Scoring Carbon Emissions.
Gilling’s Law, one of the most powerful laws in the social sciences, states that the way you score the game shapes the way it is played.* A simple example is that once rugby was boring with a typical...
View ArticleHeke Tangata, Māori in Markets and Cities
The cover of the book captures its theme. On the back is Whina Cooper with her granddaughter starting out on a lonely dirt road that seems to be going nowhere. The front cover shows the 1975 Land...
View ArticleWhat does the Labour’s first budget tell us?
According to the Treasury forecasts – which do not differ greatly from those of any other reputable forecasters – the economy is in a sweet spot. Output is expected to grow at about 2.9 percent a year...
View ArticleOf Foxes and Hedgehogs
The archaic Greek poet Archilochus (680-645BCE?) wrote ‘a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one important thing’ which is, presumably, why they survive.read more
View ArticleCommon Good Economics
Not long ago around half my friends were reading Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries and another half Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Few had the time to read both blockbusters.read more
View ArticleTrade Wars
I have thought that economists are especially passionate about international trade because it is an alternative to war. In order to acquire access to resources one does not need to invade, conquer and...
View ArticleEnabling Us to Assess Government Performance Better
Despite the hoopla at the time, the 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act (FRA) was an extension of the 1989 Public Finance Act (PFA) which set out new standards for the government accounts. The accounts are...
View ArticleHow’s the Government Doing?
Coming to office a month after the election, the new Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern promised ‘transformative’ rather than incremental government. The promise contrasted with the record of the...
View ArticleBad Statistics
The details are amusingly told on the Spinoff website, but briefly the NZ Herald reported an Auckland Transport survey of 1459 people which stated that ‘support for cycling overall is at 57 per cent,...
View ArticleBad Statistics
The details are amusingly told on the Spinoff website, but briefly the NZ Herald reported an Auckland Transport survey of 1459 people which stated that ‘support for cycling overall is at 57 per cent,...
View ArticleImproving the Child Poverty Reduction Bill
The proposed Child Poverty Reduction Bill is potentially world leading. However the mechanisms it proposes for the assessment and monitoring of poverty are primitive. As I said to the select committee,...
View ArticleTo Wed or not to Wed.
Once in the 1970s, I was approached by a producer about whether I had a proposition which could be debated on television. The idea was to use a court format with a jury of twelve to decide. I suggested...
View ArticleIs Democracy in Retreat?
Too often we discuss ‘democracy’ without defining the term; too frequently the result is talking at cross-purposes. This confusion has become acute in recent years when discussing whether ‘democracy’...
View ArticleAre Loans Income?
Had the Court come to any other conclusion, those businessmen jailed for fraudulently booking their business loan receipts as income (to hide a deficit in their flow of current receipts) would have...
View ArticleWhat this Economist Has Learnt From Brexit
I have found Brexit rivetting. As a piece of Econ 101, it is straight forward. (OK, I simplify; it is rare for first year students to study in any depth the implications of intra-industry trade, supply...
View ArticleImbalanced Trade
From my office window I can see the single lane at the end of a motorway, usually filled with a queue of slowly moving cars. The conventional wisdom is that it should be two-laned to remove the...
View ArticleWhat Should the Government Be Doing?
I am going to eschew the usual response of various specific policies (such as a capital gains tax, resolving the Working for Families mess, spending more on the arts or establishing something like...
View ArticleWhither Archives New Zealand and the National Library?
In 2010 the State Services Commission, in its bureaucratic arrogance, decided to merge Archives NZ and the National Library into the Department of Internal Affairs. National cabinet ministers, under...
View Article‘Business Opinion’ is falling. Does it matter?
When I was closely associated with a business opinion survey many years ago, we found that the responses about the state of the economy were virtually valueless. If you asked a business whether they...
View ArticleWinning Winston
One has been amused by the discovery by so many right-wing commentators that Winston Peters is not the devil incarnate that they have portrayed for twenty-five years and their surprise that he proved...
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