I’m working on a longish piece on how to pay for the global financial crisis, and it seems like a good idea to deal with some side issues separately. One of the standard post-crisis responses of governments, i has been to increase the age at which people become eligible for public old age pensions. This change is likely to flow through to other policies, for example by shaping the presumptions around the tax treatment of private retirement income.
I want to step away from these financial positions and ask the question: does it make sense, in general, for people to retire at older ages than in the past? For those who want the “shorter” version, my answer, on balance, is “Yes, at least in Australia”.
There are two main factors that should influence the age at which we retire. First, improving productivity means that any given standard of living can be achieved with less work, and we would expect at least some of this benefit to take the form of an increase in leisure, including more years spent in retirement. Second, and going in the opposite direction, we are living longer and (because of higher education levels and increased difficulty of entry to the workforce) starting work later[1]. So, with a fixed retirement age, the number of years out of the workforce is increasing, while the number in the workforce is decreasing.
At least in the Australian context, the second of these factors is dominant. In the last 30 years, the expectancy of remaining life at 60 has risen from 18 years to 24. I’ll guess that average age of entry to the workforce has also risen by about 5 years, say from 17 to 22. That implies a “typical” 1980 life course for full-time workers retiring at 65 of 48 years with 30 years pre- and post-work. The comparable figures now are 43 and 41. So, a proportion of the productivity growth in this period has been used to reduce the proportion of lifetime years spent at work, from over 60 per cent to just over 50 per cent.
By contrast, at least for full-time workers, there has been no reduction in annual hours of work. Official full-time conditions were fixed in the early 1980s at 38 hours/week with four weeks annual leave + public holidays and some long-service leave. That hasn’t changed, but there was a big increase during the 1990s in people working longer hours, and that’s been . Given that prime-age adults also have responsibility for children, this doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Those who think employment conditions reflect voluntary bargaining might argue that this apparently unsatisfactory outcome must reflect the preferences of workers and employers. I don’t buy this, at least as far as workers are concerned. But even if it were true, preferences are affected by policy settings such as pension ages. Leaving the pension age unchanged when life expectancy changes pushes people to work harder since their required savings increase. This is, on the face of it, a bad outcome. So, it makes sense for public policy to encourage later retirement, and discourage ultra-long working hours.
fn1. This assumes that time spent at school/uni should not be regarded as “work”. There are some complex issues here I’ll try to discuss more.
John Quiggin 
@P.M.Lawrence
Thanks for linking to your previous post which contains your submission on retirement to the Henry Review. Today I had time to read it. I like your approach of policy planning in a realistic intergenerational framework with heterogeneous agents regarding their personal circumstances. I also like your discussion on myopia, ie the practical consequences of the reality of incomplete financial markets. It is also ‘conservative’ in the sense of small steps, one at the time.
As you wish.
Your post @44 contains a series of assumptions, some or all of which may be applicable for some individuals somewhere under some conditions.
May I refer you to P.M.Lawrence’s post on page 2 and his linked submission to the Henry Review. IMHO, his submission contains sufficient material to illustrate the complexity in reality which is missing in your post.
@Freelander
I wholeheartedly agree Freelander – if you scratch a conservative Friedmanite or for that matter a libertarian only lightly you invariably find a sanctimonious knowall lond winded dictators with prescriptions for legislation when it suits them.
That means they like plenty of restrictions and legislation on workers and none on the bosses. So tiresome and so predictable.
@Ernestine Gross
Ernestine – Jim Rose lacks substance and attempts to make up for it with volume and shallow ideology.
@Alice
you say that “…they like plenty of restrictions and legislation on workers and none on the bosses.”
You will recall that on this blog I oppose workchoices for several reasons.
First, it undermined the local democracy and separation of power advantages of federalism.
Secondly, Workchoices abolished the common law and the freedom of contract. In its 600 pages of prohibitions, workchoices prohibited employers and employees from freely agreeing unfair dismissal provisions.
On this point see http://www.voxeu.org/index.php?q=node/595 which is Richard Freeman’s essay “From fair-go to rip-off: Australia’s new labour code”.
Thirdly, there is an emerging contractual duty across common law jurisdictions of an implied term of employment contracts that employers promise to be good employers. Not surprising in the age of human capital. Australia is behind in this common law innovation because of its reliance on regulations, which are obviously prone to interest group capture and politicisation.
I have also posted that:
• The rotation of power is common in democracies, and the worst rise to the top, so it is wise to design constitutional safeguards to minimise the damage done when those crazies to the right or left of you get their chance in office, as they will.
• Privatisation and deregulation is a lot slower in a federal system with an effective upper house elected by proportional representation. Regulatory powers and public asset ownership is spread over different levels of federations, with different parties always in power at various levels at the same time, all worried about losing office by going to far away from what the majority wants.
• The will of the people is constantly tested and measured in a federal system with elections at one level or another every year or so contested on a mix of local and national issues. Any failings of privatisation or deregulation in pioneering jurisdictions would quickly become apparent and would not be copied by the rest of the country.
Get to the facts, Alice, get to the facts.
@Jim Rose
I promise I will “get to the facts” Jim Rose if you promise to “get to the point.”
@Jim Rose
Jim – classic delusionism – you claim to be opposed to workchoices “legislation” when what really offends you is any “legislation” not specifically “workchoices legislation”. You claim
“In its 600 pages of prohibitions, workchoices prohibited employers and employees from freely agreeing unfair dismissal provisions.”
So Australians threw it and its pushers out of government because everyone knows first year apprentices and single mums who may work part time along with millions of other working families simply cant sit down, have a nice cuppa tea with the boss and then negotiate unfair dismissal provisions in any favourable terms as it applies to them
You are positively dreaming. The labour market is not some nice little cosy sit down chatfest “get to know your boss” and have a little friendly negotiation about your terms and remuneration for many. For those – negotiation doesnt even exist.
For that reason alone, your objections to workchoices are built on sand.
@Ernestine Gross
I am not so sure that P.M. Lawrence’s thoughts on retirement policy and investor policy are as compelling as you appear to think.
His noting that investors must cope with uncertainty about the future when saving for their retirement is not a new insight. Share prices are determined by expectations of the future, which must, by definition, be unknown.
His claim that “no matter how much an investment portfolio is diversified, eventually any investment strategy collapses” is open to question especially for retirement savings.
If behavioural finance theorists are correct, then it appears investors can beat the market by taking advantages of investor mistakes such as myopia.
Good luck. Is your portfolio based on these opportunities of long-run super-normal profits? You should establish a blog documenting your ever growing riches. Be warned – most active investors do not beat the market.
The profit opportunities represented by the existence of undervalued and overvalued stocks motivate investors to trade. Active investors that are less myopic will drive out active investors that are more myopic.
Passive investors and those saving for their retirements should buy and hold diversified portfolio to earn a return that is a random walk with a positive drift. myopia is irrelevant for them because they are seekling diversification and lower trading costs.
Shares over a 15 to 20 years horizon out-perform all other financial investment options.
@Alice
The eligibility age for the public old age pension matters only when there are work and income tests and the state sector is the main supplier of retirement incomes.
Where I live, there are no income, asset or work tests on the publicly provided old age pension. Poverty rates among seniors is among the lowest in the OECD area.
Private superannuation savings are defined contribution and not subject to any work test or any other requirement to quit your job. There is a recently introduced dollar-for-dollar tax credit for contributions capped at $1000 a year and which stop at age 65.
Retirement savings receive no other tax preferment. Like all other portfolio investments, retirement savings are taxed at the lower of your marginal income tax rate or the company tax rate.
Australian private superannuation requires you to start drawing at age 65, as I recall, as an annuity or a lump sum, as I recall. Private annuity sizes depend on the age when you tap into your superannuation using actuarial formulas in some case, and final salary in others.
If most rely on private savings for their retirement, eligibility age is of little importance because the choice is between an actuarially sound annuity and a lump sum is unimportant to net retirement wealth and staying in the workforce or not.
I have previously proposed a uniform tax credit into a retirement savings account with a uniform percentage of wage contribution so that after a 45 year transition, everyone can support themselves without the need for public help.
The tax credit would stop at age 65. People can choose to take their retirement annuity whenever they want from age 65. Any deferral will increase the size of the annuity in an actuarial sound sense because it is privately provided. Any public supplement would be unnecessary by then because I have previously proposed an equal-per-head guaranteed minimum income financed by non-discriminatory uniform taxes.
@Jim Rose
Rest assured I am familiar with all the Finance theory models and many of its applications. I referred to P.M.Lawrence because, IMO, he is excellent in his approach to planning within a conceptual framework that allows for intergenerational and cross-sectional heterogenity (ie to think within a general equilibrium framework taking into account initial conditions.)
I refer to Merton’s work on continuous time trading models for risk debt portfolios. Your diversification argument does not hold even if one ignores a lot of other empirically relevant information.
The trouble with Finance, as taught in Commerce courses is that the conditions for the existence of an equilibrium are not taught but merely characterisations of solutions to the models, assuming a solution exists.
Personally, I don’t subscribe to ‘saving for retirement’ relying on financial securities. To make my point briefly, at best, financial securities merely transfer numbers or probability distributions or, more generally pay-offs, denominated in real numbers. Retired people can’t eat numbers. If the successor generation refuses to exchange goods and services for real numbers then no amount of ‘financial wealth’ will ensure the survival of the elderly and the sick.
@Ernestine Gross
Thank you for your comments
I am not a fan of blackboard economics with its benchmarks of perfection and of equilibrium without any credible means of explaining how equilibrium is reached and re-reached in a world of continuous change.
As an empirical matter, the world-wide spread of passive index tracker funds since 1971 is a mark in favour of the efficient markets hypothesis. I assume that you shun passive index tracker funds as a point of principle?
Markets are efficient in the Hayekian or classical sense because they are better than the real life alternative, namely government action, in making use of information.
Markets are effective at mobilising individual initiative and utilising dispersed knowledge to realize gains from trade and gains from innovation and in so doing making systemic adjustments that promote wealth creation. Markets work through a process of entrepreneurial discovery and competitive selection.
The pioneers of the efficient markets hypothesis and their research assistants in the 1960s became super rich after founding their own passive investment funds. One of these research assistants was so grateful that he recently shelled out $300 million to rename the Chicago business school the Booth School of Business.
Paul Samuelson (1965) was the only one of the pioneers of the efficient markets hypothesis who I know of who failed to profit from his business finance research.
Behavioural finance is of little practical value because it gives the same investment advice as the efficient markets hypothesis. Buy and hold. Diversify. Put your money in index funds. Pay attention to the one thing you can control – costs – and keep them as low as possible. The expected return on such a portfolio is the price people require to bear market risk.
In the long run, a diversified allocation of passive funds typically beats all but a few active managers who will randomly beat this approach.
@Jim Rose
I won’t reply because your post is off topic. (I am also tired of the talking points of verbal theoreticians; we just have to agree to disagree and leave it at that.)
@Ernestine Gross
To be on topic, one reason for introducing a more flexible retirement age is the greater reliance on private retirement savings.
Regulatory requirements to take retirement savings as annuities at a fixed age can catch people short in a recession. These rules are the flip-sides of prior tax preferment.
Investment horizons more and more investors will be switching from long-term gains such as when they are young and in their prime age working years to income security as near and reach retirement. This may affect the cost of capital.
The offsetting behaviour that fixed retirement ages will provoke will be a push-back to a younger age where portfolio switching starts between long-term gains to income security. This may affect the cost of capital.
Where I live, there is neither a mandatory retirement age nor any legal requirement to start drawing on your retirement savings at a certain age. There is a minimum age if you want to receive the matching tax credit, which is up to you, but no maximum age.
@Ernestine Gross
The incredible space taking up verbal ping pong artists Ernestine – who does that remind you of? What is it with the “take up as much space per post as possible” to push an ideological dogma – its worse than one too many posts. The aim is clearly to take up space and hope to dominate the screen if not the post count.
@Ernestine Gross
That’s the way to go.
With ‘verbal theoreticians’, experts in rhetorical economics, there is no victory because the measure is not correctness or truth, but loquaciousness and linguistic dexterity, and a true adherent never gives a whiff of ever admitting they were wrong. When understood for what debate with such a person is, a ‘pissing match’ in sophistry, where the search for truth (and commonly accepted facts) is (are) unheard of, the ‘debate’ can be treated with all the contempt it deserves. Then the fun can begin. The true route to victory is to show the unintended humour in what they say. Fortunately, there is usually plenty of that.
@Alice
I like the way any topic can always be worked back to the hymn sheet. Once ‘on song’ they can then post away.
@Freelander
Im with you on that Freelander – the single minded verbose barrage of barely comprehensible nonsense splattered here and there with economic jargons collected piecemeal but with little real economic understanding and with diversions to outer space and back (throw in a bit of financial market jargon, a drop of emh, a pinch of investment horizons and switching preferences chatter, a tspn of annuity discussion and prior tax preferement gets a mention….but at the end dont forget to preach no regulation…..(except mandatory super – keeps in a job selling financial securities) – even workchoices as bad as it was should go in preference to no labour market rules at all. Save our kids? Why? Nah – send em to work at five as long as they negotiated their employment conditions freely with the boss over a nice cup of milo.
Its Milton the Monster!
On the strength of this discussion I definitely think I will be retiring earlier tonight…
@Freelander
You work Iceland into any thread. It is never to your advantage.
For example, in this thread, you put yourself in the position of having to learn that occupational pension schemes were negotiated in the 1960s in Iceland. This is 30 years ahead of Australia.
Australia has one of the highest rates of poverty for seniors – 1 in 4. Iceland has one of the lowest rates of poverty for seniors – 1 in 20.
Any solution to the retirement age and funding retirement will take decades to implement.
Australia’s current approach of raising the superannuation contribution rate leaves many in the middle class better off in retirement than when they were working. That is not necessarily the best way to spend your lifetime income.
@Jim Rose
You are even behind the times on your Iceland stats Jim Rose but never let that get in the way of a good story. You forgot what the GFC did to Iceland and its people.
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/icelands-new-poor-line-up-for-food-20100411-s0hy.html
@Jim Rose
And while you play the fiddle – your efficient markets are burning Jim Rose.
@Alice
You still cannot cope with Icelandic pension funds outperforming Australian private pension funds. The Icelandic pension funds had a much lower share market exposure.
Iceland is a Scandinavian welfare state where government accounts for 47 per cent of GDP. Apparently, this makes Iceland a libertarian hell-hole, but Hong Kong is not freely conceded by you to be to be a Freidmanite outpost! A very elastic sneer!
The economic liberalisation occurred from the early 1990s in Iceland.
There were more than a few economic liberalisations in Australia in the late 1980s and early 1990s too. Did you forget those tax cuts, bank and airline deregulation, tariff cuts, and the privatisations of Telecom, the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas?
Do these economic liberalisations make Hawke and Keating into Chicago boys too? They would be surprised.
Australia would be a much better candidate for a libertarian hell-hole than Iceland because government accounts for a 1/3rd of GDP, not one-half.
Not surprisingly, when government is already half of GDP, when it decides to bailout the Icelandic banks, it has no spare revenue capacity to honour those promises.
@Ernestine Gross
Oh, you might also be interested in my submission to the main part of the review, which is here. I have put links to the Henry Tax Review’s public submissions versions in the comments there.
@Jim Rose
Jim Rose,
You are wearing my patience mighty thin. You keep pushing the free markets line and the efficient markets line of reasoning while unemployment climbs in the US, the deficit is completely out of control (Not from government provision of services but from bailing out the wall street financial titans). Your views amount to little more than theft from the great majority of industrialised nations peoples. Its destruction. Its dangerous. But be that as it may be I personally think its too late to save our corrupt systems. Once you start mixing private enterprise with public provision and the public service…what you get and we get is cracks of corruption that open wide enough right to the top of governments. This is what we see happening now under our noses…yet still people like you say “privatise further – de-regulate further – lower the taxes on the rich further.” Yet you and your kind remain terrified of socialism as you should be…because when ordinary people get so disenchanted with the rich ripping everyone else off, destroying the middle classes and impoverishing them….do you know what you will get???
Socialism – the very thing you fear most….amd you will bring it on yourself.
@Jim Rose
And you lie Jim. Icelanders have been impoverished and are waiting in climbing food queues and you know it (and they have lost their houses and their incomes and their pensions).
The great free market experiment. Free markets ? Its a lie. It was always a lie.
@Alice
So you do regard Hawke and Keating as libertarians! I suppose you think Obama is a socialist too?
You supported the bailouts in the USA and elsewhere, not me. You want to corrupt politics with fiscal discrimination, non-uniform regulation and regulatory capture, not me.
Your claim that the Icelanders lost their pensions can easily be checked on the web and be found to the false. How many of the 26 Icelandic private pension funds failed?
@Jim Rose
Jim – I regard you as a “pusher” of very nad ideas. I regard Hawke and Keating as followers of very bad ideas. I regard Reagan as the puppet of very bad ideas.
I didnt support the bailouts. They were blatant theft by Wall st and financial institutions from US taxpayers. You claim somehow Iceland as a success story. How completely bizarre.
I argue in here with people who have lost their minds, and lost their way and dont know wrong from right any more….and push more of the destruction.
You want to blame governments when the private sector has corrupted what remains of our governments fromtop to bottom by the completely mistaken idea that government services could actually be privatised. They cant. As soon as they are the bribes start and when the bribes start its all over. May as well say…forget governments. They are useless right now, because they took the advice of people like you and handed over power to the corrupt private sector and became one with them.
You JR are just one, with your verbal nonsense, who helped governments fall apart.
Thanks for that. We are so much better off…not.
The private sector did the regulaltory capture JR. They captured governments and corrupted them in an amazinglty short space of time. here and overseas. They smashed regulation, bribed their way to the top because some idiot (likely Milton and friends) had the idea governments and the private sector could do business together like an old married couple.
Fool of an idea.
@Alice
You say that “Milton and friends) had the idea governments and the private sector could do business together like an old married couple”
Can you point to a specific economic regulation that Friedman supported?
Did Friedman support tariffs, regulatory barriers to entry, occupational licensing and the like? What are your supporting references?
Can you name a subsidy that Friedman supported? He did support a guaranteed minimum income through a negative income tax. Do you?
You want governments to have the power to regulate without constraints such as the generality norm.
You may not have noticed that political power rotates into the hands of those you do not vote for – most of the time actually – and that people can lobby governments and bureaucracies for special treatment, protection from competition, and bail-outs.
The ALP followed bad ideas between 1983 and 1996, you say? Was it quickly voted out of office for these frauds on the true believers? Who replaced Keating?
As I have said a number of times, the Left will get nowhere unless it develops a constitutional political economy of its own.
What type of democratic political system should the Left support when they are as likely to be out of power as in power?
If you want a powerful government with the power to impose other than uniform regulation across all industries, how do you prevent special interest capture and bail-outs?
You need to insert a modest degree of social realism into your view of the powers of government. Political institutions are often occupied by people with a strong sense of self-interest, with little respect for anything other than external restraints. It is to constrain and guide their behaviour that is the prime objective of political institutions.
The politics of redistribution involves a process in which the people with political leverage will often do far better than the poor and dispossessed to whom you claim to accord great pride of place.
To open the door to government regulation and redistribution provides an opening that many dubious characters will rush through. They can form short and long-term distributional coalitions that includes neither you nor your ideals, as has been the case for 57 of the last 60 years.
@Jim Rose
No – Milton didnt support any of those regualtions JR because Milton was deeply conservative and Milton supported enriching the rich even further than their “already rich” state. Milton thought the rich would “invest” and it would trickle down but the rich ran out of productive investments so they started gambling and …well…here we all are on our bottoms…and now people dont like the rich getting much much richer in the US and leaning on govetrnments and taking their taxes to support the already rich in banks, while people everywhere are being thrown out of work and out of their houses.
As I said Jim – if you get the socialism the conservatives hate and fear, its because Milton and friends opened the door, unchained and deregulated and lowered the taxes of the rich, made them richer than they ever needed to be or ever dreamed they could be, and now the poor and the middle classes who are losing their livelihoods dont like them much.
Thank Milton. Friend to the conservative and wealthy classes.
@Jim Rose
Jim you say
“To open the door to government regulation and redistribution provides an opening that many dubious characters will rush through.”
Actually – the truth is “to open the door tp privatisation and PPS deals provides an opening that many dubious characters carrying sackfuls of money and bribes will rush through to corrupt government officials and politicians in their own interests”.. and its all over now. Its happened, here and elsewhere in industrial nations. The boomer generation were hopeless leaders. Governments arent even predatory. They have been largely captured and eaten IMHO so “regulatory capture” means quite a different thing to me, obviously, than it does to you. You JR should be celebrating except you dont even realise just how private, the government has become. You wish has already arrived. Are you happy? No – you want it all gone – any last trace of feeble government. I, on the other hand, see no future in any structurally organised sense…except more infrastructure breakdown (the most obvious symptom of government breakdown).
@Alice
I gather you are still searching the net to find a bail-out that Friedman supported?
If the boomer generation had such hopeless leaders, as you say, why did they so easily dispatch the true believers?
Blaming your 57 of the last 60 years in opposition on being defeated by rivals you say are hopeless does not say much for the quality of the leading proponents of your ideals and their ability to communicate them in a way that people listen, keep listening, switch to your side and stay on your side.
I am highly sceptical about the capability and willingness of politics and politicians to further the interests of the ordinary citizen. You are much more dewier eyed about politics facilitating rather than retard economic and social progress.
You want to take your chances in a democratic politics where the whole economy is opened up for control and regulation in the general interest, where there can be little prior constitutional constraint on the definition of what such interest is by those political agents and agencies charged with the responsibility for allocative and distributive results.
Do not complain when this unfettered power of a majoritarian democracy is in the hands of your political rivals, especially when your own ideas are deeply unpopular for all but 1972 to 1975, and even then only by a small winning margin over Billy McMahon!
If libertarians believed in democracy they would use democratic means by having a party with their policies rather than trying to implement their policies by stealth and by infiltrating both sides of politics so votes don’t get a choice.
@Freelander
So you do believe that Hawke and Keating are libertarians!! What an elastic sneer indeed.
Neoliberals might be better conspiratorial sneer for you to use as it is more widely known, much vaguer and is highly elastic. Sneers such as libertarian refer to specific political programmes so they are amenable to fact checking.
Who were the infiltrators in chief? Name names!
@Freelander
An elaboration on the free advice in my last post:
• If you say Milton Freidman supports cozy government-business relationships or any other specific policy, then that can be check on the web in 5 seconds flat.
• If you say that neo-liberals are support a cozy government-business relationship, then that straw man argument is harder to check because you do not attributing it to any one in particular, but instead to a left-over-left bogeyman.
Stay away from the facts and verifiable sources Freelander, they are not your friends.
Looks like you are holding a debate with some fiction you have created. I will leave you to it and let ‘if you say’ reply.
@Freelander
Who were the libertarian infiltrators in chief into the ALP under Hawke and Keating? You claimed that “libertarians … infiltrating both sides of politics” on post #32.
A big tent indeed must be ALP meetings – recently retired communists and libertarian infiltrators!
If the mining companies and other large companies paid a fair share of tax and the wealthy didnt keep pushing for lower taxes – no we wouldnt have to work longer at all.
JQ – The rent resource tax discussion has been closed and has no comment boxes. Does that mean its off limits to discuss…its not that I am suspicious…except that I am?.
Jim Rose – you must have gotten your liberty from any meaningful work except to deluge this site with conservative “lower regulation lower taxes for the rich and keep shrinking the shrinking government” propaganda. It appears a lot more people have uppermost in their minds, in many places, the inability of governments to provide transport infrastructure. I would suggest governments, at least in the state of NSW and especially in Sydney, need to actually fatten their activities, beef up their muscles, learn to build again (instead of waiting for a private consortium to do it) and get on with the job….so everyone else apart from you can actually get to work.
@Jim Rose
And Jim Rose – there is no “left” (as in your favourite call “you on the left” or “communists” ha ha – thats almost a joke now… that shows your age – but there is a growing disenchanted disgusted middle with the righwing policies of both Liberal and Labor that are throwing their votes to the left in the greens. Green shoots.
As I have tried to tell you – the mad hard right in both major parties is making people give their votes to the greens who otherwise may not have considered it, were they getting half decent services in exchange for their tax inputs.
Ever had the feeling you stayed too late at your own party JR (same old tired songs you sing where your enemie are “commies” and the “left” ) and everyone else has gone home? Thats the new left JR (got up and left). They are moving left out of utter comtempt and frustration with what is blatantly not being delivered adequately by governments and indeed because of government failure under current neoliberal policies.
@Alice
The Greens are essentially the party of choice of the tertiary educated Left.
The rank-and file greens would be all for work for the dole as long as they were green jobs.
There is an online analysis on liberation blog on this exact point and the conservatism and lack of working class roots of the greens by the recently retired NZ green MP Sue Bradford. She was a member of the workers revolutionary party 7 years before see entered parliament. Bradford failed to turn the greens in a voice of the working class so she quit parliament when she lost the 2009 ballot for female co-convener.
As for your claim of “lower regulation lower taxes for the rich and keep shrinking the shrinking government,” I have repeatedly advocated a non-discriminatory.
Distributional politics in modern democracy involves the exploitation of minorities by majorities. As voters rotate in membership of the majority coalitions, all voters in the game lose. This result emerges only because differences in treatment are permissible. If the principle of generality could be introduced into politics, mutual exploitation could be avoided.
Generality permits such policies as flat-rate taxes, equal per head transfers or demogrants and uniform regulation of all industries. Governments could be larger than they are now to fund the demogrants. You and the rich too would have to pay a lot more in taxes than now on your superannuation nest-eggs.
As I recall, you are against a guaranteed minimum income because Friedman (1962) and Stigler (1946) pioneered the idea. You are against the removal of tax concessions on your retirement savings because it would put you out of pocket.
@Alice
oops – para 4 should read: As for your claim of “lower regulation lower taxes for the rich and keep shrinking the shrinking government,” I have repeatedly advocated a non-discriminatory democracy.
Comments are autoclosing soon, and I don’t plan to reopen them during the hiatus. So, last drinks everyone.
@Alice
We seem to agree that “The politics of redistribution involves a process in which the people with political leverage will often do far better than the poor and dispossessed”.
My solution is to constrain the process to stop such abuses and restrict political players to policies that pass a generality norm. Flat-rate taxes, equal per head transfers or demogrants and the uniform regulation of all industries.
Your solution is to hope for a political messiah – an endless supply of true believers who will stay in power for long periods of time.
The world does not work that way, so what are you going to do now?
@Jim Rose
OK JQ – have a nice break.
I dont know which way Ill be voting and it certainly wont be with the coalition if the membership is anything like Jimbo here, or with NSW State Labor ( a basket case) and QLD state labor no better and question marks over the response of State Lib opposition (seeing as their party is peopled by the incredulous and mad).
Greens are looking good and its not just me who thinks so judging by the growing numbers (a fact Jimbo cant explain away by calling greens voters tertiary academics). I could say in response federal liberal voters are non teriary educated bogans but that would be lowering myself to Jim Rose’s pat level of misrepresentation and stereotyping wouldnt it?
Am I allowed to throw my last drink on Jim Rose JQ? It would be like water of a ducks back anyway.
@Alice
At the UK General Election of 1964, a tiny 2 percent of voters with no ‘working class characteristics’ voted Labour.
People’s socio-economic characteristics are now much less significant than they used to be as indicators of how they are likely to vote, for not only do many working class people vote for parties of the right, but large swathes of the middle class now vote Labour.
Support for Labor among manual working class voters as a whole was no higher than support for the Coalition at the 2004 election. If lower grade white collar occupations are included as working class, the Coalition parties actually achieved a small lead over Labor among working class voters.
In http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2010/04/15/class-voting-and-broad-left-demography/ the author asks why are the Greens strongest in the inner cities? What is the cause of Greens voters living in the inner cities?
He found that people working in the arts, education, media and technology industries are more likely to vote Green, and as a result of the distribution of workplaces for these industries having a higher density in the inner suburbs, the people living within close proximity to their workplaces naturally leads to the inner cities having higher levels of Greens voters.
He concludes: it’s just a modern evolution of class based electoral analysis – whereas the Labor vote used to correlate strongly with manufacturing and low skill, labour intensive industries – today, the Green vote correlates with new skilled services industries like arts, education, media and technology.
@Jim Rose
15% nationally according to the latest poll Jim – now this isnt any inner city trendy tertiary academic movement Jim as much as you want to use every stereotype from wingnut land – and they have lots…..all the more reason to vote green. The people that are actually in government (and in this blog immediately above?) stopped listening and stopped doing anything much except for the very well heeled and large companies. That does not exclude the neo nasty corrupt right wing NSW Labor.
You heard Roozendahl’s latest budget – all gains to developers – nothing for public transport. Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Already banked up and people spending hours in cars. More of the same. Developers gain, state labor gains, commuters lose (YET AGAIN). Moving states is looking good. NSW State Liberal opposition are peopled by wing nuts – will they be any different ?(very doubtful).
Ive chucked my last drink at JIMBO (he didnt even get wet – thats how slippery he is) and Im leaving.
Bye to my blogbuddies – Paul Walter (expert at the art of exquisito revengo), Ernestine (who doesnt tell lies and is always polite and knows much more than me and come to think of it…is intriguingly complex and rather sophisticated), funny Freelander – free humour, Salient (who always has interesting points and is… bonus… superb cook as judged by his recipes) and Don….well Don is all round good…IS good.
Have a nice break.
Work JQ, work and dont stop! Get that book (books, umm library actually) finished.
@Alice
stereotypes!!!!!!
You’re the one that runs around to label a Scandinavian welfare state as libertarian and Hawke and Keating and the ALP as double- secret libertarians.
Indeed, the ALP and anyone else who supports economic reforms you do not like is labelled a libertarian.
You even accused Milton Friedman of supporting anti-competitive regulations. I gather you will use the three month hiatus to find that big business bail-out that Friedman supported?
The Left will never be relevant to winning office if it spends its time fighting ghosts, alleging conspiracies and smearing everyone it disagrees with as a libertarian.
I assume you will spoil your ballot paper, rather than number the second last preference box for the ALP? A good Leftie always puts the liberals last.
@Jim Rose
I didnt even do anything you said in your post. You make stuff up – thats why you arent on my blogbuddies list – you speak with forked tongue.
Just have a bit of grace (and maybe some manners) for once in your life JR, and wish JQ a nice break to get his work completed.
@Alice
Yet another extreme right wing delusional denialist talking to themselves, and battling phantoms of their own creation. Sad how mechanical their rants become. Not unlike the other rants from flat-earthers, creationists, members of various cults…
Someone today pointed out that the latest issue of Quad Rant has another climate change denialist rant. If you’re going to be crazy, clearly there is safety in numbers. This being a principle climate change denialists have demonstrated once again.
How amusing to start a post with an accusation of stereotyping and to then fill the post with stereotyping, and end with “I assume you will spoil your ballot paper, rather than number the second last preference box for the ALP? A good Leftie always puts the liberals last.”
I love the self-parody. As the ad says “Priceless.”
I think I’ll start my hiatus…