Yesterday, I gave a presentation to the Canberra Security Economics Network. Central point:

*Self-defence is special, military expenditure is not*

Spelling this out

*The need to defend the country against invasion, air attack or naval blockade involves existential risk

• Any other use of military power should be assessed in terms of (opportunity) costs and benefits

Compared to alternative public or private expenditures

Kevin Drum points to an obscure, but radical proposal to change the way the US government does benefit cost analysis. The Office of Management and Budget has released draft guidance saying

One practical approach to implementing weights that account for diminishing marginal utility uses a constant-elasticity specification to determine the weights for subgroups defined by annual income. To compute an estimate of the net benefits of a regulation using this approach, you first compute the traditional net benefits for each subgroup. You can then compute a weighted sum of the subgroup-specific net benefits: the weight for each subgroup is the median income for that subgroup divided by the U.S. median income, raised to the power of the elasticity of marginal utility times negative one. OMB has determined that 1.4 is a reasonable estimate of the income elasticity of marginal utility for use in regulatory analyses.

This is pretty obscure, but what it means is that, a project that delivers a dollar of benefits to each of a group of poor people is worth more than a project that delivers a dollar of benefits to each of a group of poor rich people.

A lot more !

Kevin uses a graph to illustrate, showing that an extra dollar for the median household is worth 50 times as much as an extra dollar for a household with an income of $1 million a year. Conversely, an extra dollar for households at the bottom of the income distribution is worth 12 times as much as an extra dollar at the median.

It’s actually simpler to get the intuition of you use an elasticity of 1, which corresponds to logarithmic utility. Then you can sum up the implications by saying that a given percentage increase (or reduction) in income yields the same additional (or reduced) utility no matter who gets it. So, for example, if a policy halved Elon Musk’s income, while doubling the income of a single randomly chosen US household, it would be evaluated as neutral. If the policy doubled the income of two households, it would be beneficial. More generally, you can just add up all the percentage changes in income from the project (included the taxes needed to finance* it). If that sum is positive, the project should be approved.

This proposal would imply such radical changes that it is almost certain to be killed off. But it’s a straightforward implication of mainstream neoclassical welfare economics, based on utilitarianism. And the estimated elasticity is very close to that we usually get when we look at individual choices under risk (you can translate to social welfare using a device like Rawls veil of ignorance).

Even if the proposal is never implemented, it has some striking implications for the way we think about utilitarianism. For instance, it means that the limitarian position for which Ingrid Robeyns has argued follows from utilitarianism, if we accept the additional claim that the existence of very rich people has a net negative impact (not necessarily large) for society as a whole.

More generally, this kind of calculation ought to give some pause to critics of utilitarianism who worry about trolley problems, forced organ donation, and the like. Unless they go with a similarly sharp case for radical income distribution, arguments like this are, in practice, politically aligned with the kind of logic-chopping practised by US-style libertarianism/propertarianism.

(H/T James Wimberley)

• Please no MMT quibbles. Substitute “release resources for” if you must.

My latest piece in Independent Australia over the fold

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The Albanese government has quietly abandoned full employment. Looking back over the past four weeks, I’ve turned out ten opinion pieces criticising the Albanese government. This piece, from Inside Story, should be the last for a while. I haven’t covered everything they’ve done wrong, but I think I’ve written enough on the topic for now.

Mainly, expressing my disappointment in the Albanese government

But save the angst for decisions that matter more

My latest piece in The Conversation looks at Tanya Plibersek’s masterclass in the delivery of bad news. We were softened up with the rejection of two zombie coal mines, then distracted by the approval of a relatively unimportant mine. The real news is that the Labor government, having rejected a formal “climate trigger” for environmental approvals, intends to complete disregard the climate effects of our coal and gas exports.

I had an odd intellectual experience recently. A US high school student wrote to me as part of an assignment, asking for my thoughts on Brave New World, and its current relevance. I replied talking about the role of “Our Ford”, and Gramsci’s contemporary concept of Fordism.

That got me thinking about post-Fordism, and then to the idea of post-post-Fordism, referring to the information economy that has emerged since the rise of the Internet. I expected that this would be a reinvention of the intellectual wheel on my part, but when I popped the phrase into DuckDuckGo, I got a single hit, which was part of a 2015 interview with UK radical economist Robin Murray. whose ideas about the concept were very similar to mine, but whose comments were very brief.

I didn’t know of Murray, but I thought I should write to him and ask him how he had developed the idea. Sadly, I was led to Wikipedia, which reported that Murray had died in 2017, apparently without writing anything further on the topic. I’ve found a handful of citations, but of the “in passing” variety.

I’m not sure where to go next with this. I’d like to revive the idea (if indeed it died with Murray), but I’m not sure how to deal with an intellectual history like this. Perhaps some of my readers knew (or knew of) Murray or have seen the idea of post-post-Fordism?