Deep Dives
Australia has a long and successful history of immigration. Migrants contribute economically, help fill labour shortages, improve the country’s demographics and provide important cultural diversity. But as countries like Sweden have learned, migration can also present significant challenges. For example, last week independent economist Chris Richardson claimed that “we’
Deep Dives
Whether immigrants fuel inflation is a complicated question, in part because there’s no single, uniform “immigrant”. Immigrants can be students, skilled workers, entire families, refugees, retirees, or backpackers. Their ages also vary, as do their consumption, savings, and working patterns. Each of those features, and how they all come
Money
Ah, the age-old question: does money buy you happiness? The general consensus is yes – to an extent. For example, surely the happiness a person gets from their billionth dollar is less than what they derived from their first dollar? Nobel Prize winners Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton (2010) formalised this
Housing
When you create a system that makes it costly to do things ‘by the book’ – common examples are drugs, guns and more recently, building houses – you alter the incentives that individuals face in their day-to-day lives. In the case of housing, strict planning and zoning laws create positive transaction costs,
Housing
Denmark has a housing problem. Not Denmark the country, but Denmark Western Australia – population 2,375 – which happens to be the least affordable town in the state and “one of the most inefficient communities in WA when it comes to the balance between large family homes and smaller dwellings, with
Artificial intelligence
US President Joe Biden recently passed an executive order regulating artificial intelligence (AI), which was met with mixed reactions. A common criticism is that the order was highly prescriptive – it assumed a lot a about the future direction of AI, even though it’s a huge unknown. One of the
Hot Takes
Andrew Leigh delivered a great speech to the Economic Society of Australia in Canberra last week (alas I was not in attendance), in which he outlined his ‘Ten Lessons for Economic Policymakers’ in detail. Most were excellent, but he missed the mark on two of them by making a common
Deep Dives
Rugby in Australia is at an all-time low: * The Wallabies were knocked out of the Rugby World Cup in the group stages for the first time ever. * Dave Rennie – hired to take the Wallabies to the World Cup – was sacked several months before the tournament even started, with Eddie Jones
Industrial policy
Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, gave his thirteenth speech on the “defining decade” this week, which he also calls the “turbulent twenties”. But other than those zingers, the speech was incredibly light on substance. So light that even a large language model was critical: “The speech’s structure was convoluted
Media
Picture this. It’s 2020, the pandemic has arrived with a bang and Big Tech companies’ share prices are soaring while the opposite is true for newspapers and TV. Australia’s then-Treasurer Josh Frydenberg settles in for his regular tennis and beer session with good mate Ryan Stokes – Josh was
Inflation
Who has fared the worst from the recent bout of inflation and ongoing cost of living crisis? It’s not who you might think from reading headline after headline about Australia’s rental crisis: “On average, households with a mortgage have experienced a significant decline in spare cash flows, unlike
Inflation
Australia’s rate of inflation – as measured by the Consumer Price Index, or CPI – “rose 1.2 per cent in the September 2023 quarter and 5.4 per cent annually, according to the latest data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS)”: “The most significant contributors to the rise in