Although I’m among the least tightly focused economists in the academic world, I’ve published almost nothing on macroeconomics – even the few things I have done have not taken a standard macro perspective. So, in the absence of blogging, I think it’s safe to say my name would never have appeared in a Berkeley Graduate Core Macro exam.

Of course, there’s a Gerschenkron-style ‘advantages of backwardness’ story here. Having learned old-style Keynesian macro, and seen it come to grief with the inflationary outburst of the early 1970s, I kept waiting for a macro research program that would both explain the Keynesian Golden Age* I grew up in and show how to restore it in a more sustainable way. None of the contenders of the past thirty years (monetarist, new classical, real business cycle, New Keynesian, central bank eclectic) seemed very promising to me, so I left the field alone.

Now, with no intellectual capital invested, it’s easy for me to pronounce the efforts of the last three decades to be largely misdirected. The harder task will be to identify and get active in the new research program that should succeed it. The work of Akerlof and Shiller is obviously a good place to start.

* Not golden for everyone, of course. Full employment really meant full employment for men, many (not all) poor countries missed out altogether, and environmental costs were often disregarded. But it was precisely during the last years of the Golden Age (the 1960s) that these issues came to the top of the agenda. In my more utopian moments, I dare to hope that, with economic liberalism behind us, we can make big progress on these and other issues.

Brad DeLong links to my post on the obsolescence of New Keynesian macro, and concludes

I have to call this one for Krugman, Clark, Akerlof, Shiller, and Quiggin and against Blanchard’s vision of growing knowledge and analytical convergence

I’ve been reasonably successful as Australian academic economists go, but, based on my journal contributions, I would have rated the likelihood of reading the phrase “Krugman, Clark, Akerlof, Shiller, and Quiggin” only marginally higher than that of being romantically linked with Angelina Jolie. Blogging really does have its rewards.

Due to arcane problems with caches, users of Firefox (and maybe some other browsers) haven’t been able to read new posts at Crooked Timber for over a week. You can work around by using Safari, or by clicking on the comments thread of a post, then clicking Home in the expanded view (please don’t ask me why this works). RSS feeds also appear to work normally.

Clive Hamilton has a piece in Crikey attacking the state of discussion on the Internet, in which the comments policy of this blog gets a moderately approving mention. As he says, maintaining a productive discussion isn’t easy, and a lot of blogs and other Internet sites don’t even try. But I don’t think that’s enough to support the conclusion that

If free speech means encouraging a free-flowing dialogue that draws the public into an exploration of alternative ideas and enriches civic culture, then the Internet is its enemy.

I’ll leave readers to point out the problems with this claim, or alternatively to defend it.

But I wanted to comment on one aspect of Clive’s piece, his claim that anonymity is the central problem. Although this seems plausible, my experience on this blog has been that the worst and most persistent trolls have been people posting under their own names (though commonly resorting to sockpuppetry to evade blocks, disrupt discussion and so on). And a couple have been academics.

I’m one of ten economists who has signed a statement criticising the inadequacies of the Rudd government’s emissions trading scheme. The statement is over the fold.

The weakness of the scheme and the fact that emissions reductions achieved through voluntary action or the newly announced home insulation scheme don’t attract credits have led to a revival of the debate over the merits of a carbon tax, as an alternative to emissions trading. Of course, it is possible to have both, as in hybrid schemes such as that proposed by Warwick McKibbin.

The question of whether to go with a carbon tax, emissions trading or a hybrid turns on two main issues. First, with a tax, or with a hybrid scheme where the emissions price is capped, we get price certainty at the expense of uncertainty about how much emissions will be reduced. With a pure emissions scheme, or a hybrid scheme in which the tax acts as a price floor, we have certainty about achieving at least the target level of emissions reductions, but uncertainty about how high the price might be. As I’ve argued before, the risks of not cutting emissions enough outweigh the risks of setting the price too high.

The other question is more pragmatic. Which approach gives the best chance for Australia to contribute to a global agreement that will actually stabilise the climate. In the past, I’ve been of the view that a pure emissions trading scheme is the way to go in this respect, and I still can’t see that an international agreement is likely to be reached without general adoption of emissions trading schemes. . But there’s no doubt that developments over the past year or so have strengthened the case for making a carbon tax part of the mix.

Now, here’s the release

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With the sudden collapse of the main ideas of the political right, the need for debate and discussion over social democratic and socialist ideas has become much more urgent.

One new venue for this is Left Focus, a blog that has been set up by longtime reader Tristan Ewins, with the aim of being open to a variety of left perspectives. The announcement says:

A new forum of the broad left. Contributions from around the world – and from the webmaster’s home in Australia – are welcome. We welcome Green, socialist, social-democratic, left liberal, and libertarian left perspectives.

All interested parties are welcome to visit and comment on the posts…

The webmaster will be publishing his work gradually through the site – but maybe you would like to contribute too?

Posts of good quality and of interest to a broadleft audience will be considered.

Anyone wanting to post contributions can write to Tristan Ewins at: tristane@bigpond.net.au

Looking at various topics that have been covered by both journalists and bloggers, I’ve noted a common theme in which journalist deplore bloggers’ habit of speculating about subjects instead of “just picking up the phone” and asking those directly involved (examples here

Doomsday hd

and here). The implied (and sometimes expressed) view of bloggers is that of lazy amateurs.

It struck me though, that asking questions of total strangers is both a distinctively journalistic activity and one that implies and requires a special kind of professional license. In fact, “Journalists do interviews” comes much closer to a definition of what is distinctive about journalism than formulations like “journalists report news, bloggers do opinion”.

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The Lori Drew case, in which a US woman set up a Myspace account under the name “Josh Evans” to torment a teenage girl who had fallen out with Drew’s daughter, and drove her victim to suicide, has some legal implications of interest to bloggers. Drew was ultimately sentenced to jail, not for her cruel prank and its fatal consequences, but for “unauthorized access to a computer system” by virtue of the false name under which the account was created. On the face of it, the same offence is committed (at least under US law) every time a commenter on a blog or noticeboard uses a sockpuppet to evade bans or blocks, or to post under multiple identities in violation of contractual terms.

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To all my readers, their friends and their families, however and wherever you celebrate, my very best wishes.Swing Vote hd

After a long hiatus, the Risk and Sustainable Management Group blog is working again. Some recent contributions

Links to podcast and presentation on The End of Economic Liberalism? I gave recently

Peggy on perverse incentives for forest depletion in Germany

Alternative views on fluoridation from Sarah and David