Servants of three masters

John Quiggin14 Comments

Universities are the servants of three masters: the state governments that provide the statutory basis, the federal government which provides most of the funding for research and domestic students and the international market.
* The Australian public are not among those to whom the universities see themselves as owing a duty
* These multiple allegiances create great opportunities for the managers of the university to pursue their own interests, playing off the various masters against each other
* It all goes bad when the international market fails

All of this can be seen at work with the refusal of the University of Melbourne to enter into an agreement with the NTEU, saying that its statutory obligations (presumably to the state government) prohibit any element of joint management.

The need for action results from the collapse of the international market, and the refusal of the third master (the Morrison government) to accept its obligation to educate Australians. Instead, they offered a “rescue” package, consisting of a promise not to impose even further cuts this year, if domestic enrolments fell.

Whataboutery and the pandemic (crosspost from Crooked Timber)

John Quiggin46 Comments

Among the many consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the measures taken to control it, there has been an epidemic of whataboutery. The starting point is the claim “we have locked down the entire economy to reduce the number of deaths from Covid-19, but we tolerate comparably large numbers of deaths from X”. Popular candidates for X include smoking, road crashes and influenza. In most, though not all, cases, the inference is that we should accept more deaths from the pandemic. Indeed, the majority of those using this argument are also opposed to any proposal to do more about the various examples of X they cite

I’m going to take the contrapositive, and argue that the inconsistency pointed out here should be resolved by taking stronger action to reduce avoidable deaths from a wide range of causes, with the primary examples being road deaths and smoking.

While whataboutery on these topics typically suggests that society has made a decision to tolerate deaths from these causes, the reality is that there have been increasingly stringent measures to reduce them, adopted over many years, and that in both cases, the ultimate objective (explicit in some jurisdictions, implicit in others) is to reduce deaths to zero. In the case of roads, this aim is expressed in Vision Zero, adopted initially in Sweden and subsequently in a variety of other places. The UK government aims to end smoking by 2030, and most governments have interim targets which imply ultimate elimination of smoking.

With or without explicit targets, the policy approach everywhere has been much the same. Restrictions aimed at reducing the risk in question have been introduced gradually over many years, with each new restriction providing a starting point for the next. In Australia’, for example, partial bans on tobacco advertising were introduced in the late 1980s. These were followed by complete ad bans, then by compulsory health warnings in small print, and finally by a requirement that cigarette packets should display gruesome photos of the consequences of smoking. At the same time, from an initial situation where smoking was universal, it has been progressively restricted in all public spaces, and where children may be exposed (as in private cars).

There is indeed an inconsistency here. If the restrictions in place now are justified in terms of a balance between health costs, damage to non-smokers and the restrictions on the rights of smokers, they would have been even more justifed 30 or 50 years ago, when the damage done by smoking was much greater. Coming back to Covid whataboutery, the inconsistency is not between accepting deaths from one source and not another, it’s between the urgent action necessitated by the pandemic and the slow pace adopted in other cases.

The slowness with which policies aimed at ending smoking, or road deaths, is easily explained. Governments have introduced them at a pace that avoids substantial political costs, and the risk of sustained non-compliance. In the case of smoking, for example, it is necessary to deal both with powerful and unscrupulous tobacco companies, using every available tool[1] to resist controls, and with a large addicted population, some (though not all) of whom have no desire to quit.

The success (so far) of lockdowns in controlling Covid, and their general acceptance outside the US, suggests that we should move more rapidly to eliminate public health risks, even where this involves coercive measures to stop people endangering others, and to prevent young people from endangering themselves. For example, partial bans on smoking in public places, or in the presence of children, should be made total. A more ambitious proposal of this kind would be to raise the smoking age, one year at a time, so that young people currently under the legal age would not be allowed to smoke until they were, say, 25 (hardly anyone begins smoking as a mature age adult, which is in itself an indication that it is not a choice open to a rational defence).

In the case of road deaths, the most obvious measures are lower speed limits in urban ares, and a greater willingness to take dangerous drivers off the road permanently. These measures will be adopted eventually – the only question is how many innocent lives will be lost before they are.

fn1. The tobacco companies not only lobbied directly, and funded a variety of front groups (astroturf smokers rights groups and free-market think tanks), but fought Australia’s packaging laws through international trade actions, ginned up by bribing governments or exploiting the Investor-State Dispute Settlement clauses of trade agreements. They were defeated, but almost certainly succeeded in deterring poorer countries, which could not afford such fights, from following Australia’s lead.

Universities and the pandemic

John Quiggin30 Comments

As I foreshadowed a while ago, the financial effects of the pandemic have been reflected in an agreement for university staff to take temporary pay cuts in order to save the jobs of casual workers. Lots of people are unhappy about this, but it’s hard to see an alternative, and the deal seems to be the best that can be reached, with the requirement that senior management take the biggest cuts and (I think) the cuts for academic staff being scaled to protect the lowest paid.

The primary cause of all this is the big reduction in overseas student numbers arising from travel restrictions and the pandemic. But the more immediate cause is the federal governments decision to exclude universities from the JobKeeper scheme, even though they would qualify under the loss of revenue .

This decision is due in large measure to the government’s culture war hostility to the university sector. It’s disappointing to see them pursue this kind of vendetta at a time when we ought to be looking for national unity. But given that this is the case, there is no serious alternative for universities but to share the pain as evenly as possible.

The fundamental problem is the quasi-NGO (quango) status of universities. Even though they are mostly funded by the federal government, universities are (mostly) organized as independent statutory bodies under state legislation. As a result, they engage in wasteful competition among themselves. Indeed, the ACCC watches for signs of anti-competitive behavior, a concept that would immediately be recognised as nonsensical in the case of schools and universities.

Education is a fundamental responsibility of government, and universities ought to be organized as a unified national system, with the responsibility of providing education to all students who can benefit from it. If that were the case, the government would have had to meet the gap in funding just as has happened in public transport and other services where revenue has fallen.

Coming back to the cuts, the NTEU-universities deal ought to be a model for the economy as a whole in important respects. Dealing with the pandemic is going to be hugely costly, and those at the top of the income distribution, in both private and public sectors, should bear most of that cost.

Supporting a Livable Income Guarantee

John Quiggin6 Comments

Some responses I gave to a student journalist asking about universal basic income.

There are two main approaches to implementing a universal basic income.

One is to introduce a universal payment to everyone in the community, funded by taxation, and gradually increase this to a “livable income”, that is, one sufficient for people to meet their basic needs on a sustainable basis.

The second is to focus on those who currently don’t receive a basic income and provide it to them. This can be done by first increasing existing benefits, such as NewStart to a livable level and then expanding access to those benefits by removing punitive work tests. This would lead to a “participation income”, where everyone who contributed to society through paid work, volunteering, study or child-rearing received a livable income. I favour the second approach, for reasons set out here.
https://johnquiggin.com/2017/02/08/why-we-should-put-basic-before-universal-in-the-pursuit-of-income-equality/

The government’s response to the pandemic has moved us much closer to a livable income guarantee, at least temporarily.  The JobSeeker allowance is twice the amount of NewStart, and compliance testing such as the requirement to make 20 job applications per month has been dropped (at least officially – some case managers haven’t got the message on this). And JobKeeper implies a willingness to intervene to prevent involuntary mass unemployment.

Since this is very much at odds with the government’s policy position before the pandemic, it is unsurprising that they are seeking to ’snap back’ once the immediate crisis is over. But this neither feasible (because the economy will take a long time to recover) nor desirable (because of the benefits of a livable income guarantee).

Sandpit

John Quiggin55 Comments

A new sandpit for long side discussions, conspiracy theories, idees fixes and so on. I’ll open this by saying I agree with the view that even an optimal response to the pandemic by China would have given the world only a few days more notice, and that most Western governments would have wasted that time anyway.

Xi: the least incompetent of the autocrats

John Quiggin60 Comments

The National Interest has a story headlined “The Coronavirus Crisis and the Chimera of Authoritarian Competence“. I expected to read about failure of Putin, Bolsonaro, Trump and other autocrats to contain the pandemic. But it was all about China.

China is the only autocracy that has had a serious pandemic and controlled it. Xi has told lies and suppressed info, just like all the other autocrats, but at least he hasn’t denied the severity of the problem and actively undermined measures to control it.

Lots of democracies have achieved the same outcome at lower cost, but the article mentions only Taiwan by name.

What makes it truly bizarre is that one of the authors is a Republican member of Congress. He has had more than three years to observe the chimera of authoritarian competence failing at first hand.

A Twitter thread posted using Spooler

Lots of people like working from home

John Quiggin32 Comments

For a long time, I’ve used Twitter to publish links to posts on this blog. But a lot of what I write now is on Twitter first. So, I’ve started using a tool called Spooler to turn Twitter threads into blog posts. Here’s the first one

According to Gallup 62 per cent of currently employed US workers have worked from home during the crisis, and 59 per cent of those would prefer to continue doing so “as much as possible”

Important qualifications:
* not the whole workforce, since so many who do in-person jobs are now unemployed
* binary choice – alternative is “Return to working at your office as much as you previously did”

Still suggests that something like 30 per cent of workforce want to work from home, and can do so reasonably effectively. Will be hard for employers to drag them all back to the office, especially with continued need for social distancing.

In print today

John Quiggin17 Comments

I’ve got two newspaper articles out today.

In the Australian Financial Review, a piece written jointly with Warwick McKibbin and Richard Holden, arguing that the Reserve Bank should dump inflation targeting and switch to targeting the level or growth rate of nominal GDP. Paywalled, but a near-final version is over the fold.

And, in Inside Story, a piece looking at the kinds of reforms we need once the lockdown phase of the pandemic is over. Rather than trawling over the remnants of the neoliberal reform agenda, I argue we need transformative changes such as a participation income.

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