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Opportunity for faculty and graduate students whose work engages with capitalism as an analytic concept and/or as an object of social, political, or historical inquiry and critique
Opportunity for PhDs whose work engages meaningfully with financial history in any time period or region of the world and who earned a doctorate within 5 years of the application deadline. Applications due March 1
The Columbia Center for Political Economy is seeking a full-time Postdoctoral Research Scholar for its Money and Finance Idea Lab. The position is anticipated to start on July 1, 2024.
Just Us Journal brings together personal stories, interviews, written material, artworks and resources from a diverse range of community members. Despite their varied perspectives or interests, each contribution relates to the concepts of action, transformation or change, and seeks to support the reader in their own journey.
This journal is compiled and designed by Kelly Nefer (she/her) who is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in lutruwita/Tasmania. Within her practice she explores concepts related to empowerment, perception and justice.
The ACCC launching legal action against Coles and Woolworths today for misleading consumers reinforces the findings of Australia Institute and Centre for Future Work research, that showed inflation is higher because of big businesses price gouging.
Key Points:
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) has launched legal action against Coles and Woolworths for misleading consumers through discount pricing claims at a time when inflation was at its highest.
The ACCC alleges the misconduct involved 266 products for Woolworths at different times across 20 months, and 245 products for Coles at different times across 15 months.
This covers the period when inflation rose to a peak of 7.8% at the end of December 2022 and led to the Reserve Bank raising interest rates 13 times in 19 months.
“Today’s announcement reinforces our research that has shown the inflation that led to the Reserve Bank raising interest rates was caused overwhelmingly by companies abusing market power to raise prices,” said Greg Jericho, Chief Economist at the Australia Institute.
“The ACCC does the best they can, but the drop in competition over recent decades has shown that the current system is failing us.
“The ACCC clearly needs stronger powers, including a competition and prices commission and divestiture powers to break up uncompetitive industries.
“Australia is dominated by uncompetitive markets. The threat of divestiture would lower prices, better service and more innovation and growth in productivity.”
Human rights must be at the centre of Australia’s approach to tech policy
Protecting, enhancing and upholding human rights is essential to ensuring Australia’s technology policy is robust, fit for purpose, and meaningfully contributes to the improvement of individuals and community wellbeing both online and off.
Digital Rights Watch actively participates in public consultations regarding the development of legislation and policy in relation to technology and human rights. We have consistently contributed to the public debate regarding many of the inquiry’s terms of reference, in particular in relation to age verification and the news media bargaining code.
Our recent submissions relevant to this inquiry include:
We’ve all seen the provocations by Israel, says Chris Hedges. The consequences of this latest one on people’s pagers and electronic devices could be catastrophic. Middle East war looms.
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Tomorrow the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, is discussing his plans to introduce nuclear power with anti-renewable energy commentator, Chris Uhlmann. No doubt we will hear the same claims about renewable energy causing electricity prices to be high and the need for nuclear power to keep prices down that both men have said in the past.
And just as was the case in the past, such claims will again be wrong.
The increased use of renewables in supplying electricity is not the cause of higher retail electricity prices – and it is clear that more renewables will lead to lower prices.
Research and data from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) and the CSIRO all make it abundantly clear that renewables are the cheapest form of electricity, and that the high cost of energy is driven by the cost of gas and coal produced electricity.
It is not surprising that people can be misled about the cause of electricity prices. Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) is a complex market stretching to 1,925 pages of rules and regulations such that any explanation of price determination will be greatly simplified.
So let us set out the two key issues to understanding retail electricity prices:
1. The cost of generating electricity (the wholesale price) is a surprisingly small component of the many costs that contribute to household electricity prices.
Interest in artificial intelligence (AI) is perhaps one of the few things growing more quickly than the size of new AI models from companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. Central to this boom is “compute” — the processing power, memory, and resources needed to perform the computations underlying AI systems. The world’s compute is mostly concentrated within three American giants — Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, while in China, Tencent and Alibaba are formidable players.
