Does it matter?

It can be argued that an Australian economics is a misallocation of intellect. Is not the idio­syncratic the anomalous? And as a society gets smaller do not its idiosyncrasies become puny? Would not the most quintessentially Australian Economics be the economics of bushfires (Healey et al., 1985)? Or perhaps the economics of brown snakes? Perhaps when economic journals took two months to arrive by sea-mail it was rational for some to pay attention to an ‘Australian Model'.

In reply a sceptic might wonder whether distance has entirely lost its sting. Johnson's claim of 1969 on the inevitability of Canada and Australia being ‘behind' remains true (1971). A sceptic might additionally declare that what globalisation has spelt for Australian economics is not so much integration but provincialisation. The aspiration of the post-war generation of cultural critics to reject a provincial self-relegation (e.g. A.A. Phillips, Robin Boyd) — an aspiration fully shared by economists like Butlin — now has little resonance, and Australian economists are content to borrow standards of judgement from the metropolis: the essential proof of the provincial mind. And when has provincialism added anything? Australia is now another Kansas. And what is the good of a second Kansas?

But if one was to commit to the pursuit of an Australian economics, we need to ask and decide wherein lies the value of any economics that rationally bears the adjective ‘Australian'? Will it be that economics that successfully brings to the world's attention certain conditions peculiar to Australia, and thereby promotes their assimilation into a universal theory? Or will it be an economics which deems universal theories as empty of content, and therefore sees no choice but to deal with the Australian situation by means of a suite of special models?

The two positions have been well aired by Kenyon (1992, 1994) and Goodwin (2002). In reflecting upon his massive Economic Enquiry in Australia at the distance of four decades, Goodwin judged:

So long as economic thought is defined as what has come out of Cambridge England and Cambridge Mass, with perhaps New York, Lausanne, Stockholm and Vienna thrown in, Australian economic thought...

(2002, 3)

With that in mind Goodwin devoted a large part of Enquiry to ‘oddballs' writing ‘disreputable periodical literature... beyond the pale of real economics'. Kenyon disputed the apparent identification of Australian economics with ‘ratbags, heretics, cranks and amateurs’, and the attendant suggestion that ‘had the First fleet never sailed... there would be very little in modern economics different from what there is today'. It is beyond the remit of this chapter to try to decide this dispute, but any choice over the orientation of Australian economics will need to weight the rival risks the two authors draw attention to.

Note

* I am indebted to the comments of Henry Ergas, Graeme Wells, Geoffrey Brennan, Mervyn Lewis, Alex Millmow, David Vines, Selwyn Cornish, Keith Rankin and George Fane.