As is usual with trends of all kinds, some recent electoral successes for far-right parties in Europe have been extrapolated into a narrative in which the rise of the far-right is just about unstoppable.

That narrative took a blow with the recent Spanish elections in which the far-right Vox party performed poorly and its coalition with the traditional conservative Popular Party failed to secure a majority. Possibly as a result, the leader of the German CDU backed away from a suggestion that his party might go into a similar coalition with the AfD. And a similar coalition government in Finland appears to be on the verge of collapse.

From the other side of the world, it’s hard to know what to make of all this, but important to try to understand it. So, I’ll toss out some thoughts and invite readers closer to the action to set me straight.

As I wrote a few years ago, the rise of a Trump-style far right has been driven by the collapse of the neoliberal consensus that dominated politics throughout the capitalist world from the 1970s, with power alternating between hard neoliberalism (represented by traditional conservative parties) and soft neoliberalism (represented by formerly socialist and social democratic parties). As the failures of neoliberalism became undeniable, there was no longer enough support to sustain two neoliberal parties, and alternatives began to emerge on both left and right.

The most dramatic manifestation of this process on the right has been Donald Trump’s takeover of the US Republican party, which is now well to the right of any of the European far-right parties (with the possible exception of Fidesz in Hungary), and still commands around 50 per cent electoral support.

In Europe, though the more common party has been the rise of a far-right party commanding around 20 per cent of the vote. In most cases, this doesn’t look to me like an upsurge in the popularity of rightwing ideas. Rather, this 20 per cent has always been there, waiting for the circumstances in which views that are normally unacceptable can gain political expression.

In my own home state of Queensland, for example, the racist One Nation party scored more than 20 per cent of the votes in a state election in 1998, before fading back into single digits.

A 20 per cent vote for the far-right enough to make it difficult for traditional conservatives to win government in their own right, but usually not enough for the far-right to lead a government of their own. Hence, the contortions mentioned above.

A lot of attention has been focused on the neo-fascist origins of some of the far right parties. But some parties with fascist roots seem to have shifted towards the centre as they got closer to office. By contrast, Fidesz and AfD, which started out as ordinary centre-right parties, are now thoroughly anti-democratic and look more like old-style fascists.

What is needed is a convincing left alternative, which is far from being evident. Marxism has proved to be a dead end. The traditional centre-left parties have yet to recover from their embrace of soft neoliberalism. Greens have more appealing ideas, but have yet to break through in most places. Perhaps the need to respond to the climate disaster will finally generate some real change. We can only hope.

I was looking at this picture of people (mostly tourists, it appears) fleeing massive fires in Rhodes, feeling despair about the future of the world

when I was struck by an even more despairing thought.
Almost certainly, a lot of the people in the picture are climate denialists. And even more certainly, they will mostly remain so despite this experience.

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– but this dream has failed before. My latest in The Conversation over the fold

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Crooked Timber, the group blog of which I’m a member turns 20 today. Here’s a post I’ve written to mark the occasion.

Not quite 20 years ago, I got an invitation to spend a week as a visiting blogger at an exciting new group blog called Crooked Timber. In the manner of the most catastrophic house guests, I managed to turn that into permanent residence.

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Hard to describe how depressed I am feeling about Australian politics right now.

The Voice Referendum was always going to be a longshot because referendums usually fail. But Albanese’s refusal to put forward a model, and the promotion of someone as abrasive as Noel Pearson as a leading advocate risk a defeat so bad that the fallback of option of a legislated Voice is unlikely.

In economic terms, Australians will be worse off by the next election than when Labor was elected – lower real wages, higher unemployment, higher interest rates, a more regressive tax system.

The fact things would have been even worse under the LNP doesn’t cheer me up

And just to make the picture complete, the Greens are overplaying their hand on housing. Should let #HAFF thro

Daniel Ellsberg has died, aged 92. I don’t have anything to add to the standard account of his heroic career, except to observe that Edward Snowden (whose cause Ellsberg championed) would probably have done better to take his chances with the US legal system, as Ellsberg did.

In decision theory, the subsection of the economics profession in which I move Ellsberg is known for a contribution made a decade before the release of the Pentagon papers. In his PhD dissertation, Ellsberg offered thought experiments undermining the idea that rational people can assign probabilities to any event relevant to their decisions. This idea has given rise to a large theoretical literature on the idea of ‘ambiguity’. Although my own work has been adjacent to this literature for many decades, it’s only recently that I have actually written on this.

A long explanation is over the fold. But for those not inclined to delve into decision theory, it might be interesting to consider other people who have been prominent in radically different ways. One example is Hedy Lamarr, a film star who also patented a radio guidance system for torpedoes (the significance of which remains in dispute). A less happy example is that of Maurice Allais, a leading figure in decision theory and Economics Nobel winner, who also advocated some fringe theories in physics. I thought a bit about Ronald Reagan, but his entry into politics was really built on his prominence as an actor, rather than being a separate accomplishment.

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The latest from my Substack newsletter.

Since the beginning of this millennium, I’ve been writing critiques of the “generation game”, the idea that people can be divided into well-defined groups (Boomers, Millennials and so on), with specific characteristics based on their year of birth. As I said in my first go at this issue, back in 2000 (reproduced here )

Much of what passes for discussion about the merits or otherwise of particular generations is little more than a repetition of unchanging formulas about different age groups Ð the moral degeneration of the young, the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old, and so on. Demographers have a word (or rather two words) for this. They distinguish between age effects and cohort effects. The group of people born in a given period, say a year or a decade, is called a cohort. Members of a cohort have things in common because they have shared common experiences through their lives. But, at any given point in time, when members of the cohort are at some particular age, they share things in common with the experience of earlier and later generations when they were at the same age.

My most prominent contribution to the debate was this piece in the New York Times five years ago, prompted by the Pew Research Centre’s announcement that it would define people born between 1981 and 1996 as members of the millennial generation. After discussing the history of the “generation” idea, I made the central point

Dividing society by generation obscures the real and enduring lines of race, class and gender. When, for example, baby boomers are blamed for “ruining America,” the argument lumps together Donald Trump and a 60-year-old black woman who works for minimum wage cleaning one of his hotels.

Now, I’m pleased to say, Pew has changed its view, partly in response to a “growing chorus of criticism about generational research and generational labels in particular.”

From now on, they will take proper account of age, cohort and period effects, with the result that

our audiences should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens. We’ll only talk about generations when it adds value, advances important national debates and highlights meaningful societal trends.

What’s striking is that this is happening at a time when political views, at least in the US, UK and Australia, show a really strong age gradient, with old people far more likely to be on the political right. Understanding this is important, and the use of sloppy labels like “Boomers” (focusing attention on a demographic event 60-80 years ago) is unlikely to be useful.

I wrote this piece for the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia following a presentation I gave along with other researchers and members of Four Day Week Global. (Video here). A version was published by Independent Australia, under the title A long weekend every week? It’s time.

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More than 150 years ago, workers in New Zealand, closely followed by Australia, were the first in the world to secure an eight-hour working day. And 75 years ago, we achieved that great boon, the weekend.

Over subsequent years, until the 1980s, we saw a steady reduction in standard hours of work, including the achievement of four weeks of annual leave, widespread long-service leave and the reduction of the standard work week to 38 hours. Thanks to sustained technological progress, productivity and living standards improved steadily over this period.

The decades since have seen further technological advances, most obviously in information technology. The rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is just the latest example. Yet there has been no general reduction in standard working hours in more than 30 years.

This may finally be about to change, with New Zealand again taking the lead. After successfully implementing a four-day week in their own company, New Zealanders Andrew Barnes and Charlotte Lockhart established 4DW Global. As the name implies, the organisation has promoted the four-day week in a number of countries, primarily by helping to implement pilot programs. 

The central idea of 4DW is summed up as 100-80-100. Workers receive 100 per cent of their previous wages while working 80 per cent of previous hours and attempting to maintain 100 per cent of previous productivity.

Initial results from trials in Australia and New Zealand have just been released with very positive outcomes. The trial was undertaken by 26 companies in sectors that included professional services, marketing, manufacturing and construction.

All but one indicated an intention to maintain the four-day week after the trial. Companies rated the impact of the four-day week to attract new employees at an 8.3/10, with productivity scoring a 7/10 and performance 6.8/10.

Employees were even more positive, and there was a big increase in self-reported productivity, with more than half (54 per cent) reporting an increase in their current work ability compared to their lifetime best.

Almost all participants (96 per cent) reduced their work time, with 88 per cent getting one full additional day off per week. When asked how much additional pay they’d require in their next job to go back to five days, 35 per cent of employees said 26-50 per cent more, 9 per cent would require more than 50 per cent, and over one in ten (11 per cent) say no amount of money would induce them to go back to five days.

Two factors have played a central role in the success so far of the four-day workweek trials.

First, progress towards reduced working hours and better conditions only takes place when the balance of supply and demand in the labour market favours workers. This was true for the Victorian stonemasons who first won the eight-hour day in Australia, and it is true for large groups of workers today. 

By contrast, many managers, whose working conditions are usually comfortable, typically prefer to undertake longer working hours. Having made this choice, they are keen to see their subordinates working as well. As a result, most employers have pushed back against limits on working hours.

Second, the pandemic showed us that just because particular ways of working have been around for a long time, this does not imply they are the only possible way of doing things, let alone the best. We rapidly discovered that for most kinds of information work, it wasn’t necessary to turn up at an office five days a week. Against their will, in some cases, managers have been forced to adapt to a world in which a large proportion of their workforce is out of sight much of the time. 

The rise of remote work, and the shift in the balance of power in the labour market, has granted workers more autonomy over how and when they do their work and allowed them to set and maintain boundaries between work time and home time. It is thus not surprising that many want to get their work done in four days, rather than five.

The shift to a four-day week has the potential to improve our lives in ways that go beyond an increase in leisure time. Gender balance should be improved, partly by making full-time work a more feasible option for many women.  The increase in hourly pay rates implied by a four-day week should flow through to part-time workers, primarily women.

Shorter working hours can also encourage men to take a more active role at home. The 4DW survey found that 27 per cent of the men in heterosexual relationships increased their share of housework and 17 per cent of men in heterosexual relationships increased their share of childcare.

Environmental and health benefits will arise from reductions in time spent commuting (around 36 minutes per week on average) and increases in time spent on exercise (30 minutes per week).

The shift to a standard four-day week is long overdue, given the technological improvements of the last four decades. While still in its early stages, it seems likely to become a reality sooner rather than later.