Some thoughts on profits and inflation, feel free to disregard.
(A) I strongly believe that oligopoly is a big problem for Australia. It helps explain why real wage growth has been low, why productivity is low, and why the real prices of so many goods and services are high.
(B) But it does not follow from this that oligopoly profiteering provides a good explanation of current inflation. After all, we had just as much oligopoly up to 2019 when inflation was persistently low.
Jul 14, 2021 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Great piece by Greg. For me one of the most disappointing things about Lowe's speech was that he brought no new facts, no new evidence to this debate, and yet he surely knows just how sensitive it is. Some loose theorising now gets reported as "RBA says migration reduces wages".
A year ago today. Practically every creditable Australian economist, spanning the ideological spectrum.
At the risk of excess self congratulation, I think we had the best of this argument. Our opponents have gone very quiet, taken to pretending success was inevitable.
[@jayrosen_nyu getting cited in economics journals now]
Formally it's a sender/many-receivers game where the receivers seek to take minimum MSE actions and the sender seeks to prevent that by "manipulating" their signals (at a cost).
[Eg voters want to make informed decisions, but a demagogue is trying to prevent that] 2/
Apr 21, 2020 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A few people have suggested I should respond directly to Professor Foster's arguments on #qanda last night rather than just saying I was appalled.
I thought the other panelists did an excellent job of explaining why her arguments were unsound. There's no need to say more.
But.
But fwiw here are some reasons why I think Prof. Foster is wrong.
1) There is no feasible way to quarantine the high-risk, even if one could identify *all* high-risk. Inevitable mixing of the high- and the low-risk would lead to the pandemic devastating the high-risk population
Nov 21, 2018 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
This is a comically bad argument to be making on the very same day the RBA governor makes the emphatic case that record-low wage growth is threatening trust in our economic institutions @ellenmfanning@bairdjulia@ABCthedrum#auspol#ausecon 1/6
Formally it's a sender/many-receivers game where the receivers seek to take minimum MSE actions and the sender seeks to prevent that by "manipulating" their signals (at a cost).