Migration patterns provide further evidence that wellbeing is not simply measured by income. New Zealand’s GDP per person is about 20 percent lower than Australia’s. Some think that the difference arises because our economic policies have been inferior. They then leaps to arguing for new policies based on ideology rather than evidence. Frequently those policies…
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Social philosophy in New Zealand is muddled and incomplete. This year, 2021, is the fiftieth anniversary of John Rawls’ The Theory of Justice, described as the most important book on political philosophy written in the twentieth century. As you might expect it is a big book (587 pages with a follow-up one of 464 pages)…
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How Can We Make Wellbeing at the Centre of Public Policy If We Dont Measure It? When the Minister of Finance announced in the 2018 budget that in the future economic policy would focus more on wellbeing, many saw a glimmer of hope that we were moving away from the mechanical thinking which underpinned Rogernomics/neoliberalism….
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Building more houses is not going to reduce house prices much (although it will help more people to be decently housed). The inflation driver is financial speculation based on leveraged borrowing. Until that is addressed, house prices will continue to boom. Policies based on theories which do not fit the facts are not going to…
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Bob Scott Lecture Series on Inequality, 25 June 2019. (See also Have We Abandoned the Egalitarian Society?) What I want to do this evening is examine egalitarianism. In particular, New Zealand is a less egalitarian society today than it was when I was growing up in the 1950s. Why? How? The structure of the paper…
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A discussion on ‘Nights’ with Bryan Crump. 28 May, 2019 The audio is here. See also here.
Ian Shirley (28 February 1940 – 20 January 2019) This obituary was first published in “The Policy Observatory” which Ian founded New Zealand’s progressive causes have been driven by a strong sense of social justice. Ian Shirley was one of the nation’s strongest drivers. He was born in Kaiapoi and spent his early years in…
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Presentation to the Wellington Statistics Group, 10 December, 2018 This year’s Child Poverty Reduction Act (CPRA) marks a major innovation in social policy. Politicians – here and overseas – have promised to eliminate child poverty at some date in the future. They never have and by the time the target date is reached the promisers…
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In my original submission on the Child Poverty Reduction Bill, I had a separate discussion proposing adding a section to the part of the bill which modifies the Oranga Tamariki Act (and will be eventually be separated out) requiring that in all activities involving a child, the best interests of the child should be paramount….
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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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But do we have the foggiest idea of what it means or how to do it well? Once upon a time, say 80 years ago back in the days of the First Labour government, ‘social investment’ referred to the government spending, including on education, health and children, which in the long run would add to…
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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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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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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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Following up my ‘AUT Policy Observatory’ report on ‘Housing Prices Relative to Consumer Prices: An Analysis’. Last week the Reserve Bank reported stress tests to assess the ability of borrowers to cope with higher mortgage interest rates. Assuming 7 percent p.a. – close to the average two-year mortgage rate over past decades – the RBNZ…
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This report was published by the AUT Policy Observatory. It’s abstract is This is an update of a note I wrote in April 2007. It uses a longer housing price series that starts in 1962 (instead of 1980) and finishes in 2016 (instead of 2007). It shows that while historically housing prices have risen a little faster than consumer prices, the…
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Or has Labour lost its clothes or forgotten how to put them on. Some Labour supporters are disturbed that the government seems to be stealing their policies. Probably National is shifting a bit to the centre, perhaps for electoral reasons (although the party is almost certainly more concerned with New Zealand First than Labour) and…
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AUT Policy Observatory May 2017 About this report This report is part of an ongoing series on urgent contemporary policy issues in Aotearoa New Zealand. This series has an objective of bringing academic research to bear on the economic, social and environmental challenges facing us today. The Policy Observatory Auckland University of Technology Private Bag…
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No, but we need to address poverty. Focusing on poverty targets which are not to be achieved in the time of the government which sets them is wasting energy and opportunity. Despite being frequently ignored, Gilling’s Law is one of the most powerful social laws I know. Formulated by Don Gilling, a retired professor of…
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