There are politicians who are more than a comms team. Prime Minister Geoffrey Palmer was not doing well in 1990, so he announced his government would halve unemployment. That would have been an impressive achievement – then the unemployment rate was about 5 percent – so much so, it gave the government a temporary boost…
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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney outlines an architecture For some decades the United States of America domination of the world has been falling. This is most obvious in economic terms. The US is no longer the world’s largest economy. It is easy to say that China is because of it has larger a population but…
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New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger nations. Among the news websites I read is a British daily which once a week interviews a local writer on the books they grew up reading and which influenced them. That’s fifty-odd a year; most interviews…
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This column is a response to the complaint that we have poor economic performance because we have summer holidays. It praises them. Summertime, and the living is easy. We used to take our kids to Coes Ford on the Selwyn River near Christchurch for mucking around in the water. Great memories. Apparently, you can’t nowadays….
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The government is still borrowing for consumption. I do not think anyone understands the politics of the spat between Ruth Richardson, who chairs the Taxpayers Union, and Nicola Willis – including those two. The underlying economic issue is analytically clearer. The technical term for it is ‘fiscal consolidation’. It is easiest to understand it by…
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How we connect economically with the world is critical. The British Labour Government is struggling. Partly it is because they were badly prepared in opposition; the Conservative Government was making such a charlie of itself that Labour expected that it would do better and gave little thought as to how it might. But while it…
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The Minister of Finance says it is but, parochialism aside, are we doing anything to ensure it really is? One of the necessary skills of a politician is to hold on to at least two contradictory positions at once. * Consider how, following the report of 72,000 New Zealanders ‘permanently’ leaving the country in the…
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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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It even happens in New Zealand. Local autonomy suffers. While Donald Trump may be democracy’s greatest political bully, he is not alone. It happens in New Zealand, not only in the offices of politicians and whips dealing with caucus. Cabinet ministers practise it in public, not least towards local government. L ocal governments are legally…
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Big Corporations Are Not What We Think They Are John Kay has been widely described as ‘one of the greatest economists of our time’. He is well grounded in economic theory and has taught it. He is rich with practical experience, both as a consultant and a corporate director, which he melds shrewdly with the…
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With his ‘I have the right to do anything I wanna do. I’m the president of the United States.’ Donald Trump is echoing Louis XIV who may have said ‘L’état, ce’est moi’ – ‘I am the state.’* The founding fathers of the American constitution were mindful of the authoritarian streak in English royalty; some had…
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What are the economic and political implications if the New Zealand economy stagnates for five and more years? Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told Morning Report that ‘We’ve got the worst recession* we have had in 30 years’. (Observe, he could have said ‘since the Rogernomics Stagnation which finished 30 years ago’, but some things may…
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What can Econ101 tell us about Trump’s tariffs? Before reviewing the economics of tariffs as indirect taxes, here is a brief account of their constitutional role. In particular, in some jurisdictions, including New Zealand, taxes and therefore tariffs are the preserve of Parliament, not that of the executive or kings. England’s civil war is complicated…
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The Government’s Growth Strategy Seems to Have Little Analytic Content. In 1990, the Prime Minister, Geoffrey Palmer, announced that he would halve unemployment – its rate was then more than 7 percent of the labour force. An OIA request turned up no technical papers. Apparently, the PM’s political advisers – jock wankers/politicos – thought the…
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Angus Deaton’s Economics in America challenges the direction that economics has taken. In 2015 Angus Deaton was the sole awardee of the Bank of Sweden’s Prize in Honour of Alfred Nobel, for his contributions in the study of ‘consumption, poverty and welfare’. (It has been relatively rare for this Nobel to recognise poverty or welfare;…
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Winning office is not the same as achieving change. A recent Economist columnist divided politicians and their political advisers into either ‘jock wankers’ or ‘nerd wankers’. It’s a distinction which I use here, but with the less pejorative ‘politicos’ and ‘policy wonks’. In opposition, the politicos are primarily concerned with getting their party elected; in…
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Why is the British Labour Government penalising its poor? We have the spectacle of the Starmer-led British Labour Government taking measures which are making some of the most struggling Brits worse off. It has got to the point where Labour’s parliamentary backbench is revolting and the government has had to make partial concessions – the…
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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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Why Government borrowing is limited This column started out to explain how the proposed structural outsourcing of public surgery was partly a consequence of the peculiarities of our fiscal borrowing practices. In summary, the restriction on the government’s debt level means seeking indirect ways to provide the required capital. One way of doing this is…
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Trump may be accelerating the decline of US power. In the 2004 film Downfall (Der Untergang), which portrays Hitler’s last days in a Berlin bunker, he says that if the German people are weak they deserve death. It is a view from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche who argued that conflicts are won by those with the…
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