Brian Easton

Listener 10 October, 1981, republished in Listener Bedside Book, (1997) p.313-314.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

“People should be made to see this,” the passenger exclaimed. He and a group of Europeans and Australasians had been stranded half way between West Germany and Australia, when an engine of our 747 ingested a vulture in Bombay. Now we were travelling by bus from the Bombay airfield to the hotel where we were to be put up while the engine was repaired.

Listener: 18 July, 1981.

Keywords: Globalisation & Trade;

The islands to our north present New Zealand with a number of economic social and political problems – the problems of how to treat neighbours who are small in numbers and materially poor, but significant to us in human terms (and perhaps of strategic importance). It would be so easy to neglect them or to use them for our convenience. However, in 1976 we took a more positive Islands Industrial Development Scheme (PIIDS).

Listener: 23 May, 1981.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;Macroeconomics & Money;

I once asked Dr W.B. Sutch how much Keynes had influenced the thinking of the first Labour Government. John Maynard Keynes’s book The General Theory of Employment and Money has been the most influential piece or economics writing this century in terms or its impact on both economic theory and economic policy. It explained how a government could practice deficit financing to increase employment.

Sutch, who was a government adviser in the 1930s, replied that Keynes had little influence. Rather, the government observed that housing materials were not being used, house builders were unemployed, and families desired houses, so that the Government ensured there was the finance to bring the builders and materials together to construct the houses that were needed.

Listener 23 May 1981.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

This book may well become a bible for advocates or the political right in New Zealand. Expressions from it (or from the television series on which it is based) are already gaining currency here. Yet such a fate would. be unfair to the Friedmans, and to New Zealand.

Listener: 25 April, 1981.

Keywords: Social Policy;

One of the curiosities of the 1970s is that although it was a period of economic stagnation, a number of important innovations were made in the income maintenance area.

The most radical was the introduction of the Accident Compensation Scheme. but others were National Superannuation, the Statutory Domestic Purposes Benefit, income tax rebates for families, and changes removing some of the discrimination against women, Even curiouser, most of these changes occurred under a National Government, which is not normally thought to be especially concerned with social security.

Listener: 28 February, 1981.

Keywords: Business & Finance;

With today’s fashion for advocating ‘more market”. it may be useful to consider the structure of New Zealand markets. A market may have one of many structures, and government intervention in each ought to reflect that.

If the market is highly competitive. with a large number of buyers and sellers, then much of the economic regulation may be left to it. With a single seller and many buyers, the government may have to limit the monopoly’s ability to abuse its own power There are many other market structures, including few sellers, many buyers and sole seller sole buyer.

Listener: 13 January, 1981.

Keywords: Growth & Innovation;

Many economists are developing a cautious optimism about the New Zealand economy. It is it view which has only the most tenuous links with the strident claims of faith in our future which we shall be hearing from the politicians this year, and the economist’s optimism may well survive the election.

The view is based on the assessment that after more than a decade of stagnation the processes, particularly in the farm sector, which drove the New Zealand economy on a growth path for d hundred years up to 1967 are beginning to reassert themselves.