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.
Monday Message Board
Back again with another Monday Message Board.
Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please. If you would like to receive my (hopefully) regular email news, please sign up using the following link
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#5, with a bullet
Thanks to a recommendation from Seth Godin, Economics in Two Lessons is suddenly a best seller in microeconomics on Amazon. Won’t last long, I expect, but nice while it does.
Xi: the least incompetent of the autocrats
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
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
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.
Read More »May Day
It’s the May Day public holiday here in Queensland, transformed, like every other public event by the coronavirus pandemic.
Most obviously, there is no May Day march for the first time in many years (possibly since the first march in the 1890s, I haven’t been able to find out for share).
More significantly, ideas associated with May Day that seemed to belong to a distant past have suddenly become crucially relevant. The most important of these is the injustice, inefficiency and absurdity of a society where those who do the most vital work are underpaid and disregarded, while the biggest rewards go to a class that turns out to be of no use when it really matters.
There is already pressure to ‘snap back’ to what was seen as normal in the recent past as soon as, or even before, the pandemic is controlled. But the message of May Day is that a better society is possible, and that the achievements of the workers movement over the past century can and should be defended and extended.
Among the many changes we need is a push to reduce inequality through both predistribution (changing the way the market rewards work) and redistribution (taxation and transfer payments). In practice that means higher minimum wages, higher wages for those who provide us with the basic wages we all need, and better funding for public services of all kinds. For those at the top of the income distribution (including professors and the many senior administrators who outrank us) that implies lower market incomes, and forgoing the tax cuts promised (and legislated) for the future.
