Brian Easton

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;

The theory of economics does not furnish a body of settled conclusions immediately applicable to policy. It is a method rather than a doctrine, an apparatus of the mind, a technique for thinking, which helps the possessor to draw correct conclusions.

Listener 18 August, 2001.

Keywords: Governance

A recent Treasury working paper Review of Evidence on Broad Outcome of Public Sector Management Regime reveals that despite the upheaval in the public sector of the last twelve years, there has been surprisingly little evaluation of the changes, and the little of which there is has not been of very high quality. Even more striking is the almost complete absence of the public’s perceptive in the evaluations. The assumption is that no-one was worse off as a result of the changes, although every ordinary member of the public has tales to the contrary. The official studies implicitly reflect an arrogant antipathy to New Zealanders, as if the state sector is only for the state servants and their political masters, and the public are just an irrelevant nuisance.

Listener 4 August 2001

Keywords Business & Finance; Growth & Innovation

Despite being used as a text book in some business schools in the 1990s, Theory K: The Key to Excellence in New Zealand Management was always a bit of a joke, for the crash of October 1987 put an end to some of its best examples of ‘excellent’ New Zealand businesses. The book devotes most space to Equiticorp (although a number of other did-not-survives were also praised). One is left wondering how a firm founded only two years before the book was published could be given such prominence. (You will find part of the answer in Ollie Newman’s “Lost Property”, which explains how public relations had a key role in gulling the investor public. )

Report prepared for the Canadian Centre for Substance Abuse by Eric Single (coordinator–Canada), David Collins (Australia), Brian Easton (New Zealand), Henrick Harwood (United States), Helen Lapsley (Australia), Pierre Kopp (France) and Ernesto Wilson (Colombia).

This report was published by the World Health Organisation in September 2003.

Keywords: Health Economics

This revised edition of these guidelines represent modifications and additions to the first edition of the International Guidelines on Estimating the Social and Economic Costs of Substance Abuse, based on discussions held at the Third International Symposium on Estimating the Economic and Social Costs of Substance Abuse, held in Banff, Alberta, Canada, in 2000.

Executive Summary

New Zealand Books August 2001, p.8-9.

Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy; Political Economy & History;

Shaun Goldfinch’s Remaking New Zealand and Australian Policy: Ideas, Institutions, and Policy Communities is the latest version of what is becoming the standard account of the origins, implementation, and outcomes of the economic changes of the 1980s and 1990s. It goes something like this.