Everyone I know says they want to spend more time at the gym – myself included. However, as an economist I’ve learnt to look past what people say and look at what they actually do. In essence, people really just wish that a previous version of themselves (them in the past) had gone to the […]
Now, I know we make a big deal of how Australians make more than we do. However, it doesn’t matter how well or how poorly a country is doing – when policy is made it should be on the basis of evidence and costing, not ideology per see. Redistribution and social goals are essential – […]
One issue I have with the constant discussion on savings, current account deficits, and consumption in NZ is how people look at it – they keep thinking that we are “consuming” to much and have needed to “borrow”. That is how we’ve been told to look at it – especially with all the talk of […]
There has been a lot of commentary on asset sales around the place, so much so that I didn’t feel like I need to write anything. Dim Post mentioned a lot of the people against asset sales and also Geoff Simmons recently wrote against them. Furthermore, both Anti-Dismal (*, *, *, *, *) and Roger […]
From Eric Crampton: I tend to be pretty skeptical of results that aren’t grounded in basic price theory or that aren’t confirmed by a lot of different methods, including both Ocular and Ordinary Least Squares. A single paper merely helps people to update their priors – it doesn’t provide conclusive evidence of a result. Often […]
… at least lets hope so right 😉 Unemployment rate rose to 6.8%, and the employment rate is at its lowest level since June 2003. Further (relative to seasonal) weakness in part-time employment was the kicker here – which is why total hours worked (the size of the labour input in a sense) still rose. […]