Author Archives: Brian Easton

With Hard Labour: the Case Of Alice Parkinson (review)

This entry was posted in Listener, Literature and Culture on by .

by Carol Markwell, directed by Phillip Mann and Jo Kahl, Suter Gallery Theatre, Nelson.

Listener: 21 January, 1995.

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

A central problem in women’s suffrage year was how to recognize all women and not just the good and the great: ordinary women and their experiences, like falling in love, getting pregnant, and getting jilted. Real enough events to tens of thousands of women, illustrative of the economic and biological asymmetry of the genders, but largely ignored officially or, if remembered, deplored.

Righting a Wrong

This entry was posted in Listener, Regulation & Taxation on by .

Listener: 21 January, 1995.

Keywords: Regulation & Taxation;

Roger Douglas’ tax policies have come in for unfair criticism from the Business Roundtable. The attack first appeared in a letter by Roundtable member Alan Gibbs, which accompanied a report the BRT had commissioned, on the burden of taxation. Gibbs wrote that the “estimates are high. The bucket transferring wealth (sic) via government is certainly a very leaky one – at least at the margin!”

Contributions to listener Books Of the Year:1994

This entry was posted in History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Listener, Literature and Culture on by .

Listener: 24 December, 1994.
Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Literature and Culture;

Edward Said’s exciting 1993 Reith lectures are now published as Representations of the Intellectual (Vintage $16.95). With passion and conviction he puts intellectuals at the centre of civilization and at the margins of society, charging them with the moral duty to address the public, as an outsider independent of government and corporation. The short book, only 90 pages, is packed with inspiration, replete with eminently quotable passages. I want to give it to all my friends who walk the lonely path of the intellectual, to say that they are not alone, that the isolation they experience is integral to their chosen profession.

A painter who walked such a lonely path is commemorated in Francis Hodgkins: Paintings and Drawings (AUP, $59.95) by Iain Buchanan, Michael Dunn, and Elizabeth Eastmond. A gorgeous selection of her subtle and sensuous works: images worth pouring over, in the way one savour’s Said’s ideas.

Poorer, but Wiser

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation on by .

Listener: 17 December, 1994.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;


This is an update on the original graph.

Many people think that our post war record has been one of continuous economic decline relative to other rich countries of the OECD. The accompanying graph tells a different story. The black lines show the volume GDP (production in constant prices) growth paths for the OECD as a whole. The top line is indexed at 1000 in 1955, the middle at 790 in 1955, and the bottom at 700. Over these three lines is superimposed the red volume GDP growth path for New Zealand.

Cost Effectiveness and Prescribing: What the Young Prescriber Needs to Know

This entry was posted in Health on by .

Paper to “The Young Prescriber in the Therapeutic Milieu”, ASCEPT Satellite Program, December 4th, 1994, Published in “Australian Prescriber”, Vol 19, Supplement 1, 1996, p.25-27.   Keywords: Health;   Introduction   Crucial to the health economist’s perspective, it is unethical to be wasteful – to use unnecessary resources. [1] Such inefficiency means that resources that…
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Measuring Inflation

This entry was posted in Listener, Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Listener19 November 1994, republished in Inflation: A Sixth Form Resource, Reserve Bank of New Zealand).

Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Statistics;

The Reserve Bank Act requires the Bank to attain and maintain price stability, but it does not define “price stability”. Practically that is defined in the Policy Targets Agreement (PTA) between the Minister of Finance and its Governor. Currently the PTA requires monetary policy to be managed so that the Consumer Price Index (CPI), with modifications discussed below, remains in a 0 to 2 percent p.a. range.

The Maori in the Labour Force

This entry was posted in Labour Studies, Maori on by .

Labour Employment Work in New Zealand, 1994, p.206-213.

Keywords: Labour Studies; Maori;

Executive Summary

* The Maori is in an inferior position in the labour force compared to the non-Maori.

* The Maori are more likely to be Not-in-the-Labour Force and more likely to be unemployed.

* When these two effects are combined together the Maori unemployment rate is not the 2.7 times the non-Maori rate that the official definitions showed in 1991, but 3.9 for males and 4.5 times for females.

* The analysis confirms that when the Maori is employed, they are more likely to be in the secondary part of the labour market, that is with low quality jobs in terms of renumeration, working conditions, career opportunities, and job security.

* Crucial for understanding the labour market is the flux between the unemployed, those not-in-the-labour market, and those in secondary employment. This churning means there is a dynamic process going on.

* Because of the higher incidence of not-in-the-labour force, and in secondary employment it is unwise to focus on Maori unemployment. At issue is the high proportion of the Maori in the secondary labour market in comparison with the non-Maori. Some policies merely shift people between the different parts of the secondary labour market.

* Econometric work suggests that only one third of the difference between Maori and non-Maori employment participation can be explained by the personal characteristics measured in the population census.

* The report acknowledges there may be other personal characteristics not measured, which also have an influence.

* However it seems likely that the most important determinants of the differences are social variables, summarized in the concept of “maoriness”. A possible practical example is that it is known that the most important source of job recruitment involves family and friends. The Maori is handicapped in doing this because of their lower employment rates, but also possibly because the Maori network is not as geared as the non-Maori family to carry out this task.

Family Policy: Creative or Destructive?

This entry was posted in Social Policy on by .

Address to the 1994 St Andrews Trust for the Study of Religion and Society, What Future the Family?, November 3, 1994.

Keywords Social Policy

During the nineteenth century, three political economies – ways of organizing the economy and society – competed for New Zealand.(1) The Maori political economy, although initially successful as the indigenous people took up the challenge of the new opportunities from European contact, faded in the later part of the century as the Maori population and ownership of resources declined from war, disease, alienation of land, and loss of rangatiratanga. I shall have little more to say about the Maori, for theirs is a story which deserves more space and competence than I have here.

Crises in the Cris: the Science Reforms Have Been Failed

This entry was posted in Governance, Growth & Innovation, Listener on by .

Listener 22 October 1994.

Keywords Governance, Growth & Innovation

We were told that the separation of scientific research funding and providing would result in better research. (The funder is the Foundation of Research, Science and Technology – FRST, pronounced “forst”; the main providers are with corporatized profit oriented Crown Research Institutes – CRIs, pronounced “crises”).

Economic and Other Ideas Behind the New Zealand Reforms

This entry was posted in Growth & Innovation, History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy, Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, vol 10, no 3. pp.78-94 ( This article benefited from comments by Keith Jackson and John Martin, and from the symposium editor Gerry Holtham,)

Keywords: Growth & Innovation; History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Macroeconomics & Money;

I. Introduction

From 1984 to the early 1990s New Zealand undertook a major reform of the mechanisms used to govern the economy and the public administration. These reforms are often called ‘rogernomics’, after Roger Douglas, the Minister of Finance who instigated them, and the reformers are known as ‘rogernomes’. The reforms might be called the application of “economic rationalism”, which Michael Pusey defines as the “doctrine that says that markets and prices are the only reliable means of setting a value [for public purposes] on anything, and … that markets and money can always, at least in principle, deliver better outcomes than states and bureaucracies” (Pussey 1993:14, original’s italics).

Approaching Family Economic Issues: Holistically or Pathologically?

This entry was posted in Distributional Economics, Social Policy on by .

Revised version of the prepared paper for the International Year of the Family, Family Rights and Responsibilities Symposium, 14-16 October, 1994 Wellington.

Keywords Distributional Economics; Social Policy

This is a paper about families with dependent children. (1) It ignores those which only adults, including independent children, and the broader issue of extended families, including whanau and hapu. The paper is further confined to only the economic aspects of the family with dependent children.

Towards a Political Economy Of New Zealand: the Tectonics Of History

This entry was posted in Political Economy & History on by .

The 1994 Hocken Annual Lecture, University of Otago, 6 October, 1994, published by the Hocken Library, 1996.

Keywords: Political Economy & History;

Introduction

As the first economist to be invited to present a Hocken lecture, I take it my task is to argue that the economy is integral to understanding history. It is a challenge I accept willingly, for in recent years the study of New Zealand history has usually ignored economic forces.

The Measurement Of Output: GDP

This entry was posted in Statistics on by .

This was written as Appendix 1.1 for an early draft of In Stormy Seas. In the process of reducing the text for publication it was dropped, but it turns up ghost like on page 11). This version is from the September 1994 version.

Keywords: Statistics;

Economists typically measure the output of an economy by Gross Domestic Product (at market prices), or GDP, that is the market production for some period usually over a year, or sometimes three months (a quarter). The basic notion is that the production of each commodity – good or service – is valued at market prices and totalled up, after deducting inputs.[1] It is a measure fraught with subtle assumptions.

OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM

This entry was posted in Listener, Macroeconomics & Money on by .

Listener: 27 August, 1994. Keywords: Macroeconomics & Money; Should we be amused or amazed at the confidence of some economic commentators? While serious analysts struggle to understand what is happening, and what happened in the past, the prima donnas tell us, with a certainty only belied by their consistently poor forecasting record.   Such gloomy…
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CHARGING STUDENTS

This entry was posted in Education, Listener on by .

Listener: 13 August, 1994   Keywords: Education;   You might think on the basis of their public stance that all university economists support higher tertiary fees. Ten economists from the Auckland University Department of Economics wrote a 1987 report advocating student loans and student related to tuition costs. This was seized by the Wellington professor…
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THE CHURCH, THE WELFARE STATE, AND THE NEW CHALLENGES

This entry was posted in History of Ideas, Methodology, Philosophy on by .

Presentation to the Seminar on “Social Services: Church-State Relationships” sponsored by the New Zealand Council of Christian Social Services, at Connelly Hall, Guildford Terrace, Wellington, July 28, 1994.   Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;   While the origins of the Christian Church are humble – itinerant preachers living on the hospitality of those…
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