A long time ago, I read an article whose author had read through all the leading economics journals from the 1930s. The striking finding was that only a tiny proportion of the articles published in those years concerned the Depression and what to do about it. This struck me as a disastrous state of affairs, and has been one factor in pushing me to comment on the important issues of the day, rather than to a narrow specialisation.

But, having attended the Australian Conference of Economists for the last couple of days, I have to say that a future historian of economic thought will be able to rewrite much the same article about the current crisis. Only a handful of papers presented at the conference have dealt with the crisis, even indirectly, and most of those have concluded that we only need marginal adjustments to our current way of doing things.

The opening plenary session, for example, was on inflation targeting and the main message was that, all things considered, inflation targeting worked pretty well in the Global Financial Crisis. Some tweaks might be needed in the future, but then again they might not. This was the same conclusion as at the Reserve Bank 60th Anniversary meeting earlier this year, and I find it pretty hard to believe.

About the best I can say is that, against this background, my Zombie Economics book stands out.

Sydney readers get a couple of chances to hear me say in person what I write here. I’ll be speaking at the Australian Conference of Economists, at Darling Harbour Dockside, Monday morning on Zombie Economics. Also, the following Sunday at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Opera House.

One of the big themes in the debate over university education has been that we should have a more differentiated system, rather than a ‘one-size fits all’ solution. This view is shared by market-oriented reformers and by some traditionalists, who look back nostalgically to the days when each state had one university, catering to a small elite, while the rest went to tech, or teachers college or (for the majority) the school of hard knocks. In the idealised view, universities would compete with diverse offerings, and the informed market choices of consumers (18-year olds and their parents) would produce an ideal outcome.

In reality, the quasi-market policies that have been dominant for the last couple of decades have reduced diversity on all dimensions except one. Before the reforms that began in the 1980s, the tertiary sector included many different types of institutions (unis, CAES, institutes of technology and TAFE), and the 1970-vintage universities consciously sought to provide an innovative alternative to the long-established sandstones. Now, there are just universities and TAFE. Policies encouraging universities to nominate “flagship” programs produced the unsurprising (but apparently unexpected) result that everyone went for MBAs and no-one for pure mathematics. Responsiveness to consumer demand produced plenty of courses in cinema studies and very few in classics. And so on. There are still some attempts at doing things differently, such as the “Melbourne model”, but overall the pattern is one of identical responses to identical incentives.

On the other hand, the reforms have amplified long-standing inequalities in wealth and status between universities. Despite the rhetoric of competition, the relative rankings of Australian universities were determined more than 100 years ago, when the sandstone universities were established, followed by the precursors of the “Dawkins universities”. The reforms did not shake these rankings, but they widened the gap between the sandstones and the 1970-vintage unis – before the reforms, a university was a university, and status differences were much less important.

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