As Lady Bracknell almost said, ‘to lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’ And so a second Government Statistician has made a hasty exit, The official reason in each case was the management of the population census but the cult of generic management is the underlying failure Generic…
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A note written for some younger economics colleagues. I was lucky when I was on the Treasury Forecasting Panel (from about 1998 to 2008) that Jas McKenzie was on it too and we could discuss our experiences. Generally, our approach was that they were the Treasury forecasts and that our task was to help them…
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Some analysis by a social statistician. A note for myself. On 20 November 2024 around 42,000 people crowded in and around Parliament Grounds nominally protesting against the Treaty Principles Bill after a Hīkoi which came from the North Cape and the Far South. What exactly was going on was more than just a protest against…
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A note written for some younger economics colleagues. I was lucky when I was on the Treasury Forecasting Panel (from about 1998 to 2008) that Jas McKenzie was on it too and we could discuss our experiences. Generally, our approach was that they were the Treasury forecasts and that our task was to help them…
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Since 2008 Statistics New Zealand has measured material hardship in households with seventeen questions in the Household Economic Survey. This note reports on my brief exploration.[1] The Unit of Measurement The hardship questions are asked of a household and responses are reported on that base. The data reported below is by individuals so a household…
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‘It has been said that figures rule the world. Maybe. I am quite sure that it is figures which show us whether it is being ruled well or badly.’ Goethe I was struck at a recent conference on equity for the elderly, how many presenters implicitly relied upon Statistics New Zealand. We take SNZ for…
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Note written for circulation in March 2024 This note explores housing tenure in the part of the distribution where the poverty line is, defining the line by the SNZ material hardship indicator. The note does not explore the AHC income-expenditure measure,[1] partly because there are insufficient observations but mostly because, as explained in the appendix,…
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Note written for circulation, December 2023 Ethnicity is not a well-defined notion for the majority of the population, but when asked for ‘official’ purposes (usually with a choice of tick boxes) most can ethnically identify themselves. (Typically, they may check as many ethnicities as they wish.) In the Population Census data used here there is…
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This is an exploratory study and may be of little value. By way of background, I observed a Kings Fund study which ranked the British health system with a group of other affluent OECD countries. I thought it would be interesting to do this for New Zealand. I got deviated when I found an…
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Introduction: The focus of this paper is on macroeconomic management and not on the entirety of economic policy. There are many issues which macroeconomic interventions cannot address. To use macroeconomic instruments, rather than the relevant targeted instrument, will blunt the effectiveness of macropolicy interventions. Reflecting, this paper is really a critique of the current primary…
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I have been gripped by the World Oddometer’s daily reports tracking the covid statistics. In a way it was a rejection of Stalin’s ‘one death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic’; I have watched with agony the paths of various countries. But this statistician knew that the data reflected reported deaths from covid,…
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Summary:. Methane (CH4) is a greenhouse gas. Some methane comes from atmospheric carbon-dioxide which is fixed in grass, eaten by livestock, belched into the atmosphere and eventually returns to atmospheric carbon-dioxide. Before it breaks down, the methane molecules form a ‘cloud’ in the atmosphere which adds to global warming at a much higher rate per…
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I was commissioned by the ‘Dominion Post’ to write an opinion piece as part of their review of the anniversary of the 2018 Census. This is a slightly revised version of what they published. The main article is ‘365 days and still counting: Census results still nowhere to be seen’. An earlier ‘Pundit’ column is ‘The…
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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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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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Big data can be used for good and it can be used for evil. Some recent public research illustrates the former but there are doubts about some private uses. It is not generally realised that Statistics New Zealand has a large research database – the Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) – containing microdata about people and households from…
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Last week’s report on wellbeing and the household income distribution told us some new things. Are we listening? Sadly, the latest MSD report The Material Wellbeing of NZ Households, by Bryan Perry, released last week, passed by quickly. It said, broadly, that there is no obviously significant shift in the level of inequality in recent years….
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Speech at the launch of the VUP Book, 29 July, 2014. Keywords: Statistics; I want to begin by paying a tribute to Jack Baker who was Government Statistician between 1958 and 1969. I first met him as a lecturer in economics statistics as a part of my second year economics course – yes the Government…
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Symposium on Inequality: Causes and Consequences June 19, 2014 Keywords: Distributional Economics; Statistics; Introduction The purpose of this paper is to present some data on top market incomes in New Zealand. It updates an earlier paper by one year to 2011/2 and extends the estimates it back to 1936/7 . The background to…
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Statistical errors aren’t unusual – so it’s important to measure their effects. Listener: 13th March, 2014 Keywords: Distributional Economics; Statistics; There was a bit of flapdoodle recently when the Treasury and Statistics New Zealand owned up to having made an error in some household income statistics, which had a knock-on effect on…
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