July discussion here. I don’t usually talk about the Business outlook stats – but I did last month, and I should this month (*). Own activity expectations moved back into positive territory, business confidence is at its highest rate since November, and inflation expectations are at record levels (3.79% – even higher than the expectation […]
Over at Econlog Bryan Caplan asks a good question – he asks why economists who often rail against the free market will also often state that they strongly support civil liberties. Fundamentally he is asking, why do these people not support freedom to trade but do support freedom of expression. Now I agree with Dr […]
According to this Herald article the fact that annual food price growth fell from 8.2% to 7.6%, and the fact that increases stemmed from a lift in fresh vege prices implies that food price inflation is now cooling. Lets investigate this claim a little bit. (Note: I am ignoring the title “Relief on way for […]
It is good to see the Frog Blog discussing happiness and policy – as fundamentally the goal of policy should be to promote the highest social happiness, not necessarily to promote the largest GDP number. The article that Frog links to can be found here, and on Saturday there was an article in the paper […]
Technology and the limited nature of non-renewable resources is an important issue in economics, the social sciences, and general policy making. It is an issue where each side of the political spectrum feels that the other side is stupid. In an article we have linked to here, there are people that feel economists ignore the […]
When I was listening to Radio NZ on Sunday I heard some people discussing why they thought “Think Big” was a good idea. Although I agree with some of the points they raised, if those points are actually true (namely that they felt, given forecasts at the time, these projects would have been viable – […]