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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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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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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Recommendations 1. That Parliament should not proceed with the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill. 2. That Parliament endorse the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi as set out by the Court of Appeal in New Zealand Māori Council v Attorney-General (1987) (C.A. 54/87), while acknowledging that the understandings of Te Tiriti o Waitangi…
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How the Prospect Theory of Behavioural Economics Makes Economic Analysis Difficult Behavioural economics has been described as the most revolutionary thing which has happened to economics for ages. The notion that people do not behave like ‘rational economic men’ (women are mainly ignored) undermines the microeconomic foundations of the subject. Not the empirical evidence on…
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This is a response to Jim Wilson’s account to his spiritual journey related in ‘From Yahweh to Papatuanuku: My Long Road Home’. His is a far richer and more interesting story than mine. I’d summarise myself as child of the Enlightenment or – perhaps more accurately– the eighth-plus grandchild of the Enlightenment. I also describe…
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How to run a successful pressure group. In 2013 a group of idealists, led by Jordan Williams and David Farrar, established the Taxpayers’ Union. To celebrate its first decade as surely New Zealand’s most successful political pressure group NZTU published The Mission: The Taxpayers Union at 10, ten short interviews (by David Cohen) of people associated…
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The 2018 Social Security Act suggests that Labour may have retreated to the minimalist (neo-liberal) welfare state which has developed out of the Richardson-Shipley ‘redesign’. One wonders what Michael Joseph Savage, Peter Fraser and Walter Nash would have thought of the Social Security Act passed by the Ardern Labour Government in 2018. Its principles were…
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Commentary on Malcolm McKinnon’s Poverty and Progress in New Zealand: thoughts on WB Sutch’s work in historical and intellectual context. Stout Research Centre, 24 April, 2024 When Bill Sutch was first told by his physician that he had advanced terminal cancer, he responded ‘that can’t possibly be true, I have far too much to do’….
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This is a background to my column ‘Te Tiriti as a Social Contract’. (February 2024) In 1956, historian Ruth Ross presented her investigations of the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 to a seminar concluding, ‘The [Māori and Pakeha] signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of [Te Tiriti’s] meaning;…
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Interpreting the agreement made at Waitangi as a social contract is a way to move forward on treaty issues. (This column follows ‘Our Understandings Of Te Tiriti Has Evolved Organically’.) Te Tiriti is in the form of a social contract of the sort that political theorists have discussed since the seventeenth century to explain how…
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Review in ‘Newsroom’ 9 May, 2023 In 1972, The New Zealand Journal of History published the article “Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and Translations” by Ruth Ross (1920-1982). Its impact continues 50 years later, and is likely to remain significant in another 50 years. It’s one of the most influential pieces of work by a…
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Presentation to U3A Southland series on Housing in NZ, via ZOOM, 17 February, 2023. Throughout my life as a professional economist, I have been challenged by the question of whether goods and services should be provided privately or publicly. I recall in the 1960s, when there were strong calls for nationalisation of many things, the…
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Brian Easton (Journalist) Interviews Brian Easton (Economist) Part I is IN OPEN SEAS: PART I: On the Seashore: (1943-1970); Part II is IN OPEN SEAS: Part II: Launched (1970-1986). Part II and Part III were going to be published as a companion pieces in Asymmetric Information but there have been no issues since August 2021 Why did…
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Brian Easton (Journalist) Interviews Brian Easton (Economist) Part I is IN OPEN SEAS: PART I: On the Seashore: (1943-1970) This was going to be published as a companion piece in Asymmetric Information but there have been no issues since August 2021 From Sussex University to Canterbury University? It was very different economics department in 1970…
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New Zealand International Review November/December 2021 Vol 46, No 6 p.26-7. LABOUR SAVING: A Memoir by Michael Cullen (Allen and Unwin, Auckland, 432pp, $50) In the 40 years since Muldoon’s reign, the predominant form of national political leadership has been a dual premiership in which, broadly, the prime minister manages the politics and the co-premier…
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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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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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