Parallel universe collapsing?

John Quiggin56 Comments

Over the last few months, a string of seemingly solid pillars of the rightwing ideological establishment have crashed, or at least wobbled. The typical case has been one of over-reach followed by public exposure and then a rush of sponsors and other supporters for the exit. Examples include

* Rush Limbaugh’s attack on Sandra Fluke and subsequent abandonment by sponsors

* The failed attempt by rightwing operatives at the Komen Foundation to blacklist Planned Parenthood

* The exposure of ALEC’s responsibility for the “stand your ground” laws that played a critical role in the Trayvon Martin case

* Most recently, the  Heartland Institute has seen sponsors bail and its entire Washington team (mostly focused on insurance issues) decamp, promising that their new operation will have nothing to do with climate “scepticism”

In addition to this, but arguably sui generis are

* the attempt (which looks like succeeding) by the Koch Brothers to take control of Cato, easily the most credible thinktank on the right of politics

* the denunciation of the Republican party by Norman Ornstein, long presented as the intellectually respectable face of the American Enterprise Institute

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Productivity and the Productivity Commission (updated)

John Quiggin72 Comments

For well over a decade, I’ve been debating the claim made by the Productivity Commission that Australia experienced a productivity surge in the 1990s. My claim has been that the apparent high rate of productivity growth in the mid-1990s was the result of measurement error, most importantly the failure to take account of the increase in the pace and intensity of work that was apparent to everyone (except PC economists) at that time. This view led me to conclude that the supposed productivity gains would dissipate as more normal labor market conditions returned, which was exactly what happened.

In most of these debates, one of my chief antagonists was Dean Parham, who worked for the PC at the time, and is now a Guest Researcher there. Today I heard that Parham had written a new paper on the weak productivity growth of the 2000s. So, I was keen to see what response he would have to my latest work and to my arguments about work intensity. The answer, quite literally is “Nothing”. I have, it appears become an un-person at the PC. Parham doesn’t cite any of my work and, more importantly, fails to mention work intensity at all.

Update The original version of the post contained a somewhat snarky suggestion that Parham had been negligent in ignoring my work. He has written to me to say that this is incorrect. The reason he doesn’t mention it is because, in his view, nothing I have written on this topic, at least since 2004, merits a response.

Further update Dean Parham writes that

the reason I did not mention your work or the work intensity thesis in my paper is that I did not consider it central to the focus of the paper (industry contributions) or even to the contextual motivation of the paper.

Since the contextual motivation of the paper is (as the title suggests) the slump in productivity, I can’t see that this differs from my summary. If Parham thinks my work merits a response, he’s welcome to provide that response here or in any other venue that suits him.

I’ve got some urgent commitments over the next few days, so I won’t be able to return to this topic until later. But in the meantime, here are some of the things I’ve written about this in the last few years. Agree or disagree, I think I’ve put forward a serious case that deserves an answer.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/article/Australian-Bulletin-Labour/147466277.html
https://johnquiggin.com/2011/08/20/no-hard-and-fast-rule-for-/
https://johnquiggin.com/2012/03/13/enough-of-these-zombie-ideas-lets-be-bold/
http://apo.org.au/commentary/surge-we-didnt-have

The Antipodean times

John Quiggin16 Comments

This comments thread raises a fun question. If a geomagnetic reversal somehow required the New York Times to be produced in Australia, who would fill the slots of the top reporters and commentators. I’ve started the ball rolling by claiming Krugman’s spot (natch!). But how about Tom Friedman, David Brooks and Maureen Dowd, to name just a few? And there’s no reason to confine yourself to current columnists – do we have a Will Rogers or a Tom Wicker? Feel free to suggest variants.

Just a reminder, this is an occasion for (perhaps mildly malicious) fun, not for defamatory attacks either on NY Times columnists or on their putative counterparts

European Elections and the Debt Debacle

John Quiggin61 Comments

That;s the title of my latest piece in The National Interest. Here’s the three-para teaser

European Elections and the Debt Debacle

The victory of socialist François Hollande in the French presidential election has been interpreted, correctly, as a repudiation of the austerity policies imposed on the euro zone by his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, in collaboration with German chancellor Angela Merkel, who endorsed Sarkozy in the election.

Hollande’s win was part of a backlash across Europe, with pro-austerity parties from Britain to Greece taking electoral drubbings. Even in Germany, Merkel’s coalition parties were crushed in a state election in Schleswig-Holstein.

It’s safe to predict that Hollande and Merkel will soon come into conflict over austerity. But Hollande’s real opponents in the struggle over European economic policy are not Merkel and the German government but the European Central Bank and its chairman Mario Draghi.

A moment that has passed?

John Quiggin12 Comments

As I wrote before, my immediate (over-)reaction to George Megalogenis The Australian Moment, was driven by the ageist generational clichés that started on page 1, and reappeared periodically thereafter. But I promised to write something about the serious content of the book and here it is.

My one-line summary is that this is probably the best exposition of Australia’s political history, over the period of market liberal reform, and from the viewpoint of the reformers, that we have seen, or are likely to. In particular, it’s better than the main rival, Paul Kelly’s End of Certainty.
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Zombies reach Australia

John Quiggin17 Comments

The Australian edition of Zombie Economics, updated and with an additional chapter on Economic Rationalism, is about to go on sale. I’ll be appearing at a launch event at Gleebooks in Sydney on Wednesday (9 May) talking with Jessica Irvine of the SMH.

The launch coincides with the US publication of a paperback edition, with a new chapter on Austerity. The Italian translation also came out recently, and there are versions coming in French, Greek, Portuguese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Collect them all!

Is Australia prepared for a crisis?

John Quiggin65 Comments

I spent yesterday in the Budget lockup for Crikey. There’s little real need for a lockup these days. The original justification was to stop people taking advantage of inside information on things like higher tax on cigarettes, but these taxes are now indexed, and changes are mostly either backdated or applied from well after Budget night. Then, for a while, the Budget was the central statement of economic policy. But nowadays, policies are put out all through the year, and most of the Budget measures are leaked in advance. Still, it’s a traditional piece of theatre and no-one seems to mind.

The first piece I wrote, over the fold, was about the implications of the European crisis

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Megalogenis and the generation game (updated)

John Quiggin29 Comments

Update On reflection, I went a bit over the top here. Generational stereotypes press my hot buttons, but that’s no excuse for the excess aggression in this post. I respect George Megalogenis as a journalist and, except on this point, I’ve found him to be insightful and thoughtful. So, apologises for losing my temper here. I will try to write a proper review of the book soon. End update

When I started reading George Megalogenis’ new book The Australian Moment I was stopped on page 1 by a piece of generation-game nonsense so silly I could scarcely believe someone as smart as GM would write it. Several people commented that it was unfair to judge a book by its first page[1], which is true, though I don’t see that there is anything wrong with commenting on the first page.

Anyway, after finishing a couple of other books that had jumped ahead in the queue (notably Red Plenty about the hopes for, and ultimate failure of, planning in the Soviet Union), I got back to The Australian Moment last night.

It started well. The discussion of the Whitlam government was excellent with some keen insights and use of declassified US State Department cables I hadn’t previously seen[2]. Then on p29, we get a quote from a young fogeyish Paul Keating in 1970, saying that “husbands have been forced to send their wives to work”. Graciously admitting that Keating is too old to be a baby boomer, Megalogenis nevertheless asserts that he “spoke for boomer men”.

Really? On the standard dating of the baby boom from 1946 to 1964, the youngest of them were six years old at the time, and even the oldest (at 24) were mostly unmarried. I doubt that many of them were worrying about household budgets. In any case, the terminology of “sending wives out to work” was crankily old-fashioned even in 1970. Keating was probably the last (in the sense of latest-born) person ever to use it in Australia. Boomer women joined the workforce as a matter of course when they finished school. The big problem for boomers entering the workforce in the 1970s wasn’t the need for two jobs but the lack of any.

At this point, I went to the index to check whether the generation-game stuff gets any better. It doesn’t. To take one of many examples, Megalogenis touts his own “generation W”[3] as responsible for punk rock, and, in particular the Sex Pistols (fronted by John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, born 1956), The Saints (Ed Kuepper, born 1955) and The Ramones, (formed in 1974, when most of Generation W was still unborn).

My point here isn’t that Megalogenis needs to redo his generation stuff with more accurate dating[4], though that would be better than nothing. It’s that any approach to political analysis that classifies people by birthdate is doomed to failure. As I pointed out more than a decade ago,

by the time the members of a given cohort reach their late twenties, their life courses have diverged so much that they cease to form a well-defined group with common experiences. The differences between men and women, rich and poor, workers and bosses, married and single, parents and nonparents count for much more than the commonality that comes from sharing a date on a birth certificate.

So what am I going to do here? If I could I would get Megalogenis to rewrite his book, deleting every reference to generations. Since that’s not possible, I will do the next best thing, and skip a couple of pages every time the word is mentioned. With that omission, the book promises to be a good read.

fn1. In reality, of course, given that it’s impossible to read more than a tiny fraction of the books that are printed every year, we all, quite literally, judge books by their covers most of the time.

fn2. No mention of the rumors, rife at the time, of CIA involvement in Whitlam’s dismissal.

fn3. An amalgam of Gens X and Y, consisting of those born between 1964 and the early 1990s. W stands for “Wogs and Women”.

fn4. If you are going to play this game at all sensibly, you need to split the Baby boom into the Vietnam generation, born before 1954 and therefore, if male, liable to conscription, and Generation Jones, born after 1954, who entered the workforce after the collapse of Bretton Woods. But the best thing to do is not to play the game at all.