Fresh Economic Thinking

Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir encounters a heated debate on the AusFinance subreddit about the merits of Australia’s superannuation system, something Cameron often raises. Also, we comment on the emergence of culture within subreddits and respond to some of the comments on Reddit about Cameron’s work. The rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation becomes somehow relevant to the whole conversation too!Enjoy this chat and leave a comment with your thoughts. Starting next week at FET is a four-part analysis that I hope will become a reference point for understanding key concepts related to housing production. * Why a feasible change of use is different from commercial feasibility* How prices determine the cost of building new homes via choices of density and quality* Housing supply is not new housing production* Why landbanking is a normal market outcome of balancing present and future housingAs always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Friend of the show Mike Fellman joins me to chat about all things macroeconomic. We pick up on a previous conversation I had with Moses Sternstein about the interest burden from public debt. Mike has a deep understanding of bond markets, macro policy, and money. It was a good chance to ask him about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which is a school of thought in economics that focuses on monetary operations and both sides of the monetary balance, which includes the debt (the liability to the government) and the asset (the Treasury bond held by the public or other organisation). Is the MMT view really that different from the standard macro view? And where does a lot of the fear about public debt come from? Who really bears the cost of interest on public debt?We dig into these questions. Enjoy the conversation. Follow Mike’s terrific Housing Hell Substack here.As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Moses Sterstein runs the terrific Random Walk substack. I stumbled across his creative insights a couple of years ago when someone sent me an article he wrote about the mythical housing shortage. Since then, I have kept track of his views on evolving macro-economic and demographic trends. This conversation was a chance for me to see how his independent analysis had led him to some similar views to mine on housing markets, but also test where we differ on the likely social, economic and political effects of long-term demographic trends. It was a surprise to hear that we have both arrived at a similar view on the application of monetary policy being too broad for many of the industry-specific inflation concerns we have today. Enjoy this conversation and find Moses on Twitter here and at his Random Walk Substack below. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This week, regular co-host Jonathan Gadir is back to discuss inheritance taxes. Are they the fairest tax that helps everyone start life on a more even footing? Or are they a nightmare of rules that require intrusive monitoring of gifts and that destroy family businesses?We take some initial steps towards understanding how much tax revenue is possible, the problems involved, and the intergenerational issues at play. An article of mine from 2014 on inheritance taxes is here.And a link to The Australia Institute report we mentioned on inheritance taxes and gift duties is here. Don’t forget that I am hosting a Land and Housing Economics workshop in Brisbane on 9-10th June 2026. Find out more here and come along to get into the weeds on property economics. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Custom workshops are also available to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Economics can be thought of as the study of human conflict. Prices are one way to settle conflicts over who gets what. So how does an economist think about war, and emergent cultural and political forces that create conflicts amongst groups?Paul Frijters runs Academia Libera Mentis, a new education institution for minds that dare. He documents this grand education experiment here at his Subtack.Paul and I go way back. Paul was my PhD supervisor, and we co-wrote Rigged, a book that dives deep into the way political favouritism operates in Australia. He has studied the way human societies function, particularly how the underlying emotional drivers of greed and love generate loyal groups as well as fierce competition. He even has a book with Gigi Foster about that called An Economic Theory of Greed, Love, Groups, and Networks. This underlying understanding of humanity should be extremely helpful for assessing potential scenarios in major global events, like the war in Iran. Although I am very much on board with the economic thinking about greed, love and groups, I am very much in the dark about the history and current tensions driving this new conflict in the Middle East. Paul has recently lived in Saudi Arabia and has been studying the region in detail. So enjoy this chat and keep in mind how things have unfolded between when we recorded, on 16th March, and what is happening when you listen to it. You can find Paul’s academy website with details of upcoming open days and events here.As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

One of the most requested guests on FET has been Professor Steve Keen. Steve has been a student of economics since the 1970s, and a critic of the oversimplifications of the neoclassical economic school. He was an academic at the University of Western Sydney for many years, and Head of School at Kingston University in the mid-2010s. One thing Steve taught me is to really think about the hidden assumptions in our economic models, which has been extremely valuable to me during my economic journey. Our conversation starts with Steve’s concerns about the Vietnam War draft, and moves on to his epiphanies about what was missing from economics education. We discuss his attempts to model the key insights of Hyman Minsky about the economic behaviour that generates macroeconomic cycles, and the state of the economic debate. Oh, and we talk about the very controversial issue of money creation by banks and the public Treasury!Find Steve’s YouTube channel here.Steve’s Debunking Economics podcast is here.And of course, Steve writes on Substack at Building a New Economics, which is where you can find his latest writings and conversations. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Most Aussie’s know Jim Penman’s face from the side of green trailers dragged through the suburbs as his franchisees mow lawns. But Jim is more than a businessman. He has written multiple books, has a PhD, and will run for election in Northcote, Victoria with the Libertarian party in November 2026. I wanted to find out what motivated Jim to run for politics, ask him about where he sees government waste and interference reducing our quality of life, and of course broach the topic of fertility, which he has a unique view on. It turns out that zoning and planning regulations are a big deal for Jim. Although we weren’t able to agree on much about this topic, we were able to break apart why our views differed.Find out more about Jim, his books, and try chatting with “AI Jim” at his website, jimpenman.com.au. Find him on X/Twitter here, and pre-order his new book Birth Rate Crisis here. Don’t forget about my upcoming Land and Housing Economics workshop on 9th and 10th June in Brisbane. Tickets here. PDF flyer attached belowAs always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Jay Lasker, aka Crémieux on Twitter/X, has spent the past few years digging into bad science and its bad data, especially in health science. For example, the rise in autism is almost solely due to expanded diagnosis and the incentives to get a diagnosis. This is especially relevant for policies like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia, which pays out on the basis of a diagnosis.Worse, because this idea of a rise in autism has become a global meme, people and politicians are already searching for answers and interventions to prevent it from getting worse! Before asking the question “Is the data correct and showing what we think?”, we jump to the question “What should we do about it?”Indeed, many of the troubling social trends that seem to capture our collective minds are pure data measurement artefacts. They aren’t real. We can stop worrying. Find Jay’s terrific Substack here.And for his excellent regular posting on Twitter/X find him here. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

You may have heard that our town planning system of rules and institutions that govern land uses in cities and often across the country is stifling new housing production, causing high prices. But much of the commentary misunderstands how town planning rules operate. I chat with Sydney town planner Tim Sneesby about how the system works, from a strategic level of creating zones and desired outcomes at a broad level, including earmarking infrastructure locations, to the day-to-day operations of assessing applications against those broader plans.I also push a little on some of the potential perverse incentives—wouldn’t town planners prefer to create cumbersome rules to keep themselves in a job and make their roles valuable even if there is no (or negative!) social benefit from those rules?For example, this article notes a rise in town planners per new home developed and the economic cost of regulating so many aspects of building designs. Let me know what you think?All comments are personal views and not those of Tim’s employer or associated entities. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Has the cultural and political pendulum swung too far in favour of women?That’s the argument made by David Maywald in his new book, The Relentless War on Masculinity. He doesn’t argue that women have done this. But even men in power are still fighting the battles of many decades ago. David looks at education and health outcomes, noting that women became the majority of university students four decades ago. There are four ways in which the cultural and political bias is expressed, called the Four Horsewomen. Once you understand them, they are hard to miss. * Misandry — the hatred of men, as well as the systemic contempt for men.* Gamma bias — the psychological tendency to interpret male and female behaviour through different lenses. A man who asserts himself is labelled aggressive, while a woman doing the same is praised as confident. A mother who works long hours is celebrated for her ambition, while a father who does so is criticised for neglecting his family.* Gynocentrism — societies that focus on women, are primarily concerned with female perspectives and interests, and take a feminine point of view.* Gaslighting — convincing men that their concerns are imaginary. Speak up about family law bias, and you’re told you must hate women. Question the “gender pay gap” narrative, and you’re accused of being sexist.David explains how to perceive these biases by whether the same judgment would be made regardless of the gender of the person being observed. As a father with two sons reaching adulthood, the most interesting data point was that young men (aged 15-24) only sit behind men over 65 in the strength of their views about traditional gender roles. Perhaps the pendulum is swinging back. Here’s a chart showing these trends, courtesy of analysis by e61 Institute. Finally, an excerpt from the book is in the article below at David’s Substack. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

During the COVID panic one of the sane voices was congitive scientist Mark Changizi. He saw the resulting panic as an emergent social and cultural phenomenon, and went as far as to sue the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for directing social media companies to censor what they deemed as misinformation. In this conversation, Mark talks of his intellectual journey, from mathematician and physicist to congitive scientist. He describes the overarching view of human perception and coordination as evolved tools and how leads to social patterns that would be replicated in any civilised large scale cooperative creatures. Would aliens also be debating free markets and communism? Here’s one example of evolved traits. Why do humans perceive visual illusions rather than have an accurate visual receptor? Because our visual perception evolved to anticipate outcomes, not accurately represent the light hitting the eyeballs. This was a fascinating discussion, and stay tuned for Mark’s comments on academia and his life since leaving academia 16 years ago. His latest book is called Motorcycle Mind, and I would recommend his previous book Expressly Human. Please find Mark at the following. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@markchangizi X: https://x.com/MarkChangiziWebsite: https://www.changizi.comAs always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a coherent way of understanding the economics of housing supply?You might be surprised, given the confidence of the prognostications of public commentators, that most don’t have a broadly accepted economic theory of why homes are built. It’s all ad hoc and often contradictory.Here, Tim Helm walks through the main empirical patterns that need to be explained by our economic theory of housing supply, and steps through why most current approaches are a poor fit. A good written explanation is here. Thanks for listening. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.Fresh Economic Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Previously, I have described an educational experiment happening in a castle in Belgium, called Academia Libera Mentis (ALM). It is run by my friend and co-author, Paul Frijters, with his wife Erika Turkstra, and alongside Gigi Foster and many others. In this episode, we discuss the story of this endeavour, as told in the upcoming book Minds that Dare. You can read about the trials and tribulations of this educational endeavour at the ALM substack. Check out the ALM website and the courses available in 2026. With a bit of luck, you might see me at ALM at some point in 2026. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

A long chat with power engineer Ben Beattie about Australia’s energy conversation, some of the muddled economics and arguments in favour of privatisation, public provision, and more. Check out Ben’s Baseload Podcast here.As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Is Australia’s housing market REALLY functioning normally? Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir pushes back on my recent statements about the housing market doing exactly what we should expect it to do in a conversation with Josh Szeps at his Uncomfortable Conversations podcast. I also respond to Steve Keen’s idea that the secret to lower home prices is regulating access to credit, such as with tighter rules limiting loan sizes to a function of current rent or value, which he expresses in this video. My basic view is that this can certainly change the speed of price adjustment in the housing market by preventing some trades, possibly dampening a bubble, but it won’t change the overall long-term average price level. It might also inadvertently make first home buying harder, not easier, which was a frustration of the strict credit controls pre-1980s. I explain more about the economic forces that constrain what housing markets can do in my book The Great Housing Hijack. This is why I argue that rather than trying to fight these forces, simply side-step them with subsidised non-market housing for the groups we think should be able to access it. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

James Nuzzo’s sports science and health research shows the gap between perception and reality when it comes to gender issues. This research, and especially his public comments about his various studies, got him cancelled and squeezed out by Edith Cowan University. You can read about it here in detail.As someone with an interest in the pursuit of truth and who is frustrated when the public conversation is at odds with the data, this topic is of interest. For example, few would realise that women became the majority of university students four decades ago, and are now the majority of staff too. So why is there still such a big push to give women more opportunities in higher education when it is men who have been behind for decades? Find James at X/Twitter here, and sign up to his newsletter below (and enjoy his Graph of the Week too).As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.Fresh Economic Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Would you believe that the same stories told in Australian housing debates about a lack of supply were dominant in Toronto, Canada, right up until the bust?I speak with Canadian real estate analyst and broker John Pasalis about how the market has changed in the past few years in Canada—from a speculative mania, to a sudden stop, to a new slow grind. Amongst it all, new apartment construction has plummeted, banks are facing numerous financing risks, and the outlook is soft. We also pick up the importance of the post-COVID immigration boom on the housing story. Find John’s Move Smartly podcast here, and follow him on Twitter here. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights.Fresh Economic Thinking is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir pushes back on my claim that Australia’s economic complexity is fine. Can a more complex economy generate better job choices and higher wages? Is it really okay to outsource the production of fundamental ingredients to a modern economy to other nations? Is Cameron just spouting nonsense neoclassical economics?Tune in to hear these questions answered, and find the original article here for paid FET subscribers:As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Too often, the public debate about housing focuses on costs and ignores investment returns to property owners. Mike Fellman was an economist at Freddie Mac and is now a property investor. He explains in this conversation how important the investment dynamics in housing are for understanding what gets built where. Find Mike on Twitter/X here and read his “thread of threads” that explains many of the misperceptions about the financial drivers of housing markets here. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

How do organisations that emerge to help people end up degrading over time and becoming a plain old shakedown?That’s the topic I discuss with regular co-host Jonathan Gadir. Although we don’t mention it, my book Rigged, co-authored with Paul Frijters, explains many of the economic mechanisms behind the degradation of institutions into what could be described as a rent-seeking mafia. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Will rent control destroy your city? Or is this a slogan economists use to signal their tribal allegiance?Cahal Moran, aka Unlearning Economics, discusses his intellectual journey into economics and the discovery of many shortcomings of how economics is taught and practised. Cahal’s latest Current Affairs article is called Rent Control is Fine, Actually. Watch all his YouTube videos here, and find his terrific video on rent control we discussed here. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

With all the cost-of-living crisis talk these days, you might wonder if it is possible for young Aussies to get ahead financially. But there is a group of people out there winning the financial game of life with their approach to financial independence. The perfect guest to discuss personal financial habits is Matt, who runs the Aussie Firebug website, where he documents his journey of to financial independence, retire early (FIRE). It is well worth checking out if financial independence is on your agenda. A couple of years back, Matt hosted a debate between me and Scott Phillips on superannuation, which you can listen to in two parts below. As a financially independent person, Matt was able to start multiple businesses, one of which is a co-working business called The Collective Co-space. You can find it here. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Taxpayers Alliance Chief Economist John Humphreys joins the FET podcast to talk all things tax. Is it possible to tax unrealised gains, as is proposed on superannuation accounts over $3 million in value? Maybe. But why bother doing it when it mostly changes the timing of taxation rather than the revenue? We speculate as to whether it is a daring political manoeuvre—propose something you know your opposition will find outrageous to trick them into arguing for exactly the tax setting you actually want.Enjoy this conversation on taxes, strange politics (where was this super-tax conversation pre-election?), my favourite topic of Effective Marginal Tax Rates, and more. Side note: One thing John and I have in common is that we both want to scrap the superannuation system. I explain my reasons in this article. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Given the Australian media’s obsession with the housing crisis, it would come as a shock to many that the share of after-tax disposable income spent on rent by renter households is lower in 2025 than it has been for most of the last decade.But that’s what ANU Professor Ben Phillips found in his latest research on rental affordability (you can find it here or download it below).In today’s FET video podcast, I chat with Ben about this surprising data and how we can make sense of it in light of current housing “crisis” debates. A key part of the story is this chart. It shows the share of disposable income (after-tax) income spent on housing for renter households. Notice that the most unaffordable period by this metric was 2012-2018.The situation is not great for renters on the lower incomes. There are people struggling at the bottom of the income distribution to keep up and rent where they previously could. But they are struggling to compete with those household who can pay higher rents. One interesting part of our discussion was the big difference between the price growth in rent advertisments and price growth of rents paid by all renter households. The chart below, from Ben’s report, shows that advertised rents (in this case using Corelogic’s data) diverge from rents paid by all renters in a cyclical way, and by a surprising amount, with advertised rents being between 10% and 40% higher than rents paid by all renters. Currently, the gap is near record highs. The existence of a gap comes from the fact that turnover in the rental market is about 2.5% per month, or 30% per year, and the distribution is such that some properties turnover more than others and hence appear more regularly in the advertised rental figures. But why is the gap so cyclical?We also chat about the fierce media debate playing out around the proposal to increase tax on the gains in superannuation accounts for the marginal amount over $3 million, which is just the top 0.5% of accounts. This has been a hot topic online. We chat about the feverish and unhinged reaction to what is a minor tightening up of an overly generous tax break that affects very few people. And if you missed my recent deep dive into why scrapping superannuation could make us all better off, try this article. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

There is an interesting debate taking place in urbanist circles. Is more density good for families because it helps reduce housing costs, or bad for families because it creates a lifestyle and environment that is not conducive to large families?Indeed, we might consider changing our policies and regulations based on what we think is the answer to this question. But do we have a reasonable answer?Daniel Hess runs the More Births Substack and is on Twitter @MoreBirths. Daniel has taken up the case against density because of its potential fertility effects and is my guest for this FET podcast video episode.Here is one of his articles on the topic.But Daniel is not alone in his concerns. The negative correlations between urban density and fertility are clear to many. In this episode, we discuss global and national fertility trends, and I push Daniel to justify why we should be concerned about these trends—after all, low-fertility places are the better places to live, have more opportunities for women, and many nations historically encouraged lower fertility to generate economic growth. In Hong Kong, the saying was “Two is enough”. In South Korea, it was “Stop at two, regardless of sex”. In Bangladesh, it was “One child is ideal, two children are enough”. Were they all wrong? I press Daniel to make the case for why low fertility is so bad, given that low fertility countries are generally the most desirable ones to live in. Here are three previous FET articles on the general topic, which show that I am not so concerned about declining fertility. A main issue Daniel identifies when it comes to the effect of housing density on fertility is the step-change in appropriateness of housing for families when increasing density from detached homes to apartments, even if the internal space in each dwelling is similar. Because of this, suburbia could be the secret sauce for high fertility. This makes intuitive sense to me.My own home is about 100 sqm internally, which is not too different from many nearby apartments. But it is on a 300 sqm lot and is therefore much more family-friendly than the 100 sqm apartments available in buildings just down the road. Maybe intermediate densities, like the small homes and townhouses that are more popular in new subdivisions these days, can still be as conducive to family formation as homes on large lots while economising on space and infrastructure. Unfortunately, this density is the most difficult to promote in existing areas where incremental change to much higher density and towers is usually the most economical for the property owner. We didn’t have a chance to dig into the popular idea in urbanist circles that the market will accommodate all needs at all locations, but regulations prevent large apartments that can accommodate families from being built. If we could deregulate to unleash the large-format family apartment, then this fertility and density issue might be resolved. For example, here’s one such statementThe fastest growing category of Toronto homes have zero bedrooms: Bachelor units grew by 28 per cent, jumping from 22,355 to 28,765."Basically, the only housing getting created in Toronto tends to be high-rise: 30, 40, 50 storeys," Mr. Moffat said. It's hard to put in units with three-plus bedrooms in those types of buildings.A mix of high land costs, restrictive zoning, using investors as preconstruction funders and high development charges pushes builders away from creating family-style units, according to Mr. Moffatt.I think such claims are 180 degrees wrong on the effect of regulations. Generally, if town planning rules limit housing types, they do so by preventing apartments so that detached homes are built instead, or requiring apartments that are built to be above a minimum size (or, in the language of The Great Housing Hijack, they restrain uses below the density equilibrium). But even having more three-bedroom and larger apartments would miss the step-change benefit of detached housing for families.Daniel comes down on the side of zoning regulations that promote detached homes where they would otherwise not be the market outcome. A key economic pattern that comes up in our conversation is that although young people have many detached housing options in smaller towns, they still commonly move to large cities and pay a premium to live in smaller apartments. For example, in Japan, small towns are giving away houses for free to try and attract families. In Australia, as in most places, housing is large and cheap in regional towns, yet the young people who grow up in those towns usually leave for higher-density places. Should we take this as evidence that low fertility and higher density lifestyles are a choice being actively made? If so, why is it bad?Finally, what of fertility policy?Should we pay a $5,000 per-child baby bonus, like Australia has done, and now Donald Trump is proposing? Or are social and cultural factors more important? After all, a lot of the decline in fertility was promoted through intentional moral suasion and cultural shifts, so perhaps this is the way it will reverse. I hope you enjoy the episode. I am keen to read comments from you all. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Was voting easy and efficient for you? This is something we should all appreciate. Australia’s electoral commission makes voting easy. Our preferential system improves on first-past-the-post single-member electoral systems. And all of this happens quietly and quickly for $30 per vote, thanks to the Australian Electoral Commission.Together with Jonathan Gadir, we riff on the good, the bad, and the ugly of elections. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.Here’s some recent paid subscriber FET content you might have missed:Theme: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music—Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0Interested in learning more? Fresh Economic Thinking runs in-person and online workshops to help your organisation dig into the economic issues you face and learn powerful insights. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Anna Samson has had a decade-long career in aid, was a US State Department-funded Fulbright Scholar, and has a PhD in international relations and American foreign policy.In this episode we discuss the inadvertent economic and political outcomes of foreign aid on receiving nations. What surprised me was Anna’s view on the scale of the rent-seeking across the aid industry and the transformation of the aid project into one of strategic military and economic interests rather than one of humanitarianism.Apologies for the audio quality.Please read Anna’s full article below about foreign aid, its failures, and its creeping national security objectives.As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. Find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0The United States has had its fair share of Presidential foreign policy doctrines over the years.The Truman Doctrine underpinned America’s Cold War containment policy to stop the spread of communism and Soviet influence.After the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, the Bush Doctrine brought us preventative military strikes and the ‘if you’re not with us, you’re against us’ principle.Just over 50 days into his second term, the Trump Doctrine is shaping up to be ‘you can’t make an omelette without blowing up the entire chicken coop’.Nowhere has this approach been more sharply felt than in the dismantling of USAID, a cornerstone of contemporary US foreign policy.Jettisoning USAID has achieved symbolic and practical purposes; it is both exactly what MAGA fans hoped for and what its critics feared: Trump embracing radical honesty in international relations by saying the quiet bits out loud and rupturing the mythology of the self-limiting guardrails on Executive power.Moments after his inauguration, President Trump, bolstered by Elon Musk’s analysis of USAID as “not an apple with a worm in it [but] a ball of worms”, froze $60 billion in overseas development aid and then stood down 97% of its staff.Industry veterans highlighted the catastrophe the Executive Orders caused: polio vaccination programs halted, tonnes of food aid left rotting in warehouses in the midst of famines, and a stop on urgent humanitarian assistance delivered to hard-to-reach conflict zones.That’s the problem with applying a Silicon Valley move-fast-and-break-things mindset to government policy: you can’t just CTRL-Z your way out of any unintended consequences.The recent Supreme Court decision ordering the Trump Administration to immediately unfreeze US$2 billion in existing aid contracts only provides temporary reprieve for those relying on American development assistance. The ruling doesn’t apply to billions in planned program funding or USAID jobs that have already been axed, both of which are the subject of separate legal challenges.To the President’s detractors, gutting USAID is ideological and myopic. But it’s also another example of Trump seeing which way the crowd is moving and running out in front.Indeed, rather than leaping to fill the void left by the US vacating the field, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a 40 per cent cut to his country’s aid budget. France and the Netherlands are also cutting their aid expenditure by about a third.While Western aid workers are wringing their hands and UN buildings are lowering their thermostats as a cost-saving measure, the sector bears a great deal of responsibility for its own demise.With little evidence to show aid programs are delivering on their grand promises of economic prosperity and development, spending billions on aid is increasingly justified as a tool to advance donor countries’ national security interests.This connection is not new: the modern aid system was built by imperial powers to help maintain influence even as their former colonial territories were achieving political independence.It should come as no surprise that many aid recipients are not exactly mourning USAID’s downfall. They point to numerous instances where USAID used humanitarianism as a front for meddling in other nations’ domestic politics.For all the talk of ‘empowerment’ and ‘local partnerships’, government-funded foreign aid is rooted in and continues to reproduce historical structures of resource extraction, dependence, market distortion and racism.Explicitly blurring the lines between humanitarianism and self-interest lays bare the iron fist of neocolonialism within the velvet glove of benevolence.From the perspective of donor countries, all this real-talk about interests over altruism requires the aid industry to demonstrate bang for taxpayer buck.It’s no accident that among the first casualties in DOGE’s USAID cuts were expat bureaucrats enjoying all the cushy accoutrements that a career in the aid industry guaranteed.Government donor agencies - including Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) — frequently administer aid money inefficiently and ineffectively; 40 per cent of Australian aid investments were rated as 'unsatisfactory' upon completion.If the aim of aid is to bolster our own security, not only should this causal link be established more directly, DFAT should explain why Australia funds aid over other defence spending with a clearer line of sight to maintaining the nation’s middle power status.Current approaches to aid program evaluations, including in DFAT’s most recent Performance of Australian Development Cooperation Report 2023-24, do not provide that level of accountability. Taxpayers are expected to accept measures like “capacity building” and numbers of individuals “supported” or “reached” in pursuit of development goals.USAID’s abolition, while confronting in its audacity, should not be met simply with self-righteous indignation about the supposed nobility of aid work or showing how aid can be weaponised to undercut the West’s rivals.Instead, it should be seen as an opportunity to rethink the whole foreign aid system. It's a chance to create a world where countries drive their own development and self-interested ‘generosity’ and donor dependence are no longer required.Decoupling foreign aid from national security will allow this money to do what it does best: humanitarian action based on foundational principles of humanity, impartiality, independence and neutrality. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Richard Tooth has a plan—save 300 lives a year on Australian roads. How? By using economic ideas to align risks and incentives better.Take a look at the chart below. People who die on Australia’s roads are young. Preventing a road death would save 40-50 years of life on average. That’s big. Cancer treatments typically save 4-10 life years, then we get five to ten times the life gains from preventing a road death as many deaths from diseases. I learnt from Richard that people will change their behaviour on the roads, either by driving more carefully, choosing a safer vehicle, or choosing not to drive at all, given the incentive to do so. But how to improve people’s incentives? Richard argues we can do this by changing how we regulate insurers. Give the insurers the right incentives for road-safety and they’ll encourage people to make better safer choices.And it works. He points out that relative to Australia insurers in the United Kingdom have greater – but still not optimal - incentives for road safety. In the United Kingdom insurers try to save money on payouts by offering discounted vehicle insurance to young drivers who opt in to telematics, a tool on your vehicle or phone that tracks your driving behaviour (braking, speed, acceleration, etc), which changes behaviour and only the whole reduces risks for all road users. Here’s a working paper of Richard’s about changing the way insurance functions to align the incentive of insurers with reducing road injuries and fatalities, using the insurance relationship to incentivise safer driving choices. It makes sense. Although I sometimes wonder whether such marginal changes make big differences, the fact that risk on the roads is heavily skewed by age and across people means that such incentives can have tangible effects on aggregate risks by focussing on those key people. To give a sense of the scale of the benefits, Richard reckons that such incentive changes through insurance could reduce the road toll in the range of 20% to 40%, saving 300 lives of the 1,300 lives taken on the roads each year and preventing a similar proportion of the 40,000 road injuries. In all, he reckons there are about $20 billion of benefits from better incentives to reduce overall road risks, while the cost of these changes would be extremely low. If you have an interest in this policy area, please reach out and I can put you in touch with Richard.For those who want to dig more into the topics we discussed, try these links* The 2021-22 Parliamentary Inquiry into Road Safety. Note its the Committee’s Recommendation 26:The committee recommends that the Australian Government work with state and territory governments, the insurance industry and other road safety stakeholders to investigate opportunities to reform motor vehicle insurance and to develop a roadmap towards policy and law reform.The Government responded in October 2023.The Australian Government will raise this recommendation with the state and territory governments, who are responsible for compulsory third-party insurance.* The Bureau of Infrastructure and Transport Research Economics (BITRE) publishes an annual report that compares Australia's road safety performance with that of other OECD nations. Find it here. The BITRE also reports on the social cost of road crashes, and you can find that here.* We spoke of the Tullock Spike and how decreasing risks for drivers in the road makes them behave in a way that increases the risks for others. This article on the Peltzman Effect describes the incentives at play. As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. Find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

Paul Frijters runs Academia Libera Mentis from a castle in Belgium. After a distinguished academic career in Australia and Europe, he is creating an academic oasis in the Ardennes for thinking, learning and growing. I’ve written before about this project.Today, we reflect on five years of the corona panic debacle, the economic and social fallout we are still experiencing, and what we could have known early on but refused to collectively acknowledge due to the madness of crowds. We discuss in detail the enormous cost to our lives of lockdowns, the fact that the low-risk nature of COVID was clear early on from things like the Diamond Princess event, and how to minimise panic in the future when the unexpected happens. You can read the full story of my COVID experience in these two articles:Unfortunately, here in my city of Brisbane, we are going through another panic and lockdown. We are so far a week into a “cyclone lockdown”. There have been two days of school closures in a large part of the state, deferred hospital treatments, extra delays of construction work (beyond justified by the weather), and shortages at supermarkets (especially toilet paper, the preferred emergency ration).It is okay to prepare for potential power losses and strong winds. But “potential” is a key word here. Why did we panic early rather than waiting for better information? Conditional statements seem too advanced. Differential consideration of risks—based on location in this case, rather than age and health condition in the COVID case—seem too subtle. All I hear is that a risk is a risk, so stop complaining. The craziest part is how much people love it. Take action, any action. Will that action help? Who cares! It doesn’t matter. And I fear that the collective impulse that makes for a rich and functional society is exactly the impulse that drives this behaviour. What else will we do to be part of the crowd in the next emergency?Paul predicted in 2022 that as a society we would learn that an instinct for such action has been nurtured and that new lockdowns would emerge. Here are some of Paul’s early writings on COVID and the nature of the crowd reaction to it from 2020 and 2021 that we mentioned. * Here’s a March 2020 assessment of the sheer scale of the human cost of lockdowns, border closures and other policy choices. * Here’s an August 2020 prediction of a baby bust (with some hope of a small boom). * Here’s a 2021 explanation of how many physical policies probably led to more virus circulation rather than less. * And here are some of Paul’s predictions from the comments section of this article about the likely ways the NDIS will be rorted from back in 2016.As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. Find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

A few weeks back, I had engineer Ben Beattie on the podcast to explain some of the unappreciated costs of transitioning to a renewable electricity grid. Before this, Aidan Morrison had explained how many of the costs required to deal with variation in when and where energy is produced from wind and solar were excluded from the (in)famous GenCost report from the CSIRO. Today, Professor Mark Diesendorf, who has studied the electricity grid and energy markets for many decades, provides the counterargument to these claims and makes the case that renewables will be cheaper in the coming decade. A couple of insightful points I took away were:* “Baseload” generation still requires some backup for breakdowns and maintenance* Sometimes expensive electricity in countries with a lot of renewables is just measuring the expense of the country overall (my interpretation of his point).We tried to get to the heart of where disagreements exist, and where they don’t, rather than talk past each other. I hope we achieved that. Find Mark’s writings at https://www.markdiesendorf.com and his latest book, The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation: Technological, Socioeconomic and Political Change, here.—————————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

In a recent FET article, I explained how the rental market adjusts to inflation arising in non-housing goods and services. Find that article here:The key quote is this:Another insight from the rental equilibrium is that inflation in non-housing goods means that renter households can pay more for rent because that means giving up fewerother goods and services for an extra quantity or quality of housing. This is the opposite of what many people might expect. Some might think that if goods and services have risen in price then households have less left over for rent, so rents should fall when there is inflation. This is wrong. In this episode, Jonathan and I discuss the mechanisms at play, whether housing is different and more important than other goods and services, and more. Enjoy. —————————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Electrical engineer Ben Beattie runs The Baseload Podcast, providing “common sense and unfiltered commentary” on Australia’s energy sector. Given the enormous investments taking place now (and planned in the next decade) to transition Australia’s electricity grid to predominantly renewables, it is worth keeping a close eye on the engineering and economic realities at play. To know if the costs of the planned energy transition path make sense given the benefits, we at a bare minimum need to know the true costs. Follow Ben on X here and read his articles on energy issues at The Spectator here.In the podcast, we discussed the graph below showing the total generation and demand in Australia’s electricity network (link here). Notice the enormous increase in nameplate generation capacity in the past decade while grid-electricity demand has remained flat. This shows that there has been very little extra energy generated for all that extra investment in capacity, as most of that new capacity is highly variable. You can find data here on the daily generation from different sources in Australia’s grid. Below I show a typical day with the features we spoke about in the podcast:* Coal (brown and black in the chart) is being curtailed during the day to make room for solar generation.* Gas (pink) fills up the even period when solar generation quickly drops off.* Wind (green) is variable and unpredictable throughout the period. * A baseload of about 18,000MW of generation needs to be delivered 24 hours a day.The Frontier report discussed offers an alternative to the Integrate System Plan (ISP) (in the jargon we used, this report shows what Toyota has for sale, not just Ferrari). You can find it here. Lastly, find below a previous FET article by Aidan Morrison explaining some of the deceptive analysis behind the story of a renewables grid being the cheapest option. —————————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Cameron and Jonathan discuss the trend of moving from Australia to cheaper countries abroad to beat the cost of living and the apparent inability to get ahead down under. ——————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Cameron and Jonathan examine Australia’s proposed social media ban for kids aged 16 and find it hard not to be critical of it.——————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Robert Sobyra is the research lead at BuildSkills Australia. Earlier this year Rob predicted that Australian unemployment in December would be above 4.7%. I took the other side of the bet and that now seems to be the winning side. Hear about why that unemployment uptick was forecast and the puzzling strength of the Australian economy, especially relative to its peers in Canada and New Zealand. Also learn about how important immigration is, or is not, when it comes to skilled construction workers.Find Robert on LinkedIn here.——————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Robert is an insightful Aussie commentator who has written at Fresh Economic Thinking before about the puzzle of the Labor party refusing to move left politically.Hear Robert’s thoughts on bicycle helmets, superannuation, school lunches and public transport fares and see if you are convinced by the arguments. Find Robert on X here.——————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Today we talk about the ongoing mystery of how to get sustained economic growth in Australia and peer nations and some of the political challenges we face trying to break out of this stagnation.Australian journalist and economic commentator Tarric Brooker coined the term “Burnout Economics” and writes regular analysis at burnouteconomics.com. Find Tarric on X here.——————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …

Why does the Australia Human Rights Commission think that the proposed misinformation bill is bad news? In this deep dive we look at what is proposed in the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill and its strange provisions, such as the specific harms of questioning elections or referenda and questioning the merits of public health measures. Looks suspiciously like an attempt to rewrite the history of the COVID era and the voice referendum. ——————Follow Cameron and Jonathan on X/Twitter. Buy The Great Housing Hijack here.Please like, comment, share, and subscribe.Theme music: Happy Swing by Serge Quadrado Music under Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC 4.0 This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.com/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.fresheconomicthinking.comPaid Fresh Economic Thinking subscribers can enjoy the audiobook version of Rigged: How networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians via their favourite podcast app.Chapters will be released weekly over the coming months.A physical copy or ebook can be bought here.Rigged was originally published in 2017 under the title Game of Mates, but was …