I’m not an energy economist, and am currently a bit short on time, so I thought I’d outsource discussing the new Greens policy on solar. As a matter of principle I see it as saying “consumers are credit constrained, the energy sector has issues of competition, and the installation capacity exists, given that government loans […]
Via the Herald I spotted this State of the Nation report by the Salvation Army (Note: The core report can be found here). It is nicely put together, taking a whole series of publicly available data and making it fit for public consumption! Also I appreciate their focus on shining attention on issues that get […]
After an exhaustive nominations round the final 20 New Zealand economists have been selected. To quote from someone who nominated for this round of “New Zealand’s Sexiest Economist” (NZSE). At first I thought this was ridiculous. But thinking about the work New Zealand economists do, I think there are a lot of ‘sexy economists’ ~ […]
There has been a series of posts by people discussing a new book, “Big Ideas in Macroeconomics“. Ryan Decker points out a good post by Steven Williamson that has links to other posts. I haven’t read the book, in fact I haven’t ordered it yet (but intend to) – but I don’t really intend to […]
Excellent article over at Aeon (we linked to earlier in the week, but it deserves its own post), I’d suggest you head over and give it a read. To quote one passage: Kuznets lost the argument about measuring social welfare over economic activity back in the 1930s. Now it’s time to put these two concepts in […]
On stuff I noticed the following comments by Michael Littlewood. “Simply citing that there are 2.2 million members and $19 billion in the scheme doesn’t actually tell you anything,” the paper’s author, Michael Littlewood said. “It just tells you that KiwiSaver’s popular – and why wouldn’t it be, with the incentives that it has.” Littlewood […]