The American evidence is that they frequently do not. For over a century there was a separate Department of Labour, which was amalgamated into that vast miscellaneous department, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment. Today there is no Minister of Labour, while the portfolios of workplace relations and safety and of immigration are held…
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Are we too focused on material consumption at the expense of wellbeing? GDP is a measure of market activity. It was originally developed to understand what was happening to the market economy, especially about the rise in unemployment during the Great Depression. It was never intended to summarise all human economic activity. For more than…
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Presentation to Auckland U3A Meadowbank, 21 August I have been asked to talk about New Zealand’s economic history and what we might learn from it which sheds light on the future of the economy. I shall have to be selective. Not in Narrow Seas: The Economic History of Aotearoa New Zealand is 250,000 words. In…
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There is insufficient support for neoliberal economic policies so political parties of the hard right are adopting populist causes. To succeed the neoliberal revolution of Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson had to change the culture of New Zealanders from their belief that the government was usually the solution to a problem to a society which…
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Paul Krugman described behavioural economics as the most important innovation in the economics discipline for half a century.[1] Three decades ago, I reviewed The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomalies of Economic Life by Richard Thaler which reported behaviour which appeared anomalous according to the economist’s standard model of ‘rational economic man’. Anomalies are at the…
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The 2026 World Happiness Report challenges us to think differently about economics and about New Zealand. The New Zealand media reported the latest World Happiness Report with the single headline that New Zealand ranked 11th. It deserved more attention for there is much to be learned from the report and the 14 earlier ones. The…
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Chapter 2 of ‘In Open Seas’. Ignoring the fact that humans are social has been a failing of much economic policy thinking. It underpinned the neoliberal changes on the 1980s and 1990s which were based upon the assumption that an individual’s consumption or income was the focus of policy. But a person’s income (or consumption)…
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Land and Money: How Britain colonised Australasia in the long 19th century by John Lepper 2 vols, Kerr Publishing. This review was published in Newsroom on 19 February, 2026 Some decades ago, a colleague was presenting a paper on the peripheral labour force – today we call it the ‘precariat’ – to a room of…
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The tensions between different approaches to the economy are surfacing as the election nears. As we head towards next year’s election, the tensions between the coalition partners are becoming increasingly evident. There are always these tensions, even before MMP when there were but two significant parties, but they were hidden within the caucuses. For instance,…
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What have the 2025 Nobel awards in economics to say to us? One of the economic puzzles of human existence is that for most of it, going back to its beginnings, the material standard of living did not change much. Then, about 200 years ago, it began increasing; in some places more than others but…
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We should not assume that all adopted innovations are progressive. Jonathon Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ illustrates that sometimes they require social measures to enhance well being. The Anxious Generation is a book which probably everyone engaging with adolescents should read. Haidt’s thesis is that smartphones replacing flip phones led to a marked deterioration in the…
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The Government’s plans to remove the wellbeing provisions in the Public Finance Act represents a reversal of the way society is travelling. I welcomed the Ardern-Robertson’s Government decision to focus on wellbeing in its budgets. It went on to amend the Public Finance Act to require the government to state the wellbeing objectives that will…
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While many of the world’s Christian religions seem preoccupied with personal issues that Jesus, their founder, barely touched upon, they must engage with economic issues too. Robert Prevost, chose the name Leo on becoming the 267th Bishop of Rome – the Pope – in homage to Leo XIII (in office 1878-1903) who issued the 1891…
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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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