Author Archives: Brian Easton

A Proposal for an Earnings-Related Redundancy Insurance Protection.

1          Summary 1.1       This short paper sets out a scheme for reducing the shock of lost income from redundancy. 2          Preliminaries: Dealing with a Private Market Failure 2.1       This proposal arises because the private market has not been able to provide adequate income protection for those who become unemployed from redundancy. In particular…
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Notes on ‘Rentier Capitalism’

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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Designing a The Primary Macropolicy Wellbeing Indicator

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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We Must Avoid Treating Māori As Living Fossils.

There are times when tikanga needs to be broken for tikanga to survive. I recently gave a presentation on Māori economic history based on my Not in Narrow Seas. Its most important message was that Māori proved to be a very adaptable people continually evolving as new opportunities arose. The European tradition recalls the Duke…
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A Brief History of the Māori Economy: How Things Change

Presentation to a Statistics New Zealand Seminar, 23 February, 2021. Māori involvement in the economy has been an integral part of New Zealand’s story, even if we ignore the first 500 years when there was only a Māori economy. Unlike many of our histories, Not in Narrow Seas does not. There are about 40,000 words…
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The Sources Of House Price Inflation.

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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Is The King Above The Law?

While many readers will say ‘the king is certainly not above the law’, not everyone believes that, especially if they are in power. The term ‘democracy’ is complicated and often used misleadingly. For instance, the ‘German Democratic Republic’ (a.k.a. East Germany), which was a part of the Soviet Empire, had one male in four reporting…
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Opening Pandora’s American Box

All nations have shadows; some acknowledge them. For others they shape their image in uncomfortable ways. The staunch Labour supporter was in despair at what her Rogernomics Government was doing. But she finished ‘at least, we got rid of Muldoon’, a response which tells us that then, and today, one’s views of Robert Muldoon, prime…
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Reviews of Not in Narrow Seas

Michael Reddell. ‘Not in Narrow Seas’, Croaking Cassandra, May 30, 2020. Brian Fallow: ‘Progress of NZ Economy Has Been a Rocky Road’ Herald, 20 June 2020. Joan Druett: ‘Not in Narrow Seas’, World of the Written Word. 21 June 2020. Shamubeel Eaqub: ‘Brian Easton Will Now Harrumph’, Newsroom, July 2, 2020 Max Harris: ‘Book Review…
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ECONOMISTS AT WAR: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars: Alan Bollard

New Zealand International Review, January/February 2021 Vol 46, No 1: p.28-29 (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2020, 321pp, £20) The outcome of a long war is usually determined by the economic strength of the combatants. But how to present this in a lively and interesting way — battles are so much more engaging? Alan Bollard successfully…
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