Fresh Economic Thinking

Why does an economist start a website documenting the effect of city upzoning?

Matthew Maltman is an Australian economist who runs the website onefinaleffort.com. In this interview, Cameron talks with Matthew Maltman about the case for experimenting with zoning changes to understand what really happens. Did Auckland fix its housing problems with upzoning? Where are other planning rule changes being tested?

Find Matthew on Twitter at @1finaleffort

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Misha Saul is an investment manager by day, but by night he is also one of the more interesting participants in Australia’s economic, cultural and political debates. He has broad interests in history, culture, war, finance and business, and always gets you thinking. For example, Misha wrote an essay entitled A “New Hong Kong” in Australia? where he mused about building new cities and how we might become more radical and ambitious about what is achievable.

Follow Misha’s terrific Kvetch subtack and find him on Twitter here.

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

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What exactly is Super? What’s its purpose? How can we do retirement policy better?

This is Part 2 of a special joint episode where Cameron is hosted by Matt from Aussie Firebug to participate in a debate about superannuation with CIO of The Motley Fool Australia, Scott Phillips.

Find Part 1 of this episode here.

Check out Aussie Firebug here.

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Please leave a comment with your ideas for future podcast conversations and Substack posts.

Thanks for reading Fresh Economic Thinking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

What exactly is Super? What’s its purpose?

This is Part 1 of a special joint episode where Cameron is hosted by Matt from Aussie Firebug to participate in a debate about superannuation with CIO of The Motley Fool Australia, Scott Phillips.

* What is the purpose of Super?

* Is there an alternative to the current Super system?

* Thoughts on how we could fix the Super system

* Do we actually need to have both Super and the Age Pension?

Check out Aussie Firebug here

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Please leave a comment with your ideas for future podcast conversations and Substack posts.

Thanks for reading Fresh Economic Thinking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

The Economist magazine recently wrote about the “worrying amount of fraud in medical research” and the former editor of The BMJ medical journal, Richard Smith, asked if it is “Time to assume that health research is fraudulent until proven otherwise?”

Too many designated experts in our society are anything but. They get things wrong, and when they do, they impose enormous costs on others.

Is a “f**k up levy” a solution?

Experts would pay a levy so that when they inevitably screw up we can use the money collected to compensate those who bear the costs. This is the idea that kicks off the conversation this week.

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

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Our first FET podcast guest is Catherine Cashmore, an experienced property professional. Catherine’s insights are unique because not only does she have on-the-ground insights about property investing, she has a deep understanding of the theoretical and policy debates about housing and property that have happened since the days of Henry George in the late 19th century.

As well as dealing with this long history of property debates, we ask Catherine about what buyers often get wrong about property investment, whether there is a financial logic to renting instead of buying, and what might be next for Australia’s property market.

You can find out more about Catherine and her thoughts on property markets and policy at the following places.

* The Land Cycle Investor is a free newsletter including lots of cool interviews!https://landcycleinvestor.fattail.com.au/  

* Cycles, Trends & Forecasts, containing in-depth information concerning the land cycle, how it applies to Australia and how to use the knowledge to create wealth.https://fattail.com.au/subscription/pan/

* Catherine’s personal website is at cashmoreco.com.au

* Prosper Australia is at Prosper.org.au

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Please leave a comment with your ideas for future podcast conversations and Substack posts.

Thanks for reading Fresh Economic Thinking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Is economic growth possible in a finite world?

It’s a big question. In this episode, we discuss whether economic growth must come with more resource use, whether that is good or bad, whether degrowth is possible, and practical ways that societies get good environmental outcomes.

Also, learn how Cameron has changed his views on this after a decade of research and why he now has an optimistic view about our environmental future.

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Please leave a comment with your ideas for future podcast conversations and Substack posts.

Thanks for reading Fresh Economic Thinking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

“Prediction. In ten years it will be hard to find anyone who will admit to supporting COVID lockdowns, school closures, masks, and vaccine passports.”

That was Cameron’s viral tweet this week. It gets to the heart of the great unwinding of COVID panic, an opinion shift that is becoming more evident by the day.

A similar unwinding is happening in the crypto world with the collapse of the FTX exchange. Those who bought into crypto hype for years are now changing their tune. The libertarian impulse that fed the hype turned out to just be a story, as many losers in this Ponzi scheme are now asking where the financial regulators were all along.

Lastly, in economic news, Australia has seen wage price growth of 3% in the past year, but household spending is up 28%. How can that be?

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Please leave a comment with your ideas for future podcast conversations and Substack posts.

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It has been a tumultuous 2022. Residual COVID panic persists in the news, but the real health issues this year are not COVID. Deaths from all causes are up 17% in Australia in 2022 and are similarly elevated in many countries.

We look at Australia’s COVID vaccine compensation scheme and dig into the puzzle of why the media seems to be ignoring 2,600 injured people who have made compensation claims.

These health outcomes were a policy choice. But no one seems to care.

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Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

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Thanks for reading Fresh Economic Thinking! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

We first chat about recent observations from our travels of what you notice about “rich” countries (whatever you interpret that to mean).

Then, we tackle one of my pet topic of Effective Marginal Tax Rates (EMTRs)—that is the combined effect of both taxes and losing welfare from earning an additional dollar (due to “means testing”). David Sligar’s recent article on the topic caught our eye.

I help clarify my argument that capital gains are just incomes with a different label, with nothing unique about them in economic terms compared to wages or other income. We can transform one into the other with accounting tricks. This was the topic of a recent substack post.

Follow Cameron and Jonathan on Twitter.

Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0

Please leave a comment with your ideas for future podcast conversations and Substack posts.