Commentary on Malcolm McKinnon’s Poverty and Progress in New Zealand: thoughts on WB Sutch’s work in historical and intellectual context. Stout Research Centre, 24 April, 2024 When Bill Sutch was first told by his physician that he had advanced terminal cancer, he responded ‘that can’t possibly be true, I have far too much to do’….
Continue reading this entry »
This is a background to my column ‘Te Tiriti as a Social Contract’. (February 2024) In 1956, historian Ruth Ross presented her investigations of the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 to a seminar concluding, ‘The [Māori and Pakeha] signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of [Te Tiriti’s] meaning;…
Continue reading this entry »
Review in ‘Newsroom’ 9 May, 2023 In 1972, The New Zealand Journal of History published the article “Te Tiriti o Waitangi: Texts and Translations” by Ruth Ross (1920-1982). Its impact continues 50 years later, and is likely to remain significant in another 50 years. It’s one of the most influential pieces of work by a…
Continue reading this entry »
Presentation to U3A Southland series on Housing in NZ, via ZOOM, 17 February, 2023. Throughout my life as a professional economist, I have been challenged by the question of whether goods and services should be provided privately or publicly. I recall in the 1960s, when there were strong calls for nationalisation of many things, the…
Continue reading this entry »
Brian Easton (Journalist) Interviews Brian Easton (Economist) Part I is IN OPEN SEAS: PART I: On the Seashore: (1943-1970); Part II is IN OPEN SEAS: Part II: Launched (1970-1986). Part II and Part III were going to be published as a companion pieces in Asymmetric Information but there have been no issues since August 2021 Why did…
Continue reading this entry »
Brian Easton (Journalist) Interviews Brian Easton (Economist) Part I is IN OPEN SEAS: PART I: On the Seashore: (1943-1970) This was going to be published as a companion piece in Asymmetric Information but there have been no issues since August 2021 From Sussex University to Canterbury University? It was very different economics department in 1970…
Continue reading this entry »
New Zealand International Review November/December 2021 Vol 46, No 6 p.26-7. LABOUR SAVING: A Memoir by Michael Cullen (Allen and Unwin, Auckland, 432pp, $50) In the 40 years since Muldoon’s reign, the predominant form of national political leadership has been a dual premiership in which, broadly, the prime minister manages the politics and the co-premier…
Continue reading this entry »
Brian Easton (Journalist) Interviews Brian Easton (Economist) Published in Asymmetric Information, Issue 71 August 2021. You grew up in Christchurch? In Somerfield, in the south of the city, in a state house the family bought. Dad was an electrician who in the middle of his life became a psychopaedic nurse. Mum was a clerical worker…
Continue reading this entry »
The Marginal Revolutionaries: How Austrian Economists Fought the War of Ideas: Janek Wasserman (Yale University Press; 2019) Asymmetric Information, Issue No. 70 / April 2021 p.7-8. Mentioning to colleagues that I was reading a book on Austrian economists almost invariably led to strong responses – sometimes positive, more often negative. But, typically, their responses were…
Continue reading this entry »
In the Abstract: Will Most Of Us Have an Impoverished Retirement? (June 6, 1998) Richard Thaler’s Savings Principles (7 January 1999) Two Styles Of Management (1 July 1999) This reviews Thaler, R.H. (1992) The Winner’s Curse: Paradoxes and Anomolies of Economic Life, Princeton University Press; Thaler, R.H. (1994) Quasi Rational Economics, Russell…
Continue reading this entry »
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…
Continue reading this entry »
Migration patterns provide further evidence that wellbeing is not simply measured by income. New Zealand’s GDP per person is about 20 percent lower than Australia’s. Some think that the difference arises because our economic policies have been inferior. They then leaps to arguing for new policies based on ideology rather than evidence. Frequently those policies…
Continue reading this entry »
Social philosophy in New Zealand is muddled and incomplete. This year, 2021, is the fiftieth anniversary of John Rawls’ The Theory of Justice, described as the most important book on political philosophy written in the twentieth century. As you might expect it is a big book (587 pages with a follow-up one of 464 pages)…
Continue reading this entry »
How Can We Make Wellbeing at the Centre of Public Policy If We Dont Measure It? When the Minister of Finance announced in the 2018 budget that in the future economic policy would focus more on wellbeing, many saw a glimmer of hope that we were moving away from the mechanical thinking which underpinned Rogernomics/neoliberalism….
Continue reading this entry »
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…
Continue reading this entry »
Policy Quarterly Vol 16 No 3 (2020) p.79-80. The earliest assessment of Jas that I recall is that he was ‘New Zealand’s John Stone’, referring to a towering secretary of the Australian Treasury. When I told Jas this, he was appalled because their political views were very different. I explained that the comparison arose because…
Continue reading this entry »
Unlike in some other places, the New Zealand Government decided that books were not essential goods and closed all bookshops during Alert Level 4. Even during Alert Level 3 you can only buy books online.
Bob Scott Lecture Series on Inequality, 25 June 2019. (See also Have We Abandoned the Egalitarian Society?) What I want to do this evening is examine egalitarianism. In particular, New Zealand is a less egalitarian society today than it was when I was growing up in the 1950s. Why? How? The structure of the paper…
Continue reading this entry »
A discussion on ‘Nights’ with Bryan Crump. 28 May, 2019 The audio is here. See also here.