Unfreeze: How to create a high growth economy after the pandemic

With Darcy WE Allen, Sinclair Davidson, Aaron M Lane and Jason Potts. American Institute for Economic Research, 2020

During March and early April 2020, much of the world economy was deliberately shut-down and frozen to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Modern economies are complex systems that are not easily frozen and unfrozen. Governments now face the challenge of unfreezing their economies. The social and economic cost of the pandemic will be enormous and long-lasting. This book develops an analytic and policy framework—cryoeconomics—for understanding what needs to happen next and how to restore our standard of living. We spell out the policy settings necessary for the rapid adaptation and market re-coordination that is required to resuscitate the economy. We explain why a return to business as usual is simply not enough to get everyone working again. A period of high growth prosperity will be imperative to deal with the costs of the freeze. This book tackles the tough questions and fills some of the current void of ideas and thinking about economic recovery. We develop a framework and principles for an institutional re-build, presenting a path to recovery based on the ideas of private governance, permissionless innovation, and entrepreneurial dynamism.

Available at Amazon in print and Kindle and Amazon Australia in Kindle edition.

Cryoeconomics: how to unfreeze the economy

With Darcy Allen, Sinclair Davidson, Aaron Lane and Jason Potts. Originally a Medium post.

The Australian government, like many governments around the world, wants to freeze the economy while it tackles the coronavirus pandemic. This is what the Commonwealth’s JobKeeper payments and bailout packages are supposed to do: hold workers in place and keep employment relationships together until mandatory social distancing ends.

Easier said than done. We are in completely uncharted territory. We’ve never tried to freeze an economy before, let alone tried to thaw it out a few weeks or months later. That’s why our new project, cryoeconomics, looks at the economics of unfreezing an economy.

To understand why this will be so hard, think of an economy as a remarkably complex pattern of relationships. Those relationships are not only between employees and employers, but also between borrowers and lenders, between shareholders and companies, between landlords and tenants, between producers tied together on supply chains, and between brands and tastemakers and their fans.

The patterns that make up our economy weren’t designed from above. They evolved from the distributed decisions of consumers and producers, and are shaped by the complex interaction between the supply of goods and services and their demand.

The problem is that the patterns the government plans to freeze are not the patterns we will need when they finally let us thaw.

When the government decides to pull the economy out of hibernation, the world will look very different. As a simple example, it’s quite possible that many Australians, forced to stay home rather than eat out, discover they love to cook. This will influence the demand for restaurants at the end of the crisis. On the other hand, our pent-up desire for active social lives might get us out into the hospitality sector with some enthusiasm. There will be drastic changes because of global supply chain disruptions and government policies. These changes will be exacerbated by the fact that not all countries will be unfrozen at the same time.

The upshot is that the economy which the government is trying to hibernate is an economy designed for the needs and preferences of a society that has not suffered through a destructive pandemic.

Unfreezing the economy is going to be extremely disruptive. New patterns will have to be discovered. As soon as the JobKeeper payments end, many of the jobs that they have frozen in place will disappear. And despite the government’s efforts, many economic relationships will have been destroyed.

Yet there will also be new economic opportunities — new demands from consumers, and new expectations. Digital services and home delivery will no doubt be more popular than they were before.

These disruptions will be unpredictable — particularly if, as we expect, the return to work is gradual and staggered (perhaps according to health and age considerations or access to testing).

As we unfreeze, the problem facing the economy won’t primarily be how to stimulate an amorphous ‘demand’ (as many economists argue government should respond to a normal economic recession) but how to rapidly discover new economic patterns.

It is here that over-regulation is a major problem. So much of the laws and regulations imposed by the government assume the existence of particular economic patterns — particular ways of doing things. Those regulations can inhibit our ability to adjust to new circumstances.

In the global response to the crisis there has already been a lot of covert deregulations. The most obvious are around medical devices and testing. A number of regulatory agencies have stood down some rules temporarily to allow companies to respond to the crisis more flexibly. The Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority is now willing to let banks hold less capital. The Australian Securities and Investment Commission has dropped some of its most intrusive corporate surveillance programs.

The deregulatory responses we’ve seen so far relate to how we can freeze the economy. A flexible regulatory environment is even more critical as we unfreeze. Anything that prevents businesses from adapting and rehiring staff according to the needs of the new economic pattern will keep us poorer, longer.

Today the government is focused on fighting the public health crisis. But having now turned a health crisis into an economic crisis, it must quickly put in place an adaptive regulatory environment to enable people and businesses to discover what a post-freeze economy looks like.

Christian Porter’s defamation reform would be a catastrophic mistake

With Aaron M Lane

Attorney-General Christian Porter wants social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to be legally liable for defamatory comments made by their users.

Right now, the common law can distinguish between the legal liability of active publishers of information (like newspapers and broadcasters) and the passive platform operators that allow users to publish information themselves. Courts decide where this distinction is drawn according the unique facts of each case.

But in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, the Attorney-General declared he wants to eliminate the distinction altogether: “Online platforms should be held to essentially the same standards as other publishers.”

The Attorney-General’s proposal is fundamentally confused. Removing the distinction between digital platforms and newspapers would have a devastating effect on both those platforms and our ability to communicate with each other.

The proposal is bad on its merits. But even besides that, the conservative government needs to understand how destructive it would be to the conservative movement online.

Let’s start with the legal principles. It makes sense that newspapers and broadcasters are liable for what they publish. They actively commission and produce the content that appears on their services. They read it, edit it, arrange and curate it. They pay for it. Newspapers and broadcasters have not only an editorial voice, but complete editorial control. Indeed, it is this close supervision of what they publish that gives them strength in the marketplace of ideas.

Social media platforms do nothing of the sort. Not only do they not commission the content that appears on our newsfeeds (let alone read, factcheck, or edit that content), they don’t typically confirm that their users are even real people – not, say, bots or foreign impersonators. They merely provide a platform for us to communicate with each other. Social media has facilitated a massive, global conversation. But it has no editorial voice.

In the United States a parallel debate is going on among Republicans about whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act – which explicitly prevents courts from treating ‘interactive computer services’ as publishers or speakers for the purpose of legal liability – should be abolished.

Section 230 has variously been described by scholars and commentators as “the 26 words that created the internet” or the “the internet’s first amendment”. The internet law professor Jeff Kosseff writes that eliminating this provision would “turn the internet into a closed, one-way street”. Attorney-General Porter’s proposal would have the same effect.

If social media platforms have to bear legal responsibility for what their users say, they will assume editorial responsibility for it. That means editing, deleting, and blocking all content that could be even the least bit legally questionable.

Newspapers and broadcasters sometimes take calculated risks with what they print, if they believe that the information they reveal is in the public interest. But why would a technological company – a company that lacks an editorial voice or the journalistic vision – be anything but hypercautious? Why wouldn’t it delete anything and everything with even the slightest risk?

And here is where the practical politics comes in. Even if the Attorney-General’s proposal was a good idea in principle, this policy would be particularly devastating for the conservative movement that supports his government. Indeed, it is hard to imagine a legislative proposal that would more effectively, and immediately, cut down the Australian conservative movement online.

After all, what side of politics benefits most from the political diversity and openness of the modern internet? What side of politics has relied most on the internet’s ability to bypass traditional media gateways? It is difficult to imagine the conservative political surge in recent years without social media – without Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all those podcast platforms.

If conservatives are concerned about social media networks “censoring” conservative content on their services now, well, making them liable for everything conservatives say would supercharge that.

And why would this policy stop at defamation laws? Why wouldn’t it also apply to liabilities around, say, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act? Or our sedition laws? We are looking at a future where technology companies in California (companies that many conservatives believe are stacked with culturally left employees) could be required to second-guess how the most left-wing judges in Australia might enforce this country’s draconian anti-speech restrictions.

The Coalition government should also reflect on how some of its most recent legislative programs have backfired on conservatives. The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, passed in 2018 in order to tackle Chinese interference in Australian politics, is now being used to target the organiser of the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Cooper, and even Tony Abbott.

The Attorney-General is right that defamation law needs reform. Australia’s defamation framework is heavy-handed and disproportionately favours private reputation over the public need to discuss significant issues. But removing the courts’ ability to determine liability for defamation – and instead deputising the world’s technology companies to enforce what they imagine it could be – would be a catastrophic mistake.

Cryptodemocracy: How Blockchain Can Radically Expand Democratic Choice

With Darcy WE Allen and Aaron M Lane. Lexington Books, 2019

This book investigates the theoretical and practical implications of blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies for democratic decision making. What new structures of democracy does blockchain technology enable? A cryptodemocracy is cryptographically-secured collective choice infrastructure on which individuals coordinate their voting property rights. Drawing on economic and political theory, a cryptodemocracy is a more fluid and emergent form of collective choice. This book examines these theoretical characteristics before exploring specific applications of a cryptodemocracy in labor bargaining and corporate governance. The analysis of the characteristics of a more emergent and contractual democratic process has implications for a wide range of collective choice.

Coming soon from Lexington Books

Cryptodemocracy and its institutional possibilities

With Darcy WE Allen, Aaron M Lane and Jason Potts. Review of Austrian Economics, 2018.

Abstract: Democracy is an economic problem of choice constrained by transaction costs and information costs. Society must choose between competing institutional frameworks for the conduct of voting and elections. These decisions over the structure of democracy are constrained by the technologies and institutions available. As a governance technology, blockchain reduces the costs of coordinating information and preferences between dispersed people. Blockchain could be applied to the voting and electoral process to form new institutional possibilities in a cryptodemocracy. This paper analyses the potential of a cryptodemocracy using institutional cryptoeconomics and the Institutional Possibility Frontier (IPF). The central claim is that blockchain lowers the social costs of disorder in the democratic process, mainly by incorporating information about preferences through new structures of democratic decision making. We examine one potential new form of democratic institution, quadratic voting, as an example of a new institutional possibility facilitated by blockchain technology.

Available at the Review of Austrian Economics. Earlier working paper available at SSRN.

Opening statement to Victorian Standing Committee on the Economy and Infrastructure Subcommittee inquiry into ride sourcing services

With Darcy Allen and Aaron Lane

Regulatory decisions surrounding the ridesharing industry are of critical importance to the Victorian economy, because they will set a precedent for the disruption and the potential disruption of the sharing economy more broadly.

The most general principle underpinning our submission today is the idea of permissionless innovation — that is, we believe, a quality regulatory system, one that deals well with disruptive technologies and business models and one that enables innovation by default. In contrast, a permissioned system is one where unnecessary red tape is applied that stifles the potential for entrepreneurs to bring benefits to consumers. Further, we must remain wary of erecting any regulatory barriers today that will prevent the emergence of new business models tomorrow.

It should be a guiding principle that any definitions and new regulations, if they are enacted, should be broad enough so that they do not exclude new organisational and technological forms which may later emerge in the future. A second issue permeating the debates on ride sourcing are the concerns over consumer safety and protection. These legitimate concerns are best examined by asking a deeper question: why do we regulate point-to-point transport in the first place?

The main rationale for regulation of point-to-point transport is to protect and maintain the safety of the public. Government intervention to achieve this goal is largely justified on the basis of asymmetric information — problems between drivers and passengers, where riders lack information about the characteristics of the drivers. Traditional solutions to this market failure are through government regulation. However, enabled by new technologies such as the smart phone and the GPS, these are changing necessary scope of government intervention. They are developing new ways to achieve the safety and consumer protection that Victorians desire and deserve.

Self-regulation of ridesharing has proved remarkably efficient and remarkably effective. For instance, the growth of the reputational mechanisms where drivers and riders rate each other, just as an example, the use of cashless payment systems through ridesharing platforms and the removal of anonymity issues. The implication of this technological progress is that governments must reassess the extent to which imposing state-based regulation is necessary.

A further contentious issue for this committee is the matter of industry transition and the question of compensation. Licences are licences to drive and operate a taxi. They were not invented to be financial instruments. They are not government guarantees of return or guarantees of a certain level of income. The risk of regulatory changes are and should be borne by the licence-holders themselves. Disruption and change is natural. It is a natural state of a vibrant, technologically innovative market economy. Furthermore, compensation hinders the competitive and evolutionary adjustment of a market-based economy.

We at the IPA are concerned about the precedent that compensation sets for future disruption, as taxpayers and consumers might be expected to pay for barriers to economic progress that have been erected in the past. Allowing incumbent industries to seek compensation for technological change is a dangerous door that Parliament should not open.

The IPA believes that new business models which uproot traditional markets, break down industry categories and maximise the use of scarce resources should be welcomed by this committee. Overregulation, however, could suppress this potential economic revolution. Victoria must adopt a deregulatory approach to ridesharing, one that brings down existing barriers without erecting new ones. Such a permissionless innovation approach will make Victoria an attractive jurisdiction to future entrepreneurial endeavours. We thank you very much for the opportunity and welcome the committee’s questions.

Coastal Shipping Reform: Industry Saviour or Regulatory Nightmare?

With Aaron Lane

Executive Summary: On July 1 2012, the Gillard Government passed the most extensive suite of changes to coastal trading since the Navigation Act 1912 in the form of the Coastal Trading (Revitalising Australian Shipping) Act 2012 and its associated Acts.

They come on top of the Fair Work Act 2009, which imposed Australian labour standards on foreignregistered ships operating with foreign crews in the Australian coastal shipping trade.

The combination of these changes have negative effects for the Australian economy and for Australian businesses and consumers.

  • These changes are intended to reduce the number of foreign vessels currently carrying coastal freight, and to make Australian ships more competitive. They do so by significantly increasing the regulatory burden on foreign-flagged ships.
  • Foreign-registered ships temporarily operating on the coastal trade must undertake at least five voyages in twelve months, and the loading dates, origin and destination, cargo types and volumes are specified at the start of that period.
  • Foreign-registered ships can only carry cargo if there are no Australian-flagged ships (or foreign-flagged ships transitioning to Australian flags) that can do so.
  • Foreign-flagged ships carrying foreign crews have to pay Australian award wages, which are far in excess of International Transport Workers’ Federation rates.

These changes are aimed at encouraging the use of vessels that employ solely Australian resident crews. In doing so, the changes have the effect of significantly reducing the flexibility in the coastal shipping trade, and squeezing foreign-flagged ships out of the market. As a result of the 2012 changes alone, the net present value of the coastal shipping industry’s net economic benefit to the Australian economy is between $76 million and $150 million less than it would be in the absence of these changes.

It is clear that the changes will increase transport costs. This could result in bulk commodities being sourced from cheaper overseas markets, thus negatively affecting Australian commodity producers.

Increased transport costs could also be passed downstream to consumers. This paper examines the broader economic effects that seem likely to arise as a result of these changes.

Finally, this paper asks what ought to be done about coastal shipping. It concludes that a marketdriven, open regulatory framework should instead govern Australian shipping, and it calls on the Abbott Government to implement changes as a matter of priority.

Available in PDF here.