As usual, 26 January has been marked by protests, denunciations of those protests, and further iterations. Even apart from the fact that it marks an invasion, the foundation of a colony that later became one of Australia’s states isn’t much of a basis for a national day.
A logical choice would be the day our Federation came into force. Unfortunately for this idea, our Founders chose 1 Jan 1901. The first day of the 20th century[1] must have seemed like an auspicious choice for a new country, but it ruled out the anniversary as a national day.
The ideal thing would be to fix the problems of our current system with a republican constitution including a treaty with the original owners of our land. That would provide a date really worthy of celebration.
In the meantime, I suggest 3 March, the anniversary of the day in 1986 when the Australia Act came into force, finally establishing beyond any doubt that Australia is an independent country, entirely separate from the UK[2]. We had by 1986 a constitution and public policy that was at least formally non-racist, thanks to the 1967 referendum and the end of the White Australia policy. Many of the symbolic problems with the current date would be avoided, though the real injustices would remain to be addressed.
It’s true that the Australia Act doesn’t have a lot of resonance. But any date with a lot of resonance is bound to resonate badly for a large proportion of the population. At least this would be a choice nearly all of us could celebrate without worrying too much about its precise significance.
fn1. At least if you start the count from 1CE. I think it would be more sensible to cross-label 1BCE as 0 CE, making 1900 the start of C20. I had always assumed that Dionysius Exiguus, who invented the AD calendar was unaware of the concept of zero, but Wikipedia accords him a prominent role in its history.
fn2. Whether, when and to what extent, we had become an independent country before 1986 remains a mystery, but there’s no doubt after that.
There’s been a recent fuss in various media arising from a tweet from economist Ben Golub regarding astonishment that economists haven’t “worked through” Smith and Marx. English professor Alex Moskowitz chimed in with a claim that economics can’t be a real discipline because economists don’t know the history of their own discipline.
This claim is oversold as regards Smith. Every econ student gets the pin factory example of scale economies and the standard quote about the butcher, the baker and the Invisible Hand. And any moderately sophisticated economist knows that the Theory of Moral Sentiments refutes the vulgar self-interest theory of the kind of people who wear Adam Smith ties. There’s lots more interesting stuff on labour saving innovation, risk attitudes and other topics which still gets quoted.
As for Smith’s writing in support of free trade, it isn’t read much but not because economists now teach fancy mathematical models. Ricardo superseded him, not long afterwards, with comparative advantage, and his example of Portugal, England, cloth and wine is still a standard illustration.
Then there is some stuff that is just plain wrong, like the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. 19th century economists from Smith to Marx wasted a lot of time on this, but there’s no point in rereading it, except for the kind of history of economic thought rather brutally described as “the wrong ideas of dead men(sic)”.
So, it’s true that hardly anyone, except historians of thought, “works through” The Wealth of Nations, let alone Smith’s entire body of work. Like readers in many genres, economists reading Smith skip straight to the good bits.
Unlike with Smith, not many economists read Marx, or at least Capital, any more, because not many economists do Marxist/Marxian economics any more. Marx wrote lots that is still relevant, most obviously the Communist Manifesto, with which any educated person, and certainly any economist, should be familiar. The account of the rise of capitalism, the class struggle and the potential for crisis in capitalism was unequalled when it was written and still commands our attention. But it isn’t something that needs to be “worked through” to do economics.
The economic analysis in Capital is not part of the intellectual history of mainstream (neoclassical/Keynesian) economics. The micro-economic approach that stems from the marginalist revolution of the 1870s owes nothing to Marx, and was developed by economists who had probably never read him (the first published critique from a marginalist viewpoint was by Wicksteed in the 1880s). Keynesian macroeconomics shares with Marx the recognition that capitalism is inherently prone to crisis, but doesn’t draw on his theoretical framework much. Henry George, also little read today, is probably more relevant. His ideas on taxing appreciating land rents have been misappropriated by single-taxers but they remain valid and policy-relevant.
For a long time, Marxist economics was relevant as a rival to the dominant neoclassical/Keynesian program, but that is no longer true. There was still a moderately active literature on the “transformation problem” 50 years ago, but it seems to have died, or (according to Andrew Kliman) been resolved. Most leftwing critiques of the mainstream now draw more on Keynes and Minsky than on Capital.
Given that Marxist thought is still influential in lots of spheres, the decline of Marxist economics might well be a problem. But, if so, the answer is for Marxists to do more and better economics
Coming back to mainstream economics, the lack of historical awareness is a real problem. But the problem isn’t a lack of appreciation of the classics of the long 19th century. It’s that the economics profession pays far too little attention to its relatively recent history, from the 1930s to the present.
Most glaringly, as Paul Krugman points out fairly regularly, there have been only the most cursory attempts to explain the success of Keynesian macroeconomic policies in the decades after 1945. The NAIRU model for short-term macro policy, followed by all central banks, rests almost entirely on the experience of stagflation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And the theoretical twists and turns that produced the currently dominant Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model (the Lucas critique, new classical macro, various versions of “New Keynesianism”) have largely been forgotten. The result is that a theoretical-policy framework, centred on inflation targeting is presented as an eternal truth, when it is only about 30 years old and has had very limited success either as an explanatory/predictive theory or as a guide to policy.
The situation is not quite as bad outside macro. But, to the extent that macro theories are wrong, the results of most micro analysis can only be regarded as partial and provisional. And an awareness of intellectual history would lead to a much more cautious view of our current theories and tools, notably with respect to game theory.
This is the second in a series discussing the Australian legislation banning people under 16 from using social media. The previous post is here .
I’m writing from the perspective of a longstanding user of new media and also as someone with personal experience of dealing (not very successfully) with problems of under-16 screen addiction. On the other hand, I’m not a technical expert so I may get some details wrong. I’ll be happy to accept correction on these points
The evidence
The social media ban was rushed through Parliament with no real inquiry into the nature of the problem it was supposed to solve or the likely effects of a ban. Evidence from mental health experts on the question of whether and how social media use is harmful is at best inconclusive, as far as I can determine.
But the advocates of a ban haven’t worried too much about that. They’ve relied on casual correlation and on the testimony of instant experts, with no particular expertise in the mental health of young people.
The most commonly cited piece of evidence is the fact that mental health problems among young people have increased, starting 10-15 years ago around the time that social media became a Big Thing. Correlation is assumed to imply causation.
I have to wonder whether people making this point have been watching or reading the news. It’s been increasingly awful ever since the 9/11 terror attacks more than 20 years ago. Endless wars, global heating, the Global Financial Crisis and the decade of austerity that followed, Trump, Covid and now Trump again. I have a naturally optimistic temperament, but that hasn’t been enough to stop me getting more and more depressed.
Depression among the old has been reflected in their strong support for far-right political parties in many countries, and for the nostalgic politics of Brexit and MAGA. You could make a plausible-sounding case that exposure to talk radio, outrage media and so on is driving this. And if teenagers were making the rules, they might force old people to turn off their preferred media. But the only real solution is to work for a less depressing world.
The other main source of evidence has been from instant experts, most notably Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt
Twenge is an exponent of the intellectually discredited, but still popular, idea of generational analysis. I’ve been pointing out the absurdities of this idea for 25 years now. My criticisms and those of others have gradually come home. Most notably the Pew Research Center, a longstanding user of the framework, has announced “should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens.” I reviewed Twenge’s latest book here concluding “for serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive.”
I didn’t pay much attention to Twenge’s discussion of Generation Z. But her work perfectly illustrates a point I’ve often made that much of the generation game literature consists of restatements of long-standing cliches about “young people these days” and old people “blocking up the halls”. In 2006, Twenge published a book on Millennials, entitled Generation Me: Why today’s young Americans are more confident, assertive, entitled–and more miserable than ever before. Her description of Millennials then was very similar to that of Gen Z now.
I’m underwhelmed by Twenge’s work, but she appears to be an honest scholar. By contrast, I’ve long regarded Jonathan Haidt as a charlatan, whose message shifts over time, but always in a way that appeals to a big audience. I first came across his work in 2012, and responded critically. That was about the time he published The Righteous Mind, where he presented himself as a liberal, concerned that fellow-liberals misunderstood the concerns of conservatives. Whereas liberals saw conservatives as driven by racism and misogyny, Haidt argued that they were actually motivated by concerns about moral purity and legitimate authority. Criticising them just created unnecessary division. I saw this as an example of the well-known Internet tradition of “concern trolling” [2]
When Donald Trump emerged as the conservative standard-bearer, the moral purity stuff looked pretty silly, so Haidt moved on. Along with Bari Weiss, Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris he emerged as part of the self-described “Intellectual Dark Web”, characterised mostly by complaints about being silenced by leftwing critics. These complaints were, of course, widely aired in a variety of prominent platforms. When Republicans demanded forcible silencing of protests over the Gaza genocide, these free-speech warriors were nowhere to be found.
With his usual agility, Haidt has jumped on the bandwagon of concern about social media. And, unsurprisingly, he has been amplified by traditional media, which have been at least as problematic, but get a free pass in this debate.
Given that we have no real understanding of the problem, it’s hard to know how, if at all, the solution of a ban is going to work. But the legislation is unlikely to be repealed, so it’s worth thinking about what might happen when it takes effect. More soon, I hop.e
fn1. As is often the case, evidence is mixed. The advocates of a social media ban cite studies showing no such increase among the old.
This the first in a series discussing the Australian legislation banning people under 16 from using social media. I’m writing from the perspective of a longstanding user of new media and also as someone with personal experience of dealing (not very successfully) with problems of under-16 screen addiction. On the other hand, I’m not a technical expert so I may get some details wrong. I’ll be happy to accept correction on these points
1. What is the ban and how (if at all) will it work
The legislation was rushed through Parliament with little discussion, so not much has been spelt out about its scope or how the ban will be implemented.
The legislation requires specified sites to adopt some form of age verification – yet to be spelt out. It is explicitly said to apply to
• Instagram
• TikTok
• Snapchat
• Facebook
• Reddit
• X (formerly Twitter)
but would presumably also apply to Bluesky and Threads, and perhaps the Fediverse. On the other hand messaging services are explicitly exempt – it would be hard to restrict them without also banning SMS. Also, and unlike the US, there are no restrictions on adult sites.
It seems unlikely that the Australian government will have much success in prosecuting non-compliant sites based overseas. So, the primary enforcement mechanism will presumably come by forcing Australian ISPs to block access to these sites.
In the absence of countermeasures, bans of this kind can easily be evaded using Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). These make it impossible for ISPs to determine which sites are being visited, but typically do not conceal the fact that a VPN is being used The most effective countermeasure would probably be a requirement for ISPs to block VPNs altogether. Such a requirement would severely compromise privacy for all users. As usual in such cases, there are workarounds that would require even more intrusive countermeasures.
Summing up, a ban on U16 access to social media sites can be made at least partially effective. However, it will have significant impacts on all Australian users, including loss of access to some social media, and restrictions on privacy tools such as VPNs.
Twenty-five years ago, the world waited for the dawn of a new millennium (a few pedants grumbled that the millennium wouldn’t start until 2001, but no one paid much attention). The excitement of the occasion was tempered by concern, and, in some quarters panic, about the possibility of a massive computer outage resulting from the “Y2K” or “millennium” bug.
The origin story of the bug was that, in the 1970s and 1980s, computer programmers had saved space, or merely effort, by coding years with two digits rather than four. Indeed, the habit was so ingrained that the dominant operating system of the day was called Windows 98, and required some minor fixed to deal with the arrival of the year 2000.
Without such adjustments, it was feared, computer programs would misperceive dates in 2000 as if they were in 1900, producing chaotic errors. The issue had been discussed on the then-nascent Internet for years, mostly in humorous terms. But as the critical date approached, the tone turned to panic, at least in the main English speaking countries.
The catalyst was the realisation that the bug might be found in “embedded systems”, such as the microchips found in virtually every modern device, such as aircraft and lift control system. If they failed, technological society might grind to a halt producing the scenario discussed as ‘“The End Of The World As We Know It” (TEOTWAWKI). This scenario was taken seriously enough to generate an effort to check everything from fax machines to microwave ovens.
I’ve avoided post-mortems on the US election disaster for two reasons.
First, they are useless as a guide to the future. The next US election, if there is one [1], will be a referendum on the Trump regime. Campaign strategies that might have gained the Democrats a few percentage points in November 2024 won’t be at all relevant in 2026 or 2028, let alone in the aftermath of a regime collapse further in the future.
Second, by focusing on the marginal shifts between 2020 (or even 2012) and 2024, these post-mortems miss the crucial fact that the divisions in US politics have been more or less constant[2] for the last 30 years, as this graph from the Pew Foundation shows.
Throughout this period the Republican Party has been competitive only because, it has received the consistent support of 60 per cent of white men.
Of course, that wouldn’t be enough without some votes from non-whites and women. But there is no group other than white men where the Republicans have had a reliable majority over the past 30 years.
More precisely the Republicans represent, and depend on, angry white men. I first heard the term “angry white men” in relation to the 1994 mid-term election when the proto-Trump Newt Gingrich led the Republicans to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years. The 1994 outcome was the culmination of Nixon’s Southern strategy, bringing Southern whites, angry about their loss of social dominance in the Civil Rights ere, into the Republican camp.
All that has really happened since then is that white American men, fuelled by a steady diet of Fox News and talk radio, have got angrier and angrier. This was concealed, for a while, by the fact that the Republican party establishment had sufficient control over nomination processes to ensure that most candidates were relative moderates. But over time that control has eroded, and the establishment itself has been taken over by angry white men, predominantly Southerners.
What are angry white men angry about? Lots of the discussion focuses on economic disappointments. But there are plenty of high-income Republican. The Republican affiliation of white men has remained constant through boom and bust, recovery and contraction. There has been a shift of support between more educated (now less Republican) and less educated (more Republican) white men, reflecting the increasingly stupid content of the anger diet, but there is no shortage of college-educated consumers and purveyors of white male anger.
Angry white men are overwhelmingly Christian (non-Christian white men mostly support the Democrats, and it used to be argued that they were deeply concerned about a variety of moral and ethical issues, mostly around sex and gender. But Trump has trashed all of their supposed values, notably including principled opposition to abortion, without losing any support. They are still vociferously bigoted against trans people, but really, any target will do.
Political success is going to make angry white men even angrier. By silencing their opponents they can, in the immortal words of the New York Times Editorial Board acquire “the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed”, but they will still be shunned, and know that they are being derided behind their backs.
Perhaps if the Democrats had been a bit luckier or cleverer in 2024, another four years might have been enough to change things, but there’s no point in regretting that now. Perhaps Trump’s rule will be so chaotic as to bring the whole enterprise crashing down around him. Or, perhaps, this shrinking minority of the population will continue to hold the vast majority of positions of power indefinitely into the future, relying on increasingly stringent repression to secure their hold.
Is there a solution to the problem of angry white men? If there is, I can’t see it, except for the eternal fact that all things must pass.
fn1. Of course, the forms of an election will be observed, as they are almost everywhere in the world. But if the press is tightly controlled, the police and army under political directions political opponents silenced or jailed, the rituals of an election don’t imply the possibility of a change of government.
fn2. The only notable trend is the increase in Republican suppport among Hispanics. This is a complicated topic, which I don’t propose to discuss here. Please, no comments on this, or on short term changes between 2020 and 2024/
I wrote this for a Guardian panel. The published version was cut for space reasons, so here’s the full version
The central concern expressed by the Reserve Bank in defending its high-interest rate policy is that expectations of higher inflation may become entrenched, requiring a further, more painful round of contractionary monetary policy in the future. Even after stripping out the effects of various “cost of living measures”, the RBA’s estimated core inflation rate is only just above 3 per cent. This suggests extreme sensitivity to the risk of even a modest increase in the long run rate of inflation.
By contrast, the RBA expresses no concern that the reduction in economic growth induced by its policies will lead to a permanent reduction in living standards. The underlying assumption of the RBA’s macroeconomic model is that the economy will always return to a long-run growth path determined by technology and economic structure.
But there is ample evidence, notably from New Zealand and the UK to suggest that the loss in productive capacity associated with slowdowns and recessions is permanent or very close to it. Until the 1980s, the New Zealand and Australian economies grew almost in parallel. But from the early 1990s, onwards, while Australia has avoided recession (at least on the widely-used measure of two quarters of negative growth) for more than thirty years, New Zealand has had at least half a dozen. This miserable performance, reflecting both policy misjudgements and overzealous neoliberal reforms has resulted in New Zealand falling far behind Australia in terms of incomes and living standards. The steady flow of New Zealanders to our shores, and the lack of any comparable flow in the opposite direction, reflects this.
In the UK, the combined effects of the GFC, Conservative austerity policies and Brexit has produced a long period of stagnation in national income. As Brad DeLong observes, had Britain continued on its pre-2008 growth trend it would now be forty percent richer than it is today
Even though Australia has experienced a lengthy period of declining national income per person, the RBA does not even mention the risk of a permanent reduction in living standards. In its pursuit of rapid achievement of an essentially arbitrary inflation target, RBA monetary policy puts all our futures at risk
Last week, I gave a presentation at the 2024 Australian Basic Income Fellows Workshop. Most of the talks were about Basic Income trials, which have been undertaken around the world. I focused on something more modest but perhaps more achievable: getting evidence on the effects of Scrapping or Scaling Back Mutual Obligation and Income Management.
You can download the Powerpoint presentation here or see the slides on my Substack
A few weeks ago, I drew up a flowchart to estimate the probability that Trump would establish a dictatorship in the US, which looked, at the time, like an even money bet.
We don’t need to speculate any more. Trump has announced the dictatorship, and there is no sign of effective resistance. The key elements so far include
Extremists announced for all major positions, with a demand that they be recess appointments, not subject to Senate scrutiny
A state of emergency from Day 1, with the use of the military against domestic opponents
Mass deportations, initially of non-citizens and then of “denaturalised” legal immigrants
A third term (bizarrely, the nervous laughter that greeted this led to it being reported as a joke).
A comprehensive purge of the army, FBI and civil service
It’s clear that Trump will face no resistance from the Republican party. There’s an outside chance that the Supreme Court will constrain some measures, such as outright suppression of opposition media, but that won’t make much difference.
It’s possible that Trump will overreach in some way, such as carrying out his threat to execute political opponents before the ground is fully prepared. Or, his economic policies may prove so disastrous that even rigged elections can’t be won. But there is no good reason to expect this.
I can’t give any hopeful advice to Americans. The idea of defeating Trump at the next election is an illusion. Although elections may be conducted for some time, the outcome will be predetermined. Street protest might be tolerated, as long as it is harmless, but will be suppressed brutally if it threatens the regime. Legal action will go nowhere, given that the Supreme Court has already authorised any criminal action Trump might take as president.
The models to learn from are those of dissidents in places like China and the Soviet Union. They involve cautious cultivation of an alternative, ready for the opportunity when and if it comes.
For Australia, the easy, and wrong, course of action will be to pretend that nothing has happened. But in reality, we are on our own. Trump is often described as “transactional”, but this carries the implication that having made a deal, he sticks to it. In reality, Trump reneges whenever it suits him, and sometimes just on a whim. If it suits Trump to drag us into a war with China, he will do it. Equally, if he can benefit from leaving us in the lurch, he will do that
Our correct course is to disengage slowly and focus on protecting ourselves. That means a return to the policy of balancing China and the US, now with the recognition that there is nothing to choose between the two in terms of democracy. We need to back out of AUKUS and focus on defending ourselves, with what Sam Roggeveen has called an “echidna” strategy – lots of anti-ship missiles, and the best air defences we can buy, from anyone willing to supply them.
John Quiggin 