Tag Archive for 'neoliberalism'

Jobs, jobs, jobs (if you make car parts)

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by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics, Energy, Industrial Relations, Markets, Politics and Poverty
. 37 Comments

Following on from one of the conclusions that can be drawn from the thread on Bernard Keane’s critique of the Rudd government’s involvement with bankers – that there’s a growing perception that the long term implications of “emergency” economic decisions haven’t been well considered – I was intrigued to read a report about a car parts supplier in Adelaide:

The Government is “actively considering” a joint submission from the Adelaide exhaust system and shock absorber manufacturer Tenneco and the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union that it provide accredited training and also pay the wages of the company’s 600 workers for days the company is forced to halt production.

I think we’re seeing an increasingly corporatist trend in economic policy, and what’s rather intriguing is that the usual voices of neo-liberal orthodoxy aren’t running around the shop demanding “let the free market rip!” (unless I’m missing something). Perhaps that’s because these sort of moves appear widely supported by big business.

If the Tenneco plan goes ahead, it puts some flesh on the government’s rhetoric about the need to preserve skills through a downturn due to the underlying shortages in the labour market. It might also be argued that directing wage subsidies to those already in skilled full time employment is preferable to targeting retraining and labour market measures to those same workers if and when they’re on the dole. Continue reading ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs (if you make car parts)’

Nationalise the banks!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 1 month ago
in Economics, Markets and Policy
. 33 Comments

In a piece in today’s Crikey sparked off by Kevin Rudd’s remarks about the difficulty Australian banks are having accessing foreign capital, Bernard Keane makes some good points about the response to the global financial crisis:

Rudd’s rather anodyne response to this threat is that “we will continue to work in partnership with the private sector to do what we can to support Australia’s credit markets.” This means more work for the Government-banking oligopoly combination. Bankers and officials have been busy discussing options while the rest of us were having a break.

This approach — and this is not to suggest there’s a viable alternative — is not merely entrenching the position of the major banks, which have been allowed to consume competitors, but also entrenching the Federal Government at the heart of our financial system.

It’s not nationalisation; it’s more like the worst of both worlds. Politicians and bureaucrats are now key decisionmakers in our financial system, but they have limited control via the major banks, which continue to operate — as they’re required to — in the best interests of their shareholders. Responsibility and accountability are diffused between ministers, Treasury, agencies and the banks themselves. And there are multiple ways in which it could go wrong. Taxpayers could be left, via government guarantees, with failed businesses and debt. Business might struggle to obtain necessary capital. The only guaranteed winners are the big banks…

Continue reading ‘Nationalise the banks!’

Unemployment and social responsibility

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Economics, Industrial Relations, International, Poverty and Sociology
. 59 Comments

The economic news of the day was a fall in the number of jobs advertised – as measured by ANZ – to “recession levels” – the eighth successive monthly drop. A number of economists extrapolated this to an unemployment rate of around 7% by year’s end. Of course, the trend may not be a straight line, but these things have a habit of being self-reinforcing. It’s interesting to note that the Federal Opposition could currently have their own favourite line of 2008 turned around on them – they’re arguably “talking up” unemployment at the moment. Julie Bishop might like to take a lesson from any number of Labor shadows from their decade plus in opposition – this doom and gloom isn’t necessarily smart, particularly when you’re briefing your mates in the press about how exciting it is that you might be back in power after only one term.

But of more moment, probably, is the response of those who actually make decisions about the labour market. Predictably, the Howard era Fair Pay Commission Chair, Ian Harper, warned that the low paid couldn’t expect much. This, despite the fact that the pay rises awarded by the FPC over the past two years failed to have the dire impact on employment predicted by business lobbies. It was interesting in this context to read a good piece by Mike Steketee in The Australian last week:

Some economists argue that cutting wages, particularly for the unskilled and low skilled, is the surest way of keeping more people in work. Quite apart from the fact that Labor’s ruling out such an option helped it win the last election, the main problem facing businesses is lack of demand for their products.

Cutting wages would reduce consumer demand further and it would run directly counter to the Government’s policy of putting more money into people’s pockets to try to put a floor under demand. In any case, the wages share of national income is the lowest for a generation, suggesting labour costs are less of a burden for business than in the past.

Continue reading ‘Unemployment and social responsibility’

Climate change denialism and the future of the right

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Climate change, Environment, Ethics, International, Markets, Science, Sociology and USA
. 66 Comments

With George W. Bush having a little over a week in office left to go of what has been a very long eight years, it’s timely to turn to the question of the long term implications for the political strength of the right of stances which refuse to engage with reality. In that context, John Quiggin has an interesting post on science and the right. I don’t agree with all he says about the “science wars”, but I think he’s spot on both with his lapidary analysis of the affinities between climate change denialism and right wing politics and in this observation:

The issue is not going to go away, regardless of the short-term success or failure of attempts to reach a global agreement to stabilise the climate. The more clearly the political right is identified with the anti-science side of this debate, the harder it will be to salvage any of its existing institutions.

Kevin Rudd’s rhetoric in 2007 recognised that Australian politics deals particularly badly with long term issues. Our statist political culture means that interest groups of all kinds seek to cut deals for whatever their short term interests require, and the veneer of “ideas” – particularly neo-liberal ones – is particularly thin, hardly sufficing to pave over the cracks of corporate self-interest. Rudd, of course, has hardly fulfilled the hopes he himself aroused. But surely it’s worth wondering what long term costs the right will bear after the time passes when denialism loses any patina of plausibility.

Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Economics, Markets, Philosophy, Politics and Sociology
. 18 Comments

This post is a sequel to my previous one on economic faith and doctrines. When reflecting further about the ideological construction of “oppressive state intervention” and some of the comments made on the thread, I kept thinking about the fact that the liberal economy needs an enormous amount of state intervention and support to function, and that a social democratic perspective can be non-statist. One of the easiest elisions to make in thinking about politics and the economy is to equate anti-statism with the right and statism with the left. The two binaries do not map on to each other so simply. In fact, it’s a sure sign of thinking that’s really far too prone to ideology to assume that they do.

So I was happy to find this point rather elegantly made by the Canadian academic Leo Panitch:

Continue reading ‘Economics and ideology: u r doin it wrong!’

Economic faith and doctrines

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Economics, Markets, Philosophy, Politics, Religion and Sociology
. 43 Comments

Gary Sauer-Thompson has trained an observant eye on an editorial in the Fin:

Yes, the road ahead looks difficult. But this is no time to abandon our faith in the capacity for enterprises and markets free of oppressive state intervention to reinvent ourselves and bounce back. Human ingenuity will prevail, confidence will eventually return and the wheels of commerce will spin again. There is too much evidence that the world, despite periodic setbacks, continues to progress.

He parses this intriguing paragraph thus:

Interesting isn’t it. The defence of free market capitalism depends on faith not on reason. Reason cannot do the job any more given the global financial crisis and its aftershocks on the economy. So faith is called in to plug the gaps.

Of course, faith was always a big component of economic liberalism. Enlightenment doctrines (and Marxism is another), having toppled God from his epistemological throne as the prime cause, took on some of the characteristics of the theism they thought they’d banished. So economic science has always been contaminated by ideology. Normative values such as “progress” and “ingenuity” underpin a worldview which partakes in blindness as well as insight. Now that a leap of faith is required to defend one’s choice of belief, we’re beginning to see this aspect of economic liberalism in plain view. We’re being asked to sign up to a metaphysics.

Coincidentally, John Quiggin has posted the inaugural number in a promised series of observations about economic doctrines which have been discredited by the Global Financial Crisis. First cab off the rank – the efficient markets hypothesis. Continue reading ‘Economic faith and doctrines’

2009: The year ahead

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 2 months ago
in Activism, Climate change, Economics, Energy, Environment, Government, Health, Howardia, Industrial Relations, International, Markets, Media, Policy, Poverty, Sociology, The Web and USA
. 18 Comments

As is traditional in Australia, the first day of the new year saw the release of cabinet records from thirty years ago at state and federal level. Incidentally, the underwhelming nature of what was revealed should put a big question mark over whether this level of concealment is really necessary given a greater preference for open government. But, nevertheless, the theme of the day was something like “the more things change…” and intriguingly the press pack appear to have been put onto that scent by one John Winston Howard, who I’d have thought wouldn’t want anyone to remember he was Treasurer three decades ago. But to claim that the conjuncture of circumstances we now enter is anything but weakly analogous to those which pertained in 1978 is wrong.

Prediction at the minute level is a fool’s game, though it’s one a lot of people like to indulge in. Nevertheless, I think it’s safe to say that 2009 will be an interesting year. Many patterns which were becoming evident in 2008 – a year of transition politically and economically – will crystallise into a more definable shape this year.

Perhaps most important is the election of Barack Obama.

Continue reading ‘2009: The year ahead’

John Hewson discovers excitable punctuation, anti-political fantasies and other stuff to do with the end of political year 2008

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 3 months ago
in Activism, Christmas, Climate change, Economics, Energy, Federal Elections, Foreign Elections, International, Markets, Media, Policy, Politics, Sociology and USA
. 12 Comments

End of year reflection on the state of politics and the nation type articles can be interesting. They can be tedious rehashes of trivia and reinventions of an already distorted reality to prove punditarian narratives r us and are ace (read any column in the Opposition Organ for an example). They can be quite thoughtful and rise above the usual trivia and actually say something. Or they can be quite weird.

John Hewson’s contribution in today’s Fin falls into the latter category. I strongly suspect his article is the first time evah a columnist in the venerable biz organ has written the sentence: “Whatever!” – indeed, Dr JoHew has been rather exuberant with his punctuation for emphasis in what is a sustained attack on the Reserve Bank. He may have a point that Glenn Stevens indicating that he’ll be taking a rest over January isn’t the best idea – as he points out, the Fed has rates heading down to a range between 0% and 0.25% and UK rates are at 2%. Perhaps Stevens thinks that in the month or so of the Great Australian Stupor, we’ll all spend the economy back to health by splurging on alcopops and sunscreen. On the other hand, Hewson is probably right that Aussie parochialism can’t be afforded anymore – the rest of the world may not understand that we’re all at the beach.

But Hewson’s paradox is that his solution is typical of what got us here in the first place – better “governance” and a more “independent” board – which sits uneasily with his own complaint that no one is allowed to complain about the independent Bank. This is the sort of neoliberal managerialist fantasy that landed us in this mess (in part) and the proscription is even more technocratic wonkery!

Speaking of which, that takes me to my segue about Kevin Rudd, political reality, climate change and technocratic wonkery.

Continue reading ‘John Hewson discovers excitable punctuation, anti-political fantasies and other stuff to do with the end of political year 2008′

Is neoliberalism finished?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 5 months ago
in China, Developing world, Economics, Foreign Elections, Foreign policy, International, Markets, Philosophy, Politics, Sociology, USA and War
. 74 Comments

The question’s in the air at the moment. In the Australian blogosphere, John Quiggin thinks the financial markets crisis has killed it off, while Nicholas Gruen is (rightly in my view) more skeptical. [In response to commenters, Quiggin goes on in another post to define what he means by neoliberalism.]

From my (sociological) point of view, the shorter answer to the question is – no.

In fact, I think the way the question’s posed reflects a number of category mistakes. Continue reading ‘Is neoliberalism finished?’

The end of financialisation? II

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Economics, International, Markets, Media, Sociology and USA
. 62 Comments

As a supplement to earlier posts on the sociology of the global financial crisis from Kim and dk.au, I thought I’d note something very interesting written by Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber. Farrell traces the shift in paradigm in the regulatory architecture of finance, one that has supplemented the first shift away from direct involvement of the state in economic ownership:

The second is more specific and recent – the tendency to replace ‘heavy-handed’ forms of regulation with ‘regulation with a light touch’ and self-regulation. This has been most marked in Anglo-American economies, but other countries (in continental Europe and elsewhere) have faced persistent ideological pressures to move in this direction. This is a large chunk of the so-called ‘reform’ agenda that the Economist magazine, the OECD and other such bodies keep pushing. Both of these shifts are largely ideological – that is, they gained much of their impetus from changes in the ideas which constitute policy-makers’ shared collective wisdom about how to deal with the economy.

The second shift (the reform agenda) is now a busted flush. Its proponents are in disarray (if I’m feeling in a vindictive mood, I may well buy a copy of the next Economist to see how its editorialists try to rationalize all of this).

Any reasonable assessment of the actions of the Fed and the US Treasury would suggest that they’re driven by confusion and are very much ad-hoc measures. Neither Bernanke nor Paulson seems to have much of a big picture grip, and politicians reciting “the fundamentals are sound” is clearly not going to cut the mustard now, even, as with John McCain, precipitating something of a backlash.

John Quiggin has speculated on how all this will play out. The confusion has led to some quite bizarre moments, such as pundits on Lateline Business declaiming “capitalism is in crisis” and “the financial markets may not be viable”. What we’re seeing – among other things – is a decomposition of that abstraction “the markets” and a reduction of these so-called impersonal forces to the panicked reactions of individuals. If Robert Skidelsky is right, and a tipping point has been reached, it begs a very big question, which Farrell answers in terms of process (because no one can know the outcome of such a fluid conjuncture). Continue reading ‘The end of financialisation? II’

Diagnosing Market Collapse

Published
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dk.au
1 year, 6 months ago
in Consumerism, Disasters, Government, Markets, Media and Policy
. 39 Comments

Whether exuberant or pessimistic, market expectations tend to gather momentum:

“It is a chicken-and-egg issue,” said Tanya Azarchs, an analyst at S&P. “When Lehman looks as if it’s having trouble raising capital, shares fall. When shares fall, raising capital by selling shares gets harder. Regardless of whether the rumour is true or not, in a way it becomes self-fulfilling.”

Continue reading ‘Diagnosing Market Collapse’

On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Education, Ethics, History, International, Philosophy, Policy, Politics and Sociology
. 108 Comments

Club Troppo’s Don Arthur and I started a correspondence by email about some of the issues I raised in my post the other day about neo-liberalism and thinktanks, and the very rapid Blairisation of the Rudd/Gillard agenda (which has certainly become even more evident in the interim with the latest instalment in the “education revolution” and the momentum that some liberal and libertarian bloggers are correct to assume is building up towards vouchers in all forms of education). I don’t want to try to represent Don’s side of the discussion, but I did want to talk about a few things that I put to him, and thank him for the very stimulating opportunity to clarify my thoughts.

One argument that’s often raised by liberals in denying that talk of neoliberalism makes sense is the claim that the state is still large as a percentage of GDP, that Howard did redistribution, and so on. That’s a point that Andrew Norton often makes, in claiming that there’s a degree of social democratic consensus still embodied in the governing practices of the Australian state. John Quiggin has made the same, or a very similar point, from a different political position. There’s some truth in this, but only some. No, Margaret Thatcher didn’t succeed in rolling back the state very far. But expecting her to is to make a false assumption – that the ideological objective only has meaning insofar as it achieves its ostensible aims. What she was actually doing was building up a stronger state in some areas to contain the damage from its withdrawal from some areas. You need a strong state to attack the weak, basically.

Continue reading ‘On the futility of arguing about Hayek, or what’s in a name?’

Advance Australia Fair?

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Anzac Day, Australiana, Books, Writers & Writing, Culture, Ethics, History, Indigenous, Markets, Media, Nationalism, Philosophy and Politics
. 23 Comments

At one stage, having read a lecture by Mark Davis in Overland, I thought his new book was going to be an update of Gangland. I’ve just started reading The Land of Plenty: Australia in the 2000s (expect a full review in due course), but it appears very much as if at some point in the course of writing, it turned into an update of the late Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. Certainly the idea that we’re coasting on our luck, riding on the back of another resources boom, is both enough to set in train a comparison between the Australia of 1964 and the nation of 2008 and to recognise a powerful structure of feeling which Kevin07 articulated all the way to the Lodge.

One of the more interesting arguments Davis makes in the opening chapter is that “being Australian is an ethical project”. He quotes Nettie Palmer, writing in Meanjin in 1944:

A new country that is merely an imitation of its predecessors, that discovers no new thoughts or forms, that contributes nothing to the meaning of the world – would it deserve to exist?

In a way, the dislocations and the sense of insecurity Davis seeks to trace over the past three decades reflect a disjunction between the nation and the state – a disjunction embodied in the casual bipartisanship of the major parties, even if some of the wellsprings of everyday doubt and pain were harnessed by Kevin Rudd and Labor in 2007. If one were to compare political ideologies, both conservatism and social democracy – in quite different ways – want to see the state as a vehicle for creating meanings and symbols, for fostering a shared and collective culture. One looks back, the other forward, but it’s characteristic of both to regard governance as something like steering a ship – while one may tack often, there’s an intention of heading in a determined direction.

Liberalisms of almost all stripes are quite hostile to the idea of a collective vision realised through the state. Continue reading ‘Advance Australia Fair?’

Feminism good for families

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 6 months ago
in Activism, Developing world, Economics, Europe, Feminism, History, Industrial Relations, Middle East, Parenting, Poverty, Religion, Sexuality, Sociology, USA and Women
. 123 Comments

It’s been 45 years since Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Via The Global Sociology Blog, I’ve just read this op/ed by historian Stephanie Coontz – author of Marriage, A History – writing in the Guardian to mark the anniversary. Coontz deftly turns many of the usual anti-feminist narratives on their head. Continue reading ‘Feminism good for families’