I’ve been appointed to the academic advisory committee for the Prime Minister’s Home Ownership Task Force. Most of the work will be done by the executive eommittee, which has some high-powered Australian and international economists including Stephen King, Joshua Gans and Andrew Caplin as well as Christopher Joye, who’s been the leading promoter of the idea of equity partnerships as a method of home financing.
But the real international stars, including Robert Shiller and Richard Zeckhauser are on the advisory committee. I don’t suppose we’ll be meeting regularly for coffee, but it’s great honor to be in the same group as these guys.
Readers may be interested to know how I managed this, given that governments generally give jobs like this to their friends and that I am well-known to be ‘no friend of the government’. As with a lot of things it happened pretty much by chance. Commentators of all stripes were piling on to denounce the equity partnerships idea and I wrote a piece in the Finarguing that it had some promise and deserved closer investigation. Next thing you know I got my invitation.