Reducing External Political Interference in New Zealand: A Modest Proposal.
Bryan Gould has drawn attention to the dangers we face in New Zealand of foreign political interference by funding contributions to political activity. His apposite example is Chinese money being...
View ArticleValue and Price
My brother, Keith, died in the hospital wing of a Christchurch retirement home recently.read more
View ArticleHow Should We Run a Budget Deficit?
It is very easy to demand the government should run, or increase, its budget deficit, that is, it should spend more than its revenue and (one way or another) borrow the difference. Many think that is...
View ArticleWhere is Adult Education Going?
The initial invitation suggested I talk about the future economy and its relevance to adult education. I explained that the best advice I ever came across is ‘don’t make predictions, especially about...
View ArticleHave We a Housing Policy?
The Prime Minister’s announcement that there is nothing new about homelessness is both an example of his strengths in reassuring the public that there is never really a problem and the weaknesses of...
View ArticleThe Budget: A Longer Term Prognosis.
Our politics reminds me those weekly serial movies where each week the heroine ends in an impossible situation but next week she miraculously escapes and the action moves on to the next impossible...
View ArticleReading Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance
The economic columnist I most admire is John Kay, who writes regularly for the Financial Times. He taught at various universities, was director of the independent think tank, Institute for Fiscal...
View ArticleThe Economics of Information and the Newspaper Merger
An important notion in economic analysis is of a ‘public good’ (which may be a service). Not THE public good (a.k.a. the ‘common good’), which is shared and beneficial for all or most members of a...
View ArticleBrexit and Nostalgia
As I put up this column, the Brits are about to vote on Brexit – whether Britain should withdraw from the European Union. We do not know what the outcome will be, for the opinion surveys are all over...
View ArticleMicawber Down Under
Wilkens Micawber was incarcerated in a debtors' prison. It is said that he is modelled on Charles Dickens’ father, who suffered a similar fate. Meanwhile, his twelve-year-old son had to work in a...
View ArticleIn the Best Interests of Her Children?
My last column described how the punitive measures we had for dealing with debtors were only abolished in 1989. Yet others continue to suffer from oppressive legislation – if they are low enough in...
View ArticleMisleading Pop-economics and Populism
Journalists and other populisers get away with an economics which does not quite lie, but is often very misleading. This applies to Brexit, but let’s start off with the TPPA (Trans Pacific Partnership...
View ArticleHousing and Monetarism
The tensions between the Reserve Bank and the Government over housing policy go back to the mistaken economic thinking in the 1989 Reserve Bank Act. Monetarism ruled and it is that underlying...
View ArticlePolicy by Panic
Just nine years ago, John Key, then leader of the opposition, spoke to the Auckland branch of the New Zealand Contractors Federation about housing affordability which he described then as a ‘crisis...
View ArticleFrexit for New Caledonia?
New Zealand shares a continent with the European Union. Admittedly 93 percent of Zealandia is submerged beneath the Pacific Ocean but at its most north-western are the islands of New Caledonia with a...
View ArticleHow Much Migration?
To make the intentions of this column clear, I am generally in favour of migration. I am a descendant of immigrants and live in a country in which virtually everyone admits to a migration heritage and...
View ArticleWhat Are Universities Really For?
What are universities really for? was the topic of a recent lecture by Hugh Lauder, professor of Education and Political Economy at the University of Bath (previously on the Canterbury and VUW...
View ArticleAnother Ministry of Silly Walks?
In 1920, someone wrote in the Maoriland Worker,‘The politician is like the person who would build an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, instead of constructing a good fence at the top.’ The image...
View ArticleWill Housing Prices Crash?
Two eminent but retired Reserve Bankers, Don Brash and Arthur Grimes, have argued that house prices should halve. I am not sure whether they actually mean it or are just vividly pointing out that house...
View ArticleAre New Zealanders anti-intellectual?
Last June there was a kerfuffle in the online magazine Spinoff over attitudes to intellectual activity in New Zealand.read more
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