Just Price

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In many contexts now it's the other way around. People argue for market economies not just on the basis of being more efficient but on on values, right? Like any deviation from that is somehow morally wrong. And particularly particulary in relation to financial markets, which are the most abstract and complex, distrusted of markets. But when you look at something like crypto currency or the gro financial crisis, a, you conclude that rationality also is needed if you are to avoid fairly catastrophic outcomes in infinancial macts.

The idea of an “interest rate” might seem mundane and practical, in comparison to our usual topics around here, but there is a profound philosophical idea lurking in the background: if you lend me money now against the promise of me paying you back more in the future, I am relating the different values that a certain sum has to me at different moments in time. Traditionally, the interest rates set by the government have been a major tool for influencing the economy, but in recent decades they have increasingly fallen near zero. John Quiggin relates this change to the shift from manufacturing to an information economy, and we talk about what that means for the public interest in having information be reliable and widely available. And yes, there is a bit about crypto.

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John Quiggin received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of New England. He is currently a VC Senior Fellow in Economics at the University of Queensland. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia. Among his books are Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas Still Walk Among Us and Economics in Two Lessons: Why Markets Work So Well, and Why They Can Fail So Badly.

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