Too much of our public discussion is led by those who are have strong opinions based on prejudice and ignorance rather than thorough research and understanding Bill Gallagher (he’s a knight), chief executive of the Gallagher Group, claimed that the ‘Treaty [of Waitangi] papers on display at Te Papa were fraudulent documents’ as well as…
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Comparative advantage is rarely important in modern trade deals, such as TPP11 (CPTPP). Why bother? Economics students have ‘comparative advantage’ drummed into them. The intuition seems commonsense; specialise in what you (or the country) do well and exchange the surplus for what you are not as good at. The economist’s Heckscher-Ohlin model which makes the…
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I prepared this for a US audience; hence its more American perspective. Ben Mack’s ‘How the far right is poisoning New Zealand’ was such a distorted account of New Zealand politics that it was initially considered satire. That it was serious makes its many wild assertions difficult to deal with in a short response. One…
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Despite many attempts, we have been remarkably ineffective at reducing child poverty. Can we expect the current government to do better? Over forty years ago, researchers identified that children and their families were bulk of the poor It was not possible to do this earlier because there was not the data. The Muldoon Government began…
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The new government may talk about paying greater attention to children, but it needs to change the advice and delivery institutions to achieve its goal. One of the successes of the fourth Labour (Lange-Douglas) Government was the restructuring of the scattered environmental responsibilities of the bureaucracy into three agencies: the Ministry for the Environment, which…
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Rogernomics wanted to change us culturally. Has it succeeded? Prime Minister Jacinda Arden is younger than any member of the outgoing National cabinet and is the youngest in the new one, even if you include the Greens. In contrast, Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters is older than any other member of the two cabinets. (The…
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The connection between famines and democracy may not be obvious. but each sheds light upon the other. The fourth Saturday in each November is Holodomor Remembrance Day which recalls the great Ukrainian famine of 1932-3 in which 2.4m to 7m died in a population of about 30m. The intensity of the distress and suffering was…
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Coalition governments are a consequence of MMP. They may better reflect us and our democratic aspirations than the Winner-Takes-All ones of the past. The public understanding of election outcomes remains dominated by a misunderstood account of the old electoral system which was not based on proportional representation. One commentator said confidently that the party with…
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Paul Krugman, the 2008 winner, tweeted ‘Yes! Behavorial econ is the best thing to happen to the field in generations, and [Richard] Thaler showed the way.’ Good science is essentially a subversive activity. Most scientists work within the existing paradigm – the framework of the basic assumptions, ways of thinking, and methodology commonly accepted by…
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How effective are those who pursue change outside the parliamentary system? My first memory of Sue Bradford is a feisty speech she gave to the 1984 Economic Summit Conference pleading for a greater commitment be given to the people she worked with – those on the margins of society: the unemployed, the poor, the mentally…
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New Zealand’s electoral system gives it a parliament which represents voters. Its winner-takes-all executive government, however, remains unrepresentative.* (This is a follow on from the earlier column on coalitions.) This paper tries to evaluate various coalitions on the basis of their political ideologies. It uses the scores given to parties by the TVNZ website Vote-Compass,…
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AUT Briefing PapersOctober 31, 2017 ‘Far too many New Zealanders have come to view today’s capitalism, not as their friend, but as their foe. And they are not all wrong. That is why we believe that capitalism must regain its responsible – its human face.’ Winston Peters. Announcing that he was going with Labour, Winston…
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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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This was written before the election outcome is known. It looks at the part of the executive which is not elected: the public servants and advisors. Steven Joyce, National’s campaign manager, must have thought he had Labour out cold when he claimed that its spending plans announced during the election were enormous and unsustainable. He…
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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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