Search

Too many New Zealanders are walking around with a shameful addiction. Your family members, colleagues or even spouse may be secretly struggling. Read more

I’m really glad I’m a millennial. If I wasn’t, I’d have a pretty hard time understanding exactly what they’re all about. Read more

When Cal Tech economist D. Roderick Kiewiet looked hard at the stack of American regulations affecting health and safety, he found a mess. Read more

We this week released Elisabeth Prasad's report running some of the numbers on whether compensating live kidney donors makes sense. She finds that the typical kidney transplant saves the Ministry of Health on net about $125,000 over the longer term: dialysis is expensive. Read more

The most important norm in economics was set by economist Vilfredo Pareto about a century ago. Put simply, the Pareto Criterion says that anything making at least one person better off, while making nobody else worse off, is desirable. Read more

For my sins in generally supporting consumer choice in food consumption, and in interests of fostering healthy debate, the Agencies for Nutrition Action invited me to argue with the Morgan Foundation’s Geoff Simmons on the merits of fat taxes and food regulation at his annual conference in Auckland a few weeks ago. The nutritionists put on an excellent conference. Read more

Humans often make stupid decisions - contrary to what we’d prefer to believe. Most psychologists would argue we’re not actually all that rational. Read more

It’s tough for parties in the opposition benches. They have been stripped of a major rod with which to beat National in an election year. Read more

For professional reasons, Rachel Smalley may have had to quickly retract her unfortunate on-air slip, where she labelled New Zealand women ‘heifers’ and ‘lardos’, but the facts speak for themselves. According to the Ministry of Health, one-in-three adults in New Zealand is obese, with a Body Mass Index reading of 30 or more. Read more