I’m looking forward to the release of the government’s Employment White Paper with a mixture of hope and trepidation. The fact that the title was changed from the original “Full Employment” is not encouraging, nor is the general track record of this government. On the other hand, in setting the scene for the release, Treasurer Jim Chalmers has indicated that the government will commit itself to five main objectives
sustained and inclusive full employment; job security and strong, sustainable wage growth; reigniting productivity growth; filling skills needs and building the future workforce; and overcoming barriers to employment and broadening opportunity.
It’s hard to see how the first objective can be reconciled with the fact that the Reserve Bank remains committed to a NAIRU model in which the full employment goal is subordinated to an inflation target, and that its current policies are aimed at pushing unemployment even higher than the NAIRU level.
I’ve written a piece for The Conversation explaining why the NAIRU model isn’t supported by economic experience, except for a single inflationary episode in the 1970s.
John Quiggin 
Are we not now in a situation of monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly administered prices?
“Administered prices are prices of goods set by the internal pricing structures of firms that take into account cost rather than through the market forces of supply and demand and predicted by classical economics. They were first described by institutional economists Gardiner Means and Adolf A. Berle in their 1932 book The Modern Corporation and Private Property. As Means argued in 1972, “Basically, the administered-price thesis holds that a large body of industrial prices do not behave in the fashion that classical theory would lead one to expect. It was first developed in 1934–35 to apply to the cyclical behavior of industrial prices. It specifically held that in business recessions administered prices showed a tendency not to fall as much as market prices while the recession fall in demand worked itself out primarily through a fall in sales, production, and employment.” ” – Wikipedia.
Modern monopolies/duopolies/oligopolies are not limited to pricing according to cost but price according to the power to extract rents and superprofits and to generally profiteer. They exploit their “too-big-to-fail” status, be they banks or “national” airlines, and garner huge subsidies from government which they never pay back. Rather, they sack workers illegally, pay CEO extravagant bonuses and pump share prices with buy-backs. QANTAS is a recent case in point in Australia.
Continuing the fiction that ours is a model market economy, in the classical or neoclassical sense, assists nobody except the current capitalists and market manipulators. There are no market Laws, using the term “Laws” here in the strict sense of “scientific laws”. Markets in formal economies have no scientific laws. Markets in formal economies are set up axiomatically (in essence) and thus are rule based, meaning based on laws and regulations. Such a system is a formal, axiomatic system with rules *not* Laws.
The entire rationale of the system is to herd humans for profit while pretending to give them choice. Specifically, using their the power and wealth (the same thing in this system), elite humans herd non-elite humans for profit. While all rules are observed, the outcomes will be “theorem-etic” in nature. We can note here that very complicated theorems are very hard to impossible to prove, so people cannot calculate and predict all outcomes of a complicated axiom or rule set.
Humans are rule makers, rule takers and rule breakers. In terms of the endogenous causation component, uncertainty in the economic system comes from the human actors deciding (for want of a better term) to be rule makers, rule takers or rule breakers and deciding so on an emotional basis, a logical basis, a case by case basis or a systematic theoretical basis, or any combination of these.
“Conventional” economics fails in analysis and explanation of political economy if it fails to note the distinctions between formal system and real system behaviors and continues to mistake prescriptions for descriptions. In fact, I am tempted to say conventional economics is very good at descriptions of prescriptions while hiding the basic nature of the prescriptions as prescriptions. While this continues, there can be no fundamental theoretical challenge to the hegemony of market fundamentalist capitalism. A fundamental challenge requires another step, outside the tent.