Brian Easton (Journalist) Interviews Brian Easton (Economist) Published in Asymmetric Information, Issue 71 August 2021. You grew up in Christchurch? In Somerfield, in the south of the city, in a state house the family bought. Dad was an electrician who in the middle of his life became a psychopaedic nurse. Mum was a clerical worker…
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The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas: Janek Wasserman (Yale University Press; 2019) Asymmetric Information, Issue No. 70 / April 2021 p.7-8. Mentioning to colleagues that I was reading a book on Austrian economists almost invariably led to strong responses – sometimes positive, more often negative. But, typically, their responses were…
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In the Abstract: Will Most Of Us Have an Impoverished Retirement? (June 6, 1998) Richard Thaler’s Savings Principles (7 January 1999) Two Styles Of Management (1 July 1999) This reviews Thaler, R.H. (1992) The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomolies of Economic Life, Princeton University Press; Thaler, R.H. (1994) Quasi Rational Economics, Russell…
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Presentation to the 2021 Conference of Theatre Managers & Educators, Dunedin 5-7 May. Today I am going to discuss the governments plans for the health system. Let me begin with an admission about my perspective. Many New Zealanders are more centralist in their view of the governance of society than I am. I come from…
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Presentation to the 2021 Conference of Theatre Managers & Educators, Dunedin 5-7 May. A few weeks ago, the government announced the next health sector redisorganisation. So I have scrapped the presentations I promised, in favour of an account of what is happening and where we might be going. Today’s presentation is centred on a history…
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Centralising the Public Health System The proposed health redisorganisation seeks to markedly centralise the health system. Is this grab for power justified; will it work? The Cabinet paper’s justification of the proposed changes is sevenfold. The first two are about Maori issues. One is constitutional, arguing that the ‘public health system does not meet the…
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New Zealand’s most distinguished economist reviews New Zealand’s premier financial agony aunt Newsroom 29 April, 2021 Because economists are believed to know the mysteries of finance, I am often asked to give financial advice. I advise that I would never take the advice of an economist without paying for it; that it is never worth…
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The recognition that there is a media problem is correct, but the chosen solution is likely to be disastrous. Whether it intends or not, the government is embarked on a course to undermine Radio New Zealand. It wants to merge TVNZ and RNZ in order, it says, to strengthen the media. ‘Merge’ is a weasel…
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on Not In Narrow Seas: The Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand 21 April, 2021 The most important thing I want to say today is to thank the Stout Centre for its contribution to Not In Narrow Seas. I had the privilege of a Stout Fellowship for a year which was crucial in the writing…
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Now is about the time that the Government is getting its Budget Strategy together In the week before the budget – the 2021 one is to be delivered on Thursday 20 May – there is a strange ritual in which all the commentariat and lobbyists (who are not necessarily distinct from one another) tell us…
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1 Summary 1.1 This short paper sets out a scheme for reducing the shock of lost income from redundancy. 2 Preliminaries: Dealing with a Private Market Failure 2.1 This proposal arises because the private market has not been able to provide adequate income protection for those who become unemployed from redundancy. In particular…
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Whatever the damage, especially to the British economy, Brexit has done us a service by illustrating the complexity of trade. Brexit is the only example we have of two closely integrated sophisticated economies severing trading ties. The European Union and Britain still do not have tariffs or import quotas between them – the stuff of…
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I have been dipping into Brett Christophers’ Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy and Who Pays for It? Economists should be warned that his use of the term ‘rentier’ is ‘heterodox’ (his term). I have no difficulty with Humpty-Dumpty’s ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither…
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The government’s recent housing package may work; will it do enough? Trick Question: Does New Zealand have a capital gains tax on housing? If you ask the Prime Minister she will say not. It is true that her government is increasing the scope of the ‘bright-line test’ on non-family homes to ten years. That means…
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The Climate Change Commission should immediately publish the details of its economic models and enable the public to access them. There is something strange going on with the Climate Change Commission. In its draft report the CCC said ‘We have looked at the impacts which our budgets could have on the economy and society…
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Migration patterns provide further evidence that wellbeing is not simply measured by income. New Zealand’s GDP per person is about 20 percent lower than Australia’s. Some think that the difference arises because our economic policies have been inferior. They then leaps to arguing for new policies based on ideology rather than evidence. Frequently those policies…
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Social philosophy in New Zealand is muddled and incomplete. This year, 2021, is the fiftieth anniversary of John Rawls’ The Theory of Justice, described as the most important book on political philosophy written in the twentieth century. As you might expect it is a big book (587 pages with a follow-up one of 464 pages)…
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How Can We Make Wellbeing at the Centre of Public Policy If We Dont Measure It? When the Minister of Finance announced in the 2018 budget that in the future economic policy would focus more on wellbeing, many saw a glimmer of hope that we were moving away from the mechanical thinking which underpinned Rogernomics/neoliberalism….
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Introduction: The focus of this paper is on macroeconomic management and not on the entirety of economic policy. There are many issues which macroeconomic interventions cannot address. To use macroeconomic instruments, rather than the relevant targeted instrument, will blunt the effectiveness of macropolicy interventions. Reflecting, this paper is really a critique of the current primary…
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There are times when tikanga needs to be broken for tikanga to survive. I recently gave a presentation on Māori economic history based on my Not in Narrow Seas. Its most important message was that Māori proved to be a very adaptable people continually evolving as new opportunities arose. The European tradition recalls the Duke…
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