Face time with strangers can boost economy
Human contact is an important part of health and our prosperity.
Ross Gittins is economics editor of the SMH and an economic columnist for The Age. His books include Gittins' Guide to Economics, Gittinomics and The Happy Economist.
Human contact is an important part of health and our prosperity.
One of the small pleasures of my year was watching the deft political manoeuvrings of Thomas Cromwell in the TV miniseries of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.
Some economists worry the world economy isn't growing fast enough. It's slowing down and reaching the point of "secular stagnation".
Our politicians on both sides have terrible trouble working out how supply works.
It is possible to make sense of what's happening in the labour market, but only if you follow a few rules.
Shadow treasurer Chris Bowen is right: One of the Abbott-Turnbull government's various acts of economic vandalism is its politicisation of the once-proud federal Treasury.
What would economic race-calling be without its little excitements? As you may possibly have heard, this week's news is that the economy has contracted - shrunk, gone backwards - by 0.5 per cent.
Last week in front of 1400 people at a Fairfax Media subscriber event I was outed as a "pathological optimist" by an anonymous reader, who wanted to know how I got that way.
If Treasury wants to start acting more like economists than accountants, a good place to start would be to urge its political masters to seize on the opportunity presented by the school funding "compact" proposed by the Grattan Institute.
Conventional economics is falling apart, no longer making the sense we thought it made.
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