Economics, inequality & class

Superb read from @billbowtell, one of the very few in this pandemic who understood and kept bringing us back to the basic fact. Nature makes viruses, but people and politics make pandemics. (My own two cents - the cause of this pandemic?…

@profmiketoole @CrabbBrendan I find this ongoing attempt to adopt a UK-type narrative around Covid disturbing. Vaccinate high-risk groups, then 'open up'. This fault-line still there, with the 'economic' forces pushing against public…

I sit here every day listening to basic political questions being re-routed through 'economic' framings. The great victory of the conservatives worldwide, in the past 50 years, to substitute a weighted statistical construct - The Economy -…

The seductive simplicity of this graph is what allowed the substitution of an economy, or market, for society. That equilibrium point is said to be 'society', without need for government or regulation. Probably our greatest delusion.…

Maybe a mark of how specialised and narrow knowledge now is, that even experts speak constantly about the impact of the pandemic on the Economy. Rather than seeing that what we call the Economy was actually the cause of the pandemic.

Service industries are about 80% of the Oz Economy. Do people remember that 'service' was what servants do? They were 'in service'. These are some of the worst paid jobs in the country, with the worst conditions. We've trendied them up,…

There will come a time when the solemn pontification about the 'Economy' and its various indicators will be seen in the same light as Conan Doyle's fairies at the bottom of his garden.

#insiders can we stop talking about the 'Economy' as if it were an actual thing? It's a set of statistical indicators of social activity.

#auspol @billbowtell so here we are, the public forced into a fake double-bind between 2 risks of death. What the Economy crowd wanted. The 3rd way? Eliminate virus transmission with basic public health work, while the clots are…

Bruno Latour: "We should remember that this idea of framing everything in terms of the economy is a new thing in human history. The pandemic has shown us the economy is a very narrow and limited way of organising life and deciding who is…

@GregDore2 @GidMK @profmiketoole affirmation for those who argued for elimination, for health, the economy, and 'freedom'? If you don't use strong restrictions, you need many more weaker ones, for longer, and they cost more across all 3…

#auspol #covid19 It's not actually that difficult to guess the political views of nearly every pandemic expert. That's not them abandoning science and facts, that's the basic reality that every fact is only true within a wider framework of…

#auspol #covid19 the pandemic is over! The UK full of this tripe now. Having sacrificed about 130,000 people to economic interests, it then (with the US) hoovered up most of the world's vaccine supply, and apparently ended the pandemic,…

#covid19 #auspol it's incredibly difficult to challenge the public narratives around vaccines and risk without being immediately shunted into some loon anti-vaxxer, irrational category. But a few thoughts. 1/n The AZ vaccine repeatedly…

#auspol another outbreak, in which NSW will no doubt demonstrate its big kahoonas by rejecting a short lockdown, in favour of 3 months of hotspots and laundry lists of rules, to save the Economy. While running second-last amongst States…

#auspol "Our response will be proportionate". Gladys. More weaponised spin, making 'lockdown' the evil to be avoided. Global data shows conclusively that fast lockdowns have the best health, economic and civil liberties outcomes.

#covid19 this from John Skerritt, a nice bloke. Economic thinkers have wanted this shift in the public narrative for a year, 'only vaccines will end this pandemic'. They won't, alone, it's a dangerous shift. It excuses us dropping the ball…

#insiders this BS about 'low risk appetite'. Australians don't want the virus. They're smarter than these economic boobs who think getting the rubber ducks rolling back off the production line is 'normal life'.

#insiders come on, 2 economic journalists here, buying this idiot idea that you use aggregate employment numbers to drive wages growth? Unions drive wages growth, industrial muscle. Even the RBA has said it.

#auspol #covid19 why have we allowed 'opening up' to become a theme in this pandemic? As if public health restrictions were the problem, not the virus. Countries are doing well with forced internal reflection, economically too.

#covid19 If countries who didn't control Covid until now manage it via vaccines, they can join those countries who did control it, who 'ended' the pandemic about a year ago. Can't let the incompetent who killed millions for an 'Economy'…

@covid19 look out, virus about! How about 'we have restricted movement and gathering in this area because of this variant'. Nah, that might harm the Economy 🙄 https://t.co/zCE5YjGI01

#auspol #covid19 not seeing anybody connect the 2 plagues right now. Mice and Covid. Both caused by ecosystem disruption. In turn caused by our 'Economy', which has transformed agriculture into an economic system as well. The Economy…

#auspol “...open up Australia to world travel and arrivals so that our education sector, tourism sector and all of the other kinds of compassionate reasons for us to see family and friends overseas can come to the fore.” The first two are…

#auspol #covid19 I guess it was this sort of thing that prompted the government to cut funding again from universities, and give it to rent-seeking parasites as tax cuts. https://t.co/nSgsJCN3fq

#covid19 #auspol We've heard lots of wonderful medical and scientific expertise in this pandemic. Often, sadly, ignored. What we haven't heard as much are voices from the public policy community. The thinking that ties it all together. A…

#covid19 #auspol A pandemic is an ecological, social and political event. We've treated it as an economic and medical event.

#covid19 when the history of the pandemic is written, it won't be lockdowns that caused mental health problems (if there are any problems above normal). It will be the people who put economies ahead of people. https://t.co/SQeUWfgcfj

#covid19 #auspol we learned what Oz hasn't learned. That we use a venal statistical instrument we call 'the Economy' to transform complex social issues into a handful of statistical indicators, framed to favour the interests of the…

#covid19 #auspol @billbowtell @CrabbBrendan @profmiketoole @GregDore2 a thread asking some questions about global public health programs. 1/n Normally for an epidemic outbreak, for example Ebola, the country of origin is rapidly…

#auspol the dream that the vaccines will allow us to return to normal life with virus still circulating is just the latest lethal idiot idea from the Economy cult. The Economy is the cause of the pandemic, and continues to prolong it.…

#auspol #covid19 year 2 of the pandemic, same script. The Economy cult who caused year 1, fresh from their jabs, back for more of the same. https://t.co/wO4yl6TU9h

#auspol both sides singing from the same idiot hymn sheet. The Economy has boomed after being starved of public investment for decades. The 'fiscal' rescue packages redress years of neglect. They should be the new normal.…

#auspol #covid19 if Covid was a tax, the world would have smashed it a year ago.

#auspol more Economy-driven nonsense, for other natural events. This an advisory yesterday for snow-impacted roads. I was on this particular road, there's no way it should have been open. What's 'necessary' travel? School? Work? Who knows?…

@liammannix #covid19 I'd wager that the key to pandemics will end up being virulence, not immunity. About the agency of the pathogens themselves, immunity is all about us. Viruses talk to one another. https://t.co/mEV74rH7vw

#auspol #covid19 the ABS' stringency and economic output reports are some of the most useful of the pandemic, but are rarely noted. The latest again challenges all the public narratives about lockdowns and economic impact. NSW mid-pack at…

#auspol #covid smart people need to stand up and smash the idiotic use of the 'hermit kingdom' insult, the 'we need to live with risk' spin from economic thinkers. As if Oz is running away from some more grown-up 'living with Covid'. 1/3…

#covid19 #auspol it's not clear whether the destruction of the pandemic will be enough to force us to realise that extracting a tiny number of social transactions - the economic ones - and relabelling the whole of society as these…

#auspol interesting how quickly Oz shifted to the inevitability of endemicity, after being so strong on elimination in 2020. Strategic slippage, driven by economic 'live with the virus' thinkers, expert at continuously re-disguising their…

It's cute that a member of the LNP still believes in society. Mustn't have got the memo about it being replaced by an Economy. https://t.co/GRdScVLZvE

#auspol a century ago, the metric for successful business was the ability to pay a living wage. Really there's no such thing as 'business', just as there's no such thing as traffic. There are just customers, with or without money to spend.…

#QandA small business as the backbone of modern economies is the reason they have little resilience. They can't stop for a day to avoid a lethal virus without bankruptcy, wages and conditions flatline. The hobby farmers of business.

#auspol #covid19 the world already struggled with anti-vaxxers. Imagine the damage that's been done to future vaccination campaigns by the persistence with a clearly risky product, which has traumatised and infuriated even those strongly…

#auspol I've had first dose AZ, just as context. This isn't a pro-vax/anti-vax question for me, or even pro-AZ/anti-AZ. Twitter turns everything into debating binaries. It's about public health strategy. 1/7 https://t.co/vj7QfwoECO This…

#auspol #COVID19Aus the model (too flattering) the developed world is stumbling towards is continuous re-vaccination while allowing the virus to circulate. It takes serious time to develop and manufacture variations to vaccines, and then…

#auspol #COVID19Aus great response from @CrabbBrendan to the question on 7.30 last night, about whether NSW is paving the way to us all living with Covid. "I don't think anybody wants to live with Covid." (possibly paraphrasing, going on…

#auspol #covid19nsw NSW Health doing fantastic work. But why is it acceptable that the Premier can still stand there every day and quite explicitly say a priority is 'keeping the Economy open'? Does anybody seriously still believe the…

#covid19 #auspol pandemics about the only thing in all of history that alter the distribution of wealth. https://t.co/jrqJqOBExq

#auspol #covid19nsw still the same mistaken belief in 'panic buying'. People aren't panicking, they're preparing. Nobody wants to go to the supermarket with a lethal virus circulating in the community. https://t.co/BTpGRprPNH

#auspol #covid19 it's amazing that the same experiences, repeated multiple times, teach us nothing. Symptomatic of us using our 'normal' life thinking to try to understand a pandemic, the thinking that actually created the pandemic. About…

Progress will be us questioning what 'the Economy' actually is. We give it an agency, but don't question that agency.

#auspol #covid19 when we turned our societies into economies, they lost the resilience to do the most basic act. Taking shelter. If societies had that resilience, to allow most to stay home for weeks, the pandemic would never have…

#auspol aged care isn’t just a sector of the Australian economy. Without immigration, the entire continent is just an aged care home. https://t.co/g6UV86GZHF

#auspol #covid19 watching the UK news is a jaw-dropping experience of seeing the regulatory capture of democracy by venal corporate interests, in real time. /1 https://t.co/1JSpOEODdE https://t.co/eRUZ2jXitZ A story about the apparent…

#covid19aus #auspol tens of billions are being spent on transport projects in major cities. Few begin with the basic assumptions. Why do we need so much transport? Why do people require so much mobility to undertake basic everyday life? /1…

#covid19 #auspol extraordinary paper in Nature highlighting that we should be listening to a much wider range of expertise in a pandemic. A study of patterns of movement in Colombian cities during the pandemic, triangulated against…

#covid19 #auspol there are no ‘tracks’. Left to itself a virus can’t move anywhere. People are its transport. People mixing and moving. Usually ‘economically’. https://t.co/vTLSLnFXHy

#auspol #covid19nsw the Premier lashing sick people still in circulation today. Looking at mobility data, have to wonder if not closing non-essential work was a smart idea. NSW, the ‘keeping the Economy running’ State. /1…

#auspol #covid19 a pandemic is a socio-political event rather than a biological event. For a given pathogen, the spread of infection is entirely determined by the social and political arrangements it encounters. /1 For this reason, all of…

#covid19 #auspol so interesting that we smashed flu in NSW last year, with national lockdown, but that it continues to be flatlined into 2021, with society broadly open for the past year. Potential long-term good (inc. economic) that comes…

#covid19 #auspol in clear and deliberate violation of Godwin's law, imagine if during WW2 it all seemed a bit hard, and we decided to adopt a 'live with the Nazis' strategy. Let's give up on this defeating them thing, we need our holidays…

#auspol #covid19 there are many possible meanings of ‘live with the virus’. The political/economic meaning of it is a long way from the expert meaning of it. A desperate need to challenge anybody who utters these words to be specific about…

#auspol #covid19 worth noting that 'live with the virus' advocates are mostly concerned with costs to the 'Economy' of suppressing Covid. For comparison, annual costs to the Oz Economy of influenza are over $40 billion. /1 A shift to an…

#auspol #covid19 understand this, and you understand not only what caused the pandemic, but what keeps it going. An 'economic' world where work = freedom, and being in your own home is being 'locked down'. As the Nazis said, 'Arbeit Macht…

#covid19 will we get to a point where we stop being naive and realise that the same conservatives happy to incinerate the planet to protect vested interests, won't blink an eye killing millions in a pandemic, for the same reason? /1…

#covid19 #auspol the ultimate libertarian, lunatic endgame. Public health replaced entirely by 'personal judgement'. A pandemic created by collective behaviour, now left to the irrelevant and powerless resources of individuals. /1…

#covid19 #auspol two definitions of freedom doing battle in this pandemic. It IS the pandemic, the virus is just opportunistically hitching along. Developed nations, infected with an extreme libertarian virus about 50 years ago, generated…

#auspol the economic hysteria over at the AFR is something to behold. https://t.co/LjspVyyyCD

#auspol #covid19aus more power to Gladys for strongly repudiating the boneheads in her own Cabinet who want NSW to live with the virus. Not often a fan, but good strong leadership this morning on at least that topic. Though just asked -…

#covid19 #auspol sad that Dave Graeber is no longer with us. He'd have been angry and amused at the idea a pandemic threatens the 'Economy', of which more than half he contended was 'bullshit jobs'. https://t.co/RkH4CRD9b1

#covid19 it's not news or surprising that putting animals in crowded conditions breeds infectious disease. Antibiotic use in modern feedlot farming is astronomical, to both fatten, and treat infection. But are we seeing the link to our…

It doesn't even exist. All the -isms are retroactive projections over specific things that do exist. Communism socialist, capitalist countries all share so many features.

#auspol #covid19aus the economic forces opposing public health action in this pandemic first weaponised contact tracing, as some silver bullet. NSW showing right now how ridiculous that was. Now they’re moving on to vaccines, as the next…

@covid19aus #auspol does NSW want to wait until Christmas to beat this outbreak, with only Stage 3 restrictions? Or swallow its pride and go for Stage 4? Guess which is better for the ‘Economy’? Nothing to ‘balance’ here people.…

#covid19aus #auspol John Barilaro saying that kids must get back to school, for the ‘Economy’. And that NSW is ‘riding the wave’ of its current outbreak, waiting for the ‘peak’. Close your eyes and it could be a member of BoJo’s cabinet.…

#auspol #covid19aus great to see these measures. But how do we have leaders, more than 18 months into this pandemic, still talking about health and economic issues as two separate things, to be 'balanced'? https://t.co/OGDbPi3stC

#covid19aus #auspol it’s abundantly clear that the NSW strategy is about 90% designed simply to retain Cabinet unity. The refusal to define ‘work’ of any form is a strategic device to leave as much work as possible open, to appease the…

#auspol Is there a more disgusting notion than the UK Tories’ ‘levelling up’? Not to adjust the obscene wealth of the top 1%, but instead parade the fantasy of everybody becoming a billionaire. /1 https://t.co/XjAk4BtJ2N Modern…

#auspol #covid19aus conservatives have no time for schools (or unis), they constantly cut their funding and shovel it into rich privates. So we should take with a pinch of salt this concern about having schools open. /1…

#auspol #covid19 when supermarkets fix their supply chains, 'panic buying' turns out to have been an optical illusion generated by just-in-time lean logistics. The gig economy. https://t.co/Ra95K4zlYs

@auspol #covid19 funny that the same lockdowns have improved the financial situation of just about everybody who didn't do well out of the old Economy. https://t.co/43dWa3PP4d

#auspol #covid19 what happens when you turn your society into an economy. White-hot rage at loss of income, basic public health measures and averting the death of thousands not even in the conversation. No question this is the stress many…

#auspol #covid19 "You want to have a set of economic policies that ensure that businesses pay workers enough so that they are economically secure. And that should be the price of being in business." /1 https://t.co/R2oTSkyXK9 "If you can’t…

#covid19 if we don't understand how we reached this point, we'll be back here again. Over and over. I think we reached this point by turning our societies into economies. Where every social transaction is routed through a tiny handful of…

Modern conservative politics isn't government at all. It's regulatory capture, plundering of the treasury for vested interests. These parties have no real policy platform except cut taxes, cut regulation. Thus they can't manage anything,…

#covid19 #auspol Bezos flying into orbit in his rocket-powered dildo is where we end up when we turn societies into economies. Most of the world can’t afford to shelter in their own home (if they have one) from a lethal virus. The wealthy…

#auspol #covid19aus fighting a pandemic virus with political beliefs is like bringing a knife to a gun fight. There’s barely a word of this bilge from Hildebrand that isn’t a disgusting testament to the death cult of modern libertarianism.…

#covid19 the Spanish Flu pandemic lasted just over 2 years. No vaccines, no real treatments. Covid will easily go past it in duration. And possibly still with deaths. WITH vaccines. A damning indictment of modern economic life, which…

“…saying she was "putting people ahead of our budget and people ahead of our economy".” The lethally dangerous belief system that we accept daily without blinking. Where an ‘Economy’ is a separate thing to the people.…

#covid19aus #auspol there’s no mystery as to why NSW isn’t progressing out of this outbreak, like Victoria has. It’s been in plain view for over 18 months. The NSW Government thinks the ‘Economy’ is separate to society. The Economy is…

#covid19aus #auspol the cold, dead, genocidal eyes of the loons who think an economy and a society are two separate things. NSW was always going to end up here, because we didn’t pay enough attention to the core beliefs.…

#auspol #covid19aus libertarian theatre. Collective emergencies become individual tabloid pile-ons. Toilet paper, ‘rule’-breakers. (The delicious irony of libertarians getting their jollies persecuting rule-breakers). Sydneysiders 'willing…

#auspol #covid19aus notice that the same patterns occur both nationally and internationally. The virus outbreaks triggered in wealthier areas, with few restrictions. It spreads to poorer areas, who are then corralled and left to die. /1…

#insiders Health Hazzard talking about ‘balance’, another strategic conservative word. They use it for climate change too, it means ‘we won’t actually act, to save the Economy’. Ask them to ‘balance’ the Economy with childcare, and wages,…

#auspol #covid19aus the genius of conservative politics (again) now has us quibbling over single numbers as some sort of pandemic success measure. Just as they transformed society and politics into a handful of statistical measures they…

#auspol your chance of being a billionaire in Australia is about 1 in 700,000. It doesn’t stop economic zealots running the country with that as the defining rationale for the Economy. https://t.co/rS4vzW8SFH

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19nsw the Premier with the daily magical mantra about vaccines. Get vaccinated, yes. But it won't stop this outbreak, the NSW Government needs to do its job. What happens when you follow the wealth advice, and not…

#auspol #covid19aus can we remember Australia, that during much of 2020, when the federal government could have been improving quarantine and getting the best vaccine procurement deal for Australia, it…/1 https://t.co/YBVFcjZtxr 1)…

#auspol #covid19 much of this pandemic is playing out as Camus would have predicted. Only a novel comes close to capturing the full complexity of social life. Some excerpts in Tweets, today about illness and life in an ‘Economy’. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus to expand on this. Twice now the reserve powers have been used to remove elected leaders. Both were Labor politicians. Both for trivial ‘economic’ reasons. Nothing shows better how the Economy is really just a tool of…

#auspol #covid19aus this is the Brains Trust who daily listens to the wealth advice, I mean health advice, in NSW. https://t.co/fVYyNrK7ah

When given a choice between going regularly to the shops with Covid in circulation, or stocking up to avoid that, unsurprisingly the public choose the latter. As experts advised them to when the pandemic began. They protect their health,…

#auspol #covid19aus #covid19 the pandemic will be a trilogy. Year 1 - epidemiology (epis) defeat the Empire (Economy). Year 2- the Empire strikes back, using vaccines to try to ‘live with the virus’. Year 3 - the return of the epis, when…

#covid19nsw #covid19aus #auspol NSW is not in ‘total lockdown’. It’s extended its existing lockdown measures - which aren’t working - to the entire State. Delta isn’t the problem. This is the Economy variant. Businesses remain largely…

#covid19aus #auspol NSW restrictions predominantly limit social activity. They do much less to restrict work. The NSW Cabinet still wallows in the fantasy that the ‘Economy’ is separate to the lives of its people. Until that last fantasy…

@covid19aus #auspol Belief that the ‘Economy’ is an actual thing separate to the lives of people is now going to kill many of them, and destroy the livelihood of many more. And yet everybody still talks about ‘the Economy’. Our most…

#auspol #covid19aus as NSW case numbers continue to climb the exponential curve, I do worry that the Premier has already reached PLS (my new public health term). Peak Lecturing Shrillness. So far PLS hasn't slowed case growth. Closing…

#covid19nsw #auspol 100%. The reason NSW can’t turn its numbers around is that it refuses to close more workplaces. Still trying to save its Economy, rather than its people. Doesn’t even occur to it that those are the same thing.…

@auspol #covid19aus pandemics are the RCT for all human beliefs. Turns out libertarianism is a lethal rationalisation of the status quo, via a set of statistical metrics it calls the ‘Economy’. That Emperor has been stark raving naked for…

Does anybody else ever pause and think, 'I'm arguing with people about the need to stop the community from becoming infected with a pandemic virus?' The gobsmacking genius of the 'Economy' as a mass persuasion tool, that millions now see…

#covid19aus #auspol the Doherty Report modelled vaccination of those aged 12+ only as a ‘thought experiment’. Not because the Doherty people are bastards, but because National Cabinet specifically excluded anybody below 16 in Doherty’s…

#auspol #covid19aus Josh Frydenberg’s whinge about turning off government support, like all ‘we can’t live like this forever’ whines, needs to be looked at with this data as context. /1 https://t.co/MkWzvjXRUe Look at that spending in WW1…

#auspol #covid19aus the thing to remember about a pandemic is, it only gives you an illusion of choice of action. You can go 'softer' or 'harder', but the former becomes the latter, in time, with added deaths, morbidity and economic…

#auspol #covid19aus I still remember a time when staying at home was called a holiday. The homicidal cunning of the modern political libertarian, to reframe ‘freedom’ as going to work, and oppression as being in your own home. Gotta love…

#covid19 #auspol the libertarians have cowed even most experts into believing Covid eradication is impossible. Most surrender at the idea of the social costs. /1 https://t.co/ItnhmWwxLE https://t.co/LZ4VhMp3FA Let’s consider those,…

#auspol only economists could blame administrators for the political fuck-ups of the pandemic. Maybe they hadn't noticed that the FDA only approved Pfizer for use in the past fortnight. https://t.co/WHhEryZ12V

#auspol #covid19aus 4.3 million a week globally becoming infected. 67,000 of them dying. That’s 67,000 families losing loved ones, per week. The Economy crowd want you to believe with a jab, this is all as good as over. Our disgusting and…

#auspol #covid19aus some thought the fires might force a change in climate thinking by the LNP. And then Brittany Higgins and the Respect@Work movement might change their thinking on women. And UK and US deaths might change their 'live…

#auspol #covid19aus which chapter of the public health textbook advises opening bars and restaurants in wealthier parts of town, at the same time as peak hospitalisation and death rates are predicted in the poorer suburbs? Asking for a…

“Business needs certainty”. Which disqualifies it as a model to run a society (or pandemic response) with, you’d think. Life doesn’t do certainties, except death. They used to add taxes to that saying, but business found a way to avoid…

#auspol #covid19aus hats off to public health experts who still call a spade a spade. The task is ALWAYS to eliminate or even eradicate infectious disease. Yes it’s hard. Going to the moon was hard too. Our ambition replaced by the…

@OrinCordus @RichardfromSyd1 @YouAreLobbyLud @DrBevSmallwood apparently GPs are being asked to take on HITH duties, which (also apparently) violates the usual demarcation between State-run hospitals and largely commonwealth-run general…

Up to 75% of the businesses some plan to save by ‘opening up’ would have failed anyway, inside 5 years, even without the pandemic. The ‘Economy’ isn’t a thing, we need to stop talking about it as if we’re living ‘in’ an economy. /1 #auspol…

#auspol #covid19aus the always evolving political slogan-variants, which in turn create Covid variants. The UK overnight. They now say ‘jabs, jabs, jabs become jobs, jobs, jobs’. You won’t see clearer evidence of how vaccination has been…

#auspol #covid19aus the weaponisation of Delta. A long thread on how political strategists have used Delta to re-energise the 'live with the virus' strategy, in Australia. Most political strategy happens where the public never sees it, but…

Still surprises me that we can get nearly 2 years into a pandemic, and very little discussion is had about economic resilience. If a society basically has to be shut down to avoid mass death, the problem isn’t the virus. /1 Societies are…

#auspol #covid19aus look at government spending during both world wars. That boost gave us prosperity for about 50 years afterwards. Never believe economic thinkers who say we can’t afford to spend a lot more to beat Covid. It would also…

#auspol #covid19 Modern democracy. The gated community. The more social structures collapse, the more the fortunate fence themselves off. Billionaires buy whole islands and build bunkers to escape climate change catastrophe, at the top end…

Something ancient societies knew but which we’ve forgotten is that ideas have agency. They’re never our ideas or opinions, they have an independent existence that crosses millennia. All ideas are dangerous ideas, they need to be tamed.…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus news from the front lines of ‘living with Covid’, from the UK. Today’s figures standard. 35,623 new infections. Another 180 dead. About 1000 dead per week. That’s just under their average *annual* deaths from a…

#auspol #covid19aus Australia fought so hard to defeat Covid for nearly 2 years, spending $90 billion on JobKeeper alone. Until mid-2021 it was winning too. Then came maybe the most inexplicable act of bastardry in the history of the…

#auspol both the Liberal and National parties were formed in response to the creation of the ALP in Australia, our first party. Both represented existing wealth in Australia, through farming and business mostly. They were formed to…

#auspol #nswpol hey political journos. When pollies say infections/cases no longer matter, only hospitalisations and deaths do, ask them what those hundreds of thousands of newly-infected people will be asked to do, in the next 6 months?…

#auspol #nswpol #covid19aus what’s been true across the entire world throughout this pandemic is that attempts to ‘ring-fence’ infection, either defensively or offensively, don’t work. Thread about ‘all being in it together’. /1 There was…

If we ask why we’re still in the pandemic, nearly 2 years after it began, my answer would always be: because we don’t understand money. Yesterday the feds started cutting off Covid support, at the end of a year in which it was already…

#nswpol #covid19aus “It is not about scaling back contact tracing, it will be the prioritisation…to determine where best to allocate our resources”. Dr Kerry Chant, saying ‘it’s not about scaling back, it’s about scaling back’. /1…

Wonderful article shared by @NobodyImpawtant. Twitter users will see themselves here, defending the last relatively tiny island of public conversation we have left. But I think this goes further and deeper. /1 https://t.co/btC6O3ou45 I…

#auspol this rare HD footage of Queen Victoria has profound hints (I think) to how we don’t understand politics. The adulation for the monarch was genuine. Quick thread on why the wrong people keep winning elections. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus in our slavish copying of the UK Covid strategy in NSW and Canberra, we’ve moved to the next step. Where experts ‘only advise’, and ‘it’s politicians who make the decisions’. Meaning they ignore the advice. Like they…

India, a fraction of the wealth of much of the developed world, is moving towards elimination of Covid. While richer nations open their communities up to widespread infection, to save businesses. The majority of which would have failed…

#auspol bit of a sleeper in this week’s news, great article about the fracturing of communities, ostensibly by social media. Given the fractious nature of Twitter too, there’s something important here, being missed I suspect. /1…

#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud @RealOzSAGE the weaponisation of hospitalisation. Economic interests and their representatives in government have weaponised multiple public health concepts in this pandemic, and hospitalisation is…

#nswpol #auspol #covid19aus Paul Toole repeating that his job is to 'balance' peoples' health against the 'Economy'. We're back in 2020 again. What's this 'Economy' that we need to make some people die for? Isn't it just a tool to serve…

#auspol #covid19aus Because the people who see society as an Economy are desperately trying to return to the old 'normal' before the catastrophe of the past 2 years forces changes on it, a few thoughts. /1 https://t.co/Se5STFXkGU Notice…

Here’s the Premier, saying NSW is ‘open for business’. Actually most social activity will now re-open, but it’s revealing that his first thought is business. NSW is run by business, for business, you’d have to be blind to not see it.…

Chief Medical Officer yesterday: vaccines alone won’t be sufficient to ‘suppress circulation’ of the virus. And reinforced the need to suppress that circulation. We need to shift the discussion to prevalence, and the health/social/economic…

The extraordinary pace of vaccination has upset all of the modelling (in a good way). Many countries look on with envy at how Australia mobilises the community for a challenge. We need to understand how Australia builds and maintains a…

Debates about the transition to endemicity show how science is not a homogeneous enterprise. This paper from an immunological perspective is quite upbeat. Evolutionary virologists seem less so. Etc. What to do when the science is…

Nothing speaks to the fragility of modern societies more than the phrase ‘supply chain’. The things you need always need to come from somewhere else. This is the operating system of our (‘economic’) societies, what the ‘Economy’ is -…

The corner shop represented a more resilient culture, logistically. The hyper-mobility that new forms of transport injected into our societies also stripped them of much of their resilience. Much of ‘freedom day’ type rhetoric is about the…

The ‘service sector’ employs about 90% of Australian workers, and generates about 80% of our GDP. We’ve forgotten that ‘service’ historically meant servants. One ‘went into service’. What economic mumbo-jumbo is hiding is that most of us…

This entire pandemic has been about existing vested ‘economic’ interests doing everything in their power to undermine basic public health action. Just as they undermine climate action. Health systems should be the last line of defence, not…

Dominic Perrottet, when asked about opening up to the regions again, said ‘business and consumer confidence’ is low there, so that apparently needs addressing. More than half of yesterday’s cases were in the regions. The Economy will fix…

Another day, another looking on in helplessness at modern societies, who approach existential threats with the maturity of adolescents. No adult sense of responsibility or sacrifice. The Korean War actually helps explain why, I think.…

The Peace of Westphalia, 1648. Seemingly random historical event that goes right to the heart of Covid, 2021. This apportioning of territory after the Thirty Years War was in some ways the birth of what we call countries today. Why I think…

How the ‘Economy’ changes everything about the world. This is Nordlingen in southern German. About 1100 years old. Urban patterns reflect social patterns. Notice the clear geometric organisation of the town, centred on the church. A very…

58% of Americans were opposed to the idea of going to the moon. ‘Moonshot’ became the term for having a major collective aim. For the Neville Chamberlains who want to appease Covid, to ‘live with’ it, what moonshots do you offer as an…

China never wavered from a Covid elimination strategy. The clear evidence that stopping infections and deaths is a boon to ‘the Economy’ should have destroyed that idiot, fairy tale substitute for society entirely. But the Economy is a…

“Economic progress supposes...a growing number of different desires, for, without a difference in desires, no exchange is possible, and, with the appearance of each new, different desire, the life of exchange is kindled.” Gabriel Tarde…

We can’t agree on emissions, or on Covid infections. We don’t talk about *why* we have emissions, or pandemics. It’s very difficult to make progress without getting to the why, on anything. Emissions and infections are only by-products of…

The pandemic is caused by economics, not the virus. #auspol #covid19aus @RealOzSAGE https://t.co/CsIZ5rShBW

I have decided that because the contribution of my income tax to Australian life is infinitesimally small, I should no longer pay it. It will not be missed. https://t.co/Ro8z1CF1At #auspol

Another libertarian triumph. The young lining up to fight against basics like public health. But not for affordable housing, secure employment and a living wage. #auspol https://t.co/3gbuBRcLYz

There is a fast-track way to change the world. It would take 10 minutes. Everybody join a union. And it’s not just about money. Political libertarian ideas are stupid. But they win because they’re organised. Unions have always been the…

Short thread on some bits of National Cabinet yesterday. Note the graphic first, from the PM’s own webpage. Our safety comes second to the Economy. But we already knew that. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/V3RHWbIRAV Doherty provided…

Austria, one home of free-market libertarianism. When you deny the public exists, you end up reinventing it one (incarcerated) group at a time. Libertarians hate the lockdowns their own ideas cause. /1#auspol #covid19aus @YouAreLobbyLud…

“It must never be taken from us again.” I think he genuinely sees the past 2 years as economic life, stolen by pesky public health measures. The ‘can-do capitalism’ and ‘don’t-do government’ speech. Clearly he leads a don’t-do government,…

h/t to @RichardfromSyd1 for highlighting this one. The UK infected: - nearly half of its babies under 1 - nearly 60% of its toddlers aged 1-4 - 81% of its children aged 5-14. Something I want to understand. A short thread. /1 #auspol…

Some Liberals remember that government is about people. And that the 'Economy' is these same people. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/yfTGUfNCch

Libertarians don’t solve problems. They re-brand them as non-problems, or as faux problems they can manipulate in strategic ways. They can’t solve collective problems, because they don’t believe the collective is even a thing. Quick…

Laura Tingle makes the point that our truly essential workers don’t wear high-vis or hard hats. They’re nurses, teachers, supermarket workers, cleaners, sewage workers etc. The ruling LNP code their true allegiances in their rapid return…

‘Proportionate’. Like ‘balance’, for a libertarian politician this means ‘not doing anything at all, to protect the Economy’. https://t.co/YoyoB5AT7O

The ‘let’s infect the kids to save the Economy’ UK is now requiring masks in schools. In the monkey-see, monkey-do world of live with the virus zealots, maybe it will change the rhetoric from our homegrown child-infection cheer squad.…

‘Live alongside’ a virus. The simple, lethal appeal of the metaphors used by spin merchants. To unpack this one, how do you live ‘alongside’ a virus? Does it sit on the seat next to you on the bus? Can you wave at it in the next aisle of…

Faster than the variants is the development of political strategy and spin to head-off economic damage. Within a day of the announcement of Omicron, the 'it seems mild' spin-variant was already set to go. #auspol #covid19aus…

“National Cabinet agreed that the Commonwealth and state and territory governments will continue to pursue a suppression strategy, noting the objective is to limit the rate of Omicron incursions into Australia, rather than eliminate it at…

For those of you who have ‘economic dreams’, this will be exciting. For those with some sort of functioning brain, maybe less so. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2xVatntlRC

My Year 5 daughter's teacher is a libertarian anti-vaxxer, anti-lockdown, anti-anything public health person. Yesterday she told the class not to follow rules, not to let people tell you what to do. This will be her last 2 weeks at the…

I like news from the front-line of Covid, if I can put it that way. How our National Plan is playing out in everyday life. A short thread about a meeting. /1 #auspol #covid19aus I was in a meeting with the senior managers of a large…

There’s something important to be understood in why for disasters like bushfires, experts lead the effort to end the disaster, every single day. But for the pandemic, politicians have crowded into the space. Short thread. /1 #auspol…

Will this be the tipping point that will force us to at last to deal with prevalence, with spread? To finally stop substituting society with an ‘economy’? I’m not confident. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/UZAfj5QH23

Supply and demand, one of the mythologies of economic society. The invisible (sleight of) hand, where questions of power and justice disappear inside equilibrium equations. If there’s not enough supply of something (e.g. cars),…/1 #auspol…

The Dom is on top of this. Still waving at Covid across the aisle in the supermarket, as it sits ‘alongside’ him. And I’m sure ICU staff feel for the small businesses whose cafe lattes and scented candles are more important than virus…

Can’t we just call a spade a spade? It’s been obvious since the beginning that most conservative governments will use vaccines like a type of economic viagra. With a chaser of ‘following the medical advice’ spin. No integrated public…

The stock market, proxy for the ‘economy’. One short blip when Covid started, then continuing as if nothing had happened. That’s what’s killed 17.5 million people. The people are in the yellow line, the Economy and its puppet leaders, the…

The chief economist for the Western Australia Chamber of Commerce described masks this morning as 'sand in the cogs of consumer confidence'. This is what we're up against. Business isn't a thing. The Economy isn't a thing. There are just…

Freedom Day NSW! Take that mask off and suck in some Covid, to spice up your Christmas with loved ones. Let's all drink to The Economy - Cheers! #nswpol #covid19aus #auspol https://t.co/1pkT5SrDUq

I think in Oz libertarian politicians sometimes don't realise they're talking to a pretty small minority. It only works if you make it about aspiration, status. Like schools, and tax. Public safety? Not so sure. Very small and whiney…

Another libertarian spin trick of the pandemic. ‘But’. Two contradictory sentences, joined by but. ‘We put the health and safety of our people first, BUT we also have to [insert economic thing]’. Only what follows the ‘but’ is actually…

Wealthy nations hoard all of the world’s vaccines, and then wash their hands not only of international responsibility, but even national, with ‘personal responsibility’. I’m glad to see ‘libertarian’ being used so freely now. Know your…

Some joked this would happen. But we deep down knew they’d go here. It possibly won’t stop just at health care either, if the Economy becomes too disrupted with mass infection. The Covid minimisers have defined reality as ‘what we want it…

What things are we planning to do as socieities that are so important, that we need to stop trying to beat a pandemic, to do them? It seems to be mostly: - tax cuts - dismantling the public sphere, and - flying on planes to trash other…

There’s an (often implied) assumption that if Covid gets bad enough, the deniers will eventually come to their senses. I think that’s as dangerous as assuming Covid will become more mild. We have the evidence that this is unlikely -…

This year’s federal election will test a hypothesis. The Australian libertarians believe we share the same dislike of government as the public in the UK and US. I think the Oz public has shifted there, and will entertain elements of…

A short thread on the magnitude of public maladministration in Australia in the past 50 years, driven by libertarian populists in more recent times and more general neoliberal ideas prior to that. And how Covid throws this disaster into…

Australians have had a low tolerance for libertarian ideas. The 2014 Budget, a libertarian fantasy wish-list, is empirical evidence, it destroyed that government in 2 years. My gut feeling is libertarian pandemic strategies will be even…

Monkey-see, monkey-do. On exactly the same day, on opposite ends of the world, libertarian Oz and the UK announce the same changes to testing. ‘The aim is to prevent prolonging isolation for workers’. No public health justification,…

One of many families who can’t even get basic food stuffs at the supermarket. Fruit, vegetables, meat. Then having to listen to incompetent ideologues every day saying how swimmingly it’s all going. Learning to live with Covid. You need…

I’m going to use this data to suggest that the political binaries that drive so much public debate are actually fantasies. Obviously the data shows that the ‘Economy’ is likely in more trouble now than at any stage of the pandemic. But…

We’re seeing right now the global clinical trial for neoliberal/libertarian ideas. When you try to run society as an ‘Economy’, this is what happens. The Economy is a political ruse, a statistical rationalisation of vested interest. It…

Just a reminder that Covid and climate change are the same issue. Clean air. That thin blue line contains all known life in the universe. You can’t see the Economy from space. https://t.co/uYFquoIG7D

This bit of libertarian sleight of hand: “We’re now in a stage of the pandemic where you can’t just make everything free…When someone tells you they want to make something free, someone’s always going to pay for it, and it’s going to be…

‘Confidence’ is a premium type of economic gaslighting. It’s not the amgydala, you pillock. As if we should be ‘confident’ to go out and get infected. It’s rational consumers responding to sociopathic politicians and economists.…

In other renormalisation news, the meaning of ‘proportionate’ becomes clearer. Killing 20 million of 7.8 billion people is better than killing 50 million of 1.8 billion. Relax, only Cretaceous-killing asteroids that destroy most life on…

‘Endemic’ is something always present in a population, at a certain level. Like low wages, vast gaps in wealth, underfunded public schools and hospitals, and low tax rates for the wealthy. ‘Epidemic’ is peaks within this. Like massive tax…

The neoliberal experiment of the past 50+ years is unravelling in multiple ways, all at the same time. It’s important to get back to core beliefs, because that’s the raw material of society - beliefs. Interest rates and Covid, a short…

All facts are political. ‘Endemic’, for example. In the epidemiology textbooks it describes a pattern of disease. But its origins? It was originally used to describe the persistence of disease in poor regions/countries. Like a character of…

Josh Frydenberg says the approx. $260 billion Australians have saved in the pandemic will fire economic recovery. That 'saved' money barely dents the 2 trillion in personal debt. Debt generated by devolving collective public services to…

Public health action takes place within a society. But starting in the 1970s, society was replaced with an ‘Economy’. The greatest strategic political weapon ever conceived. Many honestly believe it’s an actual thing. As with climate…

Meet just one of the libertarian leaders responsible for the Covid train wreck. The UK Treasurer. That’s a conservative estimate of his net worth, others are closer to $400-500 million. His father in law is a billionaire. Rishi is…

This is a 1798 mapping of yellow fever in NYC. One thing to notice about the Covid pandemic is the way much of the rich visualisation public health has used for centuries to analyse outbreaks has been stripped back to the barest data -…

My gut feeling that Australians don’t support libertarian fantasies (see again Tony Abbott’s 2014 budget) is getting support from the latest dire polling. Let’s hope this holds. https://t.co/cXaQHyrjEz

Public health, libertarian style. My wife, a primary teacher, said her year 3 class were discussing the RAT testing. One of the kids said 'what's that?' The other kids explained. Nope, never heard of it, the other kid said. Parents not…

This particular political metaphor (spin), ‘alongside’. The virus lives *inside* us, not alongside us. You can’t wave to it in the supermarket. Unless Tim means alongside poorer suburbs infected with Covid, in which case yes, that is the…

There is an economic eugenics too. The one where you develop algorithms to pursue and harass the poor to the point of suicide for any apparent welfare anomalies, but allow businesses to keep $40 billion in JobKeeper payments that they…

Less than 1 week into the new school year, my youngest (10) is one of only 4 students in her class still wearing a mask. We can and should blame the NSW Government for this. But also, that's a lot of parents who aren't insisting. We get…

Every effort is being made by conservative governments globally to suppress attention to deaths. In the UK they're planning to not even report them. Even constant reference to 'cases' and 'hospitalisations', and the seemingly.../1 #auspol…

50 years of libertarianism. No meaningful action against pandemics, or climate change. Rampant inequality. Soaring cost of living, stagnant wages. ‘Getting government out of our lives’. Who put government *in* our lives? We did. To save us…

The only thing children seem resilient to in this pandemic is infection. Everything else, including public health measures to prevent infection, risks damaging them for life. Strip away this constant BS. The sub-text is always the Economy.…

Andrew Probyn trotting out the ‘balance’ line on #insiders, completely house-trained by government spin doctors. Such earnest pondering, as he weighs how many people we can kill to keep the Economy going. More eugenics, dressed up as…

The decoupling of deaths from case numbers seems to reflect the collapse of comprehensive testing, as governments give up. We have form in fixing disasters by making them invisible. Plenty of genocides for example use that methodology.…

When conservatives talk about being 'better economic managers', ask what economic things they've managed. For example the current government - what 'management' of the Economy have they done in this term? Covid stimulus? At other times…

Benjamin Franklin said the only two certainties in life are death and taxes. Modern conservatives got rid of taxes. They're happy to keep the deaths, provided it's people who vote for the other side.

In our success against HIV, did we make condoms: A) free, or B) tax deductible? (Hint: we had a government then who didn't think their job was to 'get out of the way' of a virus.) https://t.co/8nMf8oGyQS

Who qualifies for a (free) Covid test in NSW? Outside schools. Nobody. Once chemists are stocked with RATs, only a doctor can get you a free test. Even the vulnerable groups listed need to do a RAT first. The LNP were outraged by…

Hearing anecdotally that many schools are already not even bothering to notify parents if a child is positive in a class. I know it from my own school, several kids are positive, but nothing has come from the school. #nswpol

A lot more talk about excess deaths now. Very few draw the obvious conclusion from the data that countries who stopped their 'economies' were the healthiest they'd ever been. You can spot where the 'Economy' came back, around February this…

The out-of-body experience of the pandemic today. A thread on the decoupling of thought from reality, with Covid strategy. And why we only ever needed about 3 days to be totally rid of Covid, but we’re into our 3rd year of it. /1…

The government relentlessly attacks super because it’s maybe an even greater threat to them than unions. VAST amounts of the nation’s wealth is now in super funds. And we - me and you - own those. /1 #auspol https://t.co/owb063cMgA This is…

Los Angeles from above tells us a lot about our cultures. That vast grey washed-out colour is mostly roads. Roads occupy between 20-60% of urban space in modern cities. Quick thread looking at a different aspect of what that means. /1…

Unemployment was always deliberately higher, to suppress wages and conditions in the workforce. It's lower now because business has had to tap homegrown labour, because foreign cheap labour is harder to access. https://t.co/gUOpvnjBZc

Why are we pretending the pandemic is over? Because the wealthy are now comfortable they're protected. No sarcasm here, this is the literal underlying political reality. Working people can get sick and die, there are always fresh workers.…

Was listening to the CEO of Flight Centre on RN this morning, talking about borders re-opening. A few thoughts. /1 #auspol A common line was repeated, that 'business needs certainty'. Actually business doesn't need any more or less…

James Valentine did a great interview this morning with an industrial relations researcher (forgotten the name, sorry). Before 7.30 if you want to re-listen. The points that I think are so vital right now: /1 #auspol 1) For NSW nurses to…

‘Mental health’ is becoming a bit of a catch-all to describe political issues. The brutalising politics of the ‘Economy’. Neoliberals medicalised a pandemic so they could ignore it. It suits them just fine for us to attribute blame for the…

In true libertarian market fashion, I may offer to pay my kids to keep their masks on. Just to reward them for swimming against the tide of dumb.

Westerners are so used to peace and prosperity that they’ve maybe forgotten the idea of a ‘balance of power’. We see our democracies as naturally more peace-loving. In reality those democracies are held in place by force, mostly the $600…

Modern democracy uses short electoral cycles, 3-5 years mostly. You can’t do much that’s lasting for a society in 3-5 years. So politicians take actual problems (when they can’t ignore them entirely), and create manipulable proxies for…

Some point to the growth of ‘service’ industries in our economies as a form of social progress. It’s actually quite funny that we even use the same word for slavery as we did 150 years ago - service. One ‘went into service’. Re-badged,…

10 reasons I give people for why I still wear a mask (in case of interest). It's good to have comebacks ready. 1) I'm focused on the vulnerable in our community, not myself. 2) I get my science from scientists, not politicians. /1 #auspol…

Mandates are the simplest, fairest and cheapest forms of pandemic action. Conservatives have been successful in portraying law as restriction, oppression. But it’s nonsense, everything else can be gamed using the existing socio-economic…

I love discussion and debate. If you respond to a Tweet of mine with just ad hominem sewage though, it’s instant block. Time for society to draw a line in the sand. I see it also as a way of adding some level of regulation to social media,…

The little things betray the lie of the ‘Economy’. Giving households smashed by cost of living pressures assistance might ‘overheat’ it. So what is the bloody Economy, if not those households, who is it for? There’s a clear answer - it’s…

The attention to mental health, from the conservatives. Sounds great. But it’s the same dogma. Much of the problem is people brutalised by the realities of the modern ‘Economy’. Medicalising it makes it your problem, not theirs. They did…

Penal colonies have an unemployment rate of 0%. I don’t get aroused by fractions of a percent decline in unemployment, when many of the people with those jobs are the working poor. Economic growth and unemployment are the metrics of…

Every modern conservative victory is a victory for sleight of hand. Creating the illusion that a nation’s prosperity trickles down from a tiny number hoarding its wealth. Remove the CEOs and conservative leaders, and a country goes on just…

The confidence trick of 'confidence'. Economically it means 'how much people are willing to spend and borrow beyond their means'. If it lags there, offer cheaper money and grants. With Covid, it means 'how much people are willing to allow…

Ah The Australian. Megaphone for the myth of the Economy, the conservative substitute for society. A con job 50 years in the making, slowly unravelling. https://t.co/qqZMAFjdlr

Every edifice of N=1 politics is starting to crumble. Let’s go back to that old-fashioned idea of common-wealth. It’s still in our name. https://t.co/nOjMv1JFmF

The inversion of majority and minority in modern politics, as a focus for how we understand both politics and society. A thread. /1 https://t.co/bx410Fao0T The worshipping of the majority in modern democracies paradoxically stems from the…

For a conservative, one is born privileged, or poor. It’s about ‘breeding’. This aristocratic view in the past at least included a sense of duty, of noblesse oblige. The servants were part of the family. Now replaced with the gig economy.…

The main roadblock to beating Covid globally is the hyper-narrowing of society’s focus to one statistical indicator, economic growth. Where ephemeral small businesses boom and bust inside 5 years, and human ambition is restricted to…

Our strongest weapon against Covid was always the law. The blindfolded Lady Justice holds the weapon in her hand. A thread. /1 https://t.co/eWD9xoZp1U From the beginning of the pandemic, politicians have claimed the need for us to…

Every day, the basics. - all infection is illness. - public health controls illness. - mass infection is a failure of public health. - public health was invented by governments. - public health is a government’s job. - the ‘Economy’ is a…

SKY News currently screening a half-hour party political featuring Josh Frydenberg, under the pretend cover of journalism about the budget. Nauseating. His opponent, an independent, described as ‘cashed up’, the latest LNP-Murdoch election…

My expert Budget analysis. “Here’s some cash, please re-elect us to government, so we can get on with the job of dismantling government.”

Language really is power. If you want to oppose the current ‘economic’ elites, you have to stop speaking in a pleading way. Speak as they speak, as if your position is self-evidently the right one. Mock them, as they already mock you. An…

Those campaigning for justice in schools for the mass infection there, a suggestion. Contact one of the top litigating law firms and sound them out about a class action under WHS law. That law seems very clear that responsibility for…

In which the ‘balancing’ of the Economy against public health turns out to be the equivalent of trying to lift yourself up with your own shoelaces. https://t.co/3Ktt1r3UGw

We foolishly thought the herd immunity folk were being metaphorical. Little realising that as modern economic work units, medicating to keep productive output going is us as well. https://t.co/tdANhM51E8

I loved waking up to the sun today. Daylight Saving societies are societies who ‘live with’ lethal viruses. Who take basic facts of human life and redefine them to try to make them go away. Daylight Saving is the ‘economic’ way to not give…

Something that changed my life, an understanding. Ideas have an agency independent of us. They’re eternal, some have existed throughout all of human history. Plato said a similar thing. It has huge implications, not least for Twitter.…

Good on @IanVerrender for reminding us that wages = power. Supply and demand is a fantasy of the Economy crowd. We hear wages have stagnated over the past decade or more. This is why. Continuous gutting of bargaining power of working…

I’m an Economy minimiser. The Economy is the greatest, most laughable and lethal fiction in all of human history. It’s some graphs and stats of social activity overlaid upon old-time feudalism. Except the old feudal lords actually had more…

‘Lockdowns’ were the perfect test case for neoliberal, libertarian politics. They made us into isolated individuals. The libertarian dream. But it stopped their society substitute, the ‘Economy’, stone dead. Nobody is ever free, alone. We…

Where are the mental health advocates for the millions dealing with Covid? Why are they so vocal about people missing school and work, but silent on Covid? Forgive me for suspecting they’re just apologists for the economic status quo. Who…

The past 2 years have been 98% politics, and 2% health science. The ‘public’, in ‘public health’. What does it mean? I reckon many would follow our idiot leaders and say it means a majority of the population. Nope. This is the real…

“My view is we need to get to a point where you are sick, you stay at home, if you’re not sick, you go to work and you go to school…“that’s living with COVID. And that’s where we need to get.” Dominic Perrotet, defining ‘living with the…

This is the time to see the reality underneath what we call the 'Economy'. The government is campaigning on 2-3 economic metrics (unemployment, growth etc.), but people know their wages are still going nowhere, their jobs are insecure,…

Day 1 of the campaign proper, and we see the LNP focus on economic indicators, its substitute for the whole society. Albo returns fire with humble apology, I'm guessing to contrast with a PM who never apologises. Fascinating to watch the…

The triumphant genius of conservative politics is that an entire election can be framed as being about a percentage point or two on one of their meaningless economic indicators. This is what they designed the ‘Economy’ to do, to suck the…

The AFR got owned. Well said Adam Bandt. What a ridiculous question, name the current wage price index. https://t.co/u83ax0WkQf

Today’s virtual press conference question. “Prime Minister, how will your planned $184 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy find its way to aged care, roads, schools, hospitals, climate action and legal aid? A working bee for the well-to-do”?

Yes this is the UK copying Australia, to the letter. Same language, ‘illegal’ arrivals, evil people smugglers. And all the same ultimately ineffective criticism, about it being immoral etc. But this is nothing much to do with refugees at…

Reading this brought home again the joke the developed world now is. Where infectious disease becomes a matter of ‘personal responsibility’. Imagine even 20 years ago saying something like ‘we’ll let malaria spread, it’s up to each person…

#insiders demonstrating everything about the ‘Economy’. A non-existent fantasy that has replaced society, and dominates politics. One whole week of the election campaign dominated by a cell in a spreadsheet.

From the Financial Times’ editorial board. An ‘economic’ HQ. Calling out the true agenda for ‘living with Covid’, and the emerging disastrous costs. https://t.co/0IVzwfAmus

The obsession with 'jobs' amongst conservatives is explained easily in this way. A job is the way conservatives regulate the flow of society's wealth through their own activities. We already have way more than we need as a society, jobs…

Covid-19 is now the 3rd largest mass casualty event in Australia in history, behind Spanish Flu, and the Scarlett Fever epidemic of 1875-76. We need to add the massacre of Aboriginal Australians during colonisation, currently estimated at…

72 no longer living with the virus in NSW this week. A day to go. How much death is acceptable? Anybody in the press gallery fancy asking, on the election hustings? Or are we all still focused on fractions of a percent of some idiot…

If you look at job ads, increasingly they publish no salary. And within organisations it’s often difficult to know what co-workers are paid. This is deliberate, to suppress wages. Short 🧵on how similar principles are being used with Covid.…

Anzac Day makes me think about the low bar we now use to describe sacrifice, in this pandemic. We missed holidays, income, school, work, social outings. For less than 2 years. Our ancestors in the world wars had 10 years of barely enough…

As Term 2 begins, feel comforted that the reason we’re infecting all of the kids is so that people can get their below-the-poverty-line income from a job, rather than welfare.

If you’re never sure that your conversations can change the world, wealthy elites can prove it to you. They already own mainstream media, and now social media. They know what changes a society. It’s not money. It’s ideas, conversation.…

Ambition would be genuinely trying to stop people catching colds and flu every year as well. All caused by filthy air, as cholera was by filthy water. Some say you can't get people to take something seriously, if it's invisible. I dunno,…

The PM is relentlessly trying to bed down US and UK-style libertarianism here. All the ‘getting government out of peoples’ lives’ guff. But who invented government? We did. All of us. To help us, to provide economies of scale for our…

Things Australians need no longer ‘fear’, and can therefore now pretend are over. The PM’s method. - bushfires - floods - cancer - heart disease - inequality - etc. Yes, ridiculous. But we swallow it, for Covid.

@QandA why are we listening to a political libertarian economist for the umpteenth time on Q&A on a public health problem they simply don’t understand?

A thread on whether the Australian Liberal Party can even survive. This election result is the endgame of something that’s been coming for 30 years. Wise Liberals and others predicted it right at the start of that 30 year period. /1…

The great political -isms from Europe and the US, like capitalism, socialism and communism, have never really explained Australian life. What is distinct about Australia, and most of it is unspoken and unseen, is that it defines itself not…

I want to talk about personal responsibility, using the extraordinary historical example of the village of Eyam (h/t to @PeterMella5). Now that the pandemic will apparently be a matter of personal responsibility, what are we seeing? /1…

“Jim Chalmers could reduce the deficit to zero within three years by increasing the ratio of tax to GDP from the 22.4 it is now to 24.4 per cent – still among the lowest in the western world.” (Alan Kohler.) Alone that’s wow. But it also…

My hope is that eventually we’ll see the ‘Economy’ as our own Emperor’s New Clothes. A political fiction designed to bypass politics with a handful of self-serving statistical indicators. GDP being one of them. We’re mistaking the measure…

Another way to look at big debts in the developed world at the moment is that they represent decades of government having to borrow to provide basic public services, because we were trapped by an ideology of tax-as-theft and…

The Teals stumbled upon the heart of Australian politics. Community. We’re a communitarian country. Not capitalist, or communist, or socialist. Community is a politics, independent of scale. A politics defined by social relations, not…

Why don’t governments protect us from Covid? Because market economies replaced societies, and they don’t have a public. Only individual consumers. No geographical or ethnic or any other identifier for people, except as customers of a…

Recent decades saw the strip-mining of workers’ wages and conditions. The ‘Economy’ boomed during this time, join the dots. It’s a bunch of statistical indicators favouring the interests of employers, invented by pollies to replace…

The economies of scale that public institutions provide are now all collapsing, as those institutions are destroyed. Each to their own = each pays their own way. And boy do they pay. https://t.co/c4L7U0wMPM

The trick of the ‘Economy’ is that it hides obvious questions. Money, for example, a tool of exchange. Of no intrinsic value at all. But the cost of money, interest rates, still incredibly low, is possibly about to smash us. A 🧵/1…

Existing economic interests won over many working people by reframing their lack of money and freedom as theft by government. But when you read the policies of business lobby groups, on deregulation, you can see who actually took that…

The RBA to announce the new cash rate tomorrow. Economics is designed to make the simple look ridiculously hard. What sort of society holds its breath about a cash rate, the cost of borrowing? A society where most don’t have any money.

Events like Vivid sit uneasily with me. It’s pretty and all, but also it represents a new more corporate style of community life. Where your life and work has very little community focus, so we have to organise ‘events’ to get the…

The politics of the Economy adapted easily to Covid. ‘Confidence’, for example. Consumers ‘lack confidence’. Meaning they have no money, and have to be seduced into going further into debt. Conservatives are skilled at seducing people into…

The marvel of heat pumps also can teach us something about social media, I think. Because social media is an emotion pump, with hate the most prominent. Social media is a hate pump. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/zAzjeDwxTY The principle of…

Supply and demand is one of the founding myths of the ‘Economy’. It’s what replaces the need (it’s said) for any sort of regulation. In practice there’s no supply of things for which there’s enormous demand, and no demand for things for…

Covid being airborne is likely why nobody with influence is really trying to beat it. Air is the last ‘commons’ left, almost impossible to appropriate for private profit. As the economic wankmonkeys would say, it’s the ultimate…

It’s nearly 75 years since the 5-day, 40-hour working week was approved in Australia. As I enjoy the long weekend, that seems a long time since any great advance for working people. Wages don’t grow, hours don’t decline. They already stole…

The existence of local councils was driven by public health action in the 19th and 20th centuries. Sewer, clean water, garbage collection, drainage. The shape of our societies was driven by public health. Ventilation should be next. The…

Anybody feeling like decades of ‘personal responsibility’ politics has led to everything we can’t provide personally - food, water, energy, education, transport, clean air, wages, equity, climate, healthcare, the arts etc. - falling apart?…

Work in Australia is predominately in varieties of care (health, aged, social) and services. That’s our ‘economy’. Privatising those areas for profit has led to death and system dysfunction. Conservative angst over ‘welfare’ mistakes…

Demographics and politics. We knew the demographic tidal wave of the boomers was eventually going to arrive at aged care. That’s where we are now. A country heavily reliant upon care and related services, with few younger workers available…

In the 'Economy', workers are 'costs'. Which is why people who turn societies into economies by design impoverish most of society. Businesses don't create jobs. Customers with money create jobs. https://t.co/2sgLR1CuWM

Now the election is over, time for political journalists to return to the greatest crisis facing the country. Covid. It’s clear the previous government workshopped spin to respond to the alarming number of ongoing weekly deaths from Covid.…

The harsh truth here is the worshipping of small business, an ideological not economic thing. It's always been an unaffordable way to sustain a country, and a major factor in the progressive destruction of wages and working conditions.…

Nick Hanauer, venture capitalist, has flipped economic wisdom: “…when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees.” Highlighting the true function of the ‘Economy’, to rationalise a tiny number hoarding…

Neoliberals replaced nations with a global market. That destroyed the agency of many people, so they diverted that anger with token ‘border control’ (only for the poor). Which is mostly fake, because it restricts tourism and the flow of…

Modern economics provides a veneer of pseudoscientific language to disguise ongoing colonial feudalism. For example, cheap labour from overseas used to be called slavery. Now called ‘labour hire’, transacted through companies who would…

The pandemic showed few understand exponential growth. But it was right at the heart of the 'Economy' the whole time too. Compound interest. All those 'growth' forecasts - economic, super etc. - are exponential growth. Even tiny growth…

I love how economics can give you graphs and formulas to explain inflation. When it’s really just people who have supplies of scarce goods and services extorting everybody else.

A table of Tories who have been unmoved as 180,000 Britons have died of Covid, furious about trains not running. People can’t get to work! Call it an Economy and you can run a slave State in plain view. https://t.co/5LhBshRGqY

Instead of calling it Covid transmission, let’s call it Covid inflation. They do things about inflation.

The greatest political sleight of hand in Australian history. The dominant narrative about Australia and Covid is that we ‘locked down’ for nearly 2 years, and then we ‘opened up’ to ‘living with the virus’. Let’s look at the facts. /1…

Two things in relation to public health, in times of Covid. 1) It was invented by governments, to keep societies functioning. A government who removes public health protections is like a government giving its military slingshots instead of…

An actuary is like an economic epidemiologist. Will tell you very quickly which public health strategy is legitimate, because it'll be the one that makes the most economic sense too.

Notice the panic about a possible 'wage-price spiral' in talk about inflation, and paying people more. No talk at all for the past 30 years of capital-price spirals, in housing for example. That's good inflation, because it enriches the…

'Wage dynamics permanently changed' = 'workers aren't getting pay rises because employers are importing cheap labour from overseas instead'. Also a main reason the push was on to get borders open again, disguised as 'freedom'.…

I am concerned about the massive income-price spiral that will be caused by $180 billion in tax cuts to the wealthy in the next few years. How about it Albo, let’s fight inflation together as a community, ditch the tax cuts. #auspol

Inflation means business is increasingly having to ‘pass costs on to consumers’. The junior in the office forgot to bank 60 years of record profits. https://t.co/EfyEuSmNUC

Because the ruling class spends millions persuading the working class that the only difference between them is that the ruling class is smarter and works harder. https://t.co/Dqad7w5O9K

What makes it possible for governments to ignore public health processes in a pandemic is the suppression of information about what’s really going on. A short thread about strategy, about taking our society back. /1 #auspol #covid19aus All…

Governments follow a herd immunity strategy for one brutal reason. To them we are literally a herd. Livestock. Replaceable by workers from anywhere else in the 'globalised economy', if needed. This was the actual plan, when nations were…

Planet Earth is like most planets, stone dead. It's that shimmering, gaseous, tiniest veneer of blue that is the difference. Air. Engineered by living things. What the Economy attacks, through climate change and now Covid. Dumb, hey.…

The ABC shared this study today, which showed a colossal drop in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic. This is fundamentally important in ways that I don’t think are immediately obvious. A thread. /1 #covid19 #auspol…

Less than half of Australia has had a flu shot this year, despite free jabs and urgent messaging. Covid vaccines still stalled. Politicians did this, minimising the risk of infection for economic purposes. The public health system may not…

The pandemic was 'over' as soon as the socio-economically advantaged felt safe. Always thus. And the disadvantaged do worse if they're unvaccinated or have co-morbidities? Bugger me if that isn't part of the definition of being…

Christina skewering the idea of ‘learning to live with the virus’. We’re not learning anything, it’s a slogan that actually means ‘do nothing’. The Economy is people, you can’t live with them constantly infected in vast numbers, how dumb…

Not only has business had full suck of the public teat under the LNP, with tax cuts and other largesse, at the same time its own investment in the Economy has been in free fall. Rent-seeking, a parasitic organism on public wealth.…

It costs $600 to get vaccinated against shingles, but we’re going to give $180 billion to people who don’t need it, in tax cuts.

The real cause of traffic is property development. Property developers literally just build houses. Houses divorced from social, cultural and economic life. To connect people to those things, they have to drive. Thus, traffic. Suburbs are…

The pandemic is a war about the public. A ‘public’ is not just everybody in a society. It’s not a counting thing. The ‘public’ is about interdependency, about how all of the different characteristics of people and groups are required for a…

When you stop an ‘Economy’, nearly everybody gets healthier and wealthier. We’re still not seeing that I don’t think, allowing the profiteers of the old normal to frame the true narratives of fear. The fear of changing the old normal.…

‘Capitalism’, ‘communism’, ‘authoritarianism’ are lazy concepts. Societies share so many characteristics, just called different things. Take the idea of a ‘planned economy’, compared to a ‘free market’ economy. /1 https://t.co/wVmsy1hkcP…

I’ve Tweeted about how the apparent disregard for the health of populations shown now by governments is entirely consistent with working people being treated as we treat livestock. This isn’t an animal rights thing (though it is that too),…

Regulatory capture, when the mechanisms of government are captured by vested interests. Seen in modern conservative parties having only a single major ‘policy’ - cut taxes - no matter the situation. It’s the unmediated conversion of…

If you have an ‘extraordinarily difficult budget position’ Mark, which you do, mandates will be a cheap way to get bang for your buck. But you’re not doing that either. #insiders

Politicians and CHOs/CMOs seem all to be captured by the LNP framing of the pandemic. All believing you either lockdown/mandate things, or do nothing. But the public is everybody, make it a multi-layered response. /1 #covid19aus #auspol -…

The genius of mandates is that they apply equally to all, irrespective of socioeconomic status or privilege. The law was designed to do that, it's a much more powerful tool than medicine in a pandemic.

‘Working from home’ is another framing that needs rethinking. It’s like ‘work-life balance’. We keep framing work as an opposite to life and home. Many workers like working from home because they want their work to happen in their…

'Business community' is not quite right. 'Business cabal' might be closer. Utterly devoid of any sense of community responsibility or of the collective nature of all wealth. Rent-seekers. https://t.co/0mRcLLRkcY

The infect everyone and titrate just a handful into hospital beds strategy is not going well. 'Everybody will get sick, but we'll try to stop people getting REALLY sick'? Imagine an economic plan that said 'everybody will be broke, but…

Richard Glover yesterday was pining for the days when political opponents could be bipartisan. We need to challenge the Pollyanna view of politics we have in the West I think, to understand why it looks like a toilet right now. #auspol…

The ALP is using the 'we inherited a trillion dollars of debt' line a lot to explain why it can't afford to do more on Covid. But retaining $180 billion in tax cuts to people who don't need them. Damaging the brand, Albo. Permanently. Do…

We need to talk about freedom I think. It's the lead weight in the Covid saddlebags. A🧵on why Daniel Defoe may be the weapon we need to fight those who won't fight Covid. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/DqGnv4Ep6y Watching the UK…

Albo is a good bloke. But for the love of our sanity, the best way to keep the costs of Covid action down is to suppression transmission. (Business should shoulder much of that load). The ‘Economy’ IS people. Infected people can’t work.…

The James Webb telescope cost over $14 billion and allows us to see deep into space and time using infrared light. The National Cabinet Covid telescope cost over $300 billion, and can filter out wavelengths of infection and death,…

These protesters demand freedom from public health action, which they see as a type of tyranny. But humans are social animals, nobody really wants freedom. All humans form hierarchies, even scientists, shaped by what the group in question…

@Mark_Butler_MP on RN again this morning, and he and @PatsKarvelas, @David_Speers and @samanthamaiden all missed the obvious solution to Covid. The problem is the solution, as Bill Mollison used to say. /1 #auspol #COVID19Aus Australia…

If the ALP thought like the LNP, they'd realise that the enormous pressure building on them on Covid is the PERFECT opportunity to ditch ridiculous tax cuts they don't believe in anyway. #auspol

If the ‘Economy’ can’t function without infecting the entire population, then it has failed as a mechanism for organising human societies, and must be scrapped. It’s not the bedrock of society, it’s one set of social transactions, chosen…

The REAL problem is the vast number of workers without sick leave. Again business is socialising its losses onto us. Whether it’s non-existent WHS, or strip-mined wages and working conditions, Covid remains a creation of business. Of the…

Pollies enslaved to the Economy will hide behind a tiny number of top-level KPIs like employment and inflation. Went to a KFC the other day and was told I couldn’t buy coleslaw, because ‘they can’t get any’. The true economics of mass…

The NSW Premier goes to the emergency Herd Immunity Taskforce meeting to discuss Covid being out of control, with a suggestion to relax protections even more. Like the UK and US conservatives, tax cuts will be the next ‘cure’. Complete…

We're following a market-based Covid strategy. The infected are individual Covid customers, with the invisible hand magically coalescing us all into something resembling public health action. Regulators ensure competition by breaking up…

In plain English, our Covid strategy is ‘we can’t afford to stop people getting sick’. Submarines? Fine. Huge tax breaks to property investors? Fine. Tax cuts to the wealthy? Fine. Stopping population-level illness? ‘We inherited a…

'Balance' always means 'let the status quo continue. Albo suggests this is a matter between employer and employee. Went to the election saying employers had been suppressing wages and working conditions for a decade. I'm sure they're…

Something no journalist I’ve seen is asking is ‘what’s the endgame of Australia’s Covid strategy?’ Given the vaccines don’t stop infections, and infections always lead to hospitalisations, deaths and economic havoc. #auspol #covid19aus

The pandemic isn’t mass stupidity. It’s the extension of privatised market-based politics, to public health. We already have privatised healthcare, transport, education, banking, defence, etc. The same political operating system responded…

The Christian Right must use the King Rupert version of the Old Testament. My King James version says both plagues and usury are very bad things. A usurious plague, allowing a plague to run to protect the Economy? Mammon be praised.

The neoliberals/libertarians (the N=1 crowd) keep winning because they target the 5%. The 5% of any group, including society, who provide the direction others then follow. I’ll use SKY News Australia as an example. The channel nobody…

Ordinary working people here are now equivalent in status to the billions in the developing world we’ve left to their ‘endemic’ diseases for years. Market-based politics made us all interchangeable. Business is looking to double the…

This is exactly what’s going on. Regulatory capture means most modern conservative parties don’t actually have policies. Just 2 main imperatives, repeated for every situation. Cut taxes, and privatise (destroy public institutions).…

Australia's household solar dominance has some critical messages for personal responsibility public health. A short thread about how we're being played again and again by spin and slogans. /1 #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/hyocd48lQt…

These numbers, we know now, won't shift a single thing, politically. When you relentlessly 'message' and lead that society is an 'Economy', not even death will be a bump in the road. The Economy is humanity's most lethal invention, with…

This is the Covid equivalent of a first homebuyer's grant. Government money used to 'prime' the Economy, but actually making the situation much worse. Thankfully now expired, but with the damage already done. The purpose of the scheme was…

We’re losing against Covid, because Covid is a symptom, not a cause. We’re fighting the wrong things. I think Twitter is an excellent empirical example of what I mean, it demonstrates the same behaviours and beliefs that are really in play…

'Alarming' data is more than 70 people dying every single day of a preventable disease, that we're not preventing. Headlines you get when you replace a society with an economy. https://t.co/GVlGwNd3OD

There’s a secret love affair between Covid and the Economy. An incestuous one. Both are exponential functions, they’re siblings. Why the Economy refuses to fight the pandemic. Short thread to explain this idea. /1 https://t.co/1Ab04DnZId…

As we move on to the ‘next phase’ of the pandemic, the mass illness, economic disruption and death phase. https://t.co/y6XT2KOAht

Here’s our real inflation problem. Might hit 80 tomorrow. #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/2jv6JlR1Yd

“Cost of living” = you need to pay somebody now to stay alive.

For nearly all of the past two thousand years there was no economic growth. And then around 1950 something remarkable happened. Have a look. A thread about the true infection in our societies, from which Covid was born. /1…

I like Jim. But watching him stand up every day to talk about inflation, interest rates and the ‘economy’ reminds me how politics has been captured by the financial industry and its backers in conservative parties. All politics now is…

When I say the ‘Economy’ doesn’t even exist, it’s based on a very clear, empirically traceable origin of the use of the idea. And it was clearly not a thing then, and isn’t now. It’s a metric of actual things that’s assumed a life of its…

Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize in economics, for her studies on how groups best manage a ‘commons’ i.e. resources that are shared by a community, of whatever size. Air is an example, and thus Covid. She distilled it to 8 principles. See…

While personal responsibility is not the way out of the pandemic, it can help. We could simply refuse to go to any inside gathering, be it restaurants, concerts, conferences etc. Crash the economy, the only thing that will get the…

Maybe the best way to defeat Covid is to defeat the ‘economy’ that stops us fighting it. The economy is the name given to society post the 1950s, when the finance industry was let loose, with the gradual weakening and eventual removal of…

Defeating the myths of the economy defeats Covid. A biggie - ‘business’. There is no such thing as business. There are customers, workers and managers. Customers buy things, which pays the managers and workers. Nick Hanauer knows it. /1…

When you read the history of public health, governments invented it to DO the ‘weighing up’. It’s spin that public health is something to be ‘balanced’ against ‘economic’ considerations. Like climate balanced against the Economy.…

Fines disproportionately impact poorer suburbs because that’s where most enforcement activity is focused, as with other crimes. NSW even ring-fenced a virus into poorer suburbs, to allow wealthier people in the State to continue to live…

The breakdown of inter-generational society, the flattering of the ‘circle of life’. Speaking to 20-somethings can be a window into where society is heading. Yesterday: ‘so how long are you going to keep wearing that mask?’, with a clear…

"...the abolition of perpetual economic growth". The exponential curve. Nothing but death and destruction when you ride that train. https://t.co/cZfM80WXVH

The economic theory of modern conservatism is equilibrium-based. Strip everything back to a ‘market’ of interacting individuals, and you get a balanced equilibrium. The current status quo, the one they profit hugely from, is defined as the…

More evidence of complete regulatory capture of government. In the UK Covid has now created ‘apocalyptic’ conditions in healthcare. The response from the governing libertarians? ‘We need more tax cuts’. They’re not a party, they’re a host…

Some of us have been trying to get focus on stringency data for more than 2 years. It shows that elimination of a pathogen is the best ‘economic’ thing to do as well. Unsurprisingly, public health systems, invented by governments, save the…

Alan Kohler has been consistently great in calling out the elephant in the room. Market-based politics is dead. The market and its handmaiden the economy have been exposed as ludicrous self-servicing fictions. https://t.co/7KoJkvhdmQ

Privatisation, the market, the economy. Strip away the slogans and it’s just a massive cost-shifting from the collective treasury to private wallets. Getting government out of peoples’ lives just puts business into those lives instead, for…

I’m not sure ‘people alive and healthy’ could be bettered as a mission statement for a society. Look at this excess deaths graph (thanks @KarenCutter4) and try to isolate what it was we stopped doing in 2020/21, that we started doing again…

If ‘the market’ was real, you wouldn’t need to constantly regulate and intervene to impersonate something like it. The weight of numbers would make it the default state of all societies. It’s wealthy people protecting their privilege, by…

How does an infinitesimally tiny group in our society, the top 1%, attract mass support for policies that clearly benefit nobody except this tiny group? And how does it keep doing it, generation after generation? Graphic from ‘The Gilded…

The reason the Reserve Bank has to create such pain by changing the price of money, is that government no longer invests in anything. So the price of money becomes the determining factor in privatised nations. Also, the Reserve Bank is a…

One of the ways conservatives win is to change education into job training. Leading to ‘job-ready graduates’ without any breadth or depth of actual learning. Skilled to keep the economy moving without any capacity to question its basic…

The first privatised pandemic can learn from multiple privatised wars. Most modern wars, like Ukraine, are really big trade shows for private arms manufacturers. Major powers become vehicles for the introduction of new products from the…

From the RBA’s own timeline history. The ‘economy’ was invented in the 1950s. By the 1960s the major responsibilities of elected governments, as highlighted, were largely flick-passed to the moneylenders. And thus we reach today, where we…

Polio was eliminated in Australia in 2000. It took 44 years, after introduction of the vaccine. It was mild in the overwhelming majority who were infected. A society reshapes everyone’s life to protect the vulnerable. An economy isolates…

Just as workplaces no longer publish salaries, to suppress wages, they also suppress information about Covid infections at work, under cover of a manufactured concern for privacy. To counter this normalisation, employees should speak…

The debates about individual and collective rights to me begin in the wrong place. Like that joke about being given directions, 'well I wouldn't start from here'. All the talk about 'balancing' the two, or prioritising one over the other,…

Thanks to @OrinCordus. 'Lockdowns' = people at home. To understand why the Economy folk fight lockdowns so viciously, read this. The Economy can't tolerate 'home', it was built on the destruction of place. My constant theme. /1…

The ALP refuses to ditch tax cuts for the wealthy. For comparison, those cuts will cost about $37 billion a year in less than a decade. The current ‘unaffordable’ cut to fuel excise costs $6 billion a year.

There’s at least some (patchy) understanding now that exponential growth of a virus is unsustainable. But few mention that the root of the entire modern economy is the exponential curve. The booms and busts of economies are epidemic waves.…

"Everything that goes wrong in a nation first goes wrong in the heads of those who dominate it." Monbiot superb here on what happens when you elect governments who don't believe in government. Cost of living, Covid - all caused by the same…

I don’t think capitalism is even a thing. None of the -isms are. If capitalism is the private means of production, why do we have a Corporations Act, just for starters? https://t.co/XlkhEGqgUE

Clearly determined to head-off public health action from Day 1. He wanted joint health and finance portfolios, to him this was an economic emergency, not a health emergency. Unlike the UK we managed to remove the vampire squid from the…

The expertise of the nation could mobilise against the Covid farce. It has a powerful institutional home. But the neoliberals got to them years ago, with New Public Management (NPM). Actually co-designed in Oz, an attempt to run public…

Cost of living is exploding at the same time in history nearly everything can be provided to people at zero cost. Inflation is really vested interests trying desperately to retain profit margins in the face of that fact. Energy will be…

Here’s one from the front-line of the RCT on neoliberal and libertarian political beliefs. Person sells own pension to pay for cost of living explosion, then dies of Covid, leaving children orphaned. https://t.co/6ROxH9tboU

But WHY did Morrison do this? Many have been saying why for more than 2 years. The same reason he set up National Cabinet. He was in emergency mode to head off a proper public health response, to Covid. Like Perrottet, he saw Covid as a…

Not clear to me how framing welfare as any sort of insurance is progress. Still the same neoliberal framework of the ‘safety net’. The reason welfare spending grows is the need to constantly redistribute huge inequalities of wealth.…

43. History will have a reckoning for the thousands killed in Australia this year. Politicians, experts and journalists who did nothing while this happened should think long and hard about their testimony at future Royal Commissions and…

Catching up on last week’s #QandA. The cause of inequality is individualist political beliefs feeding off collective wealth. Free-loading, free-riding off collective wealth. Generating that wealth collectively but pretending we’re doing it…

Australia shifted from Zero Covid to Net-Zero Covid. Net-Zero Covid is the culling of unemployable vulnerables. Economically that’s a ‘balanced’ approach.

Daily Telegraph today, UK. Nearly 190,000 Brits dead (so far), but the ‘society is an economy’ crowd is already lobbying to stop public health action for future pandemics too. Their refusal to implement protections created ‘lockdowns’,…

Real wealth comes from saving, not investing. Investing is speculative gambling, driven by exponentials. A society that saves can afford to shelter from threats, like pandemics. A society that doesn’t sees saving (‘lockdowns’) as an…

Australia made community the centre of its politics. Other countries mobilise around territory and political ideals. It’s an astonishing innovation, making social relationship the core. It’s now failing, the ‘Economy’ is sucking the life…

ABS analysis of 2020 national accounts. Notice the enormous subsidy to business (the pink), and subsequent big jump in profits (orange), which in turn drove inflation. Compensation of employees fell below 50% for the first time since 1959.…

Who lost during lockdowns. Households and businesses were very often wealthier than they’d ever been. It was the economy of scale of the State invested in people and business, rather than siphoned off as tax cuts to the wealthy. The…

The speed with which Covid became global is indicative of the hyper-mobility of human populations in 2022. I call it the ‘market on-ramp’, nations were transformed into economic markets. It should concern us that there is no inertia to…

We miss how Oz politics really works. Australians act as a community. All through the 20+ years of federal LNP resistance to renewables, Australians ignored their bullshit and as a community installed our own solar, at world record pace.…

A tiny increase of tax-take relative to GDP would erase these deficits in 1-3 years. And about a third of our overall public debt is printed money and could be just written off. Some quite simple changes would change our society…

This is actually true. The bit we (the public) missed is that we’ve been downgraded to itinerant-worker-from-developing-country status. ‘The Economy’ is the deliberate globalisation of the developing world model. And that always included…

The reason we don’t see stronger action against Covid. The mostly meaningless word ‘globalisation’ is the stripping away of all sovereignty and territorial and cultural definitions of society, and replacement by the unfettered flow of…

The neolibs (i.e. wealthy donors) are already gearing up for the next pandemic. And there’ll be none of that bedwetting public health nonsense next time, if they win this argument. https://t.co/32qcFCtg6O

I think it’s vital to understand we’re not in a battle of one side of politics against another. It’s a battle between civilisation, and hijacking pirates masquerading as politicians (regulatory capture), who are pillaging our societies…

Turns out ‘balancing the economy against Covid’ in the US put everything on one end of the see-saw. https://t.co/FvkRkCUC3X

There isn’t a clearer way to see that politics that attacks government itself and its institutions, such as public health, is the cause of this pandemic. Strip mining the economies of scale of collective institutions leaves individuals…

I’ve just had a holiday, and unlike many my dream holiday is being at home. One of my greatest pleasures is to work ON my home, not just in the DIY sense but on ‘home-making’, making it an increasingly pleasant place to be. To me this is…

I’ve Tweeted a few times about how what we call the ‘Economy’ didn’t exist before the 1960s. And that it was actually designed as a substitute for society. Beth’s book it seems goes into this in a lot more detail, in the US. Humanity’s…

Here's a great example of how the politics of the economy sucks us all in. The almost universal hatred of monopolies. A monopoly is just an economy of scale. The 'free market' will produce monopolies, because the free market is a myth. /1…

For over 70 years there's been a research program to eliminate the common cold. The Covid minimisers like to say we need to live with Covid, because that's what we do for other infectious diseases. Horseshit, we fight them. /1 #covid19aus…

The ALP knows these tax cuts are a Trojan Horse to destroy progressive income taxation in Australia. That was the LNP plan, has been for years. But Albo worries breaking an election promise will be unpopular. Popularity is the Achilles…

Is there some way we can make Monique Health Minster? It’d be a first in some time, a health minister focused on health and not the economy. https://t.co/VEBrRLgtRb

One of the greatest cons of the pandemic is the continued ignoring of one basic fact. That a pandemic is defined by number of INFECTIONS. Not hospitalisations. Not deaths. It’s infection that will also cripple beloved economies. #auspol…

The LNP are a coalition between two fundamentally different belief systems. Agrarian socialists (Nats) and free market neoliberals (Libs). About all they have in common is hatred of Labor, and unions. If the ALP and Greens formed a…

When economic thinkers hijack public health and make it a logistical operation to manage hospital capacity. Infection is illness. Mass infection is mass illness. Public unhealthiness. Infection is not only the definition of a pandemic,…

Two days after pushing through 7 to 5 day isolation, the push is already on for zero. Conservatives are not a political party, they're the old donors now having captured the mechanism of government. Regulatory capture. Why they have only…

We’re not living with Covid, we’re ignoring it. Like we live with domestic violence, inequality, crumbling public infrastructure, and runaway climate change.

Let’s apply the laws of the market, to the market. ‘Enterprises’ who can’t afford decent wages and working conditions are inept and should always have been allowed to fail. Instead we impoverished workers to protect hopeless businesses.…

We’re so domesticated by the politics of the economy. Like the idea we have to be able to ‘afford’ urgent social investment. A tiny increase in the tax-to-GDP ratio would erase budget deficits immediately. We’ve been trained not to see…

"RBA lifts rates as it races to bring inflation under control". (SMH) So refreshing to see something that is growing out of control, being controlled. Almost like that approach could catch on elsewhere.

Experts who haven't sold their soul for public and political attention stating the obvious. To stop a pandemic, you have to stop the infections. A pandemic is defined by number of infections. Not hospitalistions. Not economics. INFECTIONS.…

The ‘economy’ produces these ridiculous existential debates around what you can ‘afford’ to do. Conservatives invented it as a way to re-route wealth to their people. Reset the tax to GDP ratio up a few percentage points, and most of this…

We did a deal with the Chinese. They’d control Covid so they could keep running the entire manufacturing sectors of our outsourced economies. While we let everybody at home get infected while we fly around on planes ‘living our best life’.…

"The only way to generate enough money to both fund the transition to renewable energy and to climate change-proof Australia is to print it." Alan Kohler Well said. One of the glorious cons of the 'Economy' is perpetrated by the financial…

If China were to adopt the Covid 'strategies' of the West, the entire global economy would collapse. We mock them for disease control, while being utterly reliant upon their workforce staying uninfected. https://t.co/B7w9BHh8jH

If the ALP really believes in the stop talking about Covid and it will go away strategy, do the same for the budget. Stop talking about the fucking economy, and it’ll fix itself. Elected politicians are going to kill us. Popularity as a…

We’re in the Commonwealth, the Queen is still our monarch. I think a public holiday for her death would be logical. The throne-thumping economic zealots in charge…let’s see how skin-deep their commitment is. Maybe her funeral should be the…

‘Lockdowns’ as a concept is the key strategic political tool to undermine public health practice, in this pandemic. A few thoughts. Firstly, as the sign says, during ‘lockdowns’ we were at home. Not in prison. In our own space, not in a…

If the whole world took a holiday for 6 weeks, at the same time, we could probably be free of Covid. The ‘Economy’ wouldn’t allow it. Essential workers could have strong PPE to keep the lights on. It’s all doable. But, the Economy wouldn’t…

Listening to the complaints about the public holiday from business. Business stops for nothing now, not even death. The weekend we all won 75 years ago has largely been re-taken by it. A day of cost pales next to the mass infection…

Royal spectacle was a unifying gaze. It was the mainstream media of its day, a shared social platform to give broader meaning to society. Watching these mourners and their phones we see what’s replaced it. A fracturing. Short thread. /1…

Infection is the invasion of space. Of our most personal space, sometimes called place. Of our workplaces, social places, homes and ultimately our bodies. It’s the most granular level of empire, now called an economy, the push to total…

While technology is never simple determinism, gig economy software and also social media software were spawned in the highly libertarian environment of the US. They act as enablers of that social context when introduced in other countries,…

That last sentence is the key. 'Australians' are doing all the work, and government will give some (of our) money. So essentially, government is doing nothing. Also ALP, money just for the 'vulnerable' is pure free market politics.…

Central banks raise interest rates because whole societies now run on debt instead of savings. Why don't we save instead? Because we don't earn enough to save. Debt has been the way we've created an illusion of widespread prosperity.…

The Chinese delegation were the only people I saw at the Queen’s funeral wearing a mask. Damn those authoritarians and their obsession with Western public health practice. We’ve moved on from all that stuff, now we embrace mass disease and…

More than two thousand years of church history and more than a thousand or more of monarchy resonated in every moment of the Queen’s funeral service. A deeply impersonal experience, what we sometimes call ‘formality’. A 🧵on why I think it…

We can come here every day and wail into the abyss about the Covid debacle. The people who can change it aren’t listening. Gotta understand that to change it. It’s not so much the death of democracy I think as revealing it never existed.…

One of my favourite modern conservative stupidities is their complaint that ‘rich people pay most of the tax’. That it doesn’t even occur to them that this is because they’re hoarding most of the money.

Anecdotally Musk’s Starlink has almost brought tears to the eyes of some people in remote Australia. It’s taken a foreign billionaire to deliver modern telecommunications to the bush. Our governments just want tax cuts.…

See how ‘the economy’ is spoken of in the third person? As if it’s something that ‘runs’ separately to us? Us stopping work is just us stopping work. If it’s ‘costing’ somebody something, that tells you who really owns the economy. Not us.…

Today couples both have to work for financial reasons, even if they don’t want to. That’s 10 person days per household, per week. Reduction to a 4-day week takes that back to 8. Compare with 5 days for a single-earner household, when wages…

You can read lots of definitions of what the ‘economy’ is. But if you pretend you’re an anthropologist studying another culture, it’s mostly just people driving around everywhere, for no apparent purpose.

The ‘far Right’ of politics is always just some new populist wannabe offering even more simplistic solutions than the populist idiots they’re replacing. You can call it ‘fascism’ or ‘capitalism’, adult fairy tales. Populism is the problem,…

The UK is now following us. Labour there faced with outrageous tax cuts to the rich, but refuses to provide any solid resistance. Sound familiar? Says cuts for highest earners are wrong. But, like here, will likely do nothing. Decades of…

The default state of society is social conformity. Proust studied it in forensic detail in the Parisian salons. Without regulation, all social activity, including against Covid, will follow the laws of social imitation, conformity.…

I’ll use ‘Tories’ to describe all of the political bastards of the wider Anglo world right now, who stalled climate action for more than 3 decades, probably condemning us to extinction, and now won’t let us end a pandemic. How Nicholas…

Plagues and wars are about the only things that have ever re-balanced inequality in history. Why vested interests today are so determined to not let us fight Covid. https://t.co/1YeX1YJS83 @YouAreLobbyLud the deepest layer of resistance to…

The plea by NC for ‘consistency’ with Covid rules is the same group peer pressure to wear the same sneakers we experienced in school. Why Morrison invented National Cabinet, to create that normalising pressure on State leaders in that…

The anger we feel about politicians doing nothing about Covid is the anger the most disadvantaged in society have felt about all politics, for years. Nobody helps them. Now debt is no longer cheap, the illusion of democratic shared power…

Elections, the fossil fuel of democracy. This integrity body wouldn’t even need to exist, if it wasn’t for popularity-based politics. All the worst actions and inactions in politics are popularity-based. Imagine raising kids or teaching a…

Grown ups have fairy tales too, with goodies and baddies. My favourites are characters like ‘capitalism’, ‘democracy’, and ‘authoritarianism’. Good on Stan for saying that something is rotten, because it really is. But it’s not these…

The UK Tories can even manage to ditch tax-cuts to the top end of town. Quickly, within a week of announcing them. I don’t think the ALP recognises what terminal brand damage they’re doing letting Covid rip, and delaying ditching the…

Since the beginning of the pandemic, taxpayers in Australia have provided: - $29 billion in direct health support, and - $314 billion in economic support. A couple of critical questions here. /1 #auspol #covid19aus 1) Who’s going to jail…

Why won't they ditch the tax cuts? Because they're worried it will be unpopular. Popularity is toxic to democracy, you can't run a complex society using popularity. Popularity is not democracy. Get rid of elections. https://t.co/Wv3XhQCqql

The world’s first privatised, free-market pandemic is a battle of two exponential curves. This one is winning. https://t.co/Yw1y1Jna37

The meek adoption of ‘protect the vulnerable’ by the ALP shows the power of framing. Conservatives don’t need to win elections to win the political war. They frame all issues so that even the other side continues to do their work, when…

Watching the government tie itself in knots over Stage 3 tax cuts shows two critical things. 1) How issues are framed determines political outcomes, across elections. Conservatives have spent decades creating a frame that says tax is a…

If ‘the people’ was an actual thing, why wouldn’t scrapping huge tax cuts to the tiniest fraction of wealthy people be enormously popular? Because conservatives know that the poor prefer to aspire to be rich, than to admit they’re poor.…

There’s something so important about this photo, a window into most Western countries and why they’re failing badly to do the most fundamental thing - end a pandemic. A thread that’s an update to my pinned thread about how societies are…

An example of how election-based democracy is really just cronyism with added spin. My local council like many others is looking to dramatically increase rates, to provide basic services. They've hired a company to survey residents about…

Another vital story our political gossip columnists (journalists) don’t write about is how the entire world economy would collapse without the ‘authoritarian’ Chinese Covid measures. It’s doing all of the heavy lifting we refuse to do.…

The history of public health is so vital I think to understanding the Covid debacle we're living right now. There's maybe an assumption that the public health practice politicians are now shredding with abandon to try to win votes was a…

I know a lot of NSW teachers who quit last year. Not one of them has said it was about wages or working conditions, even though those aren’t great. It was Covid. https://t.co/O8pRq4jgqf

The power of Australian politics is the community. Not the same thing as ‘the people’, or socialism, or capitalism, or any of those European imported categories. Australian life has always had a community focus. It’s quite rare, it’s…

Covid accelerated all of the ways existing economic politics was already broken. Plagues and wars are all that have ever really fundamentally changed societies. Thus the desperate and laughable attempt to now pretend Covid is over. Reality…

I heard @drkerrynphelps valiantly fight the gaslighting of ‘people are tired of fighting Covid’ on ABC Drive this afternoon. We decided this maybe mid-2021, so in reality we toiled (spare me) less than 18 months. And to return to the…

The most powerful 4Corners I’ve seen for some time. Modern societies still run on cheap imported labour i.e. slavery. ‘Economy’ is just our modern re-branding. Covid exposed it. A combination of slavery and debt is what’s created our now…

What's happening in Griffith is total social collapse. 'Living with' Covid was designed to shift attention from this collapse, which is happening everywhere. No amount of economic hocus pocus will fix it. The old normal is dead.…

Every fantasy about a growing economy floating all boats turned out to be a lie. Enough with the rationalisations, money = power. Give workers power in employment, and wages will fix themselves. https://t.co/Hr6k1pl5OF

The triumph of economic, monetarist politics is to get everybody on all sides of politics to agree unthinkingly that the country is driven by a budget. That a country has to ‘buy’ its way of life. https://t.co/tdNtOTlAEY

I’m a big fan of what the Teal independents are doing. But wary we’re not understanding what’s going on here. As we’re seeing in the UK right now, when popularity-based politics inevitably fails, it’s usual attempt to keep going is to just…

The foundation of our entire Covid approach is the idea that those at most at risk from the virus can be somehow shielded from it. Or that they can even somehow do that themselves. This is one of the greatest of all political libertarian…

Great watch, the wrecking ball of Brexit through the UK economy. And it punctures the libertarian myth that regulation is restriction, vital for Covid management too. Regulation enables, it creates freedom. It’s business people saying…

The extraordinary thing Paul O’Neill did at Alcoa is something that should be our guide out of Covid. And a lot more besides. How worker safety is the key to economic success, but also to understanding how organisations work. /1…

Eventually the analysis reaches the obvious conclusion that monetarism has always been a politics favouring people with money. Go figure. Economic mumbo jumbo is designed to hide basic facts like this. https://t.co/u28tsV1dNy

Budget day, the most sacred of all religious ceremonies in democracies replaced by economies. Where the most popular ideologues of the day get to divert all of the essential resources of the country to funding their re-election.…

The cheapest, fairest and fastest way to end a pandemic is with regulation. Law is a technology, invented by humans, to create economies of scale and fairness. All civilised societies have public health legislation, for this exact reason.…

Do they still have a budget lock-up? Where all the top journalists and politicians breathe each other's air for the entire day leading up to the budget presentation? #auspol

Plenty of sensible things in the budget last night. Lots still to do, not least action on Covid. I sat there pondering that we have to endure the populist drivel of elections coming between us and necessary change, waiting for essential…

It's very modern N=1 politics that a government can be applauded for 'budget repair', but not people repair. Accountants took over the world and we hardly blinked. https://t.co/q4wNDrWzDX

Institutions are what hold societies together. The people who destroy them replace them with slogans. ‘The economy’, ‘living with the virus’, ‘the politics of envy’, etc. etc. Sloganism is populism. Most peoples’ understanding of public…

The public can seem really stupid. But representative democracy was designed so that they didn’t have to know how most things work. It won’t survive leaders who replace it with a market. How’d they get the job? Elections. Popularity is how…

On the one hand we elect leaders to represent everybody. On the other we say society is a free market of individuals. There's not one point of contact between those two things. And we wonder why the world seems mad.

Business says the Bill will lead to industry-wide bargaining and strikes. It’ll make a nice change from industry-wide wage suppression. The ‘freedom’ of IR deregulation led to homogeneous exploitation. Personal responsibility IR.…

The reason I get bored with all the talk about capitalism and socialism and authoritarianism, and Western democracy vs China, or even Left vs Right, is that none of these ideologies really reflect what actually happens in the world. Why…

It’s a revelation for some when they unpick ‘the economy’ and realise it’s really smoke and mirrors designed to dress feudal society in modern economic jargon. https://t.co/7TbCuDcf3f

Freedom of speech is like saying freedom of wealth. As if either speech or wealth are things we just have, freely. Both are contextual, and contested. Freedom of speech is mostly a campaign by those who already own all of the conversation,…

That lime green line is telling a story. The ‘we need to balance Covid action against the economy’ is bullshit story. https://t.co/40BDcbk05J

To a rank amateur like me, that last question in particular seems like a BOOM. I'm sure some failed economist will correct my public health naivety. https://t.co/mbvXZ1Xgoq

The explosion of cybercrime. The IT industry is built around a set of libertarian free-market beliefs. (As with all libertarian things, it's rank hypocrisy, the big IT firms are behemoths.) A dislike of regulation as always sends society…

Truly extraordinary piece from @doctorow about how the post-war shift of wealth towards working people ended in the late-1970s. I’ve Tweeted about how wars and plagues are the only two things that ever disrupt social hierarchies in a…

Living with the virus is a lie. We never opened up to the virus. We removed protection measures at scale (government), and outsourced them to private businesses and individuals. We privatised the pandemic. Just as we did education, health,…

This is what an actual health minister says. Why Germany is what we call an advanced economy, and Australia is a big quarry with kickbacks at the gate for local casual staff. https://t.co/BQOxcAr3Lx

Why is democracy failing? Because we don't build things any more. An extension on the idea that most of what we call 'democracy' is really just engineering. Using this graph as a window to the real answer. /1 (source:…

You won’t find a clearer example of society being replaced with an economy, than the determination of central bankers and politicians to inflict financial armageddon on average people to tame inflation, but total casual indifference to…

It's when you see these ads that you know this is what 'balancing' the economy against public health really means. "Be prepared for this next wave of Covid with all our PPE 10% off."

I love the twaddle of modern economics. Inflation for example is often explained as being the result of insufficient supply to meet high demand. Like that magically puts prices up. Of course the seller in that situation can say, 'sorry…

For decades we’ve lived with N=1 politics, the idea that individuals are all that’s real. It privatised and monetised society. Now this set of beliefs is infecting everybody, repeatedly. Time to expose the core beliefs in play here, if…

I re-watched Nosedive on the weekend, a great Black Mirror episode. About a society where nearly every transaction is carried out via ‘likes’, via popularity. This is us now. Populism IS this. Election-based politics for every granular…

Problems that disrupt the economy are framed as individual anxiety. Reports that residents in flood-affected towns demanded basic precautions yesterday, like getting kids and workers across a river as levels rose, and were told to ‘stop…

In Victorian England, the wealthy invented the ‘public’. Because their society was collapsing under the weight of infectious disease. After WW2 the welfare State was created to save society. The wealthy ever since have been trying to…

In the UK, ‘balancing’ the economy against Covid by loading everything on the economy side of the see-saw still isn’t working. Covid must be very heavy. https://t.co/ij67PAfAL1

Across the world politicians and business leaders spoke often of the need to ‘balance’ action against Covid with economic activity. Now action against Covid has been removed, leaving only economic activity. No surprise, it’s the climate…

Reminiscing on 'balance' and 'proportionate'. Which of course came to mean 'doing nothing except look after the economy'. https://t.co/z4m6XPLx68

“We led the country, we were the ones that were taking everybody from overseas for WA because they locked their borders, for Queensland, for Victoria, we struck the balance all the way through, our economy as a result here in NSW is…

Isn’t it time to actually do some of this ‘balancing’ politicians and business leaders talk about with Covid? Right now there’s nothing on the Covid side of the see-saw, everything is on the economic side. A proposal. /1…

Throughout the pandemic NSW has been at the bottom of the economic indicators. Infecting its population has unsurprisingly done nothing to improve the 'economy'. https://t.co/5MKVwDEOyz

Australia deliberately modelled the mass infection of children it then carried out. We don’t even think about doing that for much less dangerous diseases that we vaccinate our kids against. Infection and sickness used to be considered…

Another illusion of social media is that all of that 'free speech' creates power in some way. It doesn't, those with power and wealth are happy for us to talk or protest all day and night. It distracts us from doing things that actually…

The real problem here is our belief we can debate our way out of Covid, or climate change. The people who oppose doing both of those things are happy to overwhelm us with their BS in perpetuity. There is no conversation without a power…

When you 'balance' public health action against the economy, it doesn't work if you don't put anything on the Covid side of the see-saw. https://t.co/DTGQB2eXxZ

The entire idiot edifice of economic politics is floundering, without a clue what to do except inflict more suffering upon the people who can afford it the least. When pushed to its limits, any system shows you its real underlying…

I see the RBA, business and politicians are concerned about a possible 'wage-price spiral'. Unlike the multiple profit-price spirals of the past 30 years that left them all completely unmoved, because those are 'the economy'.

Michel Serres called our era the reign of The Beatles, of the ‘shit-eaters’. Provocative stuff, but what he was pointing at has big ramifications, including for Covid and climate change. Short thread. /1 https://t.co/YYThXeBQ9i Serres…

ABC PM this afternoon found 3 experts to say that China needs to let the virus ‘circulate’. No indication of how much. Claims the current variants are milder. This may destroy our economic supply chains. Let’s see if that’s the ‘living…

Phew, we’ve avoided having to redistribute wealth. Just as we avoided changing society because of Covid, and just infected everybody instead. The economy, the greatest political trick to protect the status quo of all time.…

Everything that upsets the status quo is bad for the economy. Paying workers more? Bad for the economy. Stopping people getting Covid? Bad for the economy. Having more flexible work-life balance? Bad for the economy. This is why the…

Language, not data. 'Living with the virus.' We live with crime, disasters, pain and suffering, poverty, injustice etc. The key thing is, how much. Living with Covid shouldn't mean everybody catching Covid 4 times a year. We live with…

I haven’t seen one piece of analysis that gets to the real reason Morrison probably did this. He was determined that the pandemic would not be allowed to interrupt his beloved economy, and his re-election campaign. https://t.co/Ax8HFGQVxe

Can we regulate media and social media please? Ignore the gibbering free speech idiots, all of our other democratic freedoms are regulated. It’s the regulation that creates the freedom, without it the wealthy and powerful do as they like.…

Really lockdowns were a shift of cost of living from individuals to governments. Much of that cost of living had been unfairly dumped on individuals years before by the politics of small government. As these same politicians like to say,…

There are only two times in the predominantly LNP-led past 30 years where cost of living went down meaningfully. Both involved large government investment, during the GFC in 2008 and then during Covid. Modern conservative politics…

If your business, small or large, is unable to pay a living wage to its workers, it's an unviable business. That's the measure of your competence as a business person, not your profits or returns to shareholders. Being a small business is…

If you're confused why many businesses resist working from home, the whole function of what they call the 'economy' is to sever the link between work and home. That's what globalisation means.

Steve Jobs took on the free market libertarianism of the IT industry and called it for the joke it is. It made Apple the biggest company in the world. Musk has collided with Jobs’ legacy. He’s toast. Our politics is embedded in these…

"The global economy is hostage to what China does with COVID”. There’s the elephant in the room the minimisers don’t even see. Financial analysts don’t mean by this ‘we want China to let Covid rip’. They mean if China does, the global…

The politicians who demanded societies ‘re-open’ in the pandemic, spent the previous 30 years demanding we ‘maintain control of our borders’ i.e. keep society as closed as possible. Except for recreational and business travel, and…

‘Lockdowns’ (really just quarantine) should have been a libertarian wet dream. The ‘there is no such thing as society’ people get very heated when you suspend the functioning of society, as it turns out. They never meant freedom, they…

Infection has always been a violation of autonomy. Enforced infection is abuse, you’re violated in the deepest, most dangerous way, by a pathogen that may never leave you while you’re alive. In farming we know this isn’t sustainable. In an…

Quite a lot of people use 'capitalism' as some sort of cause of everything going on. Like all -isms, show me where it actually exists. No country is capable of a level of organisation that would implement any system. Capitalist countries…

Today class, please explain what ‘midway point’ means in the sentence below. (5 marks). https://t.co/z5zHxR5mjC

Happy Christmas Australia! Keep buying from your sick beds, the economy needs you. https://t.co/RxPawtRzDC

Nothing will be done against Covid. Nothing can be allowed to interrupt the inexorable march of the economy. COP27 proved that too, with climate change. The ‘economy’ is a fiction created by economists and politicians to protect the status…

All sides still operate under the delusion that ‘business’ is even a thing, like the economy. Here’s the simple test. How many ‘businesses’ would survive the public having no money? Not one. How many of us would survive without businesses?…

Can we get rid of billions of taxpayer subsidies to a hopelessly inefficient industry, private health insurance? If politicians want market-based public services, let them live by the market. Private health insurance never worked.…

School discos and presentation ceremonies should prime the pump for a Covid Christmas. All completely avoidable if we had a country not run by populists terrified of losing a vote, and economic zealots who will never understand an economy…

Why can't we fight Covid? The Economy. Why can't we fight climate change? The Economy. Imagine inventing something that is no use to society in its greatest need, and then making it the entire basis for your society. https://t.co/korw4uCQH2

The genius of the economy. Get business to charge lower prices by bankrupting its customers. https://t.co/0NEiUl7JoY

Covid minimisers trotted out false balance early in the pandemic ('balancing' public health action against the economy). It's what they'd already been doing with climate change for decades. It's the same people. We've spent 3 years trapped…

Neoliberalism has a chronic or 'long' form too. Long neoliberalism is what we're living now, where society is under siege from problems in every direction, and we can do nothing. Because there is no society. The neolibs deliberately…

You know when we Tweet here about the appalling stupidity of Covid strategy? Who are we talking to? The sad answer is - the vacuum where society used to be. Like there’s still some clearing ground for injustice and stupidity. There isn’t.…

Because an economy replaces all societies with a globalised economy, we're all on a race to the bottom, because life is driven by the lowest bid. Deepti describing brilliantly how this will mean all of us getting used to what the…

Societies are not capitalist, they’re not economies either. They’re high schools. Elections are, literally, the transposition of popularity hierarchies in high school into adult life. https://t.co/yJDzf3KAQ9

All groups of all sizes are functionally the same. We label them with big floppy categories like capitalist or authoritarian or scientific, because we’re lazy. All groups operate using status hierarchies. Through social conformity. All…

Our peaceful, prosperous lives of the past 70 years weren’t the result of our democratic freedoms. It was the massive post-war boom, where war industries built consumer goods. Those markets are long saturated. Stagnant wages, minimal job…

‘Protecting the vulnerable’ is neoliberal safety net democracy. No democracy, just a market, and you have some minimal public assistance as a safety net for those who fall through the market’s cracks. A LABOR government is doing this.…

⁦@theprojecttv⁩ , grilling ⁦⁦@AdamBandt⁩ about a windfall profits tax, saying it would be ‘sovereign risk’. That’s a sponsored talking point from these bloody companies, does anybody do journalism any more? The UK did this some time ago.…

‘The economy returned to growth’ literally means the old normal, the old status quo, has ploughed through a couple of hundred thousand dead in the UK to protect its status. https://t.co/Qye36O3C5x

The UK, in a state of collapse after years of Tory ‘there is no such thing as society’ rule, now seriously debating whether they need tougher laws to stop unions striking for a living wage. The libertarians! Their freedom is literally just…

Finally on GBD, it was drafted at an American free-market think tank. Have a look at the articles on their site for the flavour of extreme libertarianism they endorse. This is now Australia’s public health policy. Under a LABOR government.…

Say it every day. We’re not living with Covid. We’re ignoring it. The status quo, often called ‘the economy’, wants us to pretend we’re back in 2019. It’s social inertia, the enormous accumulated wealth and privilege of a predominantly…

This is North Brother Island, where Mary Mallon (‘Typhoid Mary’) was held for 26 years to prevent her spreading typhoid. She was locked up, to protect everybody else. There are a few interesting things to learn here I think, about…

Imagine a target range for infection, like we have for inflation. In the old days (i.e. 3 years ago), that’s what controlling a disease meant. Heaven and Earth are being moved to get us back into the target range for inflation. Infection…

UK news yesterday, claims of this being the most ‘normal Christmas since the pandemic began’. More gaslighting rubbish. As a family currently having its Christmas ruined by having to manage Covid as a new house guest, the previous two were…

China’s economy unsurprisingly more disrupted by allowing infection than it was by preventing infection. And Western journalists explain this by lack of preparation by ‘the authoritarian’ Chinese. As if in the West things were any…

The NBN was rolled out using a libertarian political market model, where people in remote and regional areas became broadband ‘vulnerables’. Rather than, as we did for telephones, rolling out the same top-shelf model to an undifferentiated…

For Covid minimisers, the pandemic is not a novel and lethal virus spreading globally. It’s State intervention in economies. That’s what they see as the actual disaster. Our previous PM and the NSW Premier are in that camp.

Electoral politics give people a magical sense of how power works. Winning an election doesn’t give the winner power to change things. 80-90% of power is framing issues across multiple elections. That’s what the ‘economy’ is, for example,…

2 ways conservatives have dominated politics. One is framing all issues in economic terms. The economy is a con, a substitution of society by a set of numbers that reflect the status quo. And second, by owning our public communication.…

A bit sidetracked with our own Covid Christmas guest last Friday. That’s 233 families with fewer presents to buy this year. Think of the Economy. https://t.co/AmmzcQDMZQ

(This explains the Covid debacle.) We’ve lived a delusion of prosperity. Only a very tiny number are. The rest use personal debt to create faux-prosperity. Now that interest rates have ended that, the feudal nature of society has been…

Many have noticed letting Covid rip hasn’t fixed the economy, it’s made it worse. So why don’t the ‘live with the virus’ econo-zealots change course? Because that would involve the ‘State’ doing something. And that to them is the deepest…

Herd immunity is the market-based mechanism to attempt to deal with infectious disease. Not an analogy, this is the political epidemiology of Covid. Public health is intrinsically political.

On FB (where brains go to die), somebody asked ‘why don’t you ever let up about Covid’? I said it’s like having a toilet leaking raw sewage into your house. You don’t say ‘let’s leave that until another day, and go and have some fun.’

Criticising travel incenses many people, which to me suggests it’s much closer to the root of our problems than nebulous terms like ‘capitalism’. For example, we burn about a billion litres of jet fuel for this travel, per DAY. A billion…

There’s no public health effort against Covid, because our politics has no public. Res publica - also ‘common-wealth’ - means something held in common by people. Replaced by a global market, which allows no collective component. Europe at…

POW camps in the Korean war explain a lot about the total capitulation to Covid today. Nearly 40% of US prisoners died, the highest death rate in US military history. But the camps were only weakly fortified, prisoners had adequate food…

“I don't think it fundamentally would have reshaped the approach that Australia has taken to managing the virus this year.” James McCaw. We didn’t manage the virus this year. A free-market libertarian think tank wrote our Covid strategy.…

I wrote this thread to illustrate how societies are structured by social dynamics, not by politics, or capitalism (or any of the -isms). All of those are products of the same social dynamics. A society is not a collection of ‘the people’.…

While misinformation is obviously an important issue, it’s also a symptom of our broken societies that people need information at all. Public health used to be like sewage and electricity supply, taken care of. Mostly, nobody needed to…

All public health involves a politics. Using the immune system to try to defeat a pandemic is the free market version of public health. Not an analogy, it shifts all public health action to the individual. Which is an oxymoron, because it…

That mountain of personal debt is what’s created the illusion we live in democratic countries. That and welfare (which conservatives strip away) disguise what’s really a feudal society going back centuries, relatively unchanged. Including…

To link two ideas. There’s a real movement towards a 4-day working week in some countries. Industrialised nations already produce way more than they need, so the ‘economy’ crowd really just fear less mountains of coin for themselves. So,…

Great piece. The problem in the questions it asks us, is that there is no we. No public. The reason no public health is going on, is that an economy has no public. Each person in a market is equivalent to every other, globally. It’s a race…

Ask a Covid minimiser what great human project is being interrupted by slowing our economic lives to control a virus. 9 times out of 10 it’s their OS holiday, nothing else. Do we have any grand collective outcomes for what we’re all doing…

You can’t argue to do or not do things, just because ‘the public won’t support it’. The public changes its mind all the time. It’s why corporations and politicians spend billions on marketing and spin. You can market anything, including…

Reality-based politics is the paradigm shift we need. With Covid, it’s not that we replaced public heath with nothing. No society can survive an uncontrolled pandemic. We privatised the public health work. This is fundamental to bypassing…

The same people who think public health measures are ‘lockdowns’ happily deny people the right to work from home, to have clean air in their workplaces, and to move to more flexible work arrangements. They’re happy to lock you into these…

A local car dealer told me Covid was the best thing that ever happened for his business. Cashed-up customers. The people pushing for the return of the old normal are a tiny handful of wealthy parasites on society, who do no meaningful work.

The argument that we can’t do stronger Covid action because it will hurt the poor hardest is one of the most toxic pieces of nonsense of the pandemic so far. Close to 700,000 Australians were lifted out of poverty during Covid. And rapidly…

All I’d add to this excellent thread by @BlairWilliams26 is that I think we always need to look at the social dynamics, not just the narratives. The 5/95 thing, 5% of any group at any scale will determine the direction the other 95% will…

The international implementation of ‘Vision Zero’ for road safety I think provides a model for how to think about defeating not just Covid, but other infectious diseases as well. Zero road deaths has been the implemented plan for many…

I want to suggest that elected politicians be given input to decisions only after a LONG list of basic operational realities of society are dealt with. Popularity-based politics is the greatest obstacle to fixing societies that are falling…

Worth remembering this government, like the one before, is still sitting on over $100 BILLION in unnecessary tax cuts. $32 million available for Covid mitigation, on a contested basis. If every school were to receive $25,000, that would…

I have a longstanding debate with a friend about Covid. They say PH measures had to be relaxed to ‘balance’ action against a lot of other social priorities. I say to them that this is is what PH was designed to do, to do that balancing.…

Don’t be surprised that the same politicians whose ‘balanced’ Covid approach meant dropping all Covid action and returning to 100% economic action, also aren’t even bothering to ensure vax, in a vax-only approach. https://t.co/YhOQ4coTc6

Here’s the ‘balanced’ Covid approach. Full-steam ahead salivating over a handful of economic indicators. Zero action on Covid. https://t.co/CRU2xDeBVl

I remember in the early days of HIV, how anybody engaging in unprotected sex knowing the risks of HIV was condemned by the community, even charged. But with Covid social and economic activity without precaution is celebrated.

What ‘lockdowns’ did, most profoundly. Forced us to question some of the dumb assumptions of modern economic life. The people who did well out of those dumb assumptions would rather infect us all multiple times a year with a lethal virus,…

The 95% will always follow the 5%. All that changes is who occupies the 5% position. First law of high school, thus first law of economic societies. https://t.co/JP6n4M9pKT

I champion actuarial analysis of Covid because it does the thing politicians say they do, but don’t. It ‘balances’ Covid against the economy. It assesses that linkage.

Unfunded gold-plated boomer super will cost the public more than $200 billion. Much of the proposed $120 billion tax cuts will flow to that demographic as well. The government couldn’t find more than $3000 per school (about $30 million) to…

We should be grateful to Dr Gerrard, for saying out loud what National Cabinet refuses to say. That their entire strategy is based on hope, and theories of herd immunity that derive from a libertarian free-market political think tank.…

Until we unpack ‘the economy’, and see it as political strategy rather than as a physical reality, nothing will change. Economic things happen, transactions. But ‘the economy’ suggests an entity or agency that contains all of these…

Fires, floods and now Covid. Making society an economy omits the basic act of sheltering from a threat. If the economy collapses unless you infect everybody repeatedly, it’s a failed social model. With climate change this will be the…

If you want a measure of the time bomb social media is in societies, think about where the sort of behaviours you see on these platforms would be deemed acceptable anywhere else. Not a reactionary thing, I’ve researched on these platforms…

Time, on the need to regulate social media. I keep coming back to this topic because along with elections, it’s the way vested interests have hijacked democracies. Have highlighted also what I say a lot, how the idea the platforms…

Great change in politics comes because it’s forced. Not from politics itself. It took millions of men being killed in the great wars to advance women’s rights significantly, by opening up opportunities for them with the men gone. The…

Why is nothing being done to stop a pandemic? Because the mechanism for doing that, public health, was only forced upon societies by previous destructive epidemics. It wasn’t a creation of rational thought, it was panic. The ‘great stench’…

Kohler notes that voters are not trending conservative now as they age. It could also mean that progressive parties now conserve, and conservatives have been hijacked by economic pirates, who do revolutionary damage to societies.…

They update flu shots every year. Australia’s boosters to date are for older variants of Covid. There’s no talk at all of any new vaccine for 2023 either, globally. This is the ‘balance’ economic politicians talk about. 100% economy, 0%…

The Covid debate between suppressing transmission and focusing on severe disease is really a battle between two belief systems about society. One belief system says society is made of millions of individuals, each choosing their own fate.…

And in a sign of how the ‘balanced’ economic approach to the pandemic really works, the news yesterday was full of emergency language about inflation being at 7.8%. And nothing about excess deaths running at 15%. https://t.co/FNnMVI9X4J

Referring to this again, why has fighting a pandemic with an economy led to mass infection, disease and death? We can see it here, just one more step towards stripping way every last public health protection. Now, even vaccines. The answer…

The inflation we should be paying attention to. https://t.co/yUCx3bQIlr

The non-response to Covid that has surprised many was actually how society was already operating in most areas, after decades of market-based economic politics. Education a great example. Australia’s education outcomes have been in free…

Everything you need to know about why teaching is in crisis is in the determination to infect teachers and their students repeatedly with no mitigations, in this pandemic. Peel away the spin and you’ll see they’re valued only as childcare…

The class of society doing this are descended from those who sent kids down coal mines. https://t.co/mqcsut2emO

We are returning to a ‘normal’ form of life, but it’s not the normal of the post-war years, since 1945. If we zoom out, what’s happening with Covid is part of a much greater historical shift, to unwind most of those post-war years. /1…

Impoverishing the public so business will hopefully drop prices to ‘meet the market’ is going well. https://t.co/ZNaXRLEMI2

Want to use this graph again to show the birth and possible death of the unique invention of the past 150 years of human history. The public. The word is used a lot - public health, public service, public education etc. But it’s rarely…

The previous government knew all of this, but still thought the pressing public policy issue was $120 billion of tax cuts to people who don’t need them. After 30 years of John Howard-instigated assault on all things public, it’s make or…

We’re probably 50 years too late to rescue the public from political libertarians. They have a big head-start, in destroying it. Every day I see people here desperately trying to come to terms with the loss of a public, that whole…

Anthony Albanese seems to model himself on Bob Hawke, but to me he seems more like Tony Blair. For both though, longevity was key to their thinking and success. But at what price? Here’s Blair’s 2021 piece outlining his ongoing political…

People should read Jim Chalmer’s essay on values-based capitalism. And also Tony Blair’s more sophisticated essay I Tweeted earlier, from 2021. To me they’re interchangeable in the way they conceptualise things - a more compassionate…

The economy is an exponential growth function, with epidemic waves and troughs of growth, and a continuously rising baseline. The exact same pattern we’re seeing for Covid. The economy caused and perpetuates the pandemic. They’re the same…

After 30 years of anti-renewables politics, the Oz community has built so much rooftop solar capacity, it’s overwhelmed the grid’s capacity to distribute it. (AEMO graphic.) Oz politics functions via community, not by Left, Right,…

Business puts prices up. We ‘fix’ that by bankrupting customers so they won’t be able to pay the prices. Just as we infect them repeatedly, to pretend-end the pandemic. The economy. A fake substitute for society that protects its most…

To protect ‘the economy’, we’re infecting the entire population repeatedly with a lethal virus, rather than ask business to pay for the basic WHS they’re already legally required to provide. It’s not ‘lockdowns’ vs do nothing. It’s…

This is like private health insurance. The free market works so well that we have to shovel millions (or billions) of public dollars into the privatised option, to try to make it work. And it still doesn’t. https://t.co/kFIfS2ZJ1r

We’re at Yes Minister’s 4th stage of denial with energy as well as Covid. Where the deliberate blockers of essential public infrastructure and administration now use the results of that blocking to argue against fixing the damage, saying…

The same lie that drives “the economy” thinking is what’s also driving our Covid disaster. Old-style butcher shops are one way to expose the lie. Fundamental to the idea of society being an economy, is the idea that people act as…

The current drama over interest rates and inflation is another legacy of the neoliberal/libertarian ascendancy since the 1970s. The idea that the money supply is pivotal to economies was N=1 politics trying to turn societies into…

Douglas Adams’ observations about technology are another way to see how the world we live in is 100% social, and 0% economic, capitalist, socialist or anything else. Nearly everything we don’t understand we attribute to some abstract -ism,…

The ‘wall of immunity’ seems to divide even sane expert communities. Some say it’s a fantasy, others (including our most senior health advisers) say they’re confident it’s happening and is our way out of the pandemic. Two things about…

Alan Tudge in his announcement today about leaving politics called the economy the ‘foundation’ of societies. Rubbish. Government is the foundation of all modern societies. You can find nations with minimal economic activity. But you won’t…

#insiders The Stage 3 tax cuts shouldn’t be much of a problem for inflation, because hardly any Australians will get them, and those that do will shunt them off to accounts in the Caymans.

There’s that balance word again. There’s nothing on the other side of the scales at all. It’s 100% economy, 0% Covid. Just as ‘balanced’ action on climate was always 100% action on the economy, and 0% action on climate. It’s standard…

Why economic politics does nothing about continuous epidemic waves. That’s what the economy is, an exponential growth function. It sees no issues with continuous waves of destruction. Bipolar politics. https://t.co/bFtDmZ83tH

Feudalism is returning. Has been for 50 years, that’s what the economy is, a political tool to strip away ‘the public’. The public was invented in the 19th and 20th centuries, to deal with disasters. Just as kings invented parliaments…

Elected reps have no answers, they don’t run anything. The answer to the cost of living crisis is to stop living having a price in a market. To reverse the transformation of societies into economies. Which will also restore the public. And…

2 parallel movements in our societies. One, the invention of an ‘economy’ as a political weapon to strip away democratic reform of the past 150-200 years. That’s often a depressing story. But the other parallel movement isn’t. Hans (RIP)…

The principal at a local school has followed kids and other staff into isolation this week, as the virus feasts on an entire generation again. Is spending on school ventilation inflationary? Asking for a few million friends.…

It’s not accurate to call ours a vax-only Covid strategy. We’re not even vaxing. It’s an economy-only-so-ignore-Covid strategy. ‘Balanced’. https://t.co/576FQxYs8x

The RBA Governor this week, when asked about huge bank profits with cost of living soaring. We need healthy banks was the answer. We need healthy schools. Nothing is happening there. This is what ‘balancing’ the economy against Covid looks…

Have you noticed that nothing that is collectively important to the survival of society is permitted by the economy? That’s not an accident. It’s a strategic political tool invented by the politics of ‘there is no such thing as society’,…

To revisit the Doherty modelling National Cabinet commissioned before letting Covid rip in Australia, in late 2021. That time is still critically relevant to today, to decide accountability for the deliberate launch of our worst ever…

Ask politicians why they can’t do more to stop Covid, or to fix the cost of living, and you’ll get the same answer. ‘The economy’. Some people don’t believe the economy is a fiction. But you can define it precisely by all the things it…

If the economy was what people say it is, we would have figured out how to run it by now. But it always - always - just creates booms and busts. Because it isn’t what people say it is. It’s spin for ‘unregulated social life’. That’s all it…

A one-Tweet summary of my earlier longer thread. If you (the RBA) do all the right ‘economic’ things, and all it does is screw ordinary people, how long until people realise that’s the actual function of the economy? https://t.co/QCRHkUjiUE

Something that Covid shows so well is that modern societies who thought they had a base of certainty from which to act, science, have nothing of the sort. Like everything else in life, all truth is contextual. Bertrand Russell’s parable is…

Super, introduced by Paul Keating, is the most extraordinary transfer of national wealth to ordinary Australians in our history. Which is why the LNP despise it, with passion. The first time in all of history where ordinary people hold…

David Coleman, on Q&A last night. ‘It’s your money’ (about super). Most of it is your employer’s money, plus public-funded massive tax concessions. With a legislated time at which it becomes yours, at age 60+. It’s your infection too,…

The world is too complex for most of our analytical fields to really understand now I think. You have to think like a novelist, as DH Lawrence used to say, only the novel can capture that sort of complexity. My trip to the pharmacy…

In the blue corner we have the actuary. In the red we have the economist and economic politician. Actuary wins with a knock out seconds into Round 1. The economy is a political myth, designed to bypass democracy. Until we fix that, nothing…

I have less trouble seeing sentience in computer code and animals than I do finding it in modern economic politics. https://t.co/5DHkwHmWs0

We can’t do even a basic thing like stopping the rich pillaging super as a form of tax evasion. Because? Always the same reason, it might lose votes. Isn’t voting grand? Democracy’s greatest obstacle. Doesn’t achieve a single thing.

Waleed has written a very interesting piece here that overlaps with some of the things I Tweet about. It sometimes feels like we’re in a new age of puritanism, with the collapse of ordinary community-based political life shadowed by a…

From 22 minutes on, the brains trust over at the Guardian. Firstly not even aware we’re into year 4 of the pandemic. Then all sagely concluding the community ‘won’t support’ further Covid measures, regurgitating a LNP talking point as…

It’s a good question, anybody know? Contribution caps are quite low ($27K for the concessional tax, $110K if you’re happy to forego it). https://t.co/mYGqEjKL19

We’ve left behind the world where this would trigger immediate concern and action. We replaced it with (we say) an economic, global market. All nonsense, it’s still just people, doing stuff. We avoid that reality by replacing it with the…

For the past 50 years, every time ‘the economy’ was used as a substitute for society, this destruction was happening. That was the acute phase. We’re now living the chronic phase. https://t.co/i2lC73WfVv

The economy crowd believe in markets, until they don’t work. Which is always, in epidemic waves. Then regulation, like high interest rates, will be used to restore order. Regulation won’t be used against disease epidemic waves though.…

For believers in ‘the market’ as an actual thing, we currently have a free market of Covid action. Is mass infection and death what the market wanted? People seriously believe that billions of people left entirely to their own market-based…

“Business groups, diplomats and many residents had slammed Hong Kong's COVID-19 rules, saying they threatened its competitiveness and standing as an international financial centre.” There’s that ‘balance’ again. Economy 100%, Covid 0%.…

‘The economy’ is just feudalism dressed in supply and demand equilibrium equations. Not an analogy, it’s literally all that it is. https://t.co/xgTn2yXSgH

Some think I’m bananas, saying ‘the economy’ is a fiction. Pointing out that humans have traded for millennia. And there surely have been ‘economic’ transactions for as long as history. But that’s *not* ‘the economy’. It’s that ‘the’ that…

Australian politics is communitarian (look it up). Not capitalist, socialist, Left or Right. All through the climate war decades, Australians ignored the BS and went about installing an entire new national electricity generation system…

The 50-year long assault on taxation, under cover of libertarian nonsense about freedom, had one clear goal. To relieve the wealthy of their social obligations. This thread is a home-run of numbers to ram the point home.…

More evidence of how ‘the economy’ shapes society. Note that with Auspost’s troubles, at no time does even the ALP shift from the cost-recovery model in its thinking. It has to be run like a business, the conservatives win again.…

The job is the basic unit of the ‘economy’. And now that the economy has replaced society, it’s also the basic unit of society. ‘Jobs, jobs, jobs’, remember a PM saying that? A job is much more than a way to organise work. It’s a way to…

In the debate about whether Covid came from a lab or a wet market, I’ve always come down hard on the side of it coming from organising society as an economy. So that keeping coffee shops and travel agents solvent takes priority over…

"It is just assumed that the free market will look after things and we will have vets wherever we need them but that is not the case." Another victim of ‘the Economy’ fantasy. Society is falling apart. And remember, that was the actual…

The reason I don’t show much enthusiasm for mobilising behind causes is because I think it misunderstands how societies work. Petitioning elected representatives in various ways is the fantasy mythology we were all fed throwing up about…

Meantime in the UK, we’re literally at the ‘let them eat cake’ stage of social collapse. But tomatoes, not cake. Grow ‘em yourself, the supermarkets are empty. https://t.co/Zgf0QLBo6I Notice ‘personal responsibility’ used here again. Take…

NSW copied this scheme. People will remember the vouchers. Designed to break down psychological and emotional resistance to being infected. Sold as helping the economy. https://t.co/TS5ZShTws5

Again, the late 1970s was when everything changed. That’s when ‘the economy’ (‘markets’) began replacing society in earnest. We don’t need to debate these things, the empirical evidence is there in lights. Markets are a fantasy.…

“But the premier's press conferences have become a bit like that — no matter what is asked, the economy is the answer.” You won’t find a clearer empirical proof that ‘the economy’ was invented to bypass all social and political issues.…

‘The poor’ don’t see themselves as the poor. They see themselves as the equal of the rich, but unlucky and obstructed. They don’t want pity or help, they want to not be thought of as low-status citizens. They learn that in high school, we…

Better than the LNP. My cat could run a country better than the LNP, who don’t even pretend they want to. They want to shut government down, they’re honest about it. But the ALP just as enslaved to the framing of ‘the economy’. Elections…

In the power industry, when demand significantly outstrips supply, they carry out ‘load shedding’ i.e. turning off the power to users. Letting the elderly die so the rest of us can go back to meaningless jobs for the economy, is Covid load…

‘The economy’ caught red-handed. “The RBA is attempting to curb price growth by reducing the capacity of households to purchase goods and services, reducing demand and making it harder for businesses to hike prices more.” Let that sink in.…

From @EricTopol. I remember looking at annual costs to the bloody ‘economy’ of influenza, pre-Covid. It ran into the billions, in Australia. Clean air is one of the best ROIs imaginable for modern economies. https://t.co/vO1hktEItE

Longer article on installing air filtration in classrooms. The increase in educational performance the equivalent of cutting class sizes by one-third. One for politicians AND unions, at a fraction of the cost of standard pedagogical…

Maybe the greatest enabler of social breakdown we’re now living is the IT industry. Not much is said about it. As social systems have been degraded through decades of individually-focused politics, rushing to fill the void left by that…

Regional Australia will need an additional 11,000 GPs in the next decade. 50,000 teachers are projected to retire between 2020 and 2025. This is what running your society as a free market economy for 50 years does. No planning, no…

It’ll be no surprise that I think ‘the economy’ is hokum. If (as I believe) it’s just people, I’d predict that the countries who will flourish throughout this century and into the next, are those who aren’t in retirement homes. The…

This graph tells a very different story, depending on how you frame it. Right now we’re so habituated to modern economic political framings that we tend to see it as a graph about welfare. About government ‘aid’. But reframe it and you’ll…

Inflation/cost of living driven by high energy prices. Desperate need for emissions reduction. The answer is obvious. Electrify households. Households already built massive solar PV. Now subsidise them to electrify all of their appliances…

We won’t beat Covid by assuming the way out is for popularity Prom Kings and Queens in parliament to suddenly act. We need to change one fundamental belief we hold ourselves too, for change to happen. About the ‘local and the global’.…

This will be an interesting dataset to watch in 2023. Covid 1, economy 0, in 2022. https://t.co/mgzD9XjH5K

Covid is by far the greatest death toll from a natural disaster in Australia. Most of that is 2022. Nearly double the deaths of the second greatest disaster (Spanish Flu), and still climbing. Between 3-20 times more than any other disaster…

Gigi Foster, Q&A last night. The politics of the economy will always refuse to acknowledge that letting everybody catch a lethal virus will kill lots of people. https://t.co/grVenzsWJY

‘The economy’ really means ‘everybody doing whatever they like’. That’s what the market supposedly is. Which then magically builds airports and hospitals, high quality schools, and controls infections. And we reckon Flat Earthers are crazy.

Committing the budget to impossible sums has the (not accidental) benefit of providing cover for further gutting of public services. It’s a death cult, wrapped in flags and bibles. https://t.co/Kvca1tn0a9

The rise in the ‘cost of living’ is a reminder that all that created the illusion in the past 20 years of ordinary people being looked after, was a mountain of personal debt. Not a coincidence that zero action on Covid is happening at the…

Yes broken. In plain sight, ‘there is no such thing as society’. Only once in the entire history of most societies has it been any different. In the period between the end of WW2, and the early 21st century. /1 https://t.co/aAIJvrcRk2 The…

The only thing that’s free in a free market is labour. https://t.co/rp0fcoCvC4

Another way the economy crowd hijacked politics and societies, is to turn budget nights into some sort of sacred ritual. Look through your family album and see if you can find any shots of ‘mum and dad putting together the family budget’.…

Most local government areas in Australia are starved of money to provide basic resources. While we give hundreds of billions in tax cuts, and to buy the US a missile delivery platform in the Indo-Pacific. Those lunacies aside, a thought…

The disastrous myth that societies are market economies continues to destroy them. And to stop them fighting a pandemic. Until the complete nonsense of markets and economies is called out, nothing will change. Elections are pointless…

Keating’s description of Penny Wong’s wearing of leis and handing out cash as not foreign policy but more a ‘consular task’ is a brutally accurate observation. Public policy is dead, completely overwhelmed by grown up fairytales about…

It already collapsed. Replaced by a market economy. 50 years ago. We’re much, much too late to this party. (The market economy is pretend, masking basic feudalism.) https://t.co/0qmRLF8398

Albo’s problem is that he wants to be liked. He wants to be Hawke, nationally adored. But Hawke achieved that on the back of major policy reform. While both Albo and Biden target ‘division’ in politics, as if the problem is people just not…

The market at work. Paying over $1/litre for water, which you can get out of any tap for almost nothing. Obviously we needed a market to drive prices down, because free water was too expensive. https://t.co/VbxvoELO4L

The ‘market’ always fails. Maybe it isn’t real. https://t.co/tNFp7kHapS

Banks are always ‘too big to fail’, in economy land. But we can afford to infect the entire globe over and over, with a virus. Let the banks go to the wall, and save the people instead. It’s the law of the market they say they live by.…

It’s worth unpacking just how ridiculous the idea of the ‘market’ is. Both of these sets of people occupy the same global ‘market’. By current economic politics, it means they both compete equally. The whole thing is such an obvious con, a…

Thanks to @RichardfromSyd1 for alerting me to this one. Haven’t read it yet, but I obviously Tweet a lot about how the market and the economy itself are myths. Deliberately constructed myths. To replace society with old-style feudalism.…

The history of how the invention of the ‘public’ from the late-19th to the mid-20th century was deliberately unwound is a fascinating one. Much of it happened in the US, in a coalition between corporate and church interests. We’re living…

You cannot elect your way out of an economy.

Still amazes me that we’ve gone 70 years not even noticing that the idea of a market economy is almost the exact opposite of the idea of democracy. https://t.co/aZwPILHPCW

Australian society, strip-mined by foreign resource companies. With the laughable royalties then vacuumed up by older Australians. A society is a ‘circle of life’, intergenerational. An economy is just plundering, of this social wealth.…

The only thing that keeps the fantasy of societies as economies (i.e billions of isolated individuals in a market) going is the finance system. Banks issuing new money through loans. Those loans keep 8 billion market customers afloat, as…

Superb. Modern economics is mostly complete bullshit, as is its ‘economy’. You can strip it all away very easily, and wonder how you never noticed the Emperor was never wearing anything. https://t.co/9eMaQJhWMZ

This is the class of society that invented the economy. The market. What do you reckon their motivation was? https://t.co/fDo8N7vjK3

Another founding myth of ‘the economy’. Budgets, and debt. For decades conservatives have been able to strip away social programs, under cover of supposedly protecting the federal budget. It was always motivated nonsense.…

The shift to a market-economy fractured all collective attention and energy into millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Any sense of a larger social project was lost. Reality isn’t fooled. It’s now presenting us with an invoice for that 70-year…

Great thread for those who believe in the service economy. As Cory says, the real process has been transferring value ‘from those who make things for a living to those who own things for a living’. https://t.co/o4kyY2CI6I

The Block, and the surge in interest in luxury. I’ve argued that what we call an economy is really a trick, the replacement of the public sphere with a fictitious market of free-floating individuals, interacting. Driven by a sophisticated…

We’re at least 30 years too late. Governments won’t fight Covid for the same reason they won’t fight climate change. The transformation of societies into economies, complete decades ago. We missed it. No amount of health data has even the…

I don’t spend much time now appealing to elected leaders to do anything at all. They won’t, the jobs they take on are little more than following a few economic indicators on a spreadsheet. Go against ‘the economy’ and they’re toast. So…

As with 'values-based capitalism', the ALP is just sanding the rough edges off the status quo. Too terrified to confront all of the ridiculous framings the conservatives have introduced over the past 70 years. Being good little gold-star…

You can't unsee it. An economy, plus 'experience and energy'. That's it. Amazed he called it a 'state', I guess that's a dismantling still in progress. Though not capitalised, so he probably meant the state of being the elected government.…

In the UK, always a window into our future, food banks now sit alongside ‘hygiene banks’. Because people can’t afford soap or shampoo. “How can you tell he’s the King? He hasn’t got shit all over him.” Feudalism is back. Now called ‘the…

Every 6 years the ABS reports on average weekly household expenditures. The last data is 2015-16, next one is imminent. A few eye-openers into Australian life, circled in red and green. /1 https://t.co/weMO68aeD0 Australians spend as much…

Monetarism in a ‘market economy’ floods the place with cheap money, so there are no consequences for low wages (people can take on more debt), or investing in nothing real, because there’s always more cheap money to bail people out. Until…

Some blame lockdowns for a whole range of social, economic and health problems right now. Lockdowns only accelerated the collapse of systems that were already broken. What hid those breaks before was insane busyness. Hitting the pause…

We fixed the GFC by ‘going households’. Australians re-built electricity generation in this country in the past 30 years at the household level. Electrification of households addresses cost of living as well as climate change. Fast. The…

The thing that conservatives say is the bedrock of their politics - the family, the household - is also the thing all of their policies screw relentlessly. Attacking wages, working conditions, driving up the prices of these same homes.…

Another modern disguise the economy employs, labour hire. Old slavery, in modern drag. Unsurprisingly massively accelerated under the previous government. And mostly in the ‘service’ sector. It’s pantomime feudalism. Literally, not an…

Attributing disruption to supply chains in 2022 to Covid infection. But implying this is over. The disruption has just moved into peoples’ lives, still being infected, but with supply chains restored. The ‘economy’ (i.e. do nothing) wins…

I would place a large bet that when crunch time comes on tax, the massive boomer entitlements will be ‘grandfathered’ for electoral reasons (if the boomers are still living), and Gen X and younger will again cop it in the neck.…

Immunity may be the wrong model to deal with infectious disease. Domestication is the right one, I suspect. There are powerful insights in Ewald’s work. Immunity alone strips away the entire ecological context of host and pathogen. /1…

I’d wager he’s not in one of the hospital wards the rest of us are expected to use, where the most likely outcome of a hospital stay is Covid infection. https://t.co/qIEVS7bvcZ

Life in a sloganocracy. Hit me again this week, reading debates about infection-driven immunity, or ‘exposure’ immunity, hybrid immunity etc. In a sloganocracy, what guides community life is no longer government and its associated…

The US and UK leading the developed world in libertarian economy politics. In social collapse. The fact these damning mortality stats are still dire even without Covid in the US shows the problem was pre-existing, political, and also the…

Some want Covid to become another common seasonal cold virus. Usually the same people who believe economies are an actual thing. In the US, the common cold costs the economy over $20 billion per year, and is responsible for over 40% of…

Elections allow anybody into politics, so long as they’re popular. Getting a job in a supermarket requires more expertise. https://t.co/ohOy2TCOwF

The atomic unity of society is not the individual. It’s the household. Economy politics replaces society with a market, made up of independent, mobile workers, decoupled from place. But that’s not how most people live. The economy wants…

The job is the economy’s way of controlling the flow of social resources. It’s a social invention, not economic. We stopped fighting Covid because jobs and viruses mostly don’t mix. Until we remove the job as the foundation of social life,…

Marvelling at how dumb people are is exactly what libertarian economy politics wants us to do. It wants us to blame each other for the chaos their toxic leadership creates. Divide and conquer.

The ‘lockdowns broke our economies’ folk never mention that it was mostly because the supply of cheap slave labour from other countries dried up. It took a pandemic to make fully visible the true nature of ‘the economy’. Feudalism,…

We all know now, ‘balancing’ the economy against Covid protections meant doing nothing about Covid, and everything for the economy. The word balance entered discussions about journalism when people demanded to have bullshit added, to…

We need to constantly highlight that our Covid strategy was written by an extreme libertarian free market think tank. Word-for-word. I’d still be interested to be shown any public health text or set of guidelines that has ever resembled…

More politics with words. ‘Hybrid immunity’. Most meanings of the word immunity mean to be resistant to infection. But the politics of Covid has again subtly revolved around words, and transformed it into ‘having less severe disease’. I’m…

Society is social, not political. What we call politics is hierarchical social status games, with different names for the different players. Just as Grease has its T-Birds, Scorpions and Pink Ladies, we have an ALP, LNP and Greens. /1…

When you have 50 years of politics where the overwhelming priority is to strip away all vestiges of the public, don’t be surprised when public health disappears as well. Market economies have no publics. It’s in their founding beliefs.…

Evidence again that 'the market' does nothing (because it doesn't exist). The reason we got the existing vaccines was government intervention and funding. It will be the only way we get next generation vaccines too. https://t.co/YTaSdK8WK4

It’s quite something that Australia made you pay for your own Covid tests before the US did. But let’s buy subs, and have big tax cuts. https://t.co/U5m809chfD

Both Covid and climate change are not political problems to solve. They’re engineering problems. But it’s also much bigger than that sounds, and the last Industrial Revolution explains why, and shows the irrelevance of anybody who utters…

This is still the NSW Health advice. We need to make health departments completely independent of politicians, like the Reserve Bank. Then they can mandate again, instead of recommend. The RBA doesn't 'recommend' interest rate rises. But…

Some will have seen the multiple threads I've written suggesting that 'the economy' is actually a deliberate strategic invention to return societies to their default historical state. Feudalism. Every piece of the jigsaw fits, now…

From last year. When politicians talk about ‘independence’, like the RBA setting interest rates or the Remuneration Tribunal setting politician pay, they mean something that: - benefits them - is deeply unpopular. So they fabricate an…

Using immunity to try to defeat a pandemic is like trying to defeat inflation by bankrupting ordinary people, so they can’t pay inflated prices. And in fact the same people are doing both. https://t.co/Bgo8qZG28i

Politicians lie, we know they do. But the reason they lie is more interesting. They lie because they have to pretend they do something they actually don’t - run a country. They have no idea how to do that. It’s much too complex. Their…

I think it may be about time for a cost-benefit analysis on economics itself. Catastrophically irrelevant to just about everything. https://t.co/1AEcj895KF

Is masking as the pointy edge of living with the virus resistance the best choice? All of the idiot ‘economy’ things continue, but with masks. Withdraw support for all economy-driven things like mass entertainment, travel and dining out…

Both the LNP and ALP relish sinking the boot into students. Either the pollies got their free degrees already, or they’re too stupid to have one and resent it. Imagine taxing education, and not taxing corporations. The joys of the economy.…

Democracy and the economy have been having this fight for years. The economy is feudalism, disguised by equilibrium equations. Not an analogy. Free market theory says deregulating everything creates an equilibrium. But it only frees the…

If you can find a single reference to the public in the economic theory used in our politics, you’ve done very well. And that’s exactly the point of that theory. To get rid of the public, and replace it with a market. Markets also replace…

Every one of the National Selfie Group, now and since it was formed, voted unanimously to end the pandemic by mass infection, mostly of children. Children were seen as the fast-track way to herd immunity. It’s a crime against the public.…

A survey was asking if electricity should be publicly owned. Actually everything already is. We're a Common-wealth. The State invented the 'private sector', in law. The free-marketers are too stupid to understand. Just as the UN creates…

The ALP in 2023 seems mostly about symbolism, reflecting the times we live in. No real mongrel about them about better outcomes for ordinary Australians. Sanding the rough edges off LNP non-policy with values-based capitalism (a laughable…

The LNP must laugh, watching the ALP finally win back government, and then spend all of its time scurrying around trying to balance the budget, casting all ALP priorities aside, like good little neo-liberals. Played like a piano.…

The reason voting another party in rarely makes much difference should be obvious. Economies are party-agnostic. That's why conservatives invented them, to do politics, while looking like they weren't doing politics.

It takes some chuztpah to be part of a political class relentlessly minimising a pandemic, and then to say the drop in testing is because people are choosing not to have it, 'demand has dramatically reduced'. https://t.co/BEU4VtVACZ

This is the best EV policy the ALP can come up with after 10 years in opposition. Like a wet dishcloth. Adopt Saul Griffith's electrifying households strategy. Much faster, much smarter. Would fix many cost of living and other economic…

Not one person said ‘maybe monetarism is nonsense’. Monetarism is one of Milton Friedman’s babies, a key architect of the libertarian politics now laying waste to societies. It’s a key plank of ‘the economy’, conservative political…

Probably the greatest cause of mental health issues is being treated like a peasant in employment, but being expected to ‘live your best life’ in the mythology of prosperous societies. The best treatment for mental health is a living wage…

Is there a single service banks now offer customers? You give them your money, they close branches, and when their systems fail, you also pay. Bank robbing now means robbing customers, not the bank. This is ‘the economy’ right up close.…

Populism learned its craft in popular music. The Top 40 was one of the earliest populist inventions, where music was ranked entirely on popularity. To this day you can’t have a sensible discussion about the quality of music, without…

Perfect example of how societies are 100% social, not political or economic. The ALP is slow to do this because it knows millions of ordinary Australians resent the unemployed getting more money. They see them as lower status. Also why the…

These are big numbers. But will disappear into the void of the annual sacred ritual of the Economy - the budget. https://t.co/HUYHabTAq9

I have older relatives who still keep much of their money in cash, hidden at home. It’s the equivalent of us all doing our own public health now. For the same reason, ‘the economy’ doesn’t serve ordinary people. It was designed explicitly…

The true function of schooling is rarely if ever mentioned. It’s to decouple peoples’ beliefs from their close social groupings. To separate what you know from who you know, and what they believe. To interrupt social hierarchies. /1…

The ridiculously solemn discussion around the budget (which many mistake for the economy itself). Simple solutions exist to most of the 'wicked' problems, like actually taxing people. But all impossible because - popularity. That's the…

Here's a budget saving. Long Covid is caused by people catching Covid. The best way to treat it is to stop so many people catching Covid. There, $50 million saved. https://t.co/2gNLvsZ6AT

It’s the privatisation of health, just as everything else is privatised in the politics of the economy, which will allow no public, only markets. And for which every collective effort is called ‘anti-competitive’. https://t.co/fOImTlvl2p

The opponents of lockdowns openly don’t even believe society is a thing. They replaced it with a market. Shutting society down should have been a fast-track to their promised land: millions of consumers, free of society’s interference.…

While I think the economy is a myth, a re-badging of society, we could get much more sensible public discussion if we could at least distinguish between the budget and the economy. All of the talk of 'finding the money' for things is…

If you follow urban design, ‘place making’ is a hot thing. The deliberate design and making of ‘place’. This is Roppongi Hills, an urban development in Tokyo. Why this matters, a lot, for Covid too. As children of empire, we have a very…

It's depressing when even political journalists don't understand political framing. The reason all parties can't act is because 'the economy' - a political framing of society - won't allow it. The economy wins all elections. That's why it…

One way to activate your reality-politics filters is when watching films or TV shows, ignoring the human characters, and focusing instead on the infrastructure inside which the drama is unfolding. The cities or towns, the cars, the trains…

The Inflation Reduction Act in the US is a type of re-birth for industry policy. The idea that governments should shape productive capacity. I still remember the Button Plan, which set in motion the dismantling of the car industry here. An…

It might take just one question to National Cabinet to shift Covid gears. Let’s keep asking. Why is our Covid ‘strategy’ word-for-word a manifesto from a libertarian free-market think tank? #auspol #covid19aus https://t.co/ZZ2t5lSsZg

When the solution to a major social problem is said to be ‘more supply’, you know parasitic economic interests have captured the regulatory system. Gas, now housing. Supply and demand is one of the founding myths of the market economy.…

What’s really going on here is that the entire edifice of economic politics is crumbling. Monetarism, society as a market, etc. But as always the ideas won’t change, we’ll drive off a cliff first. Only catastrophe creates major social…

Australia has no shortage of housing. No ‘supply’ problem. Just as it has no shortage of gas. It has a market problem. Essential social goods like energy and housing were turned into an economic market. Leading to hoarding of the resource,…

30% of businesses fail in their first year. 50% by their second. 75% by their 4th. Business (especially small business) is a terrible model for a society. But that’s what the ‘economy’ is. Not only does it mostly fail, it’s even worse than…

Hard to fathom sometimes that the entire pandemic is only the absence of fresh air. We went to the moon over 50 years ago. But fresh air? No. The milestone Clean Air Act was introduced in the US in the 1970s. The same time as free market…

This is what ‘independence’ of a central bank means. Taking the blame for unpopular decisions. So that politicians don’t. Stupid decisions too, because the monetarism that invented central banks is stupid. It’s a key plank of free market…

We urgently need more submarines and tax cuts. And to drive down hyperinflation of bullshit. https://t.co/3Rz46e0pfq

I think it was David Suzuki who said that you can't see the economy from space. It says everything you need to know about it.

Humans are built to notice and be concerned about contrasts, not absolutes. For example you perceive a change in temperature or smell, then become accustomed. This is where normalising Covid infection got its power. By drawing upon a…

‘The vulnerable’ sounds almost caring. It isn’t. In the politics of the economy it frames the not-vulnerable as those who ‘don’t need the State’. That’s the assumed default, the normal. Once you use this framing, the State, and with it the…

The true nature of the economy is only revealed when it tanks. The illusion that society has survived its substitution by an economy is only ever maintained when there’s cheap debt for ordinary people. The old public has to borrow its…

Politics is done with framing. Not elections. How politicians frame issues can survive multiple election losses. Framing all of a society as an economy has won conservatives elections now for decades. They win even when they lose, because…

I see the new Premier got right on the job. Some job, anyway. Probably 'the economy'. https://t.co/GkDzvhwFTR

Damn commies. Making useful stuff. When will they learn that freedom is letting private school boys hijack all of your productive capacity to game the stock market, and invent financial instruments, so they can buy Lamborghinis? h/t…

The people will not rise up to defeat Covid, climate change or anything else. It’s our ideas about democracy that are destroying it. The bad people organise change, driving ‘the people’ in various directions. Good people wait for the…

How much communities changed when we all became interchangeable cogs in globalised economic markets: the old practice of letters of introduction. A community was seen as having agency, new members were assessed using existing…

Living is not a consumer good. In the focus on ‘cost of living relief’ for tomorrow’s budget, who are we all buying ‘living’ off?

The power of framing. The ALP are pleased as punch to deliver a budget surplus. Budget surpluses are weaponised conservative spin. It’d be like the LNP celebrating a growth in union membership and raising the dole.

Remember that sweet time we declared the pandemic was over, so somebody could sweep to electoral victory? Marked with the red cross. Elections, the greatest enemy of public health. And public wealth. h/t @ToshiAkima https://t.co/0HFia3Cj4F

Obviously a better budget than anything the gas industry dressed as LNP pollies ever put together. But a real disappointment on electrification. Only 110,000 households will get access to loans to electrify i.e. they still pay. 3.8 million…

Australia should have listened to Saul Griffiths for this budget. Instead it listened to business, on hydrogen. Joe Biden listened to Saul. https://t.co/m9Oj7eDL0r

On UK television they quoted a statistic that said people are more likely to go through 2 divorces, than they are to change their bank. It's excellent evidence that 'the economy' is a fiction. People act socially, always. Not as market…

The late Stephen Toulmin. Studied something I think fundamentally important to getting ourselves out of the mess societies are now in, with Covid and elsewhere. Casuistry, or casuistic reasoning. Case-based reasoning. Much, much more…

The vulnerable. To go back to the saying, that you’re only as strong as your weakest link. This was the insight that led to the invention of ‘the public’ in the late 19th century. Something we all grew up assuming was a natural part of the…

If you're going to adopt a free market think tank's template Covid strategy of protecting the vulnerable, you have to protect the vulnerable. And you can't anyway. Because they're fully connected to the rest of us. https://t.co/Do8m7M5PRq

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1…

This is the type of person currently running the UK, from which our own local conservatives draw inspiration and strategy. Jacob Rees-Mogg. You can see his respect for the whole institution of government in his pose. But it gets even more…

Great piece ⁦@ColinKinner⁩ and ⁦@BlairWilliams26⁩. Australia won’t reset because the public isn’t compatible with an economy. All that survives is ‘the vulnerable’. Which isn’t a public. https://t.co/IY2X6NLSu0

A Part 2 on Get Back. This movie is very important, and it’s irrelevant what you think about Beatles music. The beliefs that are now destroying our societies were taking root at exactly this time in history. The Beatles were a major…

The Tories dust off their only policy in response to this sort of disaster. Tax cuts , for themselves and their chums. Meantime we express outrage on social media, which achieves precisely fuck all. Social media is owned by billionaires,…

Humans are social creatures. First, foremost, and always. Even when they’re being ‘political’ they’re being social. For a long time that social life was a relatively independent domain of life, free of the clutches of commerce and…

My criticism of social media is a criticism of the founding beliefs that created it. Here they are in plain view, from the infamous AIER. The home of the GBD. Democracies do NOT emerge from the ‘bottom’ up’ That’s a libertarian fantasy. /1…

20 years ago this would have been a news headline in major newspapers. Now it’s the public health strategy of the National Cabinet and Chief Medical Officer of the country. Itself a word-for-word copy of a free market libertarian…

That hybrid immunity thing is slow to get going, hey. Going to need to slaughter a lot more people to get there. Collateral damage for the economy. https://t.co/ilKFYzp6Wk

Had some fun talking about the positives of constitutional monarchies when Charles was crowned. But never said who my preferred Head of State would be. My vote is - Australia. The land under our feet. It might seem absurd to suggest a…

This is the bind belief in ‘the economy’ has left Western nations in. While at home they smash their own institutions in an iconoclastic rush to individual freedom, it leaves the stage open for countries like China to actually build…

Revisiting the heart of the ‘economy’ for Covid Tweets, because the whole pandemic is really an economic phenomenon, not health. We can see the uptick in government spending, during the pandemic. What it MEANS is much more interesting. /1…

A fifth of the average annual road toll dead, in just a week. Week after week. We elect governments to change this, and all they care about is the economy (of course), getting re-elected, and that we all be nicer to each other. Because…

“I think we have the balance right”. If a politician says this, it means “this is as far as the focus group polling and party donors will allow us to go.” Two things will prevent action on Covid, climate change or anything else. /1 1) The…

We’re into year 4 of the pandemic. For maybe half of those 4 years most countries have done almost nothing to fight it. So let’s say 2 years of having a red hot go, at best, for most. WW2 went for 6-7 years. There was no let-up. We have no…

The GBD aligned perfectly with ‘the economy’, because it’s the same beliefs. No aim for social life except living ‘normal life’. Which is just saying the status quo should triumph. Those already winning in society should just keep winning.…

Australia's communitarian (not capitalist, not socialist) politics is best seen in community-driven change, like the massive installation of solar panels, and Clean Up Australia Day. It's a unique model that no party is tapping into. It's…

The greatest leaps in science are always conceptual. I see so much science today that is obsessed with methodology. Research methods. As if the data will reveal its meaning with enough layers of rigorous methodology. I think that’s a trap.…

Another piece of rhetorical fluff that needs to be put to bed is the idea that our societies are 'divided'. That's deliberate conservative strategy, to create a sense of division. It energises apathetic voters. /1 https://t.co/Ct5L0Juzm6…

Because we stopped doing them in NSW, when the free market fairies decided that getting people back into coffee shops was more important than keeping people alive. https://t.co/irp5i8tm11

Protecting people from disease doesn’t lock down an economy. Gutting their wages, making their housing unaffordable, raising the interest rates on their debt, uncontrolled inflation. Those things do. But they can still go to work. Or…

I’m burning through friends in this pandemic. They’re not becoming enemies, but my refusal to live with a pandemic virus has dried up most of the ways they’ll agree to interact socially. I’m also not at all interested in using social media…

Beautiful example from the UK of populism vs reality. All modern conservatives dog whistle with migration. But at the same time it’s the only thing keeping their nations and beloved economies afloat. Now reality has checkmated them.…

A job is not an economic construct, It’s a social construct, a method of social control. Once people are totally reliant upon a job to survive, society’s governance shifts to employers. None of that is accidental. https://t.co/WUT4scwGZX

Dutton and Morrison both playing the ‘all Australians are equal’ card in opposing the Voice. Classic feudal conservatism. Accumulate all the power and wealth, then say that’s the natural equilibrium of society, which regulation will…

Creating infection-free public spaces as a ‘commons’ is an approach for Covid that is neither individual or government-driven. A commons (you might have heard the name in relation to shared land, in the UK for example) is very similar to a…

Victoria’s Covid protests. There’s a critical lesson here we’re not heeding, political sleight of hand. The noise and drama of these protests is almost single-handedly responsible for the narrative that ‘people would not tolerate more…

Gotta love the economy. First it fixed a pandemic by infecting everybody. Now it's going to fix work from home by increasing the number of people who will never own one.

For those convinced capitalism (or any -ism) exists, can they point to where in legislation or elsewhere it says ‘ok, you must do things in a capitalist way’? If there is a ‘system’ running societies, where is it?

The loud noise from small business over the rise in minimum wages and award rates. There’s always a lot of angst about ‘big business’. Small business is much worse for workers. Has nothing to do with the owners being bad. The model is…

In 1948 Australian workers were finally granted a weekend, two days a week off work. The 8-hour day campaign achieved this around the time of WW1, but not for all workers. 1948 was everybody. What happened next is important for…

NSW had the same scheme. Not just economic, designed also to normalise mass infection, to break down resistance to sharing infected spaces. Dominic Perrottet spoke openly about breaking down hesitancy. Grooming the population for…

I’m sure everybody thinks the social collapse facing the UK has an obvious answer. Tax cuts to the wealthy toffs who caused the social collapse. But popular! Way to go, elections. https://t.co/NYwPl6E6F9

We must challenge the idea that action for the public good needs to be ‘balanced’ against the economy. History will tell you that’s a total misunderstanding. Too many years of dreary sociological and political theory has miscast that…

I think a quick fix here would be $300 billion+ worth of nuclear submarines, and about $200 billion in tax cuts to the top end of town. https://t.co/9UAD5dRXs5

Riddle me this. Enormous demand for housing, no supply. But not because there’s no land available, lots of those houses are sitting unfinished, unable to find a builder. Builders are going broke. The fantasies of the economy. /1…

Just as renaming feudalism as 'capitalism' hides the historical continuity of societies, in this article substitute 'slaver' for every mention of 'labour hire'. https://t.co/T5KXfL8uMy

Contacted the principal of my kids' school to ask about outside options for some upcoming events. Got the standard response I hear from all schools and workplaces now. "We're following the rules" i.e. doing nothing. This is a gap you can…

Pathetic populist politicians won’t touch Covid for fear of losing votes. The cookers spooked them, or their own ideology hated every second of public health, with Covid. That ideology hates anything public, it ‘distorts the market’, even…

Historically what makes economies boom is action against emergencies. It 'stimulates economic activity'. Like after the great wars in the 20th century, or cholera in the UK. Leading to decades of prosperity. The problem is the solution.…

Why didn’t we act sooner against climate change? The economy wouldn’t allow it. Why aren’t we acting against Covid? The economy won’t allow it. Higher wages? Economy says no. Flexible working conditions? No. Seeing the pattern? A made-up…

Nearly everybody accepts the economy exists. Nearly everybody doesn’t realise it’s just a graph. That dreaded inflation? An emergency for the economy, because that price point where P0 meets B and A is the equilibrium point of the perfect…

Let’s run Covid as a market then. As personal responsibility. I assume zero demand for the infection itself. So the equilibrium point will be zero supply. Elimination.

The real cause of inflation is the lack of regulation, across all parts of society. Regulation is what (wait for it) REGULATES society, including prices. All the talk of greed and profits and wages uses the same free market supply and…

This piece by Tony Wright nearly 6 years ago is a window into why we have inflation now. And not just ‘high gas prices’, it’s a process thing. What does business do, to control costs? It signs contracts. A type of privatised regulation. /1…

We ignored the middle ground. Going straight from emergency public health orders and ‘lockdowns’, to doing nothing. It would have been EASY to sell transition measures like ventilation, managing outbreaks, masks as required by case numbers…

Paying ordinary people enough to actually live will break the economy is an obvious reveal of what the economy is. If you’re prepared to dump the economic mumbo jumbo and actually look. The only way ordinary people were allowed a place in…

The huge push for public health in the 19th century came before the germ theory of disease. It wasn’t about microbes, it was about sanitation. About crowded and filthy urban environments. This critical report from 1842 was 50 years before…

Normalisation is the model we’ve always had for the ‘developing’ world. Endemic disease. Economic politics makes no distinction between countries, it’s a globalised market. So it’s a race to the bottom, for public health. We’re all the…

A P.S. I don’t think people get this. Public health was the product of national governments. ‘The public’ itself is. As the economy replaces those with a globalised market, public health disappears too. It was the logical next step. You…

If all you have is a hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. All sides in the inflation debate trapped in the narrow framing of monetarism. Wages, prices, productivity. Prices go up because of wider lack of regulation in society,…

Stuck in the frames. Do we see that the daily rallying and mobilising behind causes is the libertarian framing, that we’re stuck inside? It’s like we’re all little small businesses of ideas, ‘competing’ daily for customers. A market. /1…

Peter Lewis in the Guardian today. Social media has created a 'hyperactive feedback loop hardwired to turn every interaction into a contest'. I say it a lot, many resist the truth of it because deep down they love the economy of popularity…

Thankfully we went with the evidence-based 'let's let a pandemic virus infect everybody' instead, based on a single page manifesto from a free market think tank. https://t.co/MRHeUr0Wrx

Given we privatised Covid by leaving it to the public to fix themselves, at their own cost, why not do the same for inflation? Everybody refuse to pay more than 95% of the listed price for anything, problem solved.

My local council has just lifted rates by 50%. In the middle of a cost of living crisis. I don’t blame them mostly, I blame vertical fiscal imbalance. On in non technical terms, higher levels of government hogging revenue, and pissing it…

"This indicates that transmission continues to occur in the community despite decreases in case notifications." Latest NSW epi report, about sewage testing data.

The toll HCW workers pay on our behalf to keep an economy going. How's the economy going, by the way? From the latest NSW epi report. https://t.co/cs7gDuzywv

Ignore the economic framing of our social lives. The economy is a deliberately constructed myth, a rationalisation of the status quo. The only thing giving ordinary people a place in it is personal debt. When cheap money goes, the truth is…

Long periods of cheap money lead to long periods of expensive money (higher interest rates), to curb the inflation caused by the cheap money. We could just regulate our society, but that would upset the fantasy of a self-governing economy…

One of the weirdest and deepest misunderstandings in all human thought is the distinction between big and small. Scale. The prejudice that says big things are complex, small things simple. Covid thinking is like this. The bacterium MO-1 is…

Australia is on track to have easily double the local death toll of Spanish Flu, with Covid. There are many reasons this is a public health disgrace. Starting with the most common objection to the comparison - that ‘we have a lot more…

Saul Griffiths and others told the Albanese government this. They listened to the fossil fuel industry instead. Go households. Fix the ‘economy’ and inflation and cost of living, in one go. The economy is households, not businesses.…

This sort of stuff always makes us think about ‘authoritarian’ governments. But all societies are controlled, just in different ways. They don’t function otherwise. For example most of our lives in the West are now almost completely…

Silicon Valley is now misnamed, as very little silicon-based hardware is made there. It’s the crucible of modern libertarian politics, in ways that aren’t discussed. A marriage of European science and US ‘fake it ‘til you make it’…

The only functioning voice to parliament (the fossil fuel industry) won again. The industry captured our political class years ago, it has elected numpties from both sides rabbit on about ‘supply’ i.e. more of what the industry produces…

After only just over a year, I think the Albanese government is looking like toast. Yes the polling suggests the Dutton-led LNP is a train wreck (it is), this isn’t to say they’re winning either. Albo’s small target politics means nothing…

The SA Premier said in SA they limit the number of times landlords can increase rents every year to 1. The dollar limit on that annual rent increase? It's unlimited. Anything else would apparently upset the market and new supply. When your…

We will quite likely get to this point, where the number of deaths falls away to negligible levels. That’s how all chronic infection-based disease starts, when we relax, thinking the threat is gone. Meantime the pathogens get to work…

Using technology like Google and Apple Maps, you can now see any place on Earth from the comfort of your lounge, at any scale from ground level up to the view from orbit. But at the same time, these same sights are collapsing under the…

Imagine a 77-year old favourite of the boomers’ parents, playing at Woodstock in the 1960s. The oldest performer at Woodstock was Ravi Shankar, who was 49. (He didn’t like hippies and never did it again.) There’s a serious point here. /1…

Calling the economy a myth confuses just about everybody. That’s how deep the framing and normalisation has gone. But the history is very clear, it didn’t exist before the 1930s. You must engage with this history, to beat climate change…

‘The economy’ did this, in our lifetimes. It’s a strip-mining machine, of common-wealth. https://t.co/9vXTtEL4JA

'Balancing' Covid action against the economy is like trying to lift yourself up by your shoelaces. There is no economy, only people. Unhealthy people means no economic activity. How stupid that this isn't common sense.…

Ever noticed the ‘economy’ doesn’t have any aims, except to grow? Aims would disrupt the status quo, and the actual function of the economy is to protect the status quo. An economy has no vision, no aims, no bucket list. Just growth, of…

The UK didn't really choose herd immunity as a strategy. They used a market-based mechanism, as fans of the economy do for everything. Herd immunity was just the closest thing they could find in public health that looked like a market.…

Pandemics like all catastrophes expose the skeletons in society’s cupboard. Converting society to a market began decades ago. It took a catastrophe to expose the level of damage that had already done, until then we were still muddling…

The fastest, cheapest and fairest way to fix all of society’s problems is to regulate. Decades of anti-regulation political propaganda won’t make us look there for solutions. We’re told removing regulation = freedom. That’s completely…

Maybe there was a typo somewhere in the budget papers, 'renewable infection' instead of 'renewable energy'. I remember innumerates telling me cumulative death curves can only ever go up. No, they can be flat. Like ours was, with public…

The bigger and more roads you have, the greater the traffic. Supply induces demand. Just as building dams increases the demand for water. Supply and demand is the sole explanation market-based thinking has for group behaviour. It’s…

Finished this on my trip. I think everybody should read it to help understand the fundamentally material basis of our culture, being ignored by our obsessions with the daily team sports of politics. I plug it because it’s a theme I Tweet…

Just as we can’t vote our problems away, nor can we discuss or debate them away. Society has two orthogonal movements, one social (our overwhelming focus), the other is knowledge. The social dimension of society will never provide you with…

Shifting the framing of ‘opening up’ to Covid. Previously I said lockdowns didn’t end, they were privatised. We’re now paying for them with our own sick leave. But it goes even further. Because we have long experience of what that really…

We’re a promiscuous culture. Not sexually. We’re promiscuous with place. This is a common sight in the ‘outback’. If we’re not flying overseas to promiscuously consume the places there, we’re doing the ‘big lap’ of our own country. What…

The real reason ‘lockdowns’ offended the status quo, is that they shifted the locus of control in societies towards homes. ‘Home’ is a concept the economy can’t allow. Note increasing numbers homeless and renting too. Colonialism, now…

It’s not meanness. It’s the actual political belief system of both major parties. Relaxing society with an economy, which makes ‘welfare’ a prime target, because it represents using the State for social ends. Economy politics doesn’t…

If you want to have your ‘economic’ cake and eat it too, here’s how to understand this data. Yes emissions are crazily out of control. But that’s the wrong focus. They’re out of control because we’re still wallowing in the last industrial…

Saying Covid is a Class 3 Biohazard (more a laboratory classification) isn’t as powerful I think as noting it’s a Category 2, 3 AND 4 condition in the NSW Public Health Act. Being in public with a known Category 2, 3 or 4 condition without…

“…the country's economy struggles to recover from strict COVID-zero policies that ended late last year.” The pandemic is the damaging of the economy by lockdowns. Not of people by a virus. It’s all in the framing. https://t.co/6RYd8fH3Bb

Travel is the most visible manifestation of a much deeper cultural problem. You can trace it even into science and Covid action, where more than a century after quantum mechanics upended the relationship between knower and known, it still…

Ask why did work and home become so separate in the first place? Why is our labour and expertise not employed more inside the communities where we live? The ‘economy’ dispossesses, by definition. ‘Markets’ know no geography.…

Insurance is the last remnant of risk management employed by economies. As such, it’s one of the best insights into how issues are tracking, in reality. Social media is no guide, point of view is irrelevant. /1 https://t.co/UycMdeRfxS…

This story is perfect to highlight what travel cultures don’t understand. We don’t know how to occupy our own landscapes. We live on them, not in them. We travel through them. We have no idea how to live with the platypus, for example. /1…

Thinking back to the Black Summer bushfires, I’m sure we’re all relieved we’re back looking after the economy. I think there’s a pandemic in there somewhere too. But let’s talk about interest rates and productivity. https://t.co/eB364kFdSs

Helen’s question is a good one. Ask yourself in what other ways current leaders have your back, and I think it’ll be become clear that Covid is just the latest in a long line of examples of how government has long since given up serving…

The hopeless moderation and regulation of these platforms, the sociopaths who destroy them. Thanks to Twitter, amazingly for acting within a day, on a weekend, to take down an account blatantly posting details of peoples’ personal lives…

WA provided free flu shots. Public health is about government doing its job. It’s a disgrace that people are having to pay for their own Covid testing, in Australia, and funding their own privatised lockdowns, with their sick leave. During…

An exponential culture, in every way. Why we won’t fight an exponential pathogen. All economic growth is also exponential. Tackling the exponentials brings the lot crashing down, like a house of cards. (Source: International Air Transport…

Commonwealth Games cancelled because of cost. Now for the Stage 3 tax cuts…

Battling to get decent ventilation at a shared event brings to the forefront how all of this is a social phenomenon. The resistance you get is for violating social norms. People are literally terrified of varying from ‘what everybody else…

I’m not even a fraction as shocked the Commonwealth Games was cancelled as I am we cancelled public health for Covid.

Because schools are our culture, what happens in them is the most accurate indicator of where societies are heading. And when they break, society breaks. That’s what we’re seeing right now, but as always teachers are never asked or seen as…

The rot of schools being childcare for the economy then leads to universities and VET being seen as providers of 'jobs for the economy'. The whole educational system corrupted. Unis have been castrated, fighting each other in a 'market'…

Experts need to think long and hard about why think tanks and consultancy firms have the ear of governments, and universities are completely ignored, except as training providers for the economy.

That feeling of powerlessness in the face of obvious stupidity, that many of us feel for Covid, is what most of the world has felt about us for generations. They’ve had ‘endemic’ disease foisted upon them their whole lives. We are now them…

Laura misses the most important question of all. Whether ‘the economy’ is even a thing, and whether the associated monetarism as a set of beliefs that brought central banks into existence in the first place is as real as unicorns.…

A delicious own-goal here that isn’t even noticed. ‘The market’ is said to be the most efficient way to manage economic affairs. The data clearly shows house prices are higher when houses are sold through ‘the market’, and lower when…

I want to use Covid to reframe how we see social media. And human social life too, at the same time. I want to argue that despite all the talk about ‘division’ in the world, social media is the greatest engine of ‘furious agreement’.…

Alan Kohler notes here that climate change isn’t in the RBA mandate. We’ll fix climate change when we recognise it for what it is, a brand new industrial revolution, that will drive down carbon pollution and supercharge the economy.…

That ‘balance’ word again. The populists now dismantling legal systems too, all in the name of balance (meaning they don’t want it at all). Like we’re still ‘balancing’ Covid and the economy i.e. 100% economy, 0% Covid.…

State of Origin is an extremely useful tool to help understand why we can’t fix anything, from climate change to Covid. For the rest of the world, any of the soccer competitions are equally as good as examples. Your most popular team…

‘Fascism’ is one of those words sprayed around with abandon on social media. The 20th century’s two most famous fascists here. In reality fascism is just populism, in its endgame. Both hugely popular leaders, and came to power using…

Populists first impoverish ordinary people, then use that poverty with staggering hypocrisy as a reason to do nothing to fix other problems facing the same ordinary people. Popularity is the root cause of all of our troubles. High school…

The bewildered cries of ‘why is nothing being done about Covid?’ are a marker of privilege. For most of the world this is standard, they have ‘endemic’ disease foisted on them all the time. We’re all the developing world now. The Economy…

The genius of Gravity was to replace space, with place. The movie makes you feel the void at the heart of our culture. The absence of place. William Shatner when returning from orbit said the ‘final frontier’ is really the Earth beneath…

How our relationship to place explains everything. Covid, climate, the lot. My grandparents’ house was demolished this week, to make way for townhouses. (The family sold the house years ago.) A century+ of memories on that land. This…

What we call ‘home ownership’ is actually house ownership. A product of the real estate industry. An economic construct. Aboriginal concepts of home mean inhabiting place for tens of thousands of years. We’re lucky to make it to 11 years.…

Both Covid and climate change are symptoms of a stalled industrial revolution. The last industrial revolution was a response to desperate social need, it was a social movement. We misunderstand it as ‘economic’. Massive social problems are…

People are deciding whether Covid is over the same they decide whether Crocs are over (again). Or puffy jackets. Cynicism is the wrong response, fashion (imitation) is how societies work. Public health has to be led as a ‘trending’ thing.…

Yes! I dream of a day when we recognise ‘the economy’ as the greatest sleight of hand in human history. A substitute for society, favouring the privileged, masquerading as an ‘objective’ measure of all social life. https://t.co/KLfWKRmN5X

Remember how staying home stopped Covid in its tracks? The economy fairies tell us that’s not a ‘sustainable’ ongoing model. But it does show that pandemics only exist because of mobility. 15-minute city type initiatives make societies…

Know that feeling of speaking into a void, with Covid? Here’s the origin of that void, in history. It’s not capitalism, or neoliberalism, or any of that stuff. It’s social, cultural. And it’s about kids, and how they develop as the grow to…

On the major consultancy firms, some structure themselves as partnerships, so they become a sort of ‘governance shelter’, like a tax shelter, but designed to avoid major governance accountability through basic processes like audit and…

Using David’s picture to illustrate a point. This gobsmacking beauty might inspire travellers to go to Broome and ‘experience it for themselves’. Many already do. I want to challenge that seeming a good thing to do, because doing that is…

A daily reminder that 'getting the balance right between [urgent social issue] and the economy' has always and will always mean, 100% action for the economy, 0% action for [urgent social issue]. https://t.co/aDw4xMeSZK

It would be interesting to see financial statements over the pandemic for prominent Covid minimisers. There are a variety of estimation tools online that say some of them have become very wealthy promoting bullshit. They created a ‘market’…

These are the 4 stages the Doherty Institute were asked to model when we opened up in late-2021. Two important things to note here I think (we need to revisit that stage of the pandemic, as the promised Royal Commission that will probably…

A total absence of talk of infection. Pandemics have always been defined by the number of INFECTIONS. Not by how sick people get, or by how immune they are. Endemicity the same. The economic ‘live with the virus’ reframing, lethally…

The economy thinks the Covid pandemic’s greatest tragedy was not having people crammed into rooms together at the office. I’ve witnessed these celebrations firsthand, like we’re all supposed to be grateful to be back in the battery hen…

@latingle talks about a ‘really important shift’ possibly coming on housing. It isn’t important, and it won’t work. The only shift that would fix the so-called housing crisis is ditching the ridiculous economic concept of supply and…

If you want to understand how societies were hijacked by economies, you need to understand the total fiction at the middle of every economy. ‘Supply and demand’. Once you get that, everything from traffic to housing to Covid will make…

The housing and rental ‘crisis’ has a simple solution. Governments need to become property developers again, building, selling and renting a huge number of properties at significantly below ‘market’ rates. It would also be a good earner,…

#InsidersABC repeating that supply is a fix for housing. Economic thinkers reject actual intervention in the ‘market’, because they want to protect values of existing stock. But if their supply solution worked, it would do the same thing -…

On radio this morning, China's stumbling economy is described as having 'economic Long Covid'. The great opening up did the exact opposite to what was assumed.

“HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria shouldn’t be labeled as “just” epidemics or endemic. They are pandemics that have been beaten in rich countries. Allowing them to persist elsewhere is a policy choice and a budgetary decision.” /1…

We’re seeing old privatisations now having to be bailed out with massive amounts of public money. In electricity, in water, in gas, in housing. Now we’ve privatised a pandemic, and we’ll have to ‘socialise the losses’ there over the next…

About 40 years ago Michel Serres asked what seemed a strange question at the time (he was always way ahead of everybody). "What does 'we' mean?" I see the use of 'we' here a lot, as in 'why are we allowing Covid to spread?' Etc. That's…

The standard story goes like this. The ‘economy’ was sailing along in ‘normal’ life, and then a pandemic arrived and derailed it for a time. But it’s recovering now. It’s time to reframe that story. /1 https://t.co/cTflU3P3uh To begin at…

Meanwhile in the UK, Labour promises it will just be the cuddly friendly face of the economy, and do nothing remotely resembling a Labour government. This is what the economy is for, to win elections even when you don’t win. Albo’s…

One of the great things to learn from Rachel Perkins’ wonderful Australian Wars series, is how much the very existence of the States was just as a mechanism to manage the massive land grab of that time. European Australians have always…

The continuing farce of a Labor government adopting a one-page public health strategy from a free market think tank. We need an 'Anthony' - GBD' shirt. https://t.co/DSDsEwqCDr

Because there are no countries. No societies. Just millions of teenagers ‘living their best lives’, well into old age. That’s what the market and the economy always was. Society stripped of everything adult. High school.…

RN, the Snowy 2.0 stuck tunnelling machine. A political brain fart project which hapless engineers now need to try to make work. Listen to the gotcha attack, like an opposition leader trying to find a 'black hole' in a government budget.…

What nobody says when prices skyrocket because of lack of supply, of anything, is that it’s really just extortion. The owner of the scarce supply could just sell what they have left, at usual prices. Economy piffle words allow them to…

This the shift ‘the economy’ introduced to societies. To strip away their collective focus, and re-home it in millions of disparate ‘jobs’. Making the public (collective) employees (individual). Employers or ‘business’ then run the entire…

Conservatives shifted from conserving institutions, to conserving the economic status quo. Fundamentally different things. We should all be conservatives under the old definition. To respect the customs and traditions that emerge from…

Nothing about supply and demand has any basis in reality or common sense. There’s no supply of things for which there’s huge demand (affordable housing, teachers, nurses). And huge supply of things for which there’s no demand (Covid,…

And exactly as expected, the push for an inquiry predicated on concern for damage to the economy. Not on the collapse of public health. The economy is humanity’s most lethal fiction. https://t.co/XDXVSF7i0H

‘The economy’ is a political Trojan Horse deliberately designed to substitute the economic status quo for all of society. ‘Lockdowns’ damaged economies only because they showed the profound SOCIAL interconnectedness of our lives.…

It mostly escaped analysis that our ‘economy’ grew in the latest figures, but peoples’ individual financial situation declined again. That’s not an anomaly, that’s the economy doing what it was designed to do, protect the status quo. It’s…

Talk about ‘balancing’ water use in the Murray-Darling basin between economic, social and environmental uses is the same bullshit balance of economy vs climate change, and economy vs Covid. Weasel words. These aren’t separate domains to…

Worth pointing out every day that 'balancing' the economy against public health action led very quickly to 100% action for the economy, and 0% for Covid. A politician who uses the word 'balance' is lying, always. Climate change already…

One of the powerful things Hans Rosling did in his life was to get people to take their focus off the daily team sports of politics, and back onto reality. Rosling could show how so much was actually going much more right than we believe…

What all Covid inquiries will focus on, it’s a stitched-up done deal. The champions of the economy will set up these inquiries, they’re not going to be much interested in anything except their precious economy. https://t.co/yAicnQLzIo

The depth of the total collapse of a public-focused democracy is in plain view. How disgusting the champions of the economy are. Balls-out democracy-hijacking pirates. https://t.co/nLSkvpRejA

Exactly right. As for the GFC, ‘go households’. This also has a macro effect, because energy is a grid, so both local and global at the same time. Nothing would transform the country faster, including cost of living. https://t.co/CYH7srQnMr

Saul’s work shows something much more important than just how to do renewables. It fundamentally upends nonsense about the economy as a whole. That ‘business’ drives it. Households drive the economy, businesses are just rent-seekers. Try…

What’s happening in the US is a new industrial revolution. Which is EXACTLY what we need to fix climate change and Covid. No ‘balance’ required, what we call economies have always boomed when we fixed major social problems. Those…

This would make us fabulously rich. Economies boom when they address actual social problems. That's what the first Industrial Revolution did. For a fraction of the cost of a handful of submarines and ridiculous tax cuts.…

Joe Biden showing the myth of the ‘economy’. Government intervention makes economies boom. Because economies are really just societies, not markets. https://t.co/Fx75D7Tqk9

The clawback of everything ‘public’ exploded from the 1970s. You can see how they got away with it. Debt kept everything running, while public mechanisms were pulled apart. Debt is what allows the illusion that societies are economies.…

Having seen firsthand multiple times how much the obstruction to renewable rollout is laughable ‘local’ objections from people drenched in social media bullshit, I increasingly recognise very little of the Australia I grew up in. /1 Social…

Many blame ‘capitalism’ for our woes, or praise it for what’s best about our lives. Like all -isms, it doesn’t even exist. The private ownership of the means of production through supply and demand markets is mythology. All of it reliant…

The ‘cost of living crisis’ in social terms is the ‘know your place peasants’ strategy. Not an analogy. We got a shift back to a public focus in the pandemic, that’s all now being brutally clawed back. Feudalism.

You'll never understand housing (or anything) as a market. It's gambling. Bidding up prices, hope of quick capital gains etc. The sorts of measures that address problem gambling may also help with housing. @ProfSteveKeen thoughts?…

Yes the ALP have been hopeless in many ways. But politics is 99% framing, 1% elections. Once society was reframed as an economy, no electoral victory could save it. Until we stop talking about 'the economy' as an existing thing, nothing…

The faith in competition is an intrinsic part of the substitution of society with an economy. Scale brings economies of scale. The problem isn’t scale, it’s lack of regulation. Competition is the libertarian ‘invisible hand’ i.e. bullshit.…

Our politics is all symbolic team sports. You need to get ‘into the weeds’ to see what’s really in play. This story is being repeated across multiple communities, big rate increases. But this is a window into a much deeper cultural and…

7.6 million people are waiting for basic medical treatment in the UK. Living with the virus. The economy is a fast-track to extinction.

Job numbers are better. (The ‘economy’ is always just a handful of numbers.) The actual SOCIAL reality of that included people taking on extra work, to have enough money to live. The economy has no connection with social realities at all.…

I zoned out of both the Yes and No stuff from Day 1. No progress will be made through a popularity contest, though I’ll vote Yes because what harm can an advisory committee do. Here’s an excerpt from the national agreement on ‘Closing the…

The biggest lie and founding myth of the economy is that mobility = freedom. Whether it’s our obsession with roads and cars, or travel, the more mobile we’ve become the less free we are. Another way we don’t understand Covid too. /1…

Societies were broken long before Covid, when they were replaced with economies. Huge personal debt hid the damage, and created the illusion there was still a ‘public’ being looked after. The pandemic revealed the Emperor was wearing no…

Self-regulation is the economic equivalent of masturbation. Sometimes it happens, but even then only one party benefits. Banks, energy… https://t.co/GkucSwvRgR

Public health is terminal because the public died somewhere in the 1980s. Replaced by a market of individuals, an economy. There is no public in the economy, it would be seen as anti-competitive.

If we incinerate the planet for the economy, it's worth asking what the point of the economy is? Any long-term aims or vision? It has none, except to protect the status quo. There's not one other objective that even its supporters could…

It should be absolutely clear now that ‘the economy’ is really a social invention to strip away about 2 centuries of social progress. Under cover of pseudoscientific econo-babble. https://t.co/9szVDV3Ex8

It’s my project to convince that popularity IS our entire culture now, our entire politics. A social model developed in schools and then rolled out in adult life. Political parties are popularity-based groups, like we had in school. But…

Even if you adopt the economic view of the world, if you see societies as economies, all major problems like climate change and Covid are really just rent-seeking old technologies protecting a nearly 300-year-old industrial revolution,…

The ‘housing crisis’ is really just dispossession of land. The type inflicted upon indigenous peoples, and now shifting into the broader population. Under cover, as always, of a fictitious ‘economy’, a ‘market’. Weasel words to hide what’s…

A is what the economy crowd are saying should never happen again. And B is the return to ‘normal life’. https://t.co/jcwlFZipyW

The ‘economy’ has been duping us for years. Daylight Saving Time again. It wasn’t invented to save energy (it doesn’t). It was promoted by business (the economy) as a way to give working people a perception of having more leisure time,…

Another example of how ‘the economy’ is our most lethal hidden infection. On the face of it, the fact we have politicians paying attention to employment rather than leaving it to a fictitious market is a good thing. But…there’s a big but…

In which an economist repeats the standard mantra that without exorbitant prices, people will want too much of something. Supply/demand, markets. Like housing, where huge prices have reduced demand for houses. Err... https://t.co/QsM10e61Sn

Clean air should be the thing that supercharges a new industrial revolution. All industrial revolutions arise from social problems. The 'economy' booms in industrial revolutions, there's no binary here. https://t.co/h8g80lCyvG

If we stop talking about economies and go back to talking about societies and cultures, data takes on completely different meanings. In socio-cultural terms, A is ‘stay home’. That proved to be some form of collective trauma. We have no…

The party of the market, the LNP, blocked the clear trajectory of the ‘market’ with Soviet-style intervention. It’s still doing it. Saul Griffiths bang on here again. GO HOUSEHOLDS. https://t.co/TIYd1U56yx

Our model of how society works is stopping us from changing it, and helping bad people destroy it. The idea that society is an aggregate sum of thoughts and actions from millions of isolated people is WRONG. A practical example shows it,…

Those convinced we can infect our way out of a pandemic don’t think we can inflate our way out of inflation.

One of my favourite Tory UK slogans is ‘levelling up’. They mean ‘we’ll reduce inequality by making everybody else as rich as us.’ Like saying ‘you can all climb Everest now, we’re going to fill the space around it with 6000m of gravel.’…

Sunak’s Tories are jettisoning much of their climate change action, in favour of ‘practical’ net zero. There’s one of those weasel words, like ‘balance’. Means do nothing. In ‘balancing’ Covid action against the economy, can anybody…

If you unpack economic growth, nearly always it's about people. As in simply having more of them. Because there's no such thing as an economy, societies are social. That truth is going to hit us harder every single year, until we…

NSW had an eat out to help out scheme. I don’t think I saw a single journalistic critique of the stupidity of it. It was more sinister than just a fillip for the economy too. It was gaslighting, to normalise mass infection.…

The great con of ‘the economy’, and also the fastest way to see its true reality, is that it never changes. No matter how complex and different the problems facing societies are, the economy’s metrics remain the same. Inflation, jobs,…

Community-based organisation is the unique lynchpin of Australian democracy. It's been trashed by economy politics and populist blowhard politicians interested only in their petty careers. https://t.co/MSnbnaYG1U

Always think socially. Culturally. The idea of a generation implies humans shaped by an entire lifespan and the events that occur during that 50-100 years in time. But for some time now, Western humans are shaped almost exclusively by just…

If meekly surrendering to a pandemic and climate chaos isn’t clear proof that ‘the economy’ is a toxic cultural model, what else would be? Astounding that it’s still seen as some form of immutable baseline of living.

The greatest threat to the economy that public health measures represented was the rediscovery of a public, community focus to our economic activity. The hysteria over ‘lockdowns’ was the economy’s counterpunch.

Hands up who knew that in 'balancing' the economy against Covid, both of them were on the same side of the see-saw? https://t.co/y2tpoeLpjA

Societies of adolescents worship friendship. Here's why that's so dangerous, using Covid and climate change as examples. Friendship is a developmental social stage. Extending it to the centre of all adult life leads to social collapse. /1…

What ‘lockdowns’ showed was the incredible and SOCIAL inter-dependency of modern economies. The economy never was a free market of individual consumers. Every economic initiative weaves new, more complex and international social ties. /1…

Much of the ‘division’ is just the team sports of social media. Hot air. The division that isn’t is a corrective response to an undivided world where tiny numbers hoard most of the wealth. https://t.co/bx5SorXA7i

The peak energy problem, where we get big surges morning and evening, has a lot to do with the structure of our working day. The economy creates a lot of the problem. WFH mitigates it. https://t.co/5pIdaRo54f

Social media has never been an information or communication medium. It’s a libertarian assault weapon targeted at existing social hierarchies, that’s part of the design brief. It targets trust, in hierarchies of expertise. It makes ‘the…

The only reality modern governments will acknowledge, whether Left or Right, is 'the economy'. Which isn't even a thing, it's a slogan uttered to defend the status quo i.e. doing nothing. https://t.co/KOinr08aHr

It's not greed that runs societies. 'The economy' really means a society refusing to regulate anything. Each to their own. Without regulation everything needs to keep running no matter how stupid, or the lot falls over. There's no 'why' to…

They don't have a clue what to do, because nobody does. It's like reading tea leaves. People who defend 'the economy' can't explain one thing about how it works, when it stops working. There is no 'it'. It's a handful of indicators…

If you want an indication of how the economy cares so little about fresh air in schools. A primary teacher told me yesterday kids as young as Year 2 have been caught vaping in their school. But at least the free flow of commerce is…

Haven’t paid a cent for electricity in over a year. (We’re making money.) The energy part of the ‘cost of living crisis’ doesn’t exist for us. We need to re-frame our social problems, to stop feeling like isolated individuals. It’s a con.…

Everything is dead in Australia. Except the economy. All of our politics pays no attention to anything, except the economy. That should be the giveaway that it’s a colonialist con, but all sides still speak of it like some underlying…

Colonialism, the dispossession and displacement of people, didn't stop. That exact same movement continues to this day, within the old colonial powers as well. We now call it building a real estate portfolio. 'The economy' and its markets…

4 Corners last night showed yet another example of the disaster of living in a sloganocracy. The LNP’s Snowy 2.0 wet dream is the literal attempt to build out their ‘when the sun doesn’t shine and wind doesn’t blow’ slogan, for renewables.…

'Economics' derives from the Greek for 'household management'. Go households. Electrifying households, including removing barriers to EVs, would solve this problem. If you want to fuck OPEC forever, go households. 'The economy' is…

I wonder if we're getting closer to an understanding that only 'the economy' gets action from any government. And that's just a handful of indicators of how well the status quo is operating. It's a status quo perpetual motion machine.…

We can't vote our way out. Everybody will vote for the economy, which is our problem. https://t.co/A05AF3VD4d

The moment personal debt becomes unaffordable, EVERYTHING people do becomes unaffordable, in an economy. ‘Cost of living’. Which clearly shows ‘the economy’ is only accessible to ordinary people, through debt. Obviously ‘the economy’ is…

To be clear, I love both the Beatles and Stones. And they should keep playing as long as they like. My point is about the place of what was teen culture, in modern adult life and 'economies'. An indicator of a profound shift.…

It's nice NSW Health acknowledges we're still in a pandemic, and not 'post-Covid', as many others say. Pretty telling that our only indicators of infection now are who turns up half-dead at ED, and sewage treatment plants.…

Like Covid, this is mostly a WHS issue. A ban will fix the problem, but what's not being said is that it represents a widespread failure of basic WHS, on worksites. That would put employers on the hook, and economy politics won't do that.…

If a pandemic wasn't going to stop the travelling zombies, inflation certainly wasn't. Whole societies on a permanent gap year from reality. https://t.co/3mAvTjs4vo

There are signs the government understands that its only path to renewables in the time required is to target households. Electrify households, and install batteries at every scale. Will also address cost of living. Everything else will be…

Asia and particularly China is far and away the most important international relationship Australia has. But our populist ninnies prosecute an Anglo UK/US culture war against the Chinese, while expecting them at the same time to keep our…

It’s unpopular to criticise social media. (Imagine that, popularity platforms taking offence at unpopular things.) The platforms build out a model of society that strips away all social hierarchy and existing connection, and replaces it…

I think a lot of loyal ALP voters already abandoned them over their complete capitulation on Covid. But those still wavering will rush for the exits if nothing is done about Stage 3 tax cuts. #auspol https://t.co/jVjlSO00p9

Why we need to target households for the transition, not the old poles, generators and wires. Electrify households, to also drive cost of living down. https://t.co/Aue9rozErB

We're still following the 'strategy' from a free-market think tank, instead of 150 years of public health precedent. Still waiting to hear the last pandemic we used hybrid immunity against. Still can't find it in any textbooks or…

I periodically re-post the GBD, so somebody can explain how it's different to our national Covid strategy. (I find them to be identical.) And also to explain why a left-leaning government is using a free market think tank's one-pager,…

You have to love the battle. To inject humour and intelligence into it. To reject the false promises of diversionary ‘fun’ culture, that try to keep you a teenager your whole life. Travel, recreation, good ‘markets’ for the economy.…

This is how the pandemic was privatised. You drive a public virus deep into private homes, to keep ‘the economy’ running. The people you then can’t protect are your own family. It’s an obscene violation, and with bitter irony creates much…

I’m not seeing any platform generating the power old Twitter had to help shape public debate. The minute it began to have an impact, the billionaire class bought it and shut it down. They invented social media to make money and promote…

Households should be the focus of any action for ‘the economy’. There are 3.4 million household solar systems now, the single largest generating capacity in the grid. That number is projected to double by 2032. That capacity is already…

It's 70 years of anti-public politics, what we call 'the economy', as a substitute for society. There is no we, no public, in an economy. The people who invented the economy told us 'there is no such thing as society'. And that's where…

Virtual transmission (using batteries to replace many transmission lines) and consumer energy trading (like 'Uber'-Energy, where you sell your excess solar to other consumers in a consumer market) are on the AEMO and government radar. We…

The politics of the economy not only prolonged the pandemic. It created it. The whole phenomenon is political. Without the politics, there would have been no pandemic. https://t.co/mp5cStf5zz

‘Stubborn inflation’ is really stubborn refusal to rethink monetarism as a theory of society. Where money replaces ordinary regulatory democracy. Thats what monetarism was invented to do, replace democracy with a market, mediated by money.…

A wonderful editorial. I’d add that public health thrives when elites feel threatened, and vice versa. But more than that, you can’t have public health without a public. The public was invented as an entity in the late-19th century. The…

Go households, the industry has politicians in their pocket. Households are already bypassing this farce, they are and always have been the heart of any economy. A grid dissolves the distinction between local and global action. Keep…

I guess this is deflation, so isn't important like inflation. https://t.co/s6g3yNagmG

Something remarkable is happening in Australia, which only Team Reality will notice. Team Populism will just be interested in which politician farted in parliament, or danced in a funny way. The energy grid is Shakespearean. Have a look at…

Electricity retailers are maybe not all bad. Have looked at the energy trading systems that allow individuals to access the wholesale electricity market and buy and sell directly. It’s difficult to out-perform a good retailer, even with…

People endured far worse in world wars, and stuck with it for years. The difference today is the leadership void, a vacuum where action should be led from. The State beheaded, in favour of a fictitious market, which is really just every…

Add ‘overreach’ to the slogan lexicon, the new ‘balance’ or ‘proportionate’. The great push around the world in the review of Covid action, including here. To ensure public health action is never permitted again, only the economy. As if…

Great window into how trained we are now to assuming a ‘market’ is a solution to everything. 70 years of propaganda. The same is happening with the shift to a renewable energy grid, nearly entirely private at grid level. Government should…

Ever noticed that 'the economy' is completely party-agnostic, in political terms? That no matter who is elected and their belief systems, they will all end up following the dictates of a handful of entirely arbitrary statistical…

FluTracker captures generalised respiratory illness. In Economy-land, 2020 is the year that will never be allowed to happen again. We were too well. https://t.co/ae2rMZ4rGc

It’s scary out there, in organisations and businesses, the total absence of leadership and commitment to do hard things. All led by a political belief system that celebrates vacating leadership to a market that doesn’t even exist. ‘Living…

@DrCameronMurray showing how functioning societies involve governments intervening. The small government politics of the past 70 years has reversed social evolution to entrench adolescent high school life as adult life. A ‘market’ is a…

While the ALP (or anyone) believes ‘the economy’ is a thing, nothing will get better. The economy is a fiction designed to entrench existing advantage. A political invention. Only personal debt gives an illusion that it delivers for all.…

It’s frustrating that it’s not more obvious that ‘the economy’ is just ‘the market’. A social invention, a fiction, pretending humans live as isolated individuals. They never have, and never will. The proponents of the economy don’t, they…

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. That's why we invented the idea of the public, to recognise that inter-relationship at the heart of every society. If we don't protect the weakest links, the whole lot collapses. The economy…

We don't let inflation rip, we don't live with it. But we can infect every child in the land with a novel virus. Repeatedly. An entire generation, the future. A tool of our creation, the economy, does this. And we worry about AI. Bring on…

You have to look at human social behaviour to understand Covid, climate change and everything else. People act socially to defend their social groupings. The science or other facts make no difference. It’s not about Covid. /1…

You see here how only total catastrophe really shifts societies. The Tories looking to cut welfare even further, to fund inheritance tax cuts for the wealthy. On no measure other than the social team sports of protecting an existing social…

In 2008/9 the Rudd Govt targeted households to head off a financial crisis. Households *are* the economy, not one business would survive without households. The reverse isn’t true. All of our largest political problems converge upon…

A very good exploration of institutions, and trust. Societies are 100% social, and operate by the imitation and emulation of those we trust. Our institutions are the outcome, allowing us to live by trusting others with expertise in other…

Advocates for the economy hated lockdowns the most. The same people who say society doesn’t exist, and replace it with a market of billions of separate individuals. Lockdowns were the perfect example OF a market, of society stripped of its…

Only catastrophe brings social progress. Look what the Black Death did to inequality in the 14th century. Humans are incapable of acting outside their own social status games of imitative rivalry. These platforms pour petrol on that same…

If we take the ideas of economic politics at their word, Tournier shows that we’re on the right track. But those who promote it have hijacked it, for their own ends. We see it with Covid, how healthy populations are also good economies.…

The idea of private money is another libertarian fantasy. A government is just people. Tax is the same people who are taxed, deciding how to distribute a country’s wealth. https://t.co/5ATd0UB1ov

The anti-government conservatives worldwide are trying to start culture wars over nuclear power. If they win government it’ll have to be big-government owned and operated. Nobody else will touch it, it’s far too expensive, and there are no…

Remembering an ex-PM saying we need to ‘live alongside’ the virus, and open our economy. Looks like Covid isn’t keeping to its lane. https://t.co/pNq9zyfyFX

Emergency Covid action which was said to be unsustainable really was only the slightest wealth redistribution, towards low and middle income earners. ‘The economy’ is code for the old distribution. Thus desperate efforts were made to end…

This one angers me. Australia, a public health beacon pre-pandemic, led by anti-government ideologues who made us buy our own tests, in a pandemic! All while prioritising massive tax cuts to the top end of the income distribution. #auspol…

Those still confident elections are a valuable tool for democracy only need to look to NZ. Where several years of sensible governance now flipped completely back over to the regulatory capture of small government ideologues, funnelling…

This song is about peer pressure. Which used to fade in adult life, ‘I was young and caught in the crowd’. Now adult life is just as caught, negotiating every day what’s ‘trending’. What some call capitalism is just the playground,…

There are several issues I don’t comment on because they’re entrenched as social media-driven causes. It doesn’t matter what you say about those topics, it’s pointless engaging with them here because the team sports is so fanatical. But to…

Strip away the fog of economic ideas, and go back to basic social ideas. Australia, for example. We’re still a frontier culture in too many ways. That’s why we turned housing into a casino. WW1 and WW2 made modern Australia, short thread.…

Debunking much of the mythology of 'the economy', the fantasy that money could replace government (monetarism). Designed only to hand control of societies to vested interests by letting them do whatever they like and calling it a 'free…

The Resolution Foundation in the UK has provided some fascinating data that show one thing very clearly. That 'politics' is always just social groups battling for different status and thereby share of society's resources. A few examples…

EBV alone should have alerted us to the potential dangers of chronic infection. Infecting up to 95% of the global adult population, asymptomatically. We’re ‘living with’ it. And it’s becoming clearer all the time what a terrible housemate…

It’s a pathogen pile-on now we’ve replaced public health with tax cuts. https://t.co/DmcFt3hdnt

Like all the let it rippers, plenty of weasel words about difficult balancing acts. There was no balancing act, from Day 1 they looked for any way to undermine public health action, which they saw as a threat to the economy. Ditto here in…

At the UK Covid Inquiry lots of the usual tosh about ‘balancing’ social and economic impact against public health action. Public health IS that balancing. That’s why it was invented. By those with economic power, to save their economies.

This journalist got the slap-down they deserved. Albo, like Biden, misdiagnoses our political problems as ‘too much division’. Dutton is whipping the division horse every day and is taking huge handfuls out of the polling deficit. Team…

The Industrial Revolution is considered a watershed moment in human social evolution. We’re living another one right now, of even greater scope. Hidden from view by the septic drivel of social media. Energy is a social thing, not just…

I coined the term reality-based politics because reality determines where societies go. Human opinion on these realities only determines how fast the inevitable changes happen. The corollary of this is something even bigger. /1…

70 years of pretending we live in economies was really the old feudal hierarchies stripping away modern public institutions, which they despise. It’s a con. Those institutions were only allowed because 2 world wars sidelined the old…

The income share of the top 0.1% of key (and representative) English-speaking societies. This history is usually written economically. But it’s much more interesting than that. A thread about the real origins of ‘the economy’. /1…

Alan Kohler in The New Daily today. Showing that our best political analysis is being written by economic journalists like he and @MichaelPascoe01, while our political journalists just regurgitate irrelevant slogans about the economy, and…

We have tax cuts to fund. And nuclear subs. https://t.co/IhySKkCenH

Here’s a way to shift from despair to hope. How we understand groups and nations and how they work determines how we think and act. Paul O’Neill, CEO of Alcoa at the turn of the century, offered us a priceless lesson we’re not heeding. /1…

From Scientific American. Information and truth are part of an economy of social relationships. They don't run or regulate societies, without social relationships making them do that. https://t.co/6c8ENzlHtx

Even the most Covid-cautious refuse to give up recreational travel. That's why the debacle we're living is not as simple as some dark forces, capitalist or otherwise, imposing sickness upon us. Our culture is incapable of giving up…

Following the etymology of the word, economic politics is going to be forced to the realisation that households are ‘the economy’. Not business. Albanese needs to recognise fast this is his solution for energy. Just as it was Rudd’s for…

A story to challenge the narrative that a majority wanted to move on from fighting Covid. One of the causes of this rise in road toll is the large increase in the number of people avoiding public transport, to avoid Covid. People still…

Service associations from over a century ago show how what we call 'business' has changed. Networking was a focus, but very quickly it became about community service. Today's business operates under a model (the economy) where…

My Tweets are often social and cultural lenses for viewing modern life that peel away the economic and political framings we tend to use instead. Christmas is a perfect time for this sort of thing, scrolling through social media. Some…

What we’re doing could cripple societies, make them completely dysfunctional. And in not too many years. When all the things you could do to help people damage the supposed economy, it’s time to ditch a human creation that is now a toxic,…

Air travel is another perfect example of widespread regulatory capture by fossil fuel-based industries. Look at airports. Massive, ongoing expansion, despite the known challenges of climate change. But to really see the capture, have a…

You’d think this would be considered a national emergency. But like all modern conservative parties, the only solution being proposed, for anything, is more tax cuts. Feudalism is back, except historical feudal lords actually felt some…

International air travel is a leading driver of both anti-climate and anti-Covid action. We need to understand that it isn’t some mass, democratised activity. It’s a highly elite activity, both internationally and even within countries. /1…

A smart government would use this to subsidise huge amounts of household storage into the market. https://t.co/KhKCKq8c7A

Imagine some of these in every classroom in the country. Instead we’ll get tax cuts. https://t.co/ddJaHkB58P

In an economy, you celebrate the birth of Jesus. And the next day you stock up for the celebration of his death and resurrection. That way you can skip all the good deeds in life part, that damage the economy. https://t.co/tXrqAYTzt5

This to me is how our lives increasingly look. Lives focused on recreation, on ‘having a good time’. Trips, concerts, restaurant meals, sights etc. Like an eternal episode of The Love Boat. Lives of bullshit jobs, made tolerable by the…

David Cutler at Harvard, estimating costs of Long Covid, and saying they're already the equivalent of the GFC. The fantasy of 'living with' Covid and 'balancing' it against the economy demolished. As Cutler says, no amount we spend on this…

This is the game-changer. The data that shows conclusively that you don't 'live alongside' pandemics, they destroy your economies. The ECONOMIC data is in, and it's *already* a financial catastrophe. As large as the GFC, and still growing,…

Can't read most of this because of a paywall. But it seems very much at odds with the analysis I shared earlier from Cutler and Summers (https://t.co/CchnCGAt8b). Though their analysis is more economic in focus. https://t.co/RiXhAmgdIB

How does the fiction of the economy maintain itself? By creating new money, continuously reanimating the corpse. Without debt it’s epidemic waves of boom and bust, created by fluctuating human desires. https://t.co/F8JHIxgqNJ

This is where we need to reframe. All massive boosts to what's called 'the economy' come from addressing urgent social need. The original Industrial Revolution was about social need. Both climate change and Covid are HUGE opportunities to…

Watching prominent Covid minimisers move onto other libertarian causes reveals which ‘team’ they were always fighting for.( Not the public health team.) It’s worth asking, what fires up these libertarians? Short thread on how peculiar that…

We all see the UK collapsing from afar. Ordinary people choosing between eating and heating. And the Tories? Couldn’t care less. Tax cuts and destruction of public services is their only policy, in all situations. This is ‘the economy’…

For our ancestors it would have been a violation of the Sabbath. Religion fought plagues, and enforced time-off from work every week. But now we’re in an economy, and that silliness has been replaced with the right to shop 24/7, while…

The economy crowd won't rest until every perturbation of the status quo from pre-pandemic times has been erased, and any chance of taking collective action against a future pandemic is eliminated. https://t.co/sVZBQ7KC1T

The day we understand the bizarre idea of being a tourist in our own land is the day we may start to understand how little we’ve changed, culturally, since the days of Empire. Why this matters for climate and Covid, and everything else. /1…

Into our 5th year of the pandemic, and still the belief is out there that people have to choose between wealth and health. Like those aren't ultimately the same thing. https://t.co/by7QIyipce

From a year ago. The World Economic Forum noting that it's transmission that is the most lethal thing in this pandemic, not individual virulence. Still no action or appetite for action on transmission. Transmission is the root definition…

It's touching how many wealthy people who pay no tax are so concerned about taxpayers' money.

We need to completely re-frame the challenges we're currently facing. They're not 'Covid and climate change threatening the economy'. Let's keep it all in-house, in the economy itself. Covid and climate change are the economy being held…

Of course this angers. That’s why it’s done. We need to learn that this is how populism works. It’s not Left, or Right, or capitalism or any of that nonsense. It’s daily team sports, where you define your team, then unite it by starting…

Anthony Albanese said a whole lot of florid nothing when pressed about Stage 3 tax cuts this morning on RN. The LNP governs even when it doesn't win elections. That's what 'the economy' was invented to do, create continuous political wins…

Our political journalism is hopelessly ill-equipped to understand the world we’re living in, using tired ideas that date from the 19th century. Facts and logic have NEVER been the currency of politics. This matters for Covid and climate,…

The surest sign of complete regulatory capture of democratic governments by vested interests is a range of existential emergencies receiving no action, while governments obsess over inflation. The monetarist fantasy, using money to run…

Lockdowns proved the lie that the economy is. They stopped *social* activity, the activity the economy was invented to deny. ‘There is no such thing as society’. Lockdowns should have had no economic effect. Instead economies couldn’t…

It's SO important to understand that our Covid debacle is not a decision to do nothing. It's a decision to privatise the action. Society wouldn't function with no action. As Alcoa shows, that's as stupid economically as it is medically.…

The great untold story of the fabled range of ICE vehicles. Getting the fuel to the servos. It’s like the famous story about Gandhi, that it cost his family a fortune to keep him in poverty. Here are some facts, for the Australian context.…

I know many people who despair at the challenges we all face as societies, and that little is being done about them. There is comfort I think in understanding what’s going on, putting it in context. None of this is really new. About why…

The capture of democracy by ‘the economy’ is easily seen by asking this, about cost of living. Who are we paying, to live? https://t.co/CxHj3exvmM

It puzzles many that cutting tax cuts to a tiny number of rich people can be such a political hot potato. But if you understand society socially, it’s very simple. People aspire to have status. They don’t hate the rich, they want to be…

Ask your local council if tax cuts will fix this road. It’s not rocket science to do a basic accounting of gaps in public infrastructure and services, and to make that the baseline for all government budgeting. https://t.co/XWxeDrm76n

I love that Alan Kohler showed that the proposed abolition of the 37c tax rate was a rearguard suggestion from Treasury to try to stamp out tradies rorting the system, by shunting all their personal expenditure through their companies.

The LNP’s planned Stage 3 tax cuts gave $2 to men for every $1 they gave to women.

The Project suddenly found some bite tonight when questioning Jim Chalmers about the tax cuts. Am guessing the hosts earn $200K+.

It’s slowly dawning on sensible people that social media’s economy of likes is just high school culture, and destroys adult life. Good on New York. https://t.co/aieobkLve9

One of DH Lawrence’s most interesting analyses is desperately needed in a ‘mis/disinformation’ age. The role of knowledge in peoples’ lives. Lawrence had the unpopular view that knowledge is a specific vocation, that should never be shared…

The idea that governments couldn’t continue with aggressive Covid action had nothing to do with public health, but more importantly also nothing to do with economics. Let’s add some history to the spin. Government spending as % of GDP. /1…

Even the IMF now calling out the idiot ideologies, really just thinly disguised looting of public wealth for private benefit. It’s not social progress to offload the economies of scale of public investment onto private wallets.…

There’s something important to learn from shows like Downton Abbey. Period dramas from what seems a very different time, when many ordinary people were ‘in service’ to aristocracies. We assume we’ve progressed since those times. But the…

What does Rousseau have to offer us on Covid and climate change? Something pretty mind-blowing, actually. He said that a society has all of its rules at once. What does that mean? Some amazing and unexpected things, about how societies…

The picture says it all. How retirement went from being a time of winding down after a lifetime of hard work, to some sort of perpetual orgy of recreation. It will be scaled back when the boomers are done with it, as every other…

UK Labour on TV saying that while other issues like the environment are important, ‘the economy’ is the bedrock of being able to do anything. Complete nonsense, and complete capture by conservative framings. The economy is how…

Of course it is. What we’re doing with Covid, trying to manage it as a non-pandemic mild respiratory illness, is the EXACT equivalent of saying ‘we’re going to address cost of living issues by stopping the data on cost of living’.…

I’m happy to not be a younger worker. My heart is no longer in work or most other related things. The pandemic wasn’t a disruption to normal life, which will now return. No great catastrophes are that. Our lives changed fundamentally post…

All the idiot supply and demand and price curves that get applied to politics. We'd be much better off applying the economies of scale curve. Showing that scale brings efficiency. The whole rationale for having a public sector, it's a more…

The hilarious nonsense of ‘the economy’. It’s said to be a market, where supply and demand regulates the exchange of goods and prices. But it never does that, unless you regulate it. And everybody agrees ‘competition’ is what fixes…

It’s ludicrous we’re all going on with our ‘normal’ lives in ‘the economy’, when as a civilisation we’re facing the greatest emergency in all of history. We should be on a war footing. Who cares about our bullshit jobs? The economy does.…

Many with expertise came to Twitter to network, when public health mechanisms were sidelined. I’m noticing more of them becoming silent and even disappearing from here now. Some no longer even take the precautions they advocated for, for…

For 7 years we put our entire lives on hold and redirected all economic activity when Hitler invaded Poland. And this, FAR more dangerous? Normal life continues. The ‘economy’ is the Toxoplasma Gondii of human societies, the pathogen that…

Imagine hitting the campaign trail to advocate for higher inflation and higher costs of living. People would think you were unhinged. But you can lead rallies to undermine action on the greatest threat to humanity in history, and it’s just…

If you feel like much of what happened at school was pretty dumb and only a handful of people ever called it out, welcome to adult life, 2024. Social media is school life, for all ages. An economy of likes. Popularity.…

‘Balancing’ Covid action against the economy became 0% action against Covid, 100% action for the economy. Similarly, ‘hybrid immunity’ became ‘just get infected’, minus any vaccination. As with climate action, the endgame is - do nothing.…

The housing crisis is one of our greatest social issues. And it’s easily fixed, if we drop all the econo-babble about supply and demand and just build cheap houses. Pretty much all of our problems would go away if we ditched ‘the economy’…

We spent 150 years taming many of of our infectious disease threats. 4 years of free market fuckwittery is unravelling it fast. https://t.co/nC6Ug72zs4

The common wondering we do about why nothing is being done against existential threats. Have Tweeted about how this is due to the removal of the administrative construct of 'the public', invented in the late-19th to mid-20th century. But…

This is the inflation we should be worried about. #auspol https://t.co/zHWbVuNejf

There’s a total disconnect between popular political ideas and the reality of how societies work. The ISS is a good way to see the disconnect. Our politics is dominated by the idea of ‘economies’, (apparent) markets of individuals…

This is how seductive seeing society as an economy is. I don’t actually think more competition is the answer to grocery prices. That’s part of the mythology of market economies, that they operate via competition, adopted by all sides as an…

4 Corners excited some last night because it went into bat for their team. The ‘big corporate market power price gouging’ team. Except none of it made sense. Nobody asks how you get power in a market, which is supposed to be a mechanism to…

The all-out assault on Google search by search engine optimisation (SEO) marketing is a story that should be front page news. In a world where we outsource expertise to the web, Google Search is our gatekeeper. If it becomes compromised,…

Maybe an economist can explain why floor coverings/carpet don't drop significantly in cost? Had that drop already occurred much earlier in history, it being an extremely early technology? https://t.co/4lD5XEVnTK From:…

4 DEGREES. Why are societies not on a war footing? Who cares what the economy is doing? https://t.co/eRBHEKcFtq

The 'free market' LNP boosted this industry to undermine universal health care. It's not 'private' insurance at all, it's subsidised every year with billions of public dollars. The free market has already decided it's a dud. Let it…

We need to talk about disease eradication. Those delighted with the uncontrolled spread of Covid often justify it by saying nothing else can be done, that it can’t be eradicated. Like most public narratives in this pandemic, that’s a…

‘Capitalism’ and ‘late-stage capitalism’ are popular explanations for 2024. Neither ever existed. Free market politics was feudalism all along, hidden behind econo-babble. The economy has never existed, it was a sleight of hand feudal…

‘Common cold’ is a normalising term hiding a public health problem. Viruses given too-easy access to hosts. Clean air is always the last public health hurdle to fall, because it clashes with economic crowding of people in workplaces and…

The ‘economy’ we let Covid rip to apparently save is now collapsing, worldwide. It was collapsing before Covid, the pandemic just acted as an accelerant on its weaknesses. Pandemics reboot societies, we tried to stop this one doing that.…

Housing another example of how post-WW2 institutions created what we call public life. And decades of unprecedented peace, health and prosperity. Then pulled apart gradually from the 1970s, with the politics of the economy and free…

Social infrastructure is crumbling. Because our political model, ‘the economy’, is toxic to community of any kind. A community is not a market. While we keep pretending it is, we’ll keep destroying what’s left of our societies.…

The thing that holds all societies together is providing opportunities for people to connect. To create community. Without it things like this happen, people can be dead for years and nobody even notices. Social media pitched itself at…

The economy is lunacy. The ‘target band’ inflation rate is just one of a whole list of fantasy indicators with no meaningful link back to actual reality. This con is what all leaders now focus on, marinating economic KPIs that are all…

Why are societies not mobilising in the way they did for world wars? I know why. Because the great con, 'the economy', captures all of our leaders' attention. A handful of statistical indicators invented by monetarism, a Right-wing…

The government still have an opportunity to listen to Saul Griffith and solve at least 2 problems at once. Electrify homes, subsidies for appliances, solar and batteries. Creates a dramatic shift in cost of living, and also a huge boost to…

Why aren’t we fighting climate catastrophe and a pandemic? Politics is a hopeless framing for understanding our adult lives. The same social mechanisms apply across all life stages. The same social problems kids have are a window into the…

‘The economy’ cares diddly squat about cost of living lockdowns. Only Covid lockdowns bother it, because those ones cost *it* money. https://t.co/7AtGKsFF5T https://t.co/BbLmx5rK7Y

Alan Kohler shared this. Aggregate GDP was just more people (migration). If they'd targeted households from the start ('per capita') instead of a fictitious 'economy', this wouldn't have happened. What happens when you believe statistical…

Conservatives have run the ‘the economy is like a household budget’ line for so long they now actually believe it. https://t.co/qzgZL06r0Y

Actually something that WAS the result of lockdowns. But the lockdown hystericals won't mention that. Pausing our economic lifestyles made us all much healthier. What does that say? (https://t.co/tTDgtPdIyN) https://t.co/hzlQNbb7Br

“A class system is developing – the old historic ‘landed gentry’ versus the masses.” Like I often say. 'The economy' isn't a thing, it's a political strategy to dismantle public institutional life, to return us to the feudalism that…

The economy is doing great, the middle class is collapsing. These aren’t two separate things. This is the trap we’ve fallen into by interpreting social and cultural things, economically. The purpose OF the economy is to remove the middle…

When you see it you can’t unsee it. Politicians of every persuasion trapped inside the solemn idiot rituals of ‘the economy’. While Rome burns around them. Not even recognising that it’s the economy that is causing these problems, and also…

If you leave things to the ‘market’, rather than lead investment and innovation from the top, you just flounder in the world’s weeds, on every metric. https://t.co/N5IrKPbslL

Progressive politicians don’t even notice how completely captured they are by conservative framings. Like the obsession with surpluses, derived from years of conservative slogans about them. Their measure of good government now IS the…

THIS. This is investment, building a new Australia. Focusing on households, which *is* the economy. Why we targeted households to avoid the GFC. https://t.co/FA4LpzQH9D

If you reframe our modern economic life in social ways, it makes a lot more sense. I’ve always loved (and lived) the reality of this Dilbert. It’s not just the reality of economies, it’s all of human life, since humans appeared. It’s our…

The ultimate failure of ‘the economy’ as a social system is that it literally destroys societies. The basic act of reproducing itself becomes unaffordable. https://t.co/3uoxmOQ5sw https://t.co/RAXApSyAkD

There’s that ‘balance’ word again, a modern propaganda favourite. In every case the ‘balance’ means doing nothing for the thing that is balancing against anything financial, or the economy more generally. Climate change, Covid, air safety,…

This is orders of magnitude more dangerous than tyrants in Europe in the mid-20th century, where we stopped everything for more than a decade to stop them. 'The economy' is why we're doing nothing. Designed to obstruct all action, to…

It’s been enjoyable to see the concept of a ‘per capita recession’ trotted out. A slow realisation that the statistical indicators we call ‘the economy’ often bear little relationship to our actual lives. It reveals what’s really in play…

Governments doing a modicum of planning and investment was once common. Now only Asia seems to understand that profound social change comes from government planning and investment. Meanwhile we sit and wait for the 'market' to deliver.…

The LNP at the time said government shouldn't 'pick winners', leave it to the market. The same fallacy that says democracy is what 'the people' decide should happen. Groups of people don't decide anything. In markets or democracies. All…

How did the West make free market economies look real? They outsourced all the ‘command and control’ planning and manufacturing to developing nations, particularly China. The West without China could now barely boil an egg.…

Rod Stewart decided to try to repair the road near his own home, because “my Ferrari can’t go through here at all.” (The humanity.) Like any good tabloid story though, it’s overflowing with insight into our current culture. The universal…

Do you reckon the people in the foreground in hard hats were elected to come and fix the problem? Me either. A society’s problems are MUCH more complex than a collapsed building. And we try to solve them with popularity contests.…

It’s tragically amusing to watch us fork out hundreds of billions to buy and build subs, to defend us from the country whose trade is pretty much the entire Australian economy. https://t.co/em3b4ipKeZ

It’s difficult to talk about China without getting caught up in Yellow Peril politics, fuelled by old Anglo reactionary societies in the last gasps of their empires. But China’s industrial capacity is surely one of the greatest wonders of…

We may be thinking about Covid the wrong way. It remains true it seems that Covid is an overdispersed virus. It has a low dispersion parameter (k), meaning most spread is superspreading events from a very small number of people. /1…

Infection follows a network dynamic. It doesn't infect everywhere all at once, particularly Covid. It forms hubs, which then create networks, and then more hubs in these networks etc. Within countries schools are the main hubs.…

Ventilate schools. Not just to protect teachers and students (though why that isn’t reason enough is damning proof what a shithole social model an economy is), but because schools are where Covid goes to breed, and then spread everywhere.…

What happens when you turn a society into an economy. https://t.co/ayVdwVaqlB

This is a brilliant exploration of another use of network analysis, how to really hurt Putin's oligarchs. Targeting their financial intermediaries is likely to be much more effective than confiscation of their visible wealth. Societies are…

The market, like its parent the economy, is a fiction. https://t.co/VYHktnQiSa

Easter provides more raw material to see the lumpy, networked structure we (wrongly) call a society of ‘the people’. If you travel in regional areas, you’ll see old churches. ‘The Church’ more broadly pioneered network structures, over…

My current pinned Tweet is a theme I Tweet about a lot. How what we took to be normal life, pre-Covid, was historically completely abnormal. That post-war period, until the late-1970s, was historically unique, old hierarchies had been…

Pensioners in the UK get just 29% of a working wage when they retire. The OECD average is 63% and the average for EU member states is 71%. The UK is a very poor country, with a tiny number of extravagantly rich people. That’s the Tory…

The utter transformation of retirement into an orgy of consumption and travel has a cost that will continue to disenfranchise young, working people. The World Economic Forum estimates that cost for these 8 countries alone, including Oz.…

When people ask why aren’t ‘we’ doing anything about climate change or Covid, who is ‘we’? Usually it means politicians. Followed by aspersions cast on ordinary ‘dumb’ people. But the driver of grown-up responsibility has never been either…

The collapse of the post-WW2 massive investment in public services is accelerating. And that complete reversal isn’t limited to economics and politics. It includes culture. You don’t need a time machine, we’re living inside one.…

Many get rightly angry about the money to be spent on nuclear submarines. But politics is language, and something at least as egregious has been happening in Australia since 2006. The ‘Future Fund’, Australia’s biggest sovereign wealth…

With MMT ideas, if inflation is caused by money being in excess of productive capacity to use it, and taxation is the withdrawal of money from circulation to control distribution, would a better solution to current inflation problems have…

Those who say ‘not all boomers’ are correct too. Like everything else, wealth is networked, concentrated in a small number of hubs. Many boomers in fact have been hopeless savers, and will have difficult retirements. 1/3…

From: https://t.co/NgmWCuoViR Again, not having a go at Christina, it's about the ideas and public policy. 'Things are better', fewer deaths. From a public policy point of view, the deaths are not better once you add time back to the mix.…

When the clear evidence of our senses and experience tell us something is terribly wrong, with our climate and with our health in the pandemic, and nothing is done? Not only that, but when many affect joy at doing nothing? This is what…

Scientifically and economically it’s a damagingly stupid idea. People don’t like Daylight Saving, they like an extra hour of daylight after work. That’s a fundamentally different thing, achievable in multiple ways. But that would impact…

We saw the same shift to ‘off-grid’ living during the economic crises of the 1970s. It’s a false dawn, a bucolic delusion. Like most tree-change, it’s not a retreat to a more simple life. It’s a desire for the same comforts, for less money…

One of the brilliant reframings in @DrCameronMurray’s book on Australian housing, which I hope I’m understanding correctly, is the mistaken idea that housing is in fact a market to begin with. /1 https://t.co/5kG98SiyWc Because the stock…

Remember when Australia had industry policy, before the LNP decided 'the market' would do all of that for us? There is no market. All change is led. The PERFECT symmetry of the red and blue lines here. https://t.co/JcjB9P921P

Brilliant thread on short-selling, and how to use the tools of networked privilege against it. The only gripe I have with @doctorow’s work is the belief I sense that ‘competition’ i.e. taking down all ‘monopolies’, is some intrinsic good.…

Politicians and commentators floundering on cost of living. The economic framework we use to understand societies is hopeless. Like the evil Coles/Woolies duopoly. Plays well because it’s team sports. The US has great grocery competition.…

The world is networked. Hubs control most things, and that’s also not bad, it’s economies of scale. Most of the alternatives we’re presented with in consumer choice philosophy and politics are the same hubs, diversifying the brand.…

I’ve had a discussion over years with a close friend, a university professor. About our modern idea of ‘the market’, and ‘the economy’. /1 Whenever I discuss the idea of a market with anybody, it becomes clear that it’s one of those slogan…

How does the Land of the Free (market) manage to have house price-to-income ratios less than half of us here in Oz? Well, it's an interesting story. Much of the magic happens in this building, Fannie Mae HQ. /1 https://t.co/NKI4H0ZCmb…

On of the great myths of ‘the economy’ is that it operates already *without* massive government ‘intervention’. Governments create the entire framework of economic activity, including the existence of companies. /1 https://t.co/GvBKOnIYha…

We believe Western societies operate as ‘market economies’. Look at the caravan of market spruikers shout down Albo this week for daring to suggest government invest in manufacturing. But we never have been market economies. /1…

The interplay of regular and random contacts in the dynamics of superspreading. Or more simply, the role of mixing with strangers in the spread of Covid. It’s mixing with strangers that prolongs the pandemic. /1 https://t.co/BNwb6mmavs…

Saying countries evolve to service economies as they get richer is just another way of saying somebody somewhere else is doing the dirty work for them. You eventually run out of people to do the dirty work. https://t.co/8OwLzp0UFo…

There's bipartisan agreement that HECS is a good idea. It was never a good idea. A person who earns more because of their degree will already pay more tax, you don't need additional education tax on top of it. And degrees aren't the path…

Coming back to this because it seems such a critical paper, one of the few to really address hybrid immunity and model how it might be going (if it even exists). Some key extracts. /1 #auspol https://t.co/JEyitkVrY1 https://t.co/83dkNZNoJx…

If you had to do a portrait of 'society', it would look something like this. Very clumpy, a small number of networked hubs. What drives the creation and maintenance of these hubs is social contagion. Imitation. Fads and fashions. /1…

Not only are wealthy countries now large aged care homes desperate to import staff from OS, the wealthiest suburbs repeat the same pattern. Fractal patterns. https://t.co/n52Y7Z378x https://t.co/D85FXdjByy

With the insurance industry facing collapse, it’s important to extend their concept of ‘pooled risk’, to Covid. Pooled risk means distributing risk. The exact opposite of what we’re doing for Covid. /1 https://t.co/W76Ixzb75c With Covid,…

‘Lockdowns’ reduced intimate partner violence. It also made many disadvantaged people better-off than they’d ever been. The outcome of a greater share of our common-wealth going to more people. And why privilege demanded lockdowns end. /1…

The size of business is a key way we can see how all business is just social too. All of society is. What many don’t realise is how many small businesses fail. And always have. 1/7 https://t.co/Eq8PQmz8Vp https://t.co/HH3Ubc8UcI It’s a…

We don't see the social transformation that social media is. It's not about 'sharing' now, we're well past that. Social media *is* increasingly peoples' social lives. They don't just use it to share details of those lives. /1…

After WW2 we built a public-focused society. From the 1970s, that was replaced with an economy. https://t.co/UiTXHNjkXF

Cancel the debts, forgive them. The US is beginning to do that. Countries have birth rates in terminal decline because the young can’t afford to live, let alone breed. You don’t need to tax education. If students earn more, they’ll pay…

The economic phrase ‘picking winners’ is a sure marker of a moron at work. Under the LNP Australia avoided picking winners for most of the past 2 decades. It turned us into a quarry for the Chinese and fossil fuel companies.

The socio-political mathematics of Covid minimisation. Populist politicians have now replaced one model of society, with another. And it’s mostly been done with toxic maths. /1 https://t.co/LFWcYa10rN The idea of a ‘public’ is historically…

All sides of politics embrace the concept of ‘the economy’. And then wonder why public life is destroyed. The concept of the market, and of the public, are mutually exclusive. The former is violently opposed to the latter.…

The genius of this show goes well beyond anybody’s issues with Jeremy Clarkson. It’s a brilliant window into the limits of libertarian life, but also and at the same time its more regulated alternative. It’s a perpetual stalemate. Driven…

The idiocy of electoral politics. And ‘the economy’. Budget surpluses are LNP political framing. Strategy, to gut public investment. The ALP dancing like puppets, to that framing. Aren’t they good boys and girls! Numpties.…

You can’t have ‘work-life balance’ when social media is monetising your life when you’re not at work too. ‘Balance’ is a red flag BS word. Like balancing Covid action against the economy. Means 100% economy, 0% Covid.

Minimisers managed to blunt the comparison of Covid and HIV/AIDS by saying’ they’re not the same disease at all!’ The point never was that they were the same disease. The point was about chronic impacts of infection. /1…

Every day I come here and watch people struggling to find a ‘we’. So many pleading Tweets about horrible things, that nothing is being done about, as a community. That to me is the key thing to understand, if we want change. We need to…

Parenthetically, wealth comes from social status. Ageing societies obviously will place a lot of status in medicine. They use a lot of it. All societies are social. In every detail. Unsee it. https://t.co/HCDffRxRrM

“And yet it moves.” (Galileo) I sometimes advocate for something I call ‘reality politics’. Meaning politics that recognises that most of the things we argue about aren’t in our power to change. Our normal politics merely delays outcomes…

The market is a political fiction, not economic reality. Take government away, and there would be no market. Regulation brings the market into existence and keeps it there. It brings businesses in the market into existence too, through…

Regulatory capture 101. Government 'intervenes' in the market, like it sticks its nose in where it doesn't belong Governments created the market. It's a regulatory entity. This is the substitution of a society by an economy, in plain…

Murder used to be a jail sentence. Unless you live in an ‘economy’, where growth is agnostic to what it’s the growth of. Including mass death. https://t.co/Dj758OAweo https://t.co/CgRx1vxKR3

In the heady days after WW2, when rebuilding societies rather than accumulating wealth in existing status hierarchies was central to our societies, we took real joy in defeating infectious disease. https://t.co/QQM5rYQHwj

Despite the blather about ‘lockdowns’ damaging economies, in reality they were a temporary lifeline to a social model that was in terminal decline. Societies are not economies. They will keep collapsing until we understand that. (Link in…

The ideas behind an ‘economy’ are fundamentally at odds with the social realities I described in this thread. That we act as individual consumers, in markets, optimising collective outcomes. That’s never how people behave. ‘The economy’ is…

What we’re seeing in Gaza is the default state of human societies. Violence. Rene Girard saw this. Like all of our existential challenges right now, we’re not understanding it because we’re using the lens of peace and prosperity that…

What's most interesting here isn't discussed. *Why* households splintered during emergency Covid action. Were people avoiding risk of disease? And/or were they actually wealthier for the first time in forever, and looked to set up their…

So many critiques of AI say machines can’t think like humans. But most of what we call human thinking is actually the social process of imitation. Social conformity. Even the process of peer review is largely the enforcing of social…

Biden being old is seen as a massive liability. Trump being a convicted felon who led an insurrection? Meh. If you look you’ll see adolescence as the model of adult society, reinforced by social media and its economy of likes. Being old is…

'Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!' (Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray.) Wilde inadvertently saw our future. All of our worst problems are not the political problems we think they are. That’s just…

The wealth and health of Australians improved immensely under ‘lockdowns’. And yet economic commentators still try to portray public health action as a catastrophe. It’s worth checking the think tank affiliations of all who make these…

The penny is dropping that populism is the real enemy. And that 'the market' (a social fantasy, no humans act in that way, they act in teams) is a hopeless way forward. https://t.co/SBZmWBSEjl

The problems facing us should mean societies are on a war footing. Climate change and a pandemic are both MUCH bigger problems than those we go to war for. We’re not even close to being on a war footing. About our social status hierarchies…

A prominent English motoring journalist counted over 150 successive EV-bashing stories in key UK media outlets. The status quo makes sure these narratives never let up. Only catastrophe will shift them. Flood the Australian car market with…

The ridiculous levels of illness in the community right now are coming up against 19th century command and control sick leave policies. The same command and control economy that caused this pandemic. Beginning with the idiocy of the…

Ross Gittins making the very obvious point here that inflation is much more likely to be caused by disruptions to making things. Not by people spending too much money. People don’t have any money. Economic ideology, destroying lives.…

Covid disrupted our ‘supply chains’, leading to a cost of living/inflation crisis. Most of these supply chains originate in China, where we outsourced most of our manufacturing. China moved mountains to suppress Covid. We mocked them for…

We have a ‘target band’ for inflation. If we move outside this band, the universe implodes, or something. Remember having a target band for Covid infections? Somewhere around zero, or at least IN a band. That was (apparently) oppression.…

Why are required changes not being led in our societies? Because we say they’re market economies. Market economies have no leadership, by design. This is never how people actually behave. So everything is in continuous collapse, unless we…

“Academics, more than anyone, should understand that the future lies in services, not manufacturing. The good jobs come from what you know, not what you can make.” Ross trotting out the standard economic line. /1 https://t.co/1ntb6pFiYv…

The individual experience of heat exhaustion has a sobering message for us as societies. We can stumble on, thinking we’re fine. While critical life support systems are in terminal decline. This applies at the level of whole societies too.…

Trying to turn it into a cost of living issue. I have almost zero energy costs. I'm not a high income earner. I did it with renewables and EVs. Reminds me of sitting in science class with complete morons. Covid and climate, not an ounce of…

Over time I’ve watched many great public personas and thinkers prosecute great causes here. And then fall away, as they recognise that micro-blogging doesn’t change the world. Or they become entranced by the economy of likes, with surging…

You can see here the plan for housing isn’t to make it cheaper. It’s to give people more money so that they can hopefully afford a deposit. ‘The economy’ is mostly overpriced housing, bet on like a game of roulette. If house prices drop,…

In our modern sloganocracies, ‘levelling up’ is a favourite. The idea that inequality is addressed not by reining in the ultra-wealthy, but by pretending we can make everybody wealthy. It’s trickle-down, but without even any trickling.…

Covid minimisers and their followers always use the same argument to say the pandemic is over. ‘Nobody is paying any attention to it.’ This is a very important window into the dynamics of our situation. /1 You can see clearly that their…

It will bewilder and alarm many that Peter Dutton is now the preferred PM, in polling. And that the LNP is neck-and-neck to win the next election. Modern conservatives understand how people think and behave. And how to win elections. /1…

‘The economy’ is really just the team sports of imitative rivalry, escalated to a model for all of society. ‘Competition’. Said to be an intrinsic good, we even have bodies overseeing it. All it does is entrench team sports. And reinforce…

We’re dominated by anti-State ‘small government’ politics. The idea that a ‘market’ of competing individuals will always be the efficient way to carry out social transactions. An ‘economy’, replacing a society. Why this is bananas. /1…

We currently have about 55 GW of generation in the electricity grid. What does it currently cost to build a GW of nuclear power? In the US and UK, about $25 billion. /1 https://t.co/j4KxaimtUw At that price, if we were to replace our…

This is where the fossil fuel age in many ways began. Saudi Arabia's first successful oil well, Well 7. The "Prosperity Well". In 1938 it struck major oil. In a way 2024 is 1938, when it comes to energy. And Australia should be Saudi…

The incredible inertia of the status quo is already dampening recent efforts in renewable energy and EVs, as prominent examples. You can’t gradually change a status quo. It needs to be disrupted. Smashed. This is a key fact of social life.…

Coalition of free market fundamentalists launches nuclear building program styled on the Soviets. The ridiculous rabbit holes populist politics takes us down. #auspol https://t.co/neE9lXSDfv https://t.co/YmzICk5awg

Remember when Labor’s NBN was mocked by the LNP as ‘picking winners’? Let the market decide? The economy is a con. The people who promote it never act like it even exists. Because it doesn’t. https://t.co/d3lWO7s23m

Every day, with gas outages predicted and renewables rollout too slow, we’re getting closer to realising we should be electrifying households. As Rewiring Australia said. Direct action at the consumer end, not producer. Also drives down…

It’s difficult to count the number of ways societies are collapsing now, because we run them as economies (i.e. not at all). No leadership *is* an ‘economy’. Leadership ‘interferes’ with the ‘market’. Or so they say. And here we are,…

Sick and carer’s leave is up between 50 and 60% in the past two months, in NSW. How’s that for ‘balancing’ an economy against Covid? They’re on the same side of the see-saw.

If you’re not questioning the existence of ‘the economy’, rather than just trying to re-purpose it, you’re living inside a fantasy. ‘The economy’ and its ‘market’ is just society stripped of government. Exactly why it was invented, as an…

It’s absolutely clear what’s going on here. It’s The Voice Mk 2. Senior LNP politicians have even said it. A stunt designed to create a massive shift in voting intention, in a short time. The most important question here is the one we’re…

One of the founding myths of our time. Hilariously developed by a social group with vast inherited wealth, for which they never work a day in their life. https://t.co/QpLYbODH9i

Saul Griffith gave governments not just a renewable energy strategy, when he said target households. He gave them a winning political strategy. They’re too stupid to listen, too entrenched with the status quo interests in big generation…

Anthony Albanese can say, ‘do you want to wait 15-20 years for a nuclear fantasy that won’t happen, that we’ll need to mortgage the country to afford, or do you want us to help you make your household all-electric TODAY, to drive your cost…

Are PPE or other Covid mitigations tax deductible in any way?

It's quite legitimate to consider societies as engineering problems. More so in fact than as economic problems. How pilot-induced oscillations in flight have lessons for a pandemic. h/t to @YouAreLobbyLud for a conversation that made me…

One of the bizarre things about modern life is how we allow society to be described purely in the terms of one discipline only. Economics. ‘The economy’ is a construct. Not an underlying reality. There are many human disciplines that can…

That spending raised vast numbers of Australians above the poverty line, for the first time in their lives. The 'debt' they're now paying is with their exhausted sick leave. https://t.co/cczG93qqmP

We're entering a new Restoration. In the 17th century, a relatively brief experiment with a republic in what's now the UK, led by a democratic parliament, collapsed with the restoration of a monarchy under Charles II. The same script our…

You’re now most likely to catch Covid at home. From your kids, who catch it at school. Most of the young can’t even afford a home, and never will. ‘Home’ as an idea is under assault. By ‘the economy’. The economy is a verb, not a noun. /1…

The problem with ‘business’ as a concept is that it mistakes means with ends. ‘Business’ is really just services for a community. An economy changes the means (business) into an end. Converting all social life to the ‘job’, and making…

Australia’s energy is a disaster. A perfect example of how popularity-electoral governance is completely incapable of fixing our material problems. Watch all sides rush to household electrification and storage as the only feasible interim…

The enormity of this decision for democracy everywhere. Not since 1215 have Western rulers been above the law. These aren’t analogies. This is the literal Return of the King, and the end of democracy. The reversal of the Magna Carta. /1…

So much of the US right now is Rome. A failing Republic, with a surging imperial Presidency that is more like a King or Emperor. By far the most successful period in Rome’s history was its rule by emperors. Its Republic was endlessly…

Keir Starmer is a decent, intelligent guy. He'll be much better for the UK. But like Albanese he reveals the fundamental weakness of modern progressive politics. Good people are far too timid and nice. The trajectory to power for Starmer…

The word ‘fascism’ is bandied about freely here. Like fairy tales for grown-up. Nobody implements fascism. Fascism is a product, not a mechanism. It’s the endgame of populism. The stripping away of all hierarchies of authority, in favour…

Bah we screw young people. Overheard a distraught young woman who'd been making voluntary repayments to HECS-HELP during the year, thinking that meant she wouldn't have a bill at tax time. Doesn't work like that. Still got the bill, for…

A primary teacher friend has a kid in class today with known Covid (tested positive earlier in the week). Was off for a few days, parents sent the child back today, for the last day of term. Child still clearly has Covid, coughing and…

If you believe the mythology of elections, entire populations swing from being free market fanatics, to Big State socialists, in only a handful of years. And then back again, ad infinitum. Nonsense, of course. There’s a much simpler…

Another idiot hashtag, yallmasking. Who cares? I’m masking, posting a photo of myself doing it will do diddly squat to change anything. I say idiot, because it derives from the idiot idea that social change comes by ‘mobilising’ people. No…

Connection is social media’s bait-and-switch. Offer something people can’t resist, some social heroin - connecting with others. ‘Networking’. Then weaponise it by turning that connection into team sports. Then monetise the likes those…

The mythology (the ‘bait’ in its bait-and-switch) of social media, is that it’s like the world’s conversation. Everybody talking to everybody else. Except it isn’t. The same hierarchical structure shapes those conversations as exist off…

“There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening.” (McLuhan) Our sense of inevitable failure to address our problems is due to them being badly understood. 1/4 https://t.co/uF2SqtrBSu…

“Y’all Masking”? That ‘y’all’. Covid minimisers won by portraying Covid as everywhere, all of the time. The hashtag shares the framing. Covid isn’t everywhere. It’s bred in highly localised hubs (mostly schools), and transmitted through…

China continues to be the catastrophe that our rigid culture of ‘the economy’ needs, to shock it out of its entrenched status quo. Western countries desperately putting tariff walls around this shock, to try to contain it. They need to…

This event should be a wake-up call to what social media-driven culture is doing to us. Who is Trump ‘fighting’? You can see how his entire political success is to turn everything into a fight. This is the team sports I Tweet about. Where…

The US is one of the most violent countries on Earth. Because it rejects basic collective regulation of its society. Without that, violence is the default. But there’s also more to see here. Why so many mass and other prominent shootings?…

From the 1970s, the push was on to reverse the post-war emphasis on collective good. A mystery for some is why conservative politicians and their ‘economy’ have dominated this same period, when their policies are doing the reversing. It’s…

China is strategy, the West is tactics. China saw the future was renewables, decades ago. Thus their astronomical investment in that area. Western democracy is 3-5 year electoral (popularity) cycles. All tactics, to win those elections.…

Does nobody cook any more? Ordinary home cooking, not Master Chef performative rubbish for SM? Does nobody make a sandwich for lunch? Was thinking about this in a lunch break this week. Once a week at work I buy my lunch. /1 A small treat.…

The great threat of working from home for ‘the economy’ isn’t about where people work. It’s the danger of them rediscovering what ‘home’ means. Of re-centering their lives around place. The economy has always been, socially, an assault…

Speaking to a senior nursing manager in regional Australia. Needs more than 3 times as many new RNs every year than are available. Says tree changers settle in the area, often bringing no children and therefore no younger people to help…

I call toxic sociality the underlying problem behind all of our other problems. And the vanguard of toxic sociality is social media. You can see in this student post that there’s dawning realisation. /1 https://t.co/aWP2zXeGHl…

At both ends of the lifespan now humans are put into ‘care’. Child care and aged care. Societies are social, what does this mean? This grandmother calls looking after children ‘abject drudgery’. There’s more to see here. /1…

The political concept of ‘the vulnerable’. You can’t ring-fence groups in that way. This isn’t an argument about fairness. It’s about logistics. You allow the weakest links to break, the whole lot comes tumbling down. Economies (really…

For decades there have been calls for emergency strong action by governments, on climate change. One government is actually doing it. ‘The economy’ in the West is horrified. Which shows its true function. https://t.co/Nrc32AtiwA…

The phone is the gateway between social media and reality. The tool that uploads everyday life into social media, and then allows social media into those lives to transform them. This isn’t a one-way or even two-way process. It’s a…

The people of NSW can be sicker than at any other time in modern history. But we must protect the CBD, apparently. Elections solve no problems. The economy is a killing machine. https://t.co/rjXDCl6Z6C https://t.co/oSOwjeyqbU

I would like us to see all of our problems as the outcomes of quite simple to understand human behaviour. To rediscover societies for what they are - 100% social. Not political, not economic. Social. Ordinary meetings show this, the same…

As well as the impact on their ongoing health, the economic dries could ask, how much did Australia invest in the training of these athletes? Only to have those trained bodies infected the minute they arrived? https://t.co/fjPLhPpdFf

Like many I enjoy coming here to discover new things, including the science of infectious disease. But if we want things to change, we have to move away from the idea that facts or information run societies. We have to understand how…

It’s that busy world of perpetual adolescence, what we call ‘the economy’ now, that is cheerfully sacrificing children and the old to Covid. Worth pondering in conjunction with this quote, I think. https://t.co/R8vRKdTAQ8

Russia and Chinese are seen as leading ‘authoritarian’ cultures in the world today. As if a culture decides ‘hey, let’s be authoritarian’. Older cultures seem that way because they survived by having strong restrictions on much social…

John Kehoe on the #Insiders couch droning on in a ‘let the market run society’ way, without challenge. Cheering on the dreadful Productivity Commission. Societies that don’t ‘pick winners’ end up run by drug gangs, who do it for them.

An important topic. David talks about how ‘we’ are playing with fire, with tipping points. This is where, as with Covid, we need insight into how and why humans think and behave. Which is a social question, not a physical science question.…

Ask a school teacher if a model of society that says ‘just let the group interact and order will spontaneously emerge’ is a good idea. This is our idiot idea of what democracy is. It’s how social media sucked us in, that was its bait. Also…

The economic idea that societies are ‘markets’, where people automatically generate optimum outcomes through their interactions (using an ‘invisible hand’, oops). Is the same model used by social media to generate ‘democracy’. Both…

1945 is sometimes called Year Zero. Here’s one for our mental health, the frustration we have that politicians aren’t doing anything to fix our problems. A hint: they never really have. It’s actually not their job, to fix anything. /1…

Soon after the farce of let it rip got underway in workplaces, for Covid, the EAPs were thrust in everybody’s faces daily. Outright abuse of people, mandatory infection, with the inevitable trauma to them re-framed as an issue with their…

A story from Cook’s voyages demonstrates well how groups and societies run on status, not information. For sailors of that time, scurvy was a constant threat. Cook knew that sauerkraut prevented scurvy, and also kept well on voyages. But…

This is the great mythology that all sides of politics embrace. That high prices are caused by lack of competition. By monopoly. Scale is what allows humans to create things cheaply. ‘Economies of scale’. But we’re wedded to the idea that…

Strip away the econo-babble narratives, and you’ll see our housing system has already returned to the days of the landed gentry. Where land brought wealth. What I mean by modern labelling disguising the same social processes.…

As McLuhan used to say, pastimes are past-times. The tourist of today is emulating the ‘Grand Tour’ of the sons of wealthy aristocratic families in the 18th and 19th centuries. Societies are 100% social. We emulate higher status people.…

If you read the history of Victorian England, the birth of the modern world, what stands out is how much the focus of their massive engineering innovation was one thing. The health and well-being of the public. Engineers change the world,…

The level of government least noticed, local government, is largely a public health body. It provides you with clean water, removes your garbage and sewage, inspects food premises, regulates noise and pollution. And much more. Its…

Bad faith actors take our ridiculous idea of democracy as everybody saying and doing whatever they like, and use it to destroy us. We’re doing this to ourselves. We are not free. We’re slaves to the tyranny of absent leadership. Death by…

Covid minimisers (really shills for ‘the economy’) realised they could justify killing people for business by pretending to be rescuing our social lives. They spun socialising. The health benefits to socialising come from a cause not ever…

Because it took longer here in Oz for the massive public health action after WW2 in the Anglosphere to surrender to resurgent social hierarchies. Disguised as 'the economy'. We're now rapidly trying to catch up with the pack.…

What the modern culture of 'the economy' refuses to accept is that pandemics destroy the status quo. You don't just manage them. They change life itself, how we live it. Reality will win this fight. There will be many cassualties along the…

‘The economy’ is the idea that societies will run themselves, if you don’t regulate them in any way. A political invention, not economic. The fiction is maintained only by vast quantities of debt. This, the US. 1/2 https://t.co/6LOG8nCPYB…

Several religious traditions speak strongly in their most ancient texts of prohibitions on debt, and of the control of pandemics. In an ‘economy’, all custom and tradition is abandoned. And here we are, up to our eyeballs in debt and…

A society has all of its habits at once. They’re all linked. When we decided to ditch public health for Covid, we ditched it for everything. Not an accidental outcome. Minimisers are shills for market-based societies. They despise anything…

There is extensive research on social collapse, it’s not just shock and awe social media language. (From me anyway.) Previous societies have been extensively studied, to identify causal factors. Here are 4 key indicators of collapse, seen…

Much of the enormous engineering of the Victorian era survives to this day and is often still functioning. It was targeted at the public good. Today if we get infrastructure at all, it’s most often like an episode of Utopia. Politicians…

The whole world went to war several times over emergencies the tiniest fraction of the magnitude of this. 'The economy' is the trick used to pretend we shouldn't drop everything to fight this, immediately. https://t.co/8Ut9WuxpBo

‘Chinggisid’ sovereignty is what I Tweet about in describing the perennial love of Kings. Trump-type populist leaders are this sovereign form, in modern clothing. This extract has so much to teach us. /1 https://t.co/HzabNd0V4Y…

Sadly there is no 'we' in an economy. If you set up a 'we' in a market, anti-trust laws and competition policy will pull it down. We can't live in an economy and have public health. https://t.co/1Xpa6hPpiS

There is no 'we' in an economy, and that's why nothing is being done. Public institutions act against emergencies, not politicians. When populist politicians sideline the institutions, no action occurs. https://t.co/gwAxcIFMFb

Civilisations lurch between catastrophes. It’s all that changes them meaningfully. Between catastrophes they play human status games. These status games have a shared model. People join teams, which then battle for status. It’s the same…

One of the hilarious myths of societies transformed into economies, is that ‘business’ creates social activity, including jobs. Business provides goods and services for people. It’s those same people, as customers, who drive business. Not…

Modern economics is a dry and barren retrofitting of societies with fantastical self-running equilibrium models. Models that are so insanely stupid that ‘invisible hands’ have to be invented to explain why anything happens at all.…

Absolutely we need trust in expertise again. But never in a million years will we achieve that by ‘listening to voters’. All that produces is a continuous barrage of ignorant, whining complaint. This is populism’s destruction at work. /1…

While society is conceived as an economy public health will never return. That subsitution was explicitly designed to remove 'public' everything. https://t.co/Yl6SXAUc5Q

Refreshing to see the oppressed billionaire class having its speech heard at last. https://t.co/OGXx9KDP0B

The status quo will not shift, unless it’s forced to. Only catastrophe changes societies. ‘Evolved market conditions’ are the status quo fighting back, with weaponised drivel like ‘range anxiety’. A social media invention, now obstructing…

If you sidestep the daily team sports and focus only on realities, you will see with your own eyes society collapsing everywhere. I left teaching more than 20 years ago. It’s critical you don’t believe the ‘burnout’ reasons given for this…

#Insiders interrogating ‘the economy’ today. I doubt I’ll live to see the time when we realise this complete fiction was invented to protect the status quo. There is no such thing as ‘the economy’. Societies are all social. Even ‘economic’…

In the West ordinary folk are discovering the total lack of agency that has been the daily life of most of the world, for centuries. Facing existential threats that receive no action, or even a sympathetic ear. But this has always been…

An excellent Covid 3-eyed fish moment would be to ask politicians to meet in a primary school classroom, while the class gets to use the 8 air-changes-per-hour parliamentary offices and chamber. https://t.co/coXjVYL1Zu

The only thing that changes societies is catastrophes. Like Australia, whose only meaningful change to carbon emissions remains the impact of a pandemic. Described as a ‘disaster’ for the economy. The economy is the disaster. Just the…

Only catastrophes change societies. The pandemic began as an absolute boon to ordinary people, hundreds of thousands lifted out of poverty for the first time. ‘The economy’ (i.e. the status quo) quickly returned to snuff that out.…

Professor Johan Rockstrom. This is a threat well beyond why we had two world wars. Every nation should be a on a war footing. They aren't because we replaced nation states with 'economies'. A social fiction, to strip away democratic…

Social media is not social networking. We had social networking many years before we had social media. Social media is the monetisation of social networking. An economy of ‘likes’. Networking replaced by influencing. Status games. 1/3 We…

My daughter’s teacher asked a class how many of them had not had Covid. She was the only one to put her hand up. Also the only one masked. I’m sure minimisers will say she’s been damaged by not fitting in. I prefer to think her vascular…

Working from home saved Australians $85 billion in transport costs alone. The pandemic was an economic bonanza for very many ordinary Australians. Catastrophes shift societies. It's why the status quo mobilised so fast to 'live with' Covid…

The thing an economy can never allow is a strong culture of 'home'. Economies need continuous displacement and dislocation. It's no accident having a place called home is now mostly unachievable for much of the population.…

Every outrageous injustice is a window into a truth we’ve not been seeing. Why can Israel act with impunity in Gaza? Because what we call Western democracies have always been Judaeo-Christian status hierarchies, with new names. AUKUS too.…

Even Laura Tingle succumbs to the idea that electoral politics is about solving problems. It never has, and never will, it’s a status game with the currency of popularity, over the top of material realities. Guess how home ownership became…

Another window into the substitution of society with an ‘economy’ was the PM’s launch of the revised aged care legislation. Described residents of aged care as those who helped build Australia’s economy. Complete inversion of means and…

The ‘authoritarian’ Chinese cracking down on gambling. Lovely contrast with the capitulation to gambling right now in Oz, in our ‘free’ democracies. I also love that Covid destroyed Macau’s casino economy. Only catastrophes force change.…

I talk a lot about China not because I have any interest in Chinese communism, as some infected by team sports culture think. I use China as a key contrast. For example, the enormous pressure in late-2022 for China to ‘live with’ Covid. /1…

#Insiders describing the housing problem as either a ‘demand side’ or ‘supply side’ problem. Completely housetrained by the nonsense of economy politics. Public housing is the solution. Not market housing.

Annabel Crabb’s excellent piece doesn’t draw two obvious conclusions. Speech is a weapon, it’s never free. And it’s a weapon most when it targets the currency of all societies. Status. Reputation. Not politics. Not economics. Status.…

The world was international before it was national. National sovereignties and borders were allocated by an international, pre-existing social mechanism. Exhibit A. The car industry. /1 https://t.co/nxSkCnfKwY China’s threat to Western…

The bizarre thing about this is that Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. Humans don’t like competition. They like (yes, again) team sports. Holden v Ford. Woolies v Coles. Labor v Liberal. https://t.co/yjEXw0lo8d

Australia doesn’t have a supermarket duopoly. We like to say we do, because then we have a strawman villain for our team sports. Metcash and Aldi are other options, available to shoppers for well over a decade. Most shoppers won’t use…

We’re all complicit (though not responsible) in the collapse of public-focused government. As a culture we support the idea of using popularity as the sole doorway to ultimate power, through elections. That’s game over. /1…

My contention is that societies are created by a single mechanism - status - and not by economics or politics or anything else. The content of public debates is almost completely irrelevant. You’re missing the wood, for the trees, by…

Those who work in schools know that it would cost just a fraction of the casual relief budget, to fit out the entire school with good air purifiers, many times over. Continuously sick teachers are prohibitively expensive. That’s if you can…

We're apparently all agreed that the problem with housing is 'lack of supply'. As Lippmann once said, when all think alike, nobody is thinking. The problem with housing is that it's a 'market'. That's it. https://t.co/tipB47L8w3

Every day it should be clearer that what we call 'capitalism' or 'neoliberalism' all along has really just been a resurgence of the Church, in Church v State battles. The oldest of all battles for status. https://t.co/aV7Al0FGCg

A friend took delivery of one of these yesterday, a magnificent BYD Seal. What happened next is a real window into what’s happened to us, as a society. /1 https://t.co/4LXnRl9rKq He’s a bit of a revhead, has always loved his cars. So him…

Economy society strips away all custom and tradition, all leadership, in favour of a fictitious ‘market’. Leading to a proliferation of credulous nonsense, and of teams battling each other for the status void at the heart of collective…

The ALP seeing success as being puppets to the framings of 3 decades of conservative dominance. ‘We’re not the debt and deficit people!’ This is all ‘the economy’ ever was. A way for conservatives to be in power even when they don’t win…

For many Australians, much cheaper groceries have been available for years. But they don’t shop there. The nonsense of ‘competition’ ideas, the competition is already there. Economic theory, politics and commentary has exactly zero insight…

Pretty much nothing in the current narratives on supermarkets is true in reality, this research shows. There are clear lessons in the cost of living crisis to expose the farce of’ the economy’ as a framing of social life. 1/2…

Teddy Roosevelt is attributed with ‘if you’ve got them by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow’. What’s happening in the Middle East right now is a repeat of a pattern throughout history. Societies change when they’re forced to…

Tim Winton on the politics of climate, identifying ‘fossil capitalism’ as the enemy. The real enemy is something he also mentions. The status quo. Fossil fuels fuel the status quo, well beyond those specific industries. 1/5…

On a visit to northern NSW, it was difficult to not wallow in the gobsmacking beauty of the Australian countryside. But it also triggered thoughts, about place. /1 https://t.co/9cXVQjGuZa When confronted with a view like this (photo:…

Public health is in free fall. Because the public as a concept is in free fall. That’s what ‘the economy’ is, econo-babble designed to reintroduce a society run by status. (Some of this is also Covid, most dentists have rubbish infection…

A dear friend who’s throughly wedded to market ideas about societies (happy to see them as economies) was discussing climate change with me. I shared this quote with him. Here’s how it unfolded. 1/7 https://t.co/CbwE3nOa9x…

This is the value of the global personal luxury goods market (see: https://t.co/gTqRmcP9eI) Why the big growth in demand for luxury? Luxury is status. Societies are shifting from being centred on a public, to being centred on status. This…

We stopped normal life for years to fight world wars. That threat was a pimple on the arse of what's coming now. And what are we doing? Nothing. That's the power of 'the economy'. The status quo re-badged. To quote... 1/2…

At the time universal suffrage was introduced, it didn’t occur to many that it would destory the democracies using it. Many came to see it *as* democracy. A ‘voice of the people’. There are no voices in voting. Only numbers. /1…

Somebody asked me if it’s depressingly pessimistic to say meaningful social change only comes from catastrophe. It’s neither pessimism or optimism. I don’t project feelings onto reality. It’s an empirical observation of history. /1 A field…

I watched this launch today. A few thoughts. I think Tesla do some fantastic technology, brilliant engineering. It's hard to talk about because of the minefield of team sports battle surrounding the CEO. /1 https://t.co/gQpk0mbgOP I think…

What do you do, in a world where public services like public health have been destroyed? This is the question for every day. Most of the world never had those public services. So we’re now returning to the pack. I think we sometimes forget…

Thanks to @Kerbrech for sharing this excellent illustration of the status-drives-societies idea. The work Peter Turchin has done on ‘elite overproduction’. The bit in green is where I would offer a different view. 1/8…

This year’s Nobel prize in economics goes to a trio of researchers whose basic thesis is that the economy doesn’t exist. Is there a Twitter Nobel prize? https://t.co/YFe45p0fkh

Echoes of Covid here. ‘The economy’ at work again. Basic biosecurity under fire from farmers, who want to live with the outbreak. ‘Lives and livelihoods’ set in opposition to each other is what the economy is. https://t.co/rjlcu349Za…

Economic ideas (like supply and demand) are powerless to understand the housing crisis. The housing crisis is the same reversal of public-focused governance, back towards status-driven societies. High status historically was always the…

Dynamic pricing is what supply and demand is supposed to do. Prices that respond to changes in supply and demand. Because we believe the economy is an actual thing, we think supply and demand produces lower prices. lol.…

The glorious tangled web the fantasy of the world as an economy produces. 'Let's put big tariffs on those cheap Chinese cars!' 'Um, the Chinese are the biggest market for OUR cars.' https://t.co/8KIebtvLfK

There is no we. We live in economies. ‘We’ in an economy is ‘anti-competitive behaviour’. https://t.co/t82LBEiyeY

We are bringing back the past. A status-driven society (feudalism), where if you don't have status, you have nothing. Debt was all that gave the illusion of most of us having some status. We borrowed our way into the hierarchy. 1/2…

I have an engineering degree, first class honours. I read this Tweet from top to bottom and the only correct thing I could find was some of the spelling and grammar. https://t.co/XV8KTOECYz

One of the reasons the fact societies are 100% social (not economic, not political etc.) isn’t more easily seen is that our social relations are woven into our technologies. We think of technologies as tools. And so we fundamentally…

BYD employs over 110,000 engineers. Let that sink in. Here’s just how ridiculous our politics are. The world desperately needs enormous numbers of affordable electric vehicles. The Chinese have a glut of them. You’d think that’s problem…

Casey Briggs here doing what so many before have done. Talk about electoral dysfunction in the US. We can do a lot better at understanding this than trot out tired tropes about ‘polarisation’. /1 https://t.co/uSTXem8d68…

For 1-2 years, delusions like ‘hybrid immunity’ and ‘immunity debt’ survived because enough people seemed to be getting on with normal life to make them plausible fantasies. But now the evidence that these are fantasies is right there in…

This is a catastrophic lack of understanding, with implications extending well beyond the pandemic. Groups of people and societies do not think or act. I Tweet about that regularly. They are *led* to feel or act in certain ways. /1…

Laughable. What destroys trust in government is deliberate activism, by tiny minorities, usually now on platforms like this. This sort of 'inquiry' now mainstreams that activism. /1 https://t.co/ivqBoFbYg3 https://t.co/ESyNtCk9jX Activists…

In the toxic slogan 'lives and livelihoods', the 'and' is a corker, innit? You can be alive, OR have a job. That's the economy in action.

So we can bankrupt huge sections of the community to try to tame interest rates, but asking them to avoid crowds and wear a mask in crowded spaces to keep their blood vessels free of a pathogen is 'heavy-handed'. It's been another stupid…

The whole world waits on the edge of its seat for this week’s election, to see if Team Blue or Team Red will lead the great charge to do nothing meaningful against climate change and Covid. Elections create our greatest passion. The…

This is just for power supply. On my way into work today I thought about climate change and Covid. Both greater emergencies than any war. Why are societies not on a war footing? 'The economy' is why. Really just the status quo, in economic…

Nobody who believes societies are economies has the first clue why we get things like ‘cost of living’ crises. The same problems recur in our supposed economies, with the same ideas useless to prevent them. Can status explain it? You bet.…

There is no we, to be fucked. Economies have no we. Until we recognise that ‘the economy’ is the trick used to remove ‘we’ from societies, there is no pathway out. https://t.co/OM2r7wxlQH

All the things the economy is supposed to do, the pandemic actually did. Redistributed wealth more fairly, away from those dominating the status quo. Only catastrophes change societies. 1/2 https://t.co/2Hjf2JxvS0 We’re living with a…

This latest election has reinforced even more strongly for me that societies cannot be saved from election bubbles. 100% of the emotion and analysis has been either elation or despair at the relative success of the two teams, Red and Blue.…

Populism means some manage to capitalise on underlying declines in material living standards, and get brief victories. But underneath the electoral bullshit, the material reality always prevails. https://t.co/f6NqeXFV5l

#Insiders notes it was a ‘change election’ (because people are struggling, then moves on to all the (very common) meaningless babble about why people voted the way they did. We’re on track to completely misunderstand yet another election.…

One of the things to understand about China is that it plays ‘the long game’. In the West we’re hopelessly glued to meaningless short electoral cycles, which have degenerated into perpetual populist posturing aimed always at the next…

There is only one manufacturing superpower in the world. China. It manufactures more than the next 9 countries in the rankings, combined. But let me suggest how this means *way* more than you might first think. /1 https://t.co/16eaD1wFnj…

There is no ‘we’ in an economy. That’s the point, to pulverise collective action into billions of little ‘free’ people buying novelty rubber ducks, in markets. https://t.co/jfP46LHW8G

We love advocacy, ‘awareness’, ‘education’, as if the problem is other people being stupid. Advocacy is like a crusade, where you get to put together a team, and fight other teams for supremacy. And yet, the actual solution will always be…

The easiest way to bring the US budget back into balance would be to stop giving most of it away to people who don't need it, in tax cuts. https://t.co/NHQQ0bZcmf

If you use a social instead of a political or economic lens for society, you’ll see the same patterns repeating throughout history. Take a classic Agatha Christie story. So often the lynchpin of these was the social mechanism of families…

Robert Hughes’ Culture of Complaint summarises something important, even in its title. Who doesn’t feel that culture, every day? Public life is now eternal complaint. Every issue pulverised into a granularity of grievance. But you need to…

John Howard pissed away nation-building mining revenue as tax cuts and election bribes to boomers, like tax-free super. Now we’re staring down the barrel of ignoring our chance to be the Saudi Arabia of the next century, with our…

Again, all societies should be on a war footing. Everything we're doing should be repurposed to fight this threat. An extinction-level threat. 'The economy' won't allow it. Which tells you everything you need to know about what it is and…

‘Supply’ solutions suggested by politics to the housing crisis are the status quo reinforcing itself. Politics, particularly politics of the economy, is just team sports to reinforce this status quo. Only catastrophe, which is unfolding,…

I’m already seeing the building passion and excitement for the upcoming Oz federal election. We don’t see that this is like the Super Bowl for the team sports of our entire lives. Every issue is a mini-election now, with battling teams…

Here’s a fun status game from the UK. Uproar over the Labour Party there now modifying the tax-free inheritance on farms, introduced to help sustain the industry. ‘Tax-free’ attracted the wealthy like flies are attracted to a pile of shit.…

So, which of us is wiling to give up flying for recreational purposes? Easily the biggest destroyer of public health measures too, as well as climate action. Our desires. Not ‘capitalism’ or any of that other scapegoating nonsense.…

Status runs societies. Not politics, or economics, or any -ism. Status. The greatest violation to status is humiliation. Obama's mocking of Trump is said to have been key to Trump running . Germany's humiliation after WW1 led directly to…

Status runs societies, and historically that status was concentrated in families protecting their ‘line’. We still have dynasties (Murdochs, anyone?), but something in history profoundly weakened them. It’s not what you expect, I will bet.…

Disturb a system and you reveal its underlying functioning. Societies run on status. Seen in earlier times when the growing wealth of middle classes led to legislated rules around who was allowed to wear and do what. Sumptuary laws.…

Middle-aged wealthy men are often a key demographic resisting the shift to EVs. They say they lack character, or soul. They also often marry women half their age. No so fussed about character there. In reality it’s the same refusal to grow…

In feudal times a small number of families (the nobles or aristocracy) hoarded most of a society's wealth, in alliance with a King or Queen. Like I say, 'the economy' is really a social deception to reinstate feudalism, history's default…

And the people doing this to us are the most popular in elections. Inequality is a hierarchy of status. People don't want to be rid of inequality, they want to be higher up that same hierarchy. https://t.co/3pzGMiFr7z

The ‘Top 1%’, the narrative goes, oppress the other 99%, hoarding everything for themselves. In reality it’s about status, not wealth. The 99% *want* to be the top 1%. This social model repeats throughout history. Feudalism then,…

Murdered his mother to feed a status-driven social media lifestyle. These are the stories that define our culture today, rather than the pap about ‘the economy’. https://t.co/i7dUwqaMDj

Storr is absolutely right that all of society is status games. What I call team sports. There’s no escaping that, but there is shaping those sports so that they focus on more productive things. ‘Games of success’ include modern science and…

Our ‘freedumb’ times. The cultures that have the loosest social restrictions on the planet? Former communist and Eastern European countries. The countries we would see as ‘authoritarian’, have the lowest amount of social restrictions in…

How is everybody going with ‘the people’ running societies? Our own ideas about democracy are what destroys it. What those with highest status did was use this whole idea of ‘the people’ to absolutely dominate everybody. /1 They know that…

Heh, China doesn’t need to force anything. Any attempt to build something in the West now is called ‘picking winners’ by the idiot market philosophy we live by. Which means we build nothing useful at all. https://t.co/TZ2qspHKln

China ‘picking winners’, while we let ‘the market’ (i.e. the status quo) run things. The market is just a code word for leaving the status quo to do whatever it likes. https://t.co/54Y0bcUxV2

Why do bad people keep winning our political games? Because they understand people better. They know what drives all people is status. Have a look around the culture you’re living in. Whether it’s homes, cooking, watches, cars - the…

“The Coalition's plan for nuclear power is a big idea, of which we don't see that many in our current politics.” It really, laughably isn’t. It’s a political strategy with zero engineering or economic reality. Transition to renewables is…

With what is it, almost $800 billion in proposed nuclear subs and nuclear power stations, you’d have to say the Australian budget has been ‘nuked’. By the advocates of small government.

One of the critical things to understand about how we live is that our existing status hierarchies are absolutely dependent on the centralised ownership of energy. We need to shift our own framings of these debates away from the ALP/LNP…

Expanding upon @doctorow’s concept of enshittification, the corporate targeting of switching costs to trap customers and then progressively empty their bank accounts. Reading that process socially and even more important *materially* gives…

Existing homeowners can’t afford plummeting house prices. So we’ll build a glut of new ‘supply’, and those new homes will therefore be cheaper. Except the housing ‘market’ means that will cause the prices of all houses to plummet. 1/2…

NZ’s reigning RWNJs had their way, and gutted public spending. ‘The economy’ tanked. Showing yet again that all the talk about ‘the economy’ in the West disguises that only the State really drives economic activity. https://t.co/Ug8dUfLRvP

My social media feeds are flooded with friends, family and others celebrating Christmas, these platforms have become the venue to transact every aspect of our lives now. Let’s think about that bait and switch. Through the lens again of…

The most brilliant windows into our lives as humans are in the most mundane and banal stories. Like this one. I often post about how, contrary to popular opinion, our sociality and connection is actually the root of most violence. Let’s…

Please have a read of Turchin’s summary article here. It will save you wallowing in all of our modern economic and political framings of societies, that explain nothing. https://t.co/VonSYwz15j

The 20th century was a century of revolutions. Russia, China. And we had one too, the 1960s ‘counter-cultural’ revolution. Like Burke I think all revolutions are disasters for societies. They can be the catastrophes I often say bring the…

Teenagers didn’t exist before the mid-20th century. Child life and adult life wasn’t differentiated in that way. This was THE critical shift in our culture to use as a lens to view our lives today, not the idiot economic and political…

Bruno Latour once suggested ( think rightly) that we aim for an ‘object-oriented democracy’. What does this mean? Read on. His magisterial essay at the link below too. /1 https://t.co/F042joQa4O When we think about humans acting together,…

For 5 years now many of us have come here to express anger and disbelief that basic things like controlling the spread of a pandemic aren’t being done. A few years ago I realised doing that is part of the problem. Mistaking these platforms…

Social media is not just where people share information. It’s a replacement for society itself, and intended to be. The decoupling of societies from their foundations. Now, a literal de-coupling! This fascinating data will get a range of…

Human life is a battle for status. Status is also identity, without it, you’re nobody. We join groups (teams) to fight these battles, emulating high-status individuals. Team members imitate one another, ‘peer pressure’, to have membership…

I use Will’s book here so much because he captures so much of the work on status, so beautifully. It’s rank or status that drives humans. Not power, not wealth. It’s how rich you are compared to *others*, or how powerful compared to…

Copying each other is the most fundamental human act. We imitate because that gives us status, in a given group. It makes us recognisable, to the group. That in turn gives us an identity, we ‘belong’. Groups clash, their statuses collide.…

While simpletons use their Left/Right electoral goggles to understand what’s happening, Gil’s ‘Nerd Reich’ begins to implement exactly what they openly promised to do. And there’s even more to see here. /1 https://t.co/r4xdkH6DQW…

“This is China’s moment.” It really is. What nation would consider the US a more stable or useful ally than China now? Which ‘economy’ hasn’t already been almost entirely reliant upon China for decades already? https://t.co/CcywVyq5L7

Arguing with friends on permanent European tours, with their tax-free multi-million dollar super payouts, that the world is in a bad place. They’re not seeing it. Status and privilege never do see status and privilege.

We all know fashions change. Crocs are in again, for example. Do we think about what that means though, about humans? Just one more sneaky way status rules our lives. /1 https://t.co/aKjR1X8WQn Because it surely shows that what we like,…

Silicon Valley is dominating world politics. The Nerd Reich. It’s important to look at why that is, socially and culturally. Forget the technologies. Silicon Valley is the American Dream. Of get-rich-quick, the dramatic escalation of…

Indebted to @DavidJoffe64 for this share. While we flail and wail with hysterical concepts like fascism, and the tired old Left and Right rubbish, the specific thing going on gets missed. And here it is. ‘Competitive authoritarianism’.…

Looks like DOGE found the GOP tax cuts. https://t.co/W3py6NvnfN

Given that most countries’ beloved economies were almost totally reliant upon China for the past few decades anyway, the only superpower not infected by libertarian fantasies, maybe it’s time to have geopolitical alliances reflect this…

It’s about status, not money. The working class are wannabe billionaires. It’s why the American Dream gets them to vote for billionaires. https://t.co/HZJqAjioSb

Social media is not part of society. It is society. We now transact the entire continuum of our lives, from the most intimate and personal through to the economic and political, inside it. It’s owned by US and Chinese billionaires. From…

I see ‘enshittification’ as the inevitable creation of status hierarchies. Status is the currency of all human life. There’s a very anti-trust thrust to Cory’s proposed solutions, which make status hierarchies in themselves the problem. I…

It’s feudalism, not fascism. My theme for several years now (just saying). It absolutely matters that we diagnose things correctly. These are fundamentally different things. Also this piece’s solutions to me are nonsense. /1…

How we think, how we act, even how we feel, is overwhelmingly defined socially. By our membership of groups, in battle with other groups, for status. The Welcome Stranger nugget, as a beautiful example. The world’s largest ever alluvial…

The almost universal worshipping of small business reveals how far we’re infected by the terrible American disease of iconoclastic hatred of anything institutional. All sides of politics worship small business. It’s a terrible mistake. /1…

I’m reminded of DH Lawrence’s Letter from Germany, written between the world wars, when observing public life today. The shift to righteousness, to proliferating and pulverising team sports. Even those who previously seemed moderate now…

The only real currency of societies is status. You can slice and dice the economics or any other framing, it always reduces to status. What appears a victory against one status hierarchy is really the formation of another, with a different…

I’ve been called too ‘dark’ or cynical, in saying that very little humans deliberatively do changes our overall fate. That only catastrophes really change societies. But I live a very happy life, believing that. Because it grounds me, I…

Because that’s how status hierarchies work. Low-status people who have their wealth vacuumed up by high-status people don’t want to redistribute wealth. They want to be the high status people. They ‘aspire’ to and emulate them. They buy…

The narratives around mis- and disinformation are a fundamental misunderstanding of how societies work. They never run on information. They run on status. Or put more simply, the overriding reason people do what they do, is because…

The curious bed-sharing between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, showing how vacuously empty all team sports rivalry is. Rational-choice theory is the foundation of both market-driven capitalism, and State-driven democracy. Left *and* Right. /1…

Adoption of EVs is just one more example of how status runs societies. First adopters (of anything) are nearly always high status, wealthy people. They can afford new things, but buying them also gives status. Then everybody else emulates…

The transformation of societies into giant high schools is most visible in the young and the old. Both age groups bear the brunt of Covid. One left to die, the other repeatedly infected in a fool’s game of attempted population immunity. It…

Status runs societies. Not politics, not economics. Status. It seems that paradigm shift is starting to happen. https://t.co/C4J3mcRohc https://t.co/aw1qVDT1pf

Rewiring Australia was always spot on about the way forward with energy. But this is also a useful way to debunk the beliefs around activism. That last sentence, in green highlight. And ‘how communities are making it an electrification…

That feeling of the world going absolutely batshit crazy is us reaching a specific tipping point. The tipping point where reality itself is defined by the fads and fashions of social life. Where what’s real becomes what trends. /1…

“Man is not only ruled by evil passions; but his rational capacity is severely limited as well. Without the warm cloak of custom, tradition, experience, history, religion, and social hierarchy—all of which radical man would rip off—man is…

Nichols Gruen’s chat with ChatGPT brings up many of the themes I raise here. For example, the Magna Carta, the underlying framework for modern democracies, never had a thing to do with ‘the people’. It was a truce between Kings and barons.…

The building industry is falling off a cliff. All that will save it is building public housing, for government, to create affordable homes for ordinary people. Marketisation destroyed housing, energy, health and education. The market is a…

The idea that democracy is ‘the people’ running nations is like self-organisation theory. That we’ll together spontaneously decide upon the optimum thing to do. It’s also the basis of market-based econo-politics. Democracy and markets,…

The macro lens shows everything going so well. We had an election where the winning party’s policies at least resemble the desperate physical, real needs of the community. But if you put the long lens on, we’re still fucked. /1…

When imitation becomes rampant, like in the art market and now society as a whole through social media, it generates a powerful desire for 'authenticity'. Grok did a summary for me. However, this isn't quite what it seems. 1/5…

The same billionaires who are destroying democracy also own these platforms. This is where their algorithms harvest and enhance the collective anger at the destruction of civil society, to generate even more influence and wealth. Coming…

Societies where reality TV stars battle rock stars and film stars for supremacy are not capitalist, fascist, socialist or any variety of -ism. They’re giant high schools. Cultures stuck in permanent adolescence. Not an analogy, this IS our…

Only institutions can act for our collective long-term good. Everything else will always be status games. Institutions emerge from crisis, they’re the response to a crisis. They invent and embed procedures that act well beyond the lifetime…

The most serious commentators in Australia still talk about the government being able to ‘afford’ to do things, using its ‘budget’. Equating societies with household finances was always politics, to decimate public spending.…

I think the real shift with superannuation is towards ordinary people owning a much more substantial portion of collective wealth. Collectively, individually many still have little super, but it is a wider shift in the allocation of…

We happily control inflation but we now don’t control disease. That’s not ‘capitalism’ at work, that just means public health as an institution fell before financial institutions fall. The Trumps of the world target all institutions.…

‘So what can we do? is the common question when I suggest humans can’t escape status games. It’s all about that ‘we’. There is no we, in status games. ‘We’ emerges in very specific conditions only. /1 When human groups are under threat.…

The obsession with ‘the people’ in politics took off in the counterculture revolution in the mid-20th century. There it is, ‘Power to the People’. At the same time this movement went to war with the ‘establishment’ i.e. institutions.…

I think we need to completely reframe how we think about regulation and laws. They’re our greatest source of freedom, but of course today’s politics wants you to think the opposite. That they oppress you. Let’s unpack that bullshit. /1…

It’s amazing that ‘debt and deficit’ politics, weaponised junk economics, has completely captured the public policy space. Many even believe it, that governments need to find money to buy things. Central banks have been ignoring that…

The genius of Australia is invisible to all of the political categories developed mostly in Europe and applied globally. All of the -isms: capitalism, socialism, liberalism, communism etc. Australia is none of those things. And that’s why…

‘Inequality’ is the norm in all societies because status runs societies. Inequality is a marker of status. The King eats pheasant while the poor eat mouldy cabbage. The poor don’t want to be rid of inequality. They want to be at the other…

I don’t know a single politician or commentating economist or journalist who understands this. Debt and deficit politics is conservative strategy, not economics. https://t.co/KKvdunVTPp

Robert Putnam’s ‘The Upswing’ traces the cycling between “I” and “We” in American life over the past century. You can see here how the 4 great catastrophic disruptions of the first half of the 20th century drove the emergence of a…

I don’t think debate is really a worthwhile thing to be engaged with. Our fantasies about what democracy and free speech mean lead us to believe debating is some sort of winnowing process, to produce optimal outcomes. I call bullshit. /1…

Cory is one of the most intelligent and entertaining people on the platform. This thread (thanks @miki_fern) is so important to show a contrast between the view of activist life Cory often shares, and the alternative set of ideas around…

If democracy is ‘the people’ running things, why is every part of human life still structured by status, like the class system we say we left behind? https://t.co/Jt73TxUY50

Trace every part of a culture backwards to its origins - what we like to do (travel, for example), eat, wear, say, how we build and decorate homes, etc. At its origin will be a high-status person or group, who millions of others then…

So often even the most committed to public health have told me they eventually gave up fighting Covid because they didn’t want to deny themselves or their families a proper life. Another window into kidult culture. The assumptions around…

Herd immunity. The Mayo Clinic setting out the basic scientific reasons this should never work, for Covid. And yet it’s the global strategy, copied from the Great Barrington Declaration, a free market economic think tank. Let’s check with…

Every single post on this platform imploring that ‘we’ need to act to fix something is 70 years too late. Looking to do “we” things in “I” cultural times is pissing into the wind. It won’t happen, until catastrophe re-forms another ‘we’…

Our culture *is* the counterculture of the 1950s and 60s. A culture that began as teens rebelling against the old, and is ending with adult life replaced by teen life, with its teen rebels now the fabulously wealthy elites. It’s not…

Culture is mostly invisible to those living it, it’s like water is to fish. I spend a lot of time talking about the countercultural revolution of our era, with friends. Because it’s our culture. And it’s largely invisible to us, I suspect.…

It feels good to have a baddie. Unfortunately capitalism isn’t real, nor are any of the other -isms. Socieities run on status alone, they’re never economies. They’re 100% social. And we all play the same status games. Because status =…

So many see the world as competing -isms. Capitalism takes on socialism and communism, with authoritarianism now the flavour of the month too. The underlying belief here is that societies are like computers, with an operating system. But…

We don’t really understand that as social animals, everything is social. Our deepest, most intimate likes or tastes too. Take interior design. For many years now minimalist greys and whites have dominated in homes. Why is that? Why do we…

Have you noticed that the term that describes the existing state of society is about status? Status runs all societies. Not politics, not economics, not power or anything else. Status. https://t.co/CBpDObeIfL

The reverse proof that all human life is driven by status games, is to look at what happens when all status is stripped away. That experience is humiliation. The most toxic and destructive of all human experiences, far surpassing sadness,…

If the US would stop seeing this sort of inequality as an assault on democracy and instead saw it for what it is - its own people reproducing the status hierarchies it pretends it doesn’t like - it might get somewhere.…

Those sceptical that Western life is really highly school culture should maybe consider this. From an age when humans can only just walk and talk, they go to school. They remain there until they reach adulthood. Throughout their entire…

All social progress that we attribute to various kinds of activism are really opportunistic changes capitalising on some form of serious damage to the status quo. Once that damage is repaired, the gains will all be reversed.…

Australia’s main energy companies are buying up big with grid batteries. Unsurprisingly the much lower cost of generating the renewable energy to fill them isn’t being passed on to consumers. You can’t ‘market’ your way to a revolution in…

If you replace all of the hierarchies of expertise and experience in a society with a social media blancmange of self-appointed experts on everything, you’re fucked. Not capitalism or any of the -isms at work. It’s anti-establishment…

There were 3 revolutions in the 20th century, in all 3 major powers. Russia, China, the Anglosphere. We only notice the disasters of the Chinese and Russian revolutions. We ignore our own, thinking we’re somehow culture-free. All were in…

I often Tweet about the 1970s being a pivotal time in the reversing of the public gains of the we-based society, post-WW2. The period 1950-late-1970s, when ‘the public’ was the dominating principle of governance. Rebuilding broken…

Political strategists call it ‘framing’. Many of our most pressing problems are trapped inside framings invented by people who don’t want them solved. ‘The Economy’ is the greatest frame of all. The idea it even exists.…

I think it was McCartney who recently called out the nonsense of the lyric and vibe of this sort of song. It’s a window into the massive social/cultural shift that became our culture. The counterculture. When high school took over the…

The more we socialise human life, the more unequal the outcomes will become. This contrasts with our common assumptions about sociality, that it’s a type of leveller. An experiment in the early 2000s demonstrated this in a novel way.…

On #Insiders we continue the idiot gymnastics of being utterly dependent on China for our economic existence, while at the same time doing performative outrage at having anything to do with China at all.

Anybody dealing with the public is experiencing this more every day now. A continuous assault. The article traces the surge in this sort of behaviour to lockdowns. But why would lockdowns do this to people? I think it’s not hard to figure…

‘Democracy’ is really code for Anglo culture. It’s a social way of life - a culture - developed in the main Anglo countries, shown here in dark blue. And it’s in decline even in these Anglo countries, and globally. It’s not even a century…

We in the West are end-of-empire people. That social-cultural fact barely rates a mention in analysis. End of empire cultures are so habituated to things in life just working out for them, that they can’t adjust. Food just arrives every…

I sometimes get accused of being anti-democracy. But my position is that there are no ‘systems’ of government in the first place. Societies are not systems. They’re humans, acting socially. Then labelling this behaviour in a variety of…

The more social life becomes the winning of pointless daily team sports status battles on social media, the more we stop seeing repeated historical patterns. America has arrived at its next Gilded Age. Veblen wrote one of the guidebooks.…

In Dewey and Lippmann’s famous discussions about the nature of a public and democracy, they agreed on one critical thing. That only problems bring a public into being. As I say, only catastrophe creates the ‘we’ that is the public. 1/3…

In most democracies, inequality is now rampant. By not recognising the central role of status in societies, with idealistic nonsense about ‘the people’ running everything, we’ve given status uncontrolled leeway to do what it likes.…

‘The vulnerable’ is a political strategy imported from free market zealots. The idea we should all take ‘personal responsibility’ for everything, even the most basic public services, with a few crumbs (that never arrive) allocated to the…

The passion for ‘accountability’ is also the greatest weapon used by modern free market zealots to bury public administration in eternal processing. The idea lots of FOI increases ‘trust’ in public institutions is bizarre. FOI is the…

Nobel Peace Prize: Don’t Care Wars: Don’t Care Left, Right, democracy, autocracy: Don’t Care Culture and identity wars: Don’t Care Travel: Don’t Care Economies: Don’t Care Collapse of civilisation and ecosystems, by burning millions of…

We know the Great Barrington Declaration was sponsored by the American Institute of Economic Research (AIER), a libertarian free market think tank. Also a climate change denial group. The declaration didn’t even pretend to do the things it…

A revolution introduced fossil fuels into societies. We think the ‘market’ will drive them out. The true nature of the market as a defensive shield of bullshit to protect the status quo becomes more visible every day. It’s even worse than…

Democracy was never about ‘the people’. Ever. It always was feudalism with checks and balances installed to limit the power of the King. We then began calling those checks and balances ‘democracy’. This is basic history, have a look. /1…

In cultures that last, the experience of age is plugged back into society, guiding it. In kidult cultures, the aged live a permanent adolescent gap year, using the wealth we concentrate in that age group, away from those raising families…

The idea of a free market in economics is *exactly* the same as the idea of democracy as the sum of the views of millions of individuals. In both cases the fiction is used to allow uncontrolled status-driven empires to be built. Oligarchs,…

John Anderson, on public health. “One aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns was the emergence of a sense that essential freedoms were somehow gifts to be bestowed by government, rather than rights inherent to the people.” /1…

The thing about public health targeting clean air is, we were already doing it. This was a major victory in many countries, including Oz, only 20 years ago. Covid should have been the spur to target respiratory disease too. What happened…

Parliaments/legislatures began as bodies Kings were forced to consult when imposing taxes. They were part of a ceasefire between a King and his court. They were never about ‘the people’. And now they aren’t again. Democracy itself never…

It was only the catastrophes of the first half of the 20th century which gave ordinary people access to housing for the first time. Prior to that, housing and land were the exclusive prerogative of the rich and powerful. /1…

I give up trying to find people who can step out of the daily team sports of populism. Aristotle said the middle class is the key to a stable democracy. It runs democracies. Without it you get a tyranny of the rich or poor.…

Populism is described as a political strategy of appealing to ordinary people against elites. My definition of populism is any governance system that uses popularity as its main currency. That includes Western electoral democracies.…

Paul O’Neill was Secretary of the Treasury under George W. Bush. But it was what he did at Alcoa that was revolutionary, and offers us a way to run our societies that would be far superior to electoral democracy. Put public health at the…

Put public health at the centre of everything we do. It will fix everything else at the same time. No problems (political, economic, social etc.) exist in isolation, they all connect, led by ‘keystone’ problems as the hub. Public health is…

This is the turnaround the LNP now hope they can engineer with climate politics too. Economics and engineering knows anti-renewables is an idiot fantasy. But this is populism, they only need to win votes. Likely they’ll let renewables win,…

The disgusting term ‘lockdowns’ disguises that emergency Covid action actually lifted huge numbers of people out of poverty. What was ‘locked down’ wasn’t people. It was a status hierarchy that screws people. It freed them. 1/2…

I call it the ‘sub quotient’. Look at any social need, and see how much of it would disappear with the sums allocated to these subs. We need to defend ourselves from the only country that keeps our economy afloat. Also the world leader in…

The budget has become the great worship day of nations who believe they’re ‘economies’. Not realising that was a political strategy, to undermine government and social life. For a nation with a sovereign currency, a budget is almost…

Compare and contrast Sir Humprey here with the revolutionary ‘the people’ narratives coming out of the US and elsewhere. Is Sir Humphrey anti-democratic? Absolutely no. We need to understand the fundamental difference between…

A few years ago I shifted my Twitter contributions away from chronicling the problems societies face, from vomiting ignored facts into the void. Towards what seemed a more useful task, of understanding why nothing is done to fix the…

Day after day I watch brilliant people posting brilliant things into the complete void that public life now is. Desperately hoping they can get something to trend for even 10 minutes. None of that will lead to any meaningful, lasting…

Government activity as a proportion of GDP exploded in the 20th century, due to the rebuilding of societies, after two world wars, a pandemic and economic depression. From about 10% at the beginning of the century, to up to 50% by 1975,…

Not taxing enormous, cashed-up elderly populations is one of the main causes of inflation. They're spending with relish. The boomer juggernaut is still making its way through the social python. Its anti-establishment cred was always fake.…

Treasury finally has Jim house-trained. First with his ridiculous EV tax, and now on energy bill relief. Call the bill relief ‘grandfathering’ and it’s exactly the process used for many other major transitions. https://t.co/60tdfb6lIt

I think one of the most striking things to observe when here or when looking at public debates anywhere, is the hubris of control. The idea that humans determine their own fate. Societies are like ecosystems in evolution. Evolution tends…

Those in US society who are ‘decamillionaires’ (>$10 million net worth) have expanded TENFOLD in the past half century. This isn’t about inequality. This is the group from which political aspirants tend to be drawn. The number of seats…

I still believe Turchin’s overproduction of elites is a far better framework to understand Trump through. Look at the history of the Trump regime. Firstly the big increase in candidates for Presidency itself. The US is now overflowing with…

Civil rights-era reforms are often evoked as evidence of people-led change in societies. In reality they came at a time when 2 world wars, a pandemic and economic depression had immiserated elites. Status-based rule has been waiting to…

European fascism in the 20th century was populations living in the economic ruins of a world war, coupled to a feeling of total humiliation generated by the truce. Are those preconditions in the US today? Or is it the B-grade Western that…

That ‘hell of social comparison’ is the imitative rivalry Girard wrote about, the eternal battle for status. Societies that don’t find a way to suppress status rivalry don’t survive. It’s not politics, or economics. It’s social. It’s…

There is no ‘we’ in societies that call themselves economies. A ‘we’ would be anti-competitive behaviour. Economies don’t exist, they’re a social invention to bypass the State, and replace it with status hierarchies grounded in business.…

The ‘we’ many of us grew up with, where continuous calculation of collective good was centre to our governance, was not an initiative of any leadership. It was the repair of societies pulverised by war, plague and economic collapse. Only…

Pretty much all analysis of inflation talks about supply and demand. Like societies are ‘economies’, a type of machine, where you need to adjust the settings. The economics that says the machine is a complex system isn’t really shifting…

@doctorow’s concept of enshittification has achieved deserved success. But it’s also limited by an implicit framing, shared by all sides of today’s fake Left/Right team sports. That ‘the people’ is a thing, and must always be sovereign. So…

This is where Turchin’s work is so important. The two factors that lead to social revolution/collapse? Operation of the ‘wealth pump’ (elites vacuuming money from ordinary people). And a proliferation of rivals amongst the elite, who all…

What we call democracy ran from about 1945, until the late 1970s. When two world wars, a pandemic and economic collapse pulverised our existing status quo. ‘The people’ didn’t come to power. Institutions tasked with repairing broken…

The reality with inequality is that at no time in history has an established status quo voluntarily relinquished its advantages. Changes to the status quo are always forced, by internal and/or external catastrophe or existential threat.…

Most of modern economics is a political assault upon the State as a functioning entity, not science. Both the ‘Left’ with its ideas about ‘the people’ leading and the ‘Right’ with its free markets share the same conceptual framework. A…

Have made this point many times. The ‘free market’ is a fiction, it’s created by government/the State. It’s the same fiction as ‘the people’ running democracies. https://t.co/E51biH9bJs

That cute thing the billionaire class do, where they pretend they don’t understand that they pay most of the tax because they’ve vacuumed up most of a nation’s income. https://t.co/vqdurMOWuk

The only historical ways inequality has been reduced is either the catastrophic destruction of the existing status quo, for example by war. Or by governments investing directly in those who are less well-off. Or both. Everything else is…

I haven’t ‘cancelled’ ChatGPT in my life, just as I haven’t cancelled Tesla. Like millions I’ve even owned a Volkswagen, even though the Nazis founded the company. Activism is a remnant, in many ways toxic cultural form often found in…

Global capitalism was never really a thing. It’s an artefact of 19th century social theory. In reality ‘capitalism’ was a strategic fiction, to undermine the State, which obstructed uncontrolled status rivalries. The idea of individuals…

Uh oh. Large numbers of Australians could be lifted out of poverty again. For the second time in their lives. https://t.co/yUeT37h0rT

I don’t care about Thiel, but ‘liberal democracy’ never began. It’s a trick of the light caused by the catastrophic destruction of status hierarchies by two world wars, an economic depression and a pandemic, in the 20th century…

The proposed EV road user tax is one more example of public policy becoming the implementation of social media attack memes. https://t.co/ykjxuvMGYY

Those who advocate for a muscular free speech as the basis for democracy like you to think it means a society being open to new things, a sort of free market of ideas constantly in competition. But argument does the opposite. It creates…

Little progress is ever made against inequality because it’s misconceived. The financial outcomes of inequality are a second-order phenomenon, the wealth pumps (Turchin) that vacuum wealth into that tiny elite’s accounts operate with the…

The great contribution of MMT-type ideas is to openly question the assumption from both sides of politics that tax ‘funds’ government work. Once you remove that link, you can start to have sensible discussions about taxation. That link is…

The upcoming EV tax in Australia is sold under the usual narrative that fuel excise funds roads, and EV’s are therefore free-loading. The link between fuel excise and road funding (hypothecation) was formally severed almost 35 years ago,…

It goes further. The idea nations can choose between a more government driven and a ‘market’ approach is a fantasy. Everything we call the market is the highly regulated outcome of centralised coordination and planning. All societies are…

It would surely take almost zero political courage to dump the biggest albatross in the entire Australian budget. AUKUS. https://t.co/8wpzmBlPfA

Another fake binary (free markets vs the State) exported into the real world as if they were real things. Societies are made up of networked hierarchies of humans. Hierarchies of status. A ‘free market’ is just one status hierarchy being…

This is Turchin’s ‘wealth pump’. When higher status people and groups hoard vast amounts of a society’s wealth, sitting on it like a dragon on top of its gold. Societies collapse when rivals within the status elites fight each other,…

This is the root of all human thought and behaviour. Belonging in social groups, in competition with other social groups. Members bound together by imitative rivalry. We will never understand a thing by assuming humans act like a free…

Everywhere a ‘market’ mechanism is introduced, you get the same outcome. What was previously a simple service provision, for basic social services, is transformed into a status mechanism. That’s because markets don’t exist. It’s a fiction…

Modern democracy has been in steady decline since its introduction. This from The Economist’s 2024 state of democracy report. Not because it’s being undermined, but because our ideas about it are a fantasy. All societies are…

This has never had widespread popular support. The poor want to be the rich, not to tax them. Societies run on status. You have to target status, not the secondary expressions of it. https://t.co/lsa3Ve1SDq

Amazing that even in 2026 people can believe that wealth is in some direct proportion to work and talent, rather than status. Much if not most of it is inherited. Also, why the envy counter narrative works, because the poor dislike the…

Because the institutionally-driven levelling of Australian society post both world wars, arising from repair after those conflicts, created a ‘we’. Starting in the 1970s, the ‘market’ alternative was targeted at this we, dismantling it.…

Millions think the rivalry between the free market and the State is a real thing. It’s a fantasy Punch and Judy show. There no markets without States, and no States without markets. All societies are 100% social. All are run by a single…

Yes. But the even bigger lie is that there is such thing as ‘the economy’. It’s a strategic, political con, to bypass government. Like some cyborg entity that operates independently of human societies and their social relations.…

Tipping points are being reached, but it’s at this stage governments need to press even harder, to accelerate the transition. There is no ‘market’ that can create fundamental change. Winning world wars wasn’t market-led.…

When America rejected monarchy, it became a plutocracy. Status will always drive societies, manifested in different ways, unless there’s catastrophic disruption to a status quo. You can see tax rates went up only when world war suppressed…

The redress on capital gains tax and negative gearing was long overdue. But it won’t give us affordable housing. Unaffordability is about status. You need to smash the status attached to land and dwellings. Only once in all of history did…

A brand is a team, in the imitative rivalry ‘team sports’ status games that define all human life. Societies don’t run on information. People choose brands for status and identity. There are no markets, just rival teams. All ‘market…

‘Living with the virus’ arose during Covid. It was a designed wrecking ball through all of public health, replacing alert and calm swift action with platitudes about remaining calm. It’s GBD free market strategy. Paint public health as…

Advocates for electoral democracy always assured us that compulsory voting would stop this shift in Australia. But Australia may be just one of the last legs of the Trumpian populism world tour. The Left-Centre-Right (LCR) hokey pokey is…

There is no ‘we’ now. Our mistake is not understanding that. Again. That ‘we’ disappeared from the late-1970s, with the invention of market-based societies. Societies became ‘economies’ (apparently - it’s a fiction). The ‘we’ was invented…

Stop looking at our lives politically and economically. They’re social. ‘Unaffordable’ housing is really us returning to land as a feudal arrangement. To go alongside our re-energising of the monarchic/regal model of governance (Trumpian…

I pay no attention to all the political categorisations of societies. All the Left/Right, capitalist/communist garbage. None of that is real. China or Asia more generally are the only adults left in the international room. The West is…

Labor was told to be brave, to go hard on big reforms like capital gains and negative gearing. Humans are not economic animals. They’re status animals. Labor now discovering ‘the poor’ don’t like being seen as poor. They like to be seen as…

The stupidity of the idea of a housing market. There's no way to create affordable housing without depressing the prices for existing owners. Only once in all human history has housing been widely available and affordable. Post-WW2, when…

It’s these two buttons that more than anything else are destroying Western democracies. The two functions that converted social networking, a healthy and powerful thing, into social media, a toxic, civilisation-ending collective suicide.…

We’re not living in ‘late-stage capitalism’. We’re living in a giant high school, full of kidults. Adolescents have always loved cars. In Australia, there are 4 times as many cars, as there are children. This pattern of ownership is…

Working class revolts aren’t led by the richest people in the country, opening a Trump franchise. https://t.co/PduDBtg16I

The great lie of the pandemic was that public health action was unpopular and damaged people and economies. Public health was invented to prevent that. And it did. The rush to ‘re-open’ was the status quo protecting its rapidly declining…

We’ve forgotten Charles Beard, prominent US historian. Beard saw that elites drive all societies. He said the Founders of the US were a cohesive elite of wealthy property owners, slaveholders, and federal bond investors. /1…