= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
David_Gerard comments on Optimal Employment - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (267)
For the curious: One of the reasons why the wages in Australia seem so high is because Australia largely dodged the credit crunch, having put suitable controls on its financial sector well ahead of time. So the currency has stayed up - particularly compared to the USD, which has gone down the toilet. Conditions may equalise with time, but right now there's a huge discrepancy.
(I moved from Australia to London when the AUD was worth half what it is now, when it was about AUD$3 to GBP£1.)
Ah yes, I forgot that Australia largely avoided the current recession, that explains a large part of it.
And to make it stranger - cash register prices (food, etc.) in AUD have approximately doubled in the last ten years, the time in which the dollar has grown to twice the size. So in USD or GBP, stuff has gone up in price by about four - but it doesn't feel like 4x in Australia.
We have a pile of first-world economies that are not in fact all that closely coupled, except when two countries both do similar stupid things, e.g. letting the financial sector run rampant.
FWIW, the idea that "letting the financial sector run rampant" was the cause of the current recession is not uncontroversial. I and others think poor monetary policy is much more to blame.