Of the making of books there is no end

... and much study is an affliction of the flesh

That’s what the Bible (or at least, the preacher in Ecclesiastes) says, and sometimes I feel as if that’s right. But right now, I’m basking in the glow of having returned final proofs for Public Policy and Climate Change: Politics, Philosophy and Economics, a text to appear in the Lecture Notes in Economics and Policy series put out by World Scientific Publishers.

As well as approving the proofs, I produced an index, using a program with the self-explanatory title PDF Index Generator (this is different from the index function in Acrobat, which indexes every word for search purposes). As with lots of software, it’s not as good as what a professional editor would produce, but much cheaper and faster. I plan to write about the economic implications some time, but this kind of thing has been going on for a long time - in my own experience, starting with desktop publishing on the Mac.

I’ve got a couple more books in the pipeline. One of them, a volume of my collected articles optimistically entitled After Neoliberalism, is almost at proof stage. The other a cartoon history of privatisation in Australia is about to start.

I’ve been spending a lot more time on the Sunshine Coast, hoping to move there permanently. Perhaps as a benefit of local training, I did better than expected in the Mooloolaba Olympic triathlon, finishing in 3 hours 14 minutes, one of my better times in a decade or more of competition.

As I’ve already mentioned, I’ll be doing a virtual version of the MS Brissie to the Bay ride, raising money to help in the fight against multiple sclerosis and to help people living with MS. You can support me here.

Here’s a list of my published output in March

Journal article

Quiggin, J. (2024) Full employment and Working Future. The Economic and Labour Relations Review, 1-12, (My review of the Albanese government's White Paper on Employment)

Opinion pieces

On nuclear, Coalition prefers the optimism of misleading, decade-old, unverified claims, Crikey 20 March

Australia must wean itself from monster utes – and the federal government’s weakening of vehicle emissions rules won’t help one bit The Conversation, 28 March

Media

My media report for March, password quiggin (Thanks as usual to Alysha Hilevuo for preparing this)

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