krogias

One issue that occupies the minds of environmentalists from across the political spectrum is food waste. Around one-third of all food produced for human consumption is never eaten. To environmentalists, this is astonishing and terrible. But, unfortunately, they are completely wrong. And I say that as a fervent environmentalist. It is actually a world with zero food waste that is a terrible place to be. We absolutely do not want to be that world. The reason is this. Food waste is, in practice, a tremendously important global food insurance policy. In a world of zero food waste, if a natural disaster, such as a flood or drought, hits some of the most productive agricultural regions, both food production and food consumption will fall dramatically. There is no buffer. If production falls, food consumption falls by an equal amount. If a flood, for example, wiped out a quarter of world food production one year, in a world with zero food waste the per person food intake must also fall on ave

After years of being an 'off-limits' topic, a debate has finally emerged in the mainstream media about an appropriate level of immigration to Australia. As a background, immigration levels have been rising steadily since the late 1990s, with record inflows after the financial crisis of 2008, as the below ABS chart shows. The break in the data series is a change in the measurement, now applying a "12/16 month rule" of residency that captures immigrants who travel to their home country periodically, but reside in Australia for 12 out of the past 16 months. This brings the data in line with many other countries, like Canada. The latest mainstream media attention has been at The Guardian , in an article by Tom Westlake, responding to ongoing discussions at MacroBusiness, which has led to some back and forth ( here , here , and now here ). No doubt the media will prefer to avoid the main issue, instead attracting clicks with racist rants and name-calling, all the while pre

Elon Musk has lost billions of dollars for nearly a decade trying to make electric vehicles at Tesla in a way that has never been done before. In the new tech-billionaire space-race, where Musk has also been active with his Space X company, his competitor Blue Origin, run by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has been running at an enormous financial loss, requiring Bezos to sell over a billion dollars of Amazon stock a year to fund his space venture. In both of these sectors, electric vehicles and space transport, there is no guarantee of any long term profit – there are threats from multiple new entrants as well as incumbents in both sectors. Yet billions of dollars are being poured into these experimental investments. When governments fund similar decades-long loss-making ventures that expand the economy’s production capabilities, we call it industrial policy. When a billionaire does it, we say it is markets at work. But there is nothing “market like” about long-term, long-shot, gambles like th

It is no secret that increasingly, workers are no longer enjoying the fruits of their labour as a smaller and smaller group of people and companies come to share the returns of (slowing) economic growth across developed nations such as the US, the UK and Australia. The ‘jobs for the boys’ model is having a tangible and outsized impact on inequality and it is killing the economy. It is so tangible you can measure it. And measure we did. In our book, Game of Mates , I and my colleague, Professor Paul Frijters explore insights from the science of human cooperation and raw metrics of economic costs and benefits, melding this information together to paint a picture of how a nation’s wealth can become siphoned off by a well-connected network of powerful individuals. Drawing on our own research and that of others, we find that those outside the game are being bled dry, with hundreds of billions of dollars a year of hidden theft taking place. The book helps to frame a discussion on ‘grey corru