Wednesday, May 13, 2020

Bill Mitchell — Never trust a NAIRU estimate

It is Wednesday, so only some snippets today as I have deadlines and some travel to deal with. We have been finalising a Report on our latest estimates of the investment required to introduce a full-scale Job Guarantee in Australia. As part of that work, I have been going back through my NAIRU (Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment) estimates and updating data. I am also going to talk about that a bit in my presentation to the Economic Society of Australia tonight. That talk is about ultimately aimed at explaining the inflation fighting mechanisms inherent in the Job Guarantee, which is a centrepiece of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT). But to understand why that option is superior in efficiency terms, one has to know what the alternative buffer stock mechanism is. And that, of course, is the NAIRU orthodoxy. Also today, I am announcing some more detail about our plans to launch MMTed Q&A, as a weekly live program that will help people interested in our work to achieve better understandings. And some RIP style music with a suprising inflation result! Who could ask for more on a Wednesday. Tomorrow, the ABS release the Labour Force data and we will see how bad things have become in the Australian labour market over the month (more or less) just gone....
Bill Mitchell – billy blog
Never trust a NAIRU estimate
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

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