Four eighty-year-old books which are still vitally relevant today. Between 1942 and 1945, four refugees from Vienna each published a ground-breaking – seminal – book.* They left their country after Austria was taken over by fascists in 1934 and by Nazi Germany in 1938. Previously they had lived in ‘Red Vienna’; ruled by Social Democratic…
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A distinguished economist on the tensions of centralisation Newsroom. 16 April, 2025. It was not originally envisaged that the government of New Zealand would be highly centralised. The Colonial Secretary’s instructions to Hobson are about a minimalist state. That explains the provisions in Te Tiriti o Waitangi which allocate ‘kawantanga’ to the Crown and ‘rangatiratanga’…
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Neville Gibson ‘Will Labour’s failure condemn the future, book questions’, NBR, 29 Sep 2024.
A modest attempt to analyse Donald Trump’s tariff policies. Alfred Marshall, whose textbook was still in use 40 years after he died wrote ‘every short statement about economics is misleading with the possible exception of my present one.’ (The text book is 719 pages.) It’s a timely reminder that any short analysis of Trump’s tariff…
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This was offered to a media outlet but they chose another piece. Based on the Epilogue of ‘In Open Seas’. Because New Zealand is very centralised, its central government has considerable influence over the public discussion. Thus, a change of government, as happened in 2023, may change greatly the tone and even direction of cultural…
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While there have been decades of complaints – from all sides – about the workings of the Resource Management Act (RMA), replacing is proving difficult. The Coalition Government is making another attempt. To help answer the question, I am going to use the economic lens of the Coase Theorem, set out by Ronald Coase who…
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New Zealand’s economic development has always been a partnership between the public and private sectors. Public-Private-Partnerships (PPPs) have become fashionable again, partly because of the government’s ambitions to accelerate infrastructural development. There is, of course, an ideological element too, while some of the opposition to them is also ideological. PPPs come in so many different…
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It is said that economists know the price of everything and the value of nothing. That may be an exaggeration, but an even better response is to point out economists do know the difference. They did not at first. Classical economics thought that the price of something reflected the objective cost of producing it –…
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Published by AHAA (Apologies for the tabulation presentations.) Introduction By way of background, doing some unrelated work I came across some international data on the healthcare sector which seemed to contradict my, and the conventional wisdom’s, view of the healthcare sector. Broadly, it is that the sector has been underfunded. That is not what the…
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By international standards the New Zealand healthcare system appears satisfactory – certainly no worse generally than average. Yet it is undergoing another redisorganisation. While doing some unrelated work, I came across some international data on the healthcare sector which seemed to contradict my – and the conventional wisdom’s – view of the healthcare sector. Broadly,…
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Peter Frankopan’s The Earth Transformed: An Untold History is a compelling account of the interaction between humans and the environment. We would be unwise to ignore it. The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Oxford professor of history Peter Frankopan was initially widely admired. But critics point out that the book exaggerated…
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As Lady Bracknell almost said, ‘to lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’ And so a second Government Statistician has made a hasty exit, The official reason in each case was the management of the population census but the cult of generic management is the underlying failure Generic…
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Paper to NZ Fabian Society, 26 February, Wellington. The New Zealand Fabian Society has posted my paper Transforming New Zealand: Why Has the Left Failed?, which is a follow-on from my just published book, In Open Seas: How the New Zealand Labour Government Went Wrong: 2017-2023. The paper points out that the Left no longer…
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A Bully in a China Shop? It is a mystery what Donald Trump learned when he did his BA in economics at the University of Pennsylvania in the mid-1960s. The Ivy League college has a good economics reputation, but even had Trump been a top student – unlikely or he would trumpet it – his…
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Severe geological and financial earthquakes are inevitable. We just don’t know how soon and how they will play out. Are we putting enough effort into preparing for them? Every decade or so the international economy has a major financial crisis. We cannot predict exactly when or exactly how it will happen. (For what its worth,…
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Fabian Society Website Writing contemporary history is challenging. New evidence appears; events move on; it is hard to provide thoughtful reflections about events close to the writing. The last chapters of my economic history of Aotearoa New Zealand, Not in Stormy Seas, are no exception. I tried to avoid providing a conclusion in Chapter 55…
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The Yes Prime Minister This transcript of a recent conversation between the Prime Minister and his chief economic adviser has not been verified. We’ve announced we are the ‘Yes Government’. Do you like it? Yes, Prime Minister. Dreamed up by the PR team. It’s about being committed to growth. Not that the PR team know…
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AIRAANZ 2025 Conference, 3 February 2025. It is perhaps extraordinary that the Ardern-Hipkins Labour Government, which said it wanted to be ‘transformational’, did not establish a Ministry of Labour. In 2012 the Key-English National Government had merged the century-old Department of Labour into the newly established mega-agency, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MoBIE)….
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Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations. Even were there evidence they had some impact, there are other factors. Of course, we should seek to administer effectively a system…
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Tēnā koutou katoa. Apologies for the limitations of my voice. It is the consequence of surgery on my larynx. My written submission focuses on two elements of the Treaty Principles Bill which are insufficiently covered in its public discussion. The first is that the bill is bad history. Our understanding of Te Tiriti has evolved,…
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