular stagnation. He argues that population ageing is leading people in the West to save more, while digital innovation and weak population growth are reducing the need for much new physical investment by businesses and governments.

Higher saving and lower investment equal permanently lower interest rates and lower economic growth.

Well, possibly. A rival theory is that the digital revolution and the shift from more goods to more services is changing the economy in ways that the economists' conventional measuring system is incapable of picking up.

We're still getting better off, but in ways that aren't showing on the economists' dials. It's certainly true that much of the time-saving and convenience flowing from the internet is not measured by GDP.

That's been my big problem with economists' obsession with economic growth. It defines prosperity almost wholly in material terms. Any preference for greater leisure over greater production is assumed to be retrograde.

Weekends are there to be commercialised. Family ties are great, so long as they don't stop you being shifted to Perth.

But I'd like to see if, in a stagnant economy, we could throw the switch from quantity to quality. Not more, better.

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Turnbull and Morrison to fix the budget without really trying

There are a lot of -isms in economics – Keynesianism​, monetarism and many more – but it's now clear the Turnbull government is an adherent to Micawberism.

Mr Micawber, you recall, was the Dickens character who summarised his philosophy of life as: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery."

Micawber's life was miserable because he often found his finances in deficit. A bit like an Australian government post-global financial crisis.

His solution to the problem never changed. He was always waiting and hoping for "something to turn up".

We've now seen enough of the Turnbull government to realise it, too, is doing little more than hoping something eventually turns up to get the budget back to surplus.

To be fairer to the government than it deserves, the main reason repair of the budget's taking so much longer than expected is not because of any great laxness in the control of government spending, but because tax collections have grown so much more slowly than could have been expected, for reasons beyond its control.

Its revenue forecasts have repeatedly fallen short because export prices have fallen much further than expected and because the rates of price and, more particularly, wage inflation have slowed to rates unseen in decades.

Even so, successive treasurers have insisted the budget has a "spending problem, not a revenue problem". They say this; they haven't acted on it.

They've used this false claim to resist pressure to increase taxes (apart from allowing bracket creep, which the weak growth in wages has made far less potent than usual) but, after the public's resounding rejection of the Coalition's first budget, they've made no real attempt to repair the budget by making net cuts in government spending.

If that assertion surprises you it's because you've been bamboozled by the government's actual spending policy: to ensure all new spending programs are offset by cuts to existing programs.

So the unending stream of fights to get these and those spending cuts through the Senate are merely an attempt to hold the line on spending growth, not to slow it down.

That there are so many new spending programs needing to be offset is a demonstration of how utterly unrealistic is the government's professed goal of "smaller government".

The government's lack of enthusiasm for net spending cuts is shown by the increasingly piddling, penny-pinching nature of the cuts it wants to get through Parliament.

Raise the departure tax by $5; tax backpackers for the few months they're here; cut the dole by $4.40 a week; think of further ways to deny benefits to single parents and the disabled.

If you've been a budget-watcher for a few years, you can tell such measures come straight out of the bureaucrats' bottom drawer, where they've been kept for the day when the government was desperate enough to need then.

Their piddling nature is a sign that, in the search for spending cuts affecting only politically weak interest groups, the government is close to the bottom of the barrel.

Actually, what it shows is that even the policy of making departments come up with offsetting savings to cover new measures is running out of puff.

Now, be clear on this: in drawing all this to your attention, my purpose is not to criticise the government for failing to slash spending and the deficit, merely to highlight the yawning gap between what it says about budget repair and what it's actually doing.

So if its true strategy is merely to wait for something to turn up that gets us back to surplus, what could turn up?

This is where its prospects are brighter than Mr Micawber's. Coal and iron ore prices are a lot higher today than they were at the time of the budget in May. If this lasts it will do a lot to restore the growth in tax collections.

Nor is it wildly optimistic to expect that price and wage inflation will recover over the next year or two, putting some bite back into bracket creep.

But much help could come from the recalcitrant Senate. This year's budget included big tax increases – in tobacco excise, superannuation and multinational tax avoidance – intended to partially cover the ever-growing cost of cutting the rate of company tax by 5 percentage points.

If, as seems likely, the Senate accepts the tax increases but declines to pass the company tax cut on to big business, in time the budget should be well ahead on the deal.

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This year changed the politics of tax reform

The disease known as "confirmation bias" is endemic among economists. They have a marked tendency to remember events that seem to confirm the correctness of long-held beliefs, but forget developments that challenge their prejudices.

So their pre-existing notions about how the world works become ever more firmly held.

In which case, let me remind them - and you - of the view-changing lessons about tax reform they probably haven't learnt from the results of recent elections.

Economists, politicians and business people have long-held views about which tax reforms are relatively easy to bring about politically, and which aren't.

But some of these assumptions have been turned on their head by the Turnbull government's poor showing at the election in July, and by the comfortable re-election of the ACT Labor government last month.

In this year's federal election, tax reform was perhaps the biggest single issue. It was, you recall, the one to which the Coalition government was expected to bring a package of comprehensive tax changes, following a green paper and white paper decision process.

The process didn't happen, nor were either Tony Abbott or Malcolm Turnbull willing to propose the much-mooted increase in the goods and services tax.

There was no package as such, just a collection of tax measures announced in the budget brought down just before the election campaign started.

The big one was a plan to reduce the rate of company tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent, phased in over 10 years, with smaller companies going first and the cuts not reaching big business until 2024.

This was the centrepiece of the government's claim to have a "plan for jobs and growth". To this it added a tiny income tax cut of up to $6 a week for the top 20 per cent of taxpayers, earning more than $80,000 a year.

But the budget included various tax increases to help pay for these tax cuts. It pinched Labor's plan for a further big, phased increase in tobacco excise, and adopted its own versions of Labor's plans to cut back tax concessions on superannuation and extract more tax from multinational corporations.

Labor had been first to put its tax reform cards on the table. It proposed also to phase out negative gearing of property investments and cut the discount on capital gains tax.

The government considered its own measure to reduce negative gearing, but finally decided to do nothing, thus leaving itself free to claim Labor's plan would wreck the housing market. Product differentiation.

But here's our first lesson on the politics of reform: it's a lot easier for governments to propose possibly unpopular reforms when the opposition has already stuck its neck out, or when cabinet has reason to believe the opposition won't attack it for acting.

We can deduce from opinion polling, from the debate during the campaign and from the election outcome how these various reform measures went down with voters.

The tobacco excise increase, the crackdown on multinational tax avoiders and the tiny tax cut hardly rated a mention in the campaign.

Had the small but expensive tax cut not be made, it's doubtful if the Coalition would have lost many votes. Bracket creep is rarely a biting election issue.

The crackdown on multinationals was probably intended to answer the criticism that companies hardly need a tax cut when they were already paying very little, but it could just as easily have reminded voters of this argument.

The super changes attracted little discussion publicly, but did anger some well-lined Liberal supporters. After the election the measures were toned down accordingly.

But it's hard to believe the Libs lost many votes over it when Labor had similar proposals. Nor that many people loaded enough to have a problem with the super changes would have switched their vote to One Nation, as some claim.

It seems pretty clear the cut in company tax wouldn't have gained the Coalition many votes it didn't already have, but probably lost it quite a few.

The public has little sympathy for big business - can't think why - and the claim that the benefit of company tax cuts would trickle down to the rest of us wasn't believed.

Even the government's own modelling showed the belated effect on "jobs and growth" would be minor. For the punters, the link was impossible to see.

By contrast, the government's attack on Labor's negative gearing policy didn't stick and the policy may have gained more young voters than it lost from older property investors.

Economic theory tells us taxes on land are about the most economically efficient - doing least to distort the choices people make about working, saving and investing - of all taxes.

They're particularly attractive when the increasing ease with which financial capital can be moved between tax jurisdictions is used as a key argument for reform, including increasing the GST. Land is immovable.

Land tax is also much fairer - "progressive" - than "regressive" GST, which takes a higher proportion of lower incomes than higher ones.

The value of the land people own tends to be highly correlated with their overall wealth.

But many reform advocates say raising land tax would be even harder politically than raising the GST.

Well, they should note the case of the Labor government in the ACT, which got comfortably re-elected even though it has been implementing a reform long advocated by tax economists: slowly phasing out stamp duty on property conveyances while phasing in a universal land tax.

Of course, there are no controlled experiments in economics, and many factors - notably, perceptions of a government's general competence - play a part in election outcomes.

Even so, this year's elections cast doubt on some supposedly self-evident truths in the politics of tax reform: that company tax cuts won't be a problem, whereas negative gearing, superannuation and land tax are untouchable.

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Pick on the weak and friendless to pretend to fix the budget

Did you know our social security system is so open to rorting that it's possible for some people to get more from benefits than they'd earn if they took a job? And we wonder why we have problem with debt and deficit.

This scandalous state of affairs was leaked to an  Australian newspaper by sources close to the minister for Social Services, Christian Porter.

Specifically, single parents with four children can get welfare payments of more than $52,000 a year if they don't work, but less than $50,000 after tax if they work and receive the median full-time wage.

Small problem with this appalling news. It's a cock and bull story.

The welfare experts took no time to demolish it.

For a start, it's a contrived example. How many people do you know with four dependent children? There must be some single parents with four kids, but they'd a small fraction of all welfare-dependent single parents and an infinitesimal fraction of the 5.2 million recipients of federal "income support".

Worse, it's a false comparison. If the sole parent took the job they'd still be eligible for the $32,000-odd in family tax benefits per year. By supposedly preferring to accept the "parenting payment single" of less than $20,000, they'd be passing up the median full-time wage of almost $50,000 after tax.

What Porter doesn't seem to know is that family payments are specifically designed to be the same whether parents are working or not, precisely to ensure they don't discourage parents on benefits from taking a job.

So the Minister for Social Services has grossly misrepresented the workings of his own system.

Relative to people like Joe Hockey and Scott Morrison, Porter seems smart and well-spoken, eminently capable explaining a tricky concept in simple words. He's next most likely to be treasurer.

So why did he risk his reputation by putting out a line that was so quickly and easily debunked?

Perhaps because he thinks it's his job to convince us that the allegedly unsustainable growth in welfare spending is the main reason for our debt and deficit.

And because it's the job of he and his ministerial offsider, Alan Tudge, to counter the Senate's reluctance to agree to a range of cuts in the dole and other welfare benefits by creating the impression in voters' minds that welfare spending is rife with rorts and rip-offs by the undeserving poor.

Also because the Liberal heartland is desperate to believe they won't have to pay higher taxes if the welfare bill can be chopped back to size. Worse, I suspect Porter and Morrison actually believe it.

In a speech a few weeks' ago Porter worked hard to demonise his own portfolio, grossly exaggerating the size of the problem.

Today's "welfare spend" is about $160 billion a year. This makes it the largest category of (federal) government spending, representing 80 per of all individual income tax collections, he says. (Except that personal income tax represents only about half of all the federal tax we pay. Oops.)

He wants us to assume most of this $160 billion goes on people who could work, but won't: dole bludgers, sole parent bludgers and people on disability pensions pretending to have bad backs.

Except that half the money goes to bludgers who don't want to work because they're over 65. Another quarter goes to bludgers with children (the family tax benefit) or young mothers wanting subsidised childcare so they can do their bludging at work.

Most of the alleged projected "unrestrained growth" in the welfare spend will come from the continuing retirement of the baby-boomer bulge and the success of investment advisers in helping people get the age pension despite their big super payouts.

Have you noticed how many political fights in recent times arise from the government's efforts to get penny-pinching spending cuts and tax changes through the Parliament?

There's the tax on backpackers, the removal of the "energy supplement" worth $4.40 a week or so to pensioners and people on the dole, the cuts in family payments that would hit sole parents hardest, the cuts to make people wait four weeks before they get the dole and raise the eligibility age for the adult dole to 25, and even the move to stop evil maternal double-dippers using employer-provided paid parental leave to prolong the period they have at home with the baby.

Porter says we can't continue to borrow money to fund today's welfare system growth because this would burden young Australians.

He avoids admitting that apparently we can continue to borrow money to cover a tax cut for people earning more than $80,000 a year, hugely expensive cuts in company tax, a much-delayed crackdown on multinational tax avoidance and a massive increase in spending on defence.

Heard of priorities, Christian?

These penny-pinching cost cuts aimed mainly at the socially disadvantaged and politically defenceless – if roughing up asylum seekers and their kids goes down so well with voters, why not extend the attack to bottom-of-the-pile Aussies? – are far from sufficient to make much impact on the budget deficit.

They show the government is near the bottom of the barrel in the quality of budget savings it's prepared to make.

It wants us to believe the federal budget is close to bankruptcy but, in truth, it's this government that's nearer to being morally, politically and economically bankrupt.

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TALK TO NSW TREASURY, NSW

Parliament House, November 2016

I’ve always been a sympathiser and supporter of Treasuries - federal and state. I think it comes from my background as an accountant, before I began an economic journalist. But in recent years I’ve become more critical of Treasuries’ performances.

I accept and respect that Treasuries see balancing the budget as their ultimate responsibility, the issue they care about most. After all, if they don’t accept ultimate responsibility for the budget, who will? Certainly not the voters and not even the politicians.

But tho worrying about the budget is necessary to the community’s economic progress, it’s not sufficient. If remaining vigilant on budget responsibility is all Treasuries do, it’s not nearly enough.

If Treasuries don’t also accept responsibility for micro-economic policy - for the efficiency with which industries are functioning, who else will?

Actually, the two issues - budgets and economic efficiency - overlap. And it’s in this overlap that I’ve become more critical of Treasuries.

I fear that, in their preoccupation with the budget, Treasuries have been behaving more like accountants than economists. They haven’t resisted the temptation to let the end justify the means. If some spending cut helps reduce the deficit, why worry whether it’s what Paul Keating called a “quality cut”? 

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If the economy’s acting dumb, don’t blame the econocrats

Has it occurred to you that, with the Reserve Bank now run by Dr Philip Lowe and his deputy Dr Guy Debelle, Glenn Stevens may have been the last governor we'll see without a PhD?

All Stevens and his predecessor, Ian Macfarlane, could manage was a master's degree.

Of course, nothing is certain. After Dr Ken Henry was succeeded as Treasury secretary by Dr Martin Parkinson, I convinced myself the era of PhD-only secretaries had arrived at Treasury.

Wrong. It didn't occur to me that Tony Abbott would intervene, sacking Parkinson and replacing him with John Fraser (honours degree), a throwback to Treasury's (John) Stone Age.

My point is to remind you that the nation's top econocrats get ever-better educated. And take my word for it – they're not just highly qualified, they're whip smart.

When you spend as much time talking to them as I do – mainly before they make it to their top slots – you have to keep reminding yourself how exceptionally bright they are to stop you underrating your own brainpower.

They're the kind of people who – while you were at uni chasing the opposite sex, playing at politics or just goofing off – were swatting flat out, preparing for every lecture and starting early on every essay. You skimmed the texts; they read every word.

While chatting about other people's academic qualifications I suppose I should disclose my own: scraped through a bachelor of commerce, pass level.

Had to repeat several subjects, and the last pass I got, for international economics, was conceded. I couldn't see the point of economics until long after I left uni.

If by now I do know a bit about the topic, it's thanks mainly to long telephone tutorials from the aforementioned and their predecessors.

As citizens we should find it reassuring that our politicians are being advised by such smart people.

For the most part they're more intelligent (and better qualified) than their political masters – and than the politically ambitious young punks in the minister's office who stand between them and the boss.

We'd be better governed if more of the people in ministers' offices came from the department, if there was a less adversarial relationship between the office and the department, and if ministers and their private advisers were more conscious of their need for policy advice from the more expert.

After Scott Morrison's major speech about "the taxed and the taxed-not" I stopped myself saying it was clear Treasury hadn't written it because of all the bad grammar in it.

The broader point is that, although the nation may not be doing as well as we should be in increasing the human capital of the workforce, there's no doubt our workforce is getting better qualified.

Over just the 10 years to 2015, the proportion of our population aged 20 to 64 with a bachelor degree or above rose by 7.5 percentage points to 29.3 per cent.

This would include a lot of our brighter young people getting double degrees – the benefits of which I'm yet to be persuaded of. (Whether too many of our workers have actually become overqualified is a worry for another day.)

So rest assured, the economic bureaucracy is at least keeping up with the trend to better qualified workers, and probably exceeding it. Of course, people with doctorates are popping up throughout the workforce, not just the bureaucracy.

Most of the Reserve's PhDs are home grown. As you may remember from Peter Martin's fascinating biography of its new leadership, Lowe joined straight from school, meaning the Reserve funded his education all the way from undergrad university medal to doctorate from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since the Reserve earns a fortune each year by printing bank notes for less than 10¢ a pop and selling them to the banks at face value (only most of which it eventually passes on to the government), it's well able to afford to ensure its troops are well educated.

It's harder for Treasury, whose bright young things compete against the rest of the public service for a limited number of scholarships (one of which was endowed by the will of a former Treasury secretary).

You could be forgiven for wondering whether having our top econocrats so well-qualified academically is such a wonderful idea. Fortunately, there's a big difference between an econocrat with a PhD and a university lecturer with one.

Too many trainee academic economists are just learning to do mathematical tricks that will impress their peers. A post-grad from the bureaucracy knows they're learning how to prescribe better economic policy.

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Breaking news: classical Athens had an economy

Did you know that classical Athens didn't have an economy? If you find that hard to believe, you should - because it's not possible.

But if you read the many hundreds of books written about Athens in the classical period, you could be forgiven for imagining that all those philosophers, poets, artists, politicians and generals existed in a world where the mundanities of making a living and raising a family didn't exist.

This may be because the authors of those books thought that, beside the glories of Athens' literature, art, architecture and history, mere economics wasn't worth mentioning. Soo boring, darling.

Or it may be that, in the minds of the authors of earlier centuries - maybe even in the minds of the Athenians themselves - an association with "trade" carried a social stigma. Like using the lavatory, it was a necessary evil not to be mentioned in polite society.

But when Peter Acton, who studied classics at Oxford but ended up as a management consultant, finally got the chance, he decided to search out whatever information he could find to set the record straight and complete the picture of Athenian life.

Athens' classical period ran from the defeat of the second Persian invasion of Greece under Xerxes to when Athens and the rest of Greece came under the control of Alexander the Great. So, the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

Whatever they did to keep body and soul together that long ago must have been small and primitive, right?

Well, no. Acton found Athens at the time had a large and thriving manufacturing sector, defined broadly to include both mining and construction.

He set out his discoveries in the book Poiesis: Manufacturing in Classical Athens, which I'll summarise. "Poiesis" comes from the same Greek root as "poetry", but means "to make".

It seems the Athenians had a lot of manufactured items in their homes. They were at the stage of economic development where the more accoutrements you could acquire, the better off you were (whereas we're closer to satiation with goods and prefer acquiring experiences).

"Athenian Man was as likely as not to have made many of the products used in his own home and probably depended for a good part of his sustenance on manufacturing for sale," Acton says.

"However rich he was, his wives and daughters would make their own clothes, working alongside some of their slaves and perhaps supervising others in the household's workshop.

"Every time he went outside, he would be surrounded by evidence of production: the smells and the smoke of smithies and pottery furnaces, the clack of looms, the hammering of carpenters and sculptors, carts rattling through the streets full of stone or wood or bales of fine cloth or jars of imported oils."

It seems likely that more than half the city's residents would have spent at least some of their time manufacturing products for sale or home consumption, Acton estimates.

This would involve almost all the slaves, of course, either helping with household production or working in a gang for one owner.

"A reasonable estimate is that around a quarter of the free population of all status levels, men and women, worked at making things," he says.

Manufacturing activity ranged in size. "It is a common mistake to see manufacturing as having undergone a steady progression from self-sufficiency based on home crafts to mechanised mass production.

"In reality, individual craftsmen, small workshops, co-operative production arrangements and large factories have coexisted over millennia in various societies, not least in classical Athens."

Although written accounts of economic life are sparse, archaeological finds are a different matter. Material evidence gives us clues about the occupations followed.

Wood, for instance, suggests foresters, sawyers, carpenters, furniture makers and boat builders. Stone suggests quarrymen, stonemasons, sculptors, mosaicists and haulers.

Metals imply miners, blacksmiths, armourers, silversmiths, goldsmiths and coiners. Clay implies potters and tilers; hides say tanners and cobblers; reeds say rope and basket makers; herbs say healers and perfumers, and wool says fullers, dyers and weavers.

Manufacturing, Acton contends, was the great leveller. Whereas agriculture was real capitalism, contributing to social inequality, trade and industry helped to level income and status.

"The social mobility, employment opportunities and relatively even distribution of wealth that accompanied the rise of commerce helped Athens to avoid the revolutions that the Peleponnese suffered regularly."

By Acton's estimate, the classical Athenians enjoyed a high standard of living - not just compared with other people at the time, but even compared with any other society until recently.

Economic growth in Greece was up to 0.9 per cent a year, twice as fast as in England and Holland before the Industrial Revolution.

By classical times the basic daily wage was about six times that required for subsistence, and half Athens' population lived a life that was better than the typical Briton's in the 18th century.

Conspicuous consumption became increasingly common in the fourth century BCE. "Some couches and tables were highly ornate and inlaid with gold or silver.

"Men and women wore jewellery of outstanding craftsmanship and decorative ceramics or silverware for festivals might take several years of work."

Health, as measured by bone density, increased rapidly, even though urbanisation tends to have the opposite effect.

Houses, though not luxurious, were large and comfortable, typically with roof space larger than the median single detached house in the United States in 1997. The extra space accommodated more furniture and possessions.

Athens engaged in much trade. Massive imports of grain allowed her farmers to pursue their comparative advantage, producing olive oil and wine for export.

They also imported luxury items such as fine cloth, spices, dyestuffs and precious metals, often for further processing in Athens.

But it was rich in raw materials, including marble, limestone, clay and silver.

Sounds like Athenians then were doing better in relative terms than many of them are today.

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Continued globalisation requires more 'inclusive' growth

Remember globalisation? It was big news some years back. Now, however, the leaders of the global economy worry that public opinion is turning against it, pressuring governments to reverse it.

Globalisation is the process by which the barriers separating nations and their economies have been broken down by international co-operation and deregulation, but mainly by advances in technology.

We now have much more telecommunications, travel, trade, investment, money flows and migration between countries. News now travels around the world almost in real time.

Just how worried leaders have become about a reversal of this trend is revealed by a speech Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, gave in Canada this month.

She began by asserting the benefits of the process. The ability of countries to rise above narrow self-interest over the 70 years since World War II has brought unprecedented economic progress, she argues.

"Conflicts have diminished, diseases have been eradicated, poverty has been reduced and life expectancy has increased around the world."

The prime beneficiaries of economic integration and openness have been the developing countries, she says, a point the critics of globalisation rarely want to admit.

One of the most important developments was the entry of China, India and the former communist countries into the world trading system in the early 1990s.

According to the World Bank, international trade has helped reduce by half the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty.

China, for instance, saw its rate of extreme poverty drop from 36 per cent at the end of the 1990s to 6 per cent in 2011.

In a single generation, Vietnam has moved from being one of the world's poorest nations to middle-income status, which has allowed increased investment in health and education.

But the rich economies have also benefited through higher living standards, caused by a more efficient allocation of capital between countries, improved productivity and lower prices for consumers.

"Research on the consumer benefits suggest trade has roughly doubled the real incomes for a typical [rich-country] household. And for the poorest households, trade has raised real incomes by more than 150 per cent," she says.

So what's the problem? Well, for a start, the opening up of world trade effectively doubled the size of the global workforce, putting downward pressure on the wages of lower-skilled workers in the advanced economies.

In the US, competition from low-wage countries has been one of the factors contributing to a decline in manufacturing employment, along with a wave of automation.

This decline has not been spread evenly across the economy, but concentrated in some states and towns that have faced deep and long-lasting effects from overseas competition, she says.

Similarly, the benefits from economic growth have not been spread evenly. In the major advanced economies, incomes for the top 10 per cent increased by 40 per cent in the past two decades, while growing only modestly at the bottom.

Then there is the globalisation of capital. Between 1980 and 2007 there was an eight-fold expansion in global trade, but a 25-fold increase in flows of financial capital.

This has greatly increased investment in developing countries. But much of the flows have been short-term and speculative, opening the door to financial contagion – sudden outflows sweeping from country to country – leading to concerns about the stability of financial systems.

"Growing inequality in wealth, income and opportunity in many countries has added to a groundswell of discontent, especially in the industrialised world – a growing sense among some citizens that they 'lack control', that the system is somehow against them," she says.

"Financial institutions are being seen as unaccountable to society. Tax systems allow multinational companies and wealthy individuals not to pay what many would consider a fair share."

Couldn't happen here, could it.

"And there is the challenge from uncontrolled migration flows, contributing to economic and cultural anxieties."

So what should we do? The goal should be to maintain the benefits from globalisation while sharing them more widely, she says.

Governments need to do more to encourage economic growth, but make it more inclusive, to "benefit workers across all economic sectors". (The need for growth to be "inclusive" is something leaders are talking about everywhere but here.)

We need to "step up direct support for lower-skilled workers" by greater public investment in education, retraining and by facilitating occupational and geographic mobility.

We need to "strengthen social safety nets" by providing appropriate unemployment insurance, health benefits and portable pensions. The US, for instance, could cushion labour market dislocations by increasing the federal minimum wage.

We need to "address the lack of vigorous competition in key areas. Think of major industries – from banking to pharmaceuticals to social media – where some advanced economies are facing large increases in market concentration."

Not here, of course.

"Boosting fairness also means clamping down on tax evasion and preventing the artificial shifting of business profits to low-tax locations," she says.

These measures can create a positive feedback loop: stronger, more inclusive growth reduces economic inequality and increases support for further reforms and openness.

But we must resist the temptation offered by "politicians seeking office by promising to 'get tough' with foreign trade partners through ... restrictions on trade".

We tried that in the 1930s as a solution to the Great Depression, and made things a lot worse for everyone.

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Global leaders change direction while we play games

It's strange the way Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison keep shooting off overseas to compare notes with world economic heavies, but come back none the wiser.

Fortunately, the wonders of the internet allow us to read for ourselves what they're being told by the trumps at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and the International Monetary Fund.

It's clear those at the leading edge are getting increasingly worried about the outlook for the world economy and are urging a marked change of policy direction.

But while the trumps see a need for policy to swing back to the centre, our unruly Coalition is intent on drifting off to the far right.

Our preoccupation is with protecting the aspirations of the richest superannuants, changing the Racial Discrimination Act, delaying same-sex marriage, protecting negative gearing and blaming the budget deficit on greedy welfare recipients.

Back where they still care about the economy, the OECD is worried that "the world economy remains in a low-growth trap, with poor growth expectations depressing trade, investment, productivity and wages.

"This, in turn, leads to a further downward revision in growth expectations and subdued demand. Poor growth outcomes, combined with high inequality and stagnant incomes, are further complicating the political environment, making it more difficult to pursue policies that would support growth and promote inclusiveness," last week's OECD interim economic outlook said.

Here's where you're supposed to think of Donald Trump, Brexit and the resurrection of One Nation. That's really gonna help.

What's turning the prolonged period of weak global demand into a trap – a Catch 22 – is the adverse effect on the growth in supply from weak business investment spending, weak productivity improvement and the atrophying skills of the long-term jobless.

The OECD estimates that, for its 35 member countries as a whole, their "potential" growth rate per person – the average rate of growth in their capacity to produce goods and services – has halved to 1 per cent a year, relative to their average growth in potential during the two decades before the financial crisis.

The organisation is worried that growth in global trade is "exceptionally weak" and that "exceptionally low and negative interest rates" are distorting financial markets – including overblown share and housing prices – and creating risks of future crises.

So what should we do to escape the low-growth trap? Change the mix of policies.

We've relied too heavily on loose monetary policy, which won't be sufficient to get us out of trouble. Worse, it's "leading to growing financial distortions and risks".

Rather, we should move to "a stronger collective fiscal [budgetary] and structural [micro reform] policy response". Note the word "collective" – fiscal stimulus always works better when every country acts at much the same time.

The goal with fiscal and structural measures is to boost demand and raise the economy's productive capacity.

"All countries have room to restructure their spending and tax policies towards a more growth-friendly mix by increasing hard and soft infrastructure spending and using fiscal measures to support structural reforms," the organisation says.

The OECD and the IMF have argued that Australia has plenty of "fiscal space" to increase borrowing for productivity-enhancing infrastructure; space that's been increased by the very low interest rates payable on our existing and any further debt.

The latest OECD economic outlook continues: "Concrete instruments include greater spending on well-targeted active labour market programs and basic research, which should benefit both short-term demand, longer-term supply, and help to make growth more inclusive."

And, in the present environment of weak demand, supportive macro-economic policies would create a more favourable environment for the short-term effects of structural reforms, we're told.

Now get this: easing the fiscal stance through well-targeted growth-friendly measures is likely to reduce the debt-to-GDP ratio in the short term, we're told. How? By adding more to nominal GDP than it adds to public debt.

"Furthermore, provided that fiscal measures raise potential output, a temporary debt-financed expansion need not increase debt ratios in the longer term," the organisation concludes.

To be fair, both our retiring and our new Reserve Bank governor (who also go to all the international meetings) have told the government monetary policy has done its dash and we need to rely more on spending on infrastructure.

The question is how long it will take our politicians to realise that their survival in government is more likely if they improve our economic performance and improve their electoral appeal by returning to policies of the "sensible centre" and ensuring growth is more "inclusive" – as they say in Paris and Washington, but not Canberra.

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