The world turned upside down

John Quiggin73 Comments

Among news items of interest:

* The US Treasury briefly paid negative rates of interest on three-month bills (it’s now paying a more sensible zero).
* The outgoing Republican Administration in the US is about to nationalize General Motors perhaps proving the old adage, “what’s good for GM is good for the US”
* The Canadian Parliament has been prorogued until late January, precluding any legislative action against the economic crisis, but giving the Harper minority government another couple of months in office.

Any of these stories would have seemed unbelievable a year ago.

Some labour links

John Quiggin10 Comments

I’ve been meaning for a while to post some links to sites promoting campaigns to protect the rights of workers including the right to organise unions. Here are a few
Justice4Luke a site about the case of a union organiser sacked by the charity for which he worked.
LabourStart, an international site supporting union rights in many countries
Evatt FoundationAn Australian site with lots of useful analysis. One of the early Oz political bloggers, Chris Sheil, writes a fair bit there.

The economic lessons of World War II

John Quiggin75 Comments

As it has become evident that the financial crisis is comparable, in important ways, to the early stages of the Great Depression, there has been a lot of debate about the lessons to be learned from the responses to the Depression in the US, most notably the various policies that made up the New Deal. There’s a lot to be learned there, but it’s also important to remember that the Depression, in the US and elsewhere, continued throughout the 1930s before being brought to an abrupt end by the outbreak of World War II.[1]

Not only did the slump end when the war began, it did not return when the war ended – a huge difference from previous major wars.[2] Instead the three decades beginning in 1940 were a period of unparalleled prosperity for developed countries, with economic growth higher and unemployment lower than at any time before or since.

What lessons can we learn from this experience?

Read More »

Unfairly excluded!

John Quiggin28 Comments

My Crooked Timber co-blogger, Michael Bérubé made it to David Horowitz’ list of America’s 100 most dangerous professors. But when the Australian Liberal Students Federation outdid Horowitz by managing a Senate Inquiry into academic bias, I didn’t make the list of 30 or so. Here’s my post at CT – I’ve kept the explanations for non-Oz readers

The great David Horowitz campaign against evul academics has reached Australia, and has even occasioned a Senate inquiry. It was a load of fun. The report is good reading, as is the minority report by the Liberal (= conservative down under) Party Senators who called the inquiry in the first place, but lost control following their election defeat last year. A snippet suggests that those involved knew how to handle Horowitzism

From the committee’s perspective it appeared as
though it was to be called on to play its part in a university revue. The submissions,
the performance and the style – to say nothing of the rhetoric – presented by some
Liberal Students suggested a strong undergraduate tone. The ‘outing’ of Left and
purportedly Left academics and commentators (masquerading as academics as we
were told at one hearing) was in keeping with this tone. None of those outed objected.
Some appeared flattered to be named in the company of others more famous

The list of leftist academics is, I must admit, a sore point. I never located the full list (the links on the inquiry website were skew-whiff) but clearly I wasn’t on it. What does a leftist have to do to get noticed in this country?

Parched

John Quiggin15 Comments

Quite a few months ago now I took part in a session on water at the Melbourne Writers Festival, where I got to meet Gwynne Dyer, whose work on international politics I’ve been reading for many decades and also Maude Barlow from Canada and Paul Sinclair of ACF. Peter Mares chaired the session and subsequently broadcast it on The National Interest. You can read the transcript here. There was a lot of agreement but also some fairly sharp disagreement: Maude Barlow took a localist line on food production while I stressed the need for Australia to remain an exporter of food (the audience tended to agree with Maude).

The great risk shift

John Quiggin26 Comments

I’ve spent the last couple of days at a workshop sponsored by the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia on shifting allocations of risk. Most of the papers were well underway when the collapse of global financial markets implied the need for a radical revision of thinking. So a lot of discussion was prefaced with “at least until the onset of the crisis, this trend was ….” Here’s my paper.

A long recession

John Quiggin144 Comments

The National Bureau of Economic Research Business Cycle Dating Committee has just announced its judgement that the current US recession began in December 2007. A year old, and the decline is just beginning to accelerate. As these forecasters quoted in the NY Times say, the recession is virtually certain to be the longest since World War II (in fact, since the 1929-33 slump), and quite possibly the deepest as well.

The only silver lining I can see is that we might not hear any more silliness about the “technical definition” of a recession being two quarters of negative growth.