Fresh Economic Thinking

Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir encounters a heated debate on the AusFinance subreddit about the merits of Australia’s superannuation system, something Cameron often raises. Also, we comment on the emergence of culture within subreddits and respond to some of the comments on Reddit about Cameron’s work. The rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation becomes somehow relevant to the whole conversation too...

Friend of the show Mike Fellman joins me to chat about all things macroeconomic. We pick up on a previous conversation I had with Moses Sternstein about the interest burden from public debt. Mike has a deep understanding of bond markets, macro policy, and money. It was a good chance to ask him about Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which is a school of thought in economics that focuses on monetary op...

Moses Sterstein runs the terrific Random Walk substack. I stumbled across his creative insights a couple of years ago when someone sent me an article he wrote about the mythical housing shortage. Since then, I have kept track of his views on evolving macro-economic and demographic trends. This conversation was a chance for me to see how his independent analysis had led him to some similar views to...

This week, regular co-host Jonathan Gadir is back to discuss inheritance taxes. Are they the fairest tax that helps everyone start life on a more even footing? Or are they a nightmare of rules that require intrusive monitoring of gifts and that destroy family businesses? We take some initial steps towards understanding how much tax revenue is possible, the problems involved, and the intergeneratio...

Economics can be thought of as the study of human conflict. Prices are one way to settle conflicts over who gets what. So how does an economist think about war, and emergent cultural and political forces that create conflicts amongst groups? Paul Frijters runs Academia Libera Mentis, a new education institution for minds that dare. He documents this grand education experiment here at his Subtack ....

One of the most requested guests on FET has been Professor Steve Keen. Steve has been a student of economics since the 1970s, and a critic of the oversimplifications of the neoclassical economic school. He was an academic at the University of Western Sydney for many years, and Head of School at Kingston University in the mid-2010s. One thing Steve taught me is to really think about the hidden assu...

Most Aussie’s know Jim Penman’s face from the side of green trailers dragged through the suburbs as his franchisees mow lawns. But Jim is more than a businessman. He has written multiple books, has a PhD, and will run for election in Northcote, Victoria with the Libertarian party in November 2026. I wanted to find out what motivated Jim to run for politics, ask him about where he sees government w...

Jay Lasker, aka Crémieux on Twitter/X, has spent the past few years digging into bad science and its bad data, especially in health science. For example, the rise in autism is almost solely due to expanded diagnosis and the incentives to get a diagnosis. This is especially relevant for policies like the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) in Australia, which pays out on the basis of a diag...

You may have heard that our town planning system of rules and institutions that govern land uses in cities and often across the country is stifling new housing production, causing high prices. But much of the commentary misunderstands how town planning rules operate. I chat with Sydney town planner Tim Sneesby about how the system works, from a strategic level of creating zones and desired outcome...

Has the cultural and political pendulum swung too far in favour of women? That’s the argument made by David Maywald in his new book, The Relentless War on Masculinity . He doesn’t argue that women have done this. But even men in power are still fighting the battles of many decades ago. David looks at education and health outcomes, noting that women became the majority of university students four d...

During the COVID panic one of the sane voices was congitive scientist Mark Changizi. He saw the resulting panic as an emergent social and cultural phenomenon, and went as far as to sue the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) for directing social media companies to censor what they deemed as misinformation. In this conversation, Mark talks of his intellectual journey, from mathematician...

Wouldn’t it be great if we had a coherent way of understanding the economics of housing supply? You might be surprised, given the confidence of the prognostications of public commentators, that most don’t have a broadly accepted economic theory of why homes are built. It’s all ad hoc and often contradictory. Here, Tim Helm walks through the main empirical patterns that need to be explained by our...

Previously, I have described an educational experiment happening in a castle in Belgium, called Academia Libera Mentis (ALM). It is run by my friend and co-author, Paul Frijters, with his wife Erika Turkstra, and alongside Gigi Foster and many others. In this episode, we discuss the story of this endeavour, as told in the upcoming book Minds that Dare . You can read about the trials and tribulatio...

A long chat with power engineer Ben Beattie about Australia’s energy conversation, some of the muddled economics and arguments in favour of privatisation, public provision, and more. Check out Ben’s Baseload Podcast here . As always, please like, share, comment, and subscribe. Thanks for your support. You can find Fresh Economic Thinking on YouTube , Spotify , and Apple Podcasts. Theme: Happy Swin...

Is Australia’s housing market REALLY functioning normally? Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir pushes back on my recent statements about the housing market doing exactly what we should expect it to do in a conversation with Josh Szeps at his Uncomfortable Conversations podcast. I also respond to Steve Keen’s idea that the secret to lower home prices is regulating access to credit, such as with tighter...

James Nuzzo’s sports science and health research shows the gap between perception and reality when it comes to gender issues. This research, and especially his public comments about his various studies, got him cancelled and squeezed out by Edith Cowan University. You can read about it here in detail. As someone with an interest in the pursuit of truth and who is frustrated when the public convers...

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Would you believe that the same stories told in Australian housing debates about a lack of supply were dominant in Toronto, Canada, right up until the bust? I speak with Canadian real estate analyst and broker John Pasalis about how the market has changed in the past few years in Canada—from a speculative mania, to a sudden stop, to a new slow grind. Amongst it all, new apartment construction has...

Regular co-host Jonathan Gadir pushes back on my claim that Australia’s economic complexity is fine. Can a more complex economy generate better job choices and higher wages? Is it really okay to outsource the production of fundamental ingredients to a modern economy to other nations? Is Cameron just spouting nonsense neoclassical economics? Tune in to hear these questions answered, and find the or...

Too often, the public debate about housing focuses on costs and ignores investment returns to property owners. Mike Fellman was an economist at Freddie Mac and is now a property investor. He explains in this conversation how important the investment dynamics in housing are for understanding what gets built where. Find Mike on Twitter/X here and read his “thread of threads” that explains many of th...

How do organisations that emerge to help people end up degrading over time and becoming a plain old shakedown? That’s the topic I discuss with regular co-host Jonathan Gadir. Although we don’t mention it, my book Rigged , co-authored with Paul Frijters, explains many of the economic mechanisms behind the degradation of institutions into what could be described as a rent-seeking mafia. As always, p...

Will rent control destroy your city? Or is this a slogan economists use to signal their tribal allegiance? Cahal Moran, aka Unlearning Economics, discusses his intellectual journey into economics and the discovery of many shortcomings of how economics is taught and practised. Cahal’s latest Current Affairs article is called Rent Control is Fine, Actually . Watch all his YouTube videos here , and f...

With all the cost-of-living crisis talk these days, you might wonder if it is possible for young Aussies to get ahead financially. But there is a group of people out there winning the financial game of life with their approach to financial independence. The perfect guest to discuss personal financial habits is Matt, who runs the Aussie Firebug website , where he documents his journey of to financi...

Taxpayers Alliance Chief Economist John Humphreys joins the FET podcast to talk all things tax. Is it possible to tax unrealised gains, as is proposed on superannuation accounts over $3 million in value? Maybe. But why bother doing it when it mostly changes the timing of taxation rather than the revenue? We speculate as to whether it is a daring political manoeuvre—propose something you know your...

Given the Australian media’s obsession with the housing crisis, it would come as a shock to many that the share of after-tax disposable income spent on rent by renter households is lower in 2025 than it has been for most of the last decade. But that’s what ANU Professor Ben Phillips found in his latest research on rental affordability (you can find it here or download it below). In today’s FET vid...