Tag Archives: Neoliberalism

Labor and the Media: Obstacles to a Decent Society

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Two major Australian institutions are in the spotlight at the moment, the Labor Party at its annual national conference, and the media in an enquiry prompted by the Murdoch press’s excesses in Britain.  However the deepest problems with them are rarely acknowledged.  The Labor Party has become an obstacle to good governance and to a tolerable future for Australia.  The media have become more superficial, divisive, and regressive, and they are eroding our open and democratic society.

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The Nature of the Beast manuscript available on request

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A complete manuscript of The Nature of the Beast is available for comment.  It is under a password, so as not to upset potential publishers, and so I can keep track of who is looking at it.  I would love to have feedback of any kind.

Use the Books and Downloads menu above, or go here.

A sample, the first 16 pages, can be downloaded without password.

Calculating Reptiles

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[Another instalment of The Nature of the Beast has been posted, Chapters 5-8.  Here is a sample from Chapter 6.]

In 1987 Margaret Thatcher said during an interview

“… they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people … But it went too far. If children have a problem, it is society that is at fault. There is no such thing as society. There is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend upon how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate.”36

This was the origin of an infamous quotation: “There is no such thing as society”.  Continue reading →

Fundamental Flaws in Economic Thinking and Practice

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[After a 6-month break I have returned to working on The Nature of the Beast. A new version of Chapters 1-4 is available for download and comment – use the links at the top. More will follow soon. To whet your appetite, here is a sample, from the Introduction.]

The Global Financial Crisis, also known as the Great Recession, is the biggest economic malfunction since the Great Depression. You might think that those in charge when it happened, and those who designed the economic system within which it occurred, would have been chastened and purged, to be replaced by those who saw the crash coming and those who warned that the design of the economic system was prone to such failures.

However few of those responsible have been purged, and few seem to have felt chastened. Rather, they claim that no-one could have seen the crash coming. If that were true, what exactly has the economics profession been doing for the past eighty years? Everyone knows there was a Great Depression. Would it not be a top priority to figure out how it happened, so we might see the next one coming, or better still avoid the conditions that would trigger a depression? One might think so, but that is not how the great bulk of the profession has spent the past eighty years.

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Lesser Known Economic Miracles

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Two lesser-known economic good news stories provide a revealing perspective on the mainstream economic paradigm, and on Australia’s current state.

The first economic miracle is Mauritius, brought to our notice by Joseph Stiglitz in the Guardian.  Mauritius gained independence from Britain in 1968, and with few natural resources in its Indian-Ocean archipelago its economic prospects were rated as pretty dismal.  Bucking the usual prescriptions of economists (sell your soul and your land to overseas investors and tourists), and despite per capita income of less than $400, Mauritius decided to invest in its one major asset – its people.

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Sick Labor

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Prime Minister Julia Gillard has at last begun the effort to explain her carbon price policy, but all agree she has a lot of ground to regain after scoring yet another spectacular own goal for Labor, this time by announcing a price on carbon without having any clear policy on compensating households.  This while facing a Leader of the Opposition who will say and do anything for a populist scare campaign, his biggest bogey of all being “a great big new tax”.  It is not so hard to think of how to present the issue to the public, as a journalist and a blogger demonstrate.  Why can’t Labor?

Labor has form, as former PM Kevin Rudd also scored a spectacular own goal last year by walking away from the greatest moral challenge of our time, global warming.  Then there were the running sagas of home insulation, green loans and so on, which could and should have been explained, fixed and continued but which became such a political liability they too were abandoned.  Labor has displayed staggering ineptitude.

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The Australian Labor Party is Dead

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[This was published by On Line Opinion, 12 May.]

Isn’t it time we declared the Labor Party officially dead?

The party has become a façade, an empty shell, a Faux-Labor Party.  It lost its vision long since.  It has forgotten why it exists.  It has no purpose, other than to gain power for the egos that inhabit it.

Lacking a vision, Faux-Labor is purely reactive.  Lacking a vision, it cannot frame issues to its advantage.  It cannot seize the initiative.  Caught awkwardly in its opponents’ framing, it is forever on the back foot, only ever able to be less bad, never able to proclaim a noble goal and pursue it.  Its collapse in the polls is surprising only for its speed.

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Neoliberal Pseudo-Science

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Also published at  Online Opinion.

The Global Financial Collapse, which is rapidly becoming the Global Economic Collapse, is provoking deserved criticism of the neoliberal ideology that has dominated the world for three decades. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his recent debunking of neoliberalism in The Monthly, says markets need to be managed, but clearly many free-marketeers will resist reforms. We therefore need to be very clear. This was not an imperfection. It was not an unfortunate episode in an otherwise glorious record. Neoliberalism is flawed at its core, its performance was mediocre at best, and its failure was inevitable.

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Neoliberalism was always nonsense

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Neither Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s recent debunking of neoliberalism in The Monthly nor various commentaries (e.g. here,  here, and here) have identified the core of the problem with neoliberalism.  The core problem is that there is no justification, in theory or in evidence, for the claim that free markets produce desirable results, let alone optimal results.  This claim arises from the neoclassical theory of free markets, and is the foundation of the neoliberal ideology.  Very few seem to be aware of this foundational weakness of the radical right. Continue reading →