Note that some of the original submission proved redundant. For ease of presentation they have been removed. An explanation of what happened is set out here. (I have not changed the numbering.) Introduction My name is Brian Easton. I have a doctorate of science from the University of Canterbury and hold other qualifications in economics,…
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David Mayes, Professor of Finance at the University of Auckland, died on November 30, 2017, aged 71. Asymetric Information No 61, April 2018, p.6 David studied for a PPE (Philosophy, Politics and Economics) at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1968, before completing his PhD at the University of Bristol in 1971. Much of his…
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I prepared this note on the contribution of Joseph Stiglitz of the same title to an important symposium in Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 34, Numbers 1–2, 2018 (pp. 70–106). It is for economists. A shorter version is published in the AUT Briefing Papers series. Stiglitz’s text is in italics: I believe…
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What follows is a series of quantitative thoughts on the election outcome. It is based on the 2017 election night vote. Specials are likely to change precise voting shares and even seats. However potential changes do invalidate the column’s overall conclusions. Summary (which is less numerically challenging) – The share of the left has returned…
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Is public spending stuck in the vicelike grip of the austerity of our quasi-Austerian economic policy? Are we at a turning point in our politics? I don’t mean whether we have a new government. That is a matter for the voters; the polls say that either they are very volatile or that the polls are…
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The last column described the philosophy of economist James Buchanan as it applied to the United States. What is its relevance to New Zealand? When I looked at James Buchanan’s theory of public choice, I was struck by how it reflected an American institutional setting; Our political system is different. Even so, our colonial mentality…
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A new biography of James Buchanan, a founder of economist’s public choice theory, suggests he was not only anti-democratic but was working with others to revoke democracy in America. The work of economist and social philosopher James Buchanan (1919-2013) came to prominence in the mid-1980s when he was awarded the Economics Prize in honour of…
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Contribution at Funeral Service Tena koe kotoa. My name is Brian Easton. I live across the road from the Robinsons. Over the last few months I have often looked at their house with its lonely hall light and thought how it was so lived in by a family full of love and how they were…
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The just published PREFU, Treasury’s assessment of the economy, raises more important questions about our fiscal stance than what the election is talking about. Have we the right borrowing strategy? It was amusing how the Minister of Finance, Stephen Joyce, had to present the PREFU (Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Update) as both an optimistic account…
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The policy dimension of the election appears to be about the concerns with past restraints on government spending and the consequential social failures. But whatever the rhetoric, implementation of campaign promises is going to be much harder. Last Saturday, the Minister for Social Housing, Amy Adams, admitted her government had a poor record on social…
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The following is a ‘pundit column’, which was never published because the 2017 election swept it aside. Our carbon emissions regime is costing us a fortune; why are we not doing something about it? Suppose an item of government spending blew out from virtually nothing a few years back to more than $400m a year…
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Equivocation and dissembling have been integral parts of political life. How should we judge them? Among the sinners the drunk porter in Macbeth welcomes into hell is the ‘equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale’. Equivocation is a theme of the play; Shakespeare is thought to have been influenced by the…
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With most parties having announced their lists for the next election, we need to think about how the system works. As some day it may happen that an MP must be found They’re put upon the list – I’ve got a little list Of political offenders who are always safe and sound And who never…
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The lives of two outstanding economists who died recently illustrate just how diverse the profession is. I first came across William Baumol when, as a student, I valued greatly his two textbooks: Economic Dynamics and Economic Theory and Operations Analysis, both lucid, intellectually challenging and with a gentle humour. (Rather than the conventional tradeoff of…
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Effective markets are underpinned by the government. The interventions may be sophisticated and well-thought through or they may be clumsy and ineffective. The neoliberal rhetoric of ‘free markets’ leads to the latter. In a recent Metro article, Matthew Hooten wrote ‘globalisation combined with free markets has been the most successful economic and social system of…
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The growth of farm output may be slowing. Specialty cheeses show an alternative strategy of further post-farmgate processing. Land for farming ran out in the 1950s. Farm production intensified. We shifted from more dollars of farm output by using more land to getting more dollars per unit of land. Among the challenges we had was…
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By exploring the multiple worlds she grew up in in New Zealand, Helene Wong’s memoir ‘Being Chinese: A New Zealander’s Story’ tells us much about our worlds too. Economists have a predilection for the open economy because, I think, openness to trade tends to be associated with openness to ideas, to technologies, to people, to…
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Jenny Shipley says the middle class has captured the welfare state. But did she understand what the welfare state actually meant before she began attacking it? In her interview with Guy Espiner, Jenny Shipley regretted that the ‘middle class’ were still beneficiaries of the welfare state. Now the term ‘class’ is a summary of a…
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Answering that question proves to be challenging. This preliminary assessment suggests the economic benefits to incumbent New Zealanders may not be great. During the Vogel boom, say between 1871 and 1881, the population of New Zealand doubled, as did real GDP (as best as we can measure). That means per capita GDP was much the…
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If the Commercial Miracle of Newspapers is Over, What will Replace It? Newspapers have been a commercial miracle. For a very small outlay one got access to a surprisingly wide range of news, opinion and information. Part of the explanation was economies of scale, but the trick was that much of the industry’s revenue came…
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