Angus Deaton’s ‘Economics in America’ challenges the direction that economics has taken.

Winning office is not the same as achieving change. A recent Economist columnist divided politicians and their political advisers into either ‘jock wankers’ or ‘nerd wankers’. It’s a distinction which ...

Why is the British Labour Government penalising its poor? We have the spectacle of the Starmer-led British Labour Government taking measures which are making some of the most struggling Brits worse ...

We should not assume that all adopted innovations are progressive. Jonathon Haidt’s ‘The Anxious Generation’ illustrates that sometimes they require social measures to enhance well being.

What can you do when you have hit your borrowing limit and still want to spend? One option is to cut back on maintenance of your capital – say, to delay repainting the house or keeping the car in ...

This column started out to explain how the proposed structural outsourcing of public surgery was partly a consequence of the peculiarities of our fiscal borrowing practices. In summary, the ...

While many of the world’s Christian religions seem preoccupied with personal issues that Jesus, their founder, barely touched upon, they must engage with economic issues too.

Should we pursue a ‘Golden Rule’ where any public borrowing for consumption is temporary? This columnist is a fiscal conservative who is cautious about government borrowing for public consumption. I ...

Four eighty-year-old books which are still vitally relevant today. Between 1942 and 1945, four refugees from Vienna each published a ground-breaking – seminal – book.* They left their country after ...

By international standards the New Zealand healthcare system appears satisfactory – certainly no worse generally than average. Yet it is undergoing another redisorganisation.

As Lady Bracknell almost said, ‘to lose one may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose two looks like carelessness.’ And so a second Government Statistician has made a hasty exit, The official reason in ...

Do its Property Right Provisions Make Sense? Last week I pointed out that it is uninformed to argue that the New Zealand’s apparently poor economic performance can be traced only to poor regulations.