Partisanship is a powerful and deadly drug. Canada is the latest in a too-lengthy list of places badly in need of rehab. Read more

Last week, Thomas Coughlin reported that “the wellbeing framework that puts the ‘value of a statistical life’ at $4.7 million is coming under fire.” There is a lot to criticise about the wellbeing framework, and I am hardly one of its cheerleaders. But it is absurd to criticise it for trying to apply proper cost-benefit assessment – and even more absurd to criticise it for putting a value on statistical lives. Read more

Some folks take the wrong lesson from intermediate microeconomics – or never took the course in the first place. I worry that too many of them staff Wellington’s bureaus. Read more

Only the officials at Inland Revenue know why they commissioned a poll on Kiwis’ attitudes to tax that included questions about the respondents’ general political orientation. Releasing the polling data should be part of fixing any perceived problems. Hamish Rutherford’s reporting at the Dominion Post raises questions about the Department’s political impartiality. Read more

New Zealand gets a lot of things right that the rest of the world gets wrong. Where other countries screw up their goods and services taxes by exempting politically sensitive goods, New Zealand’s GST raises a lot of money at a relatively low tax rate by maintaining a broad base without exemptions. Read more

Anybody even remotely connected with housing, housing research, the building industry – or with the ability to fog a mirror by breathing on it – had to know it was near-impossible for the government to meet its KiwiBuild promises on its 10-year schedule. Our current planning rules, infrastructure financing mechanisms, building materials supply regulations, council incentives, zoning, training of construction workers, rules around letting more construction workers into the country, rules around foreign builders being able to build here, rules around foreign financing of building projects, Resource Management Act processes – all of it made any non-trivial KiwiBuild impossible. Read more

Rather than rising since the 1980s, income inequality in New Zealand rose in the late 1980s and early 1990s, then flattened out. Some of that increase was real, but some of it was complicated – as explained late last year. Read more

Everything has its season. The slow January news period brings Oxfam’s annual condemnation of wealth inequality and calls for redistribution. Read more

Every January, Oxfam releases a report on global wealth inequality. This year's Oxfam report contrasted the drop in wealth held by the less wealthy half of New Zealand with the rise in wealth enjoyed by the two Kiwis who made it on to Forbes' 2018 list of billionaires. Read more

It was during the discussions of measuring spiritual capital that the ghost of Sir John James Cowperthwaite hovered near. The shade whispered in my ear, “When I was Financial Secretary of Hong Kong, I refused to collect economic statistics for London. Read more

Community sponsorship helps Canada accept far more refugees than the government’s quota could accommodate on its own. And it looks promising for New Zealand as well. Read more

Desperate to turn away from trivial controversies here in New Zealand about Santa’s true gender, I looked to the British press and found The Times and The Telegraph reporting on claims of racism in J.R.R. Tolkien’s depiction of orcs in The Lord of the Rings. Read more