BBC Russian

IT’S IN THE BLOOD

Listener 19 December, 1992

Keywords: Health;

Richard Titmuss’s The Gift Relationship: from Human Blood to Social Policy is one of the most insightful social-science texts of the 20th century. In it he shows that how a community handles its blood-transfusion service is a paradigm for its handling of overall social relations. Which makes it all the more telling to step back from the current row and place the quality of the blood supply in the context of the total health service.

THE 1977/78 DOWNTURN IN THE NEW ZEALAND ECONOMY

This was a part of the (Long) December 1992 version of In Stormy Seas which was never published.
Keywords: Statistics;

The problem of the 1977/78 downturn arose in a different way again. In the late 1980s advocates of the policies loosely called “Rogernomics” were wont to justify their proposals by referring to the poor economic [...]

MULDOON

Listener: 12 September, 1992
Keywords: Political Economy & History;
I treasure the Tom Scott cartoon which shows the boiler room of the economy, jam-packed with pipes under great pressure, full of leaking joints, bandages, holes and bulges, and with interest rates bursting away. In the middle of this chaos is a small balding gnome, Robert Muldoon, holding [...]

FENCES AND AMBULANCES: An Economist Looks At Family Policy

Paper for �The Children�s, Young Persons and their Families Act -A Review�, A Public Seminar. Palmerston North College of Education, Friday July 10, 1992

Keywords Health; Social Policy

It is a curious, if instructive, oddity that our most famous quotation about health promotion does not appear in the Heineman Dictionary of New Zealand Quotations. We talk about the need to put fences at the top of the cliff, but the thrust of our social policy is the ambulance at the bottom -although in recent years it has been more like a cardphone from which one can ring a private cab. Fences and ambulances represent quite different ways of responding to social policy problems. The more erudite might refer to holistic social policy versus pathological social policy.

SELFISH GENERATIONS by DAVID THOMSON

New Zealannd Sociology, May 1992, Volume 7, No 1, p. 98-107.

Keywords Distributional Economics; Social Policy

Inter-generational income distribution is a difficult area, and it is a brave social scientist who would set out to offer a comprehensive account given our state of knowledge. David Thomson appears to have no such qualms.

STABILITY AND CHAOS

Listener: 20 January, 1992
Keywords: History of Ideas, Methodology & Philosophy;
Suppose you were lost in the bush, and wanted to find the sea. One strategy would be to follow a river downhill. It may not be the best way but you do get there. Economists portray market behaviour a bit like this. Here, the objective is [...]

NEW ZEALAND’S 51 BEST BOOKS

Published in The Dominion in January 1992

Keywords: Literature and Culture;

This selection is a New Zealand response to 101 Best Australian Books, complied by John Arnold and Peter Pierce for November’s Bulletin magazine. Their selection was influenced by the personal inclinations of the compilers. within constraints to produce a representative listing in terms of subject, chronological spread and gender. They were limited to one book per author and appear to have ruled out books with multiple authors such The Dictionary of New Zealand Biography. The Bulletin list is in alphabetical order. This is grouped into loose chronological order by subject (rather than by publication date).

Brian Easton