Indonesian Muslims don’t necessarily support the opinions and actions of Middle Eastern Muslims. Listener: 8 June, 2013 Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Literature and Culture; Political Economy & History; I once flew from Dublin to Vienna – both Catholic but with very different atmospheres. The distance from Mecca to Jakarta…
Continue reading this entry »
Draft for discussion; this version completed 24 May 2103. Keywords: Political Economy & History; Social Policy; Statistics; This note disinters a result I found in the 1970s and subsequently buried in Income Distribution in New Zealand. Years later it may have some relevance to some puzzles I am working on about the changing…
Continue reading this entry »
Our national airline no longer stops over there but New Zealanders should. Listener: 11 May, 2013 Keywords: Political Economy & History; The fall of Singapore in February 1942 signalled the end of the British Empire. It was not just that an Asian power had conquered one of its key outposts. Japan’s success…
Continue reading this entry »
It is said social scientists don’t live dangerously, but here’s one who did. Listener: 16 February, 2013. Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Political Economy & History; Miraculously, all four Jewish schoolboys in the picture (which accompanied the column) taken in Berlin in about 1930 escaped the Holocaust, which killed…
Continue reading this entry »
Sarah Miles: The Christchurch Fiasco: The Insurance Aftershock and its Implications for New Zealand and Beyond. Dunmore Publishing, 2012 ($37.99) New Zealand Books: Volume 23, No1, Issue 101, Autumn 2013. Keywords: Business & Finance; Political Economy & History; Given New Zealand’s reputation as ‘The Shaky Isles’, together with its accompanying history of…
Continue reading this entry »
This index, first compiled in January 2013 and subsequently updated, is a list of article on the website which have a substantial content about earthquakes and other natural calamities. They were not a focus until the Canterbury Earthquakes, which I began writing about as “Listener” columns to illustrate general issues. However, they are acquiring a…
Continue reading this entry »
This is an extract from the first chapter of the history book I am writing. In early 1855 there was an earthquake in the centre of Cook Strait, thought to be of a magnitude of about 8.1-8.2, the largest in human memory. [1] (Maori elders said there was no record in their traditions of an…
Continue reading this entry »
Young Labour Summer School; January 26, 2013 Today I want to talk about social democracy, especially its economic aspects. There are many who have narrowed down their vision of social democracy to social justice, including in international affairs. That is not the comprehensive heritage of social democracy, nor do social democrats have any special claims…
Continue reading this entry »
Writings on the Long Recession from October 2010 to December 2012 This is the third entry which summarises the Global Financial Crisis and its aftermath. The first index (www.eastonbh.ac.nz/?p=1351) covered the period from August 2007 to March 2009 The trigger was in the US sub-prime market crisis in August 2007, about a year before the…
Continue reading this entry »
During Rugby World Cup 2011, historian and editor of online encyclopedia Te Ara Jock Phillips searched for the “real New Zealand”. He trotted around museums and other earnest alternative exhibits, often rugby-related, reporting on what the non-rugby elite thought was important.
Published in “Foreign Control Watchdog” 131, December 2012: p. 22-27. In a feature article in the Christchurch Press John McCrone argues that the rebuild of earthquake-shaken Christchurch and its future development was being dominated – and distorted – by the Key Government’s approach of New Zealand Inc. (‘The Business of NZ Inc’, 8 September, 2012)….
Continue reading this entry »
What is to be Done about Light Handed Regulation? Paper to the Fabian Society, December 14, 2012. For Regulation and Leaky Buildings see http://www.eastonbh.ac.nz/?p=1686. This lecture was originally advertised as illustrating the deficiencies of light-handed regulation by failures in the building industry, particularly leaky buildings and those not robust to earthquakes. The intention was the…
Continue reading this entry »
Canterbury earthquake victims might have received quite different help but for a 1990 change in the political landscape. Listener: 15 November, 2012. In 1988, a ministerial paper proposed reforms to New Zealand’s earthquake insurance. It came 44 years after the Government had established the Earthquake and War Damage Commission that would pay out for damages…
Continue reading this entry »
Review in New Zealand Books: Summer 2012, p.23. While references to ‘fairness’ are riddled through New Zealand’s public rhetoric, how important is the notion in actual public policy? Every day someone sensitive to the issues of equity and inequality meets examples where their concerns are breached by those who, at best pay, lip service to…
Continue reading this entry »
This was an essay I wrote for a competition; when I realised it it did not not meet the competition rules, I did not submit it. While writing a history of New Zealand from an economic perspective, I have been continually confronted by the environment as an integral part of New Zealand’s history. This is…
Continue reading this entry »
This is an earlier version of a paper published in New Zealand Population Review, which was a festschrift to D. Ian Pool (Vol 7, 2011 p.178-182) Introduction In the course of writing Not in Narrow Seas: New Zealand History from an Economic Perspective I was found myself not only reporting demographic history, but using demography…
Continue reading this entry »
Introduction to a Fabian Society series on Light-handed Regulation, Wellington.10 September 2012 This is the first of five presentations on light-handed regulation. Its critics sometimes call it “light-headed” regulation, referring to the simple mindedness of the idea, or “light-fingered” regulation, referring to the way a goodly number used it to line their own pockets at…
Continue reading this entry »
St Andrew’s Study Trust lecture series: Living with Uncertainty; 4 September 2012 The notion of uncertainty – and risk, which as we shall see, is something else – is central to economics and the economies it describes. Of course there are external events which generate shocks like the Lisbon or Canterbury earthquakes. But today I…
Continue reading this entry »
National Institute of Demographic and Economic Analysis, University of Waikato Seminar: 23 August, 2012 ( am grateful to Joan Metge and Ian Pool for assistance with various aspects of this paper; the errors remain mine.) This paper is based on Chapter 34 the book I am writing: Not in Narrow Seas, which is a history…
Continue reading this entry »
Listener: 18 August, 2012. One of the reasons King Charles I was beheaded in 1649 was that, without Parliament’s approval, he raised taxes and spent the proceeds. Forty years later, after the Glorious Revolution, the English Parliament passed the Bill of Rights, requiring that the Crown tax or spend only with Parliament’s approval. That act…
Continue reading this entry »