Dr Michael G. Heller

Max Liebermann 1847-1935 'Self Portrait' The rentier is not a loveable person. ‘Honorable Idlers’ ( ehrsame Mussiggiinger ) was the official name given in some medieval cities of the Upper Rhine to members of aristocratic chambers of commerce who were rentiers and occasional entrepreneurs. I see this as an early example of the mixed emotions ‘rentier’ men and women arouse amongst us all.  Définition - A rentier could be anyone of independent means, typically an owner of capital who participates indirectly or not at all in the process of production, who draws income from rents on capital assets in the form of interest payments or dividends as opposed to wages or salaries. A rentier will not be an ‘idler’ if the category includes crafts of providing capital, money lending, self-funded entrepreneurial dabbling, Sunday-morning stockbroking, even philanthropy, all of which require labour time and can be inputs in production.  The painter Max Liebermann entirely fits...

The Three Graces (spoof of Goya’s ‘Third of May 1808’) by Cesar Santos , contemporary exponent of Latin American syncretism In a previous post I said it's wrong to portray Spanish colonial rule in Latin America as a kind of ‘identity crisis’ reverberating to the present day. Now I will explain why. We must start as America did, with la conquista .  Conquest was made easier because the Spaniards encountered divided kingdoms, vicious inter-tribal warfare, and economies of forced tribute which syphoned goods and lives from one tribe to another. If every clash of tribes and every conquest signals an ‘identity crisis’, then Indo-Americans were accustomed to the process long before Spaniards arrived. There were multiple irreconcilable identities in Latin  America prior to Spanish rule. By the end of the colonial era 300 years later, there was, for most intents and purposes, a universe identity - Hispanic. Some historians, Westerners included, tried to portray at least on...

Creatively adaptive Property Rights stand tall in the English woods Property rights are legal appropriations of ownership, use, or disposal of factors of production and consumption: land, labour, technologies, or capital. Self-evidently, the establishment of secure property rights -- identifiable, predictable, enforceable, enduring rights of private ownership and usage over anything that can be exchanged in the market -- is a precondition of modern market-based economic growth.  In a market economy it must be possible to appropriate and have free disposal of the non-human materials of production. Expansion of property rights expands the scope for improving market freedom and profit-making by creating rational expectations or calculable certainty that -- now and far into the future -- the entrepreneur can securely transfer wealth to the sphere of capital investment, and then rightfully appropriate advantages he or she gains from entering that investment for competition in t...

Stick ‘em up for peace, in Venezuela the hands are still too visible (ABC 2014) Ricardo Hausmann, professor of economics at Harvard, has an oped today at Project Syndicate in which he argues that an invisible hand operates in government just as it does in an economy. Exactly as in the modern economy, there is no possibility of central control in a big, complex, information-intensive modern government. So the modern state has evolved a mechanism for self-organisation that is equivalent to the market price-profit system for providing information and incentives which allow political systems to “identify problems, propose solutions, and monitor performance”. Venezuela does not have this mechanism, the USA does. The mechanism is intimately linked to the conditions required for modern democracy. Democracy is an open structure that helps society cope with complexity and coordination. Rich countries are rich because they are democratic, or vice versa!  So far so good - I ca...

Indonesian performers singing The Smiths against USA backdrop (2007) I have an enduring affection for my one-time close mentor Robert H. Taylor (Bob) who introduced me to good literature and high-powered contacts in Southeast Asia. Our late-afternoon reunions in his thickly-carpeted capacious office imbibing his Southeast Asian anecdotes, enormous cigars, and large amounts of whisky while he advised me on how to go about doing my fieldwork in Indonesia are now the stuff of pleasurable distant memories. This 2007 interview in ANU's 'New Mandala' shows what a colourful and controversial figure Bob was in his heyday. Little did I know when I took over the daunting task of teaching his flagship course Government & Politics in Southeast Asia at the School of Oriental & African Studies that I freed Bob up to pursue higher goals in life (Vice-Chancellorships).  The point of mentioning Bob Taylor here is that when I began researching Southeast Asia in 1990 as a post-M...

Rufino Tamayo 'Moon Dog' 1973 In the two centuries since independence Latin American intellectuals have played critical roles in government policy as direct participants or by shaping the philosophical agenda of government action. At the same time they engaged in recurrent and remarkably consistent debate about the nature of regional identity. The dilemmas on which all sides usually agreed were the problems of economic and political development, which were (in the jargon) structural bottlenecks in the circuits of production, interest group conflicts in the circuits of distribution and consumption, and repetitive crises in the political spheres. The disagreements were about the origins of the problems, and where the solutions would be found. In his influential book  The Latin Americans and Their Love-Hate Relationship With the United States ,  Carlos Rangel  helped identify the emotional divisions and delusions at the core: “We Latin Americans are not happy...