About

I started my working life in construction – having left school at 15.  Looking at a guy with rolled up plans – I decided I wanted his job.  I finished 3 years of high school in 8 months.  Being a voracious reader made it hard work but possible.  The purely pragmatic decision to study engineering became a passion when I discovered that I could numerically simulate rainfall and runoff.  I was always an environmentalist.  While studying engineering I was Vice President of the Jervis Bay Protecting Committee.  We stopped a joint US/Australian navy exercise once.  Sent the greenies out on the firing range.  Ten years later I had a Masters Degree in environmental science.  It was always apparent that only rich communities can afford environments.  And that free market economics were the source of optimal economic growth.

The global economy is worth about $100 trillion a year.  To put aid and philanthropy into perspective – the total is 0.025% of the global economy.  If spent on Copenhagen Consensus smart development goals such expenditure can generate a benefit to cost ratio of more than 15.  If spent on the UN Sustainable Development Goals you may as well piss it up against a wall.  Either way – it is nowhere near the major path to universal prosperity.  Some 3.5 billion people make less than $2 a day.  Changing that can only be done by doubling and tripling global production – and doing it as quickly as possible.  Optimal economic growth is essential and that requires an understanding and implementation of explicit principles for effective economic governance of free markets.

Markets exist – ideally – in a democratic context.  Politics provides a legislative framework for consumer protection, worker and public safety, environmental conservation and a host of other things.  Including for regulation of markets – banking capital requirements, anti-monopoly laws, prohibition of insider trading, laws on corporate transparency and probity, tax laws, etc.  A key to stable markets – and therefore growth – is fair and transparent regulation, minimal corruption and effective democratic oversight.  Markets do best where government is large enough to be an important player and small enough not to squeeze the vitality out of capitalism – government revenue of some 25% of gross domestic product, balanced budgets over the business cycle and management of interest rates and money supply to keep inflation in check.   Austrian school of economics principles on which successful economies have been built – more or less – for 100 years.   Economic growth is the easiest way to minimise the impacts of government profligacy.

Economic growth provides resources for solving problems – conserving and restoring ecosystems, better sanitation and safer water, better health and education, updating the diesel fleet and other productive assets to emit less black carbon and reduce the health and environmental impacts, developing better and cheaper ways of producing electricity, replacing cooking with wood and dung with better ways of preparing food thus avoiding respiratory disease and again reducing black carbon emissions.

Robert I Ellison