As you may or may not know, I am a vegetarian. As a result, occasionally I talk myself into needing more protein. To do this I eat cashews, which I think are actually just mainly fat, but are very yummy. Anyways, I went along to the supermarket and purchased a small number of cashews. The […]
I’m currently working part time and studying full time, which has significantly reduced the time I have to blog – even my normal plan of “writing the week ahead on Saturday morning” is starting to get stretched. So to ensure that something will be up, I’m throwing up aimless metaphors and quotes and leaving them […]
Danyl posted about the recent Productivity Commission paper on Australia vs NZ productivity differences recently. If you ignore the politics and conspiracy (the timing of the paper was well known and they were asking people to write about it, hence why I wrote this at the time) he asks a good questions, why have we […]
Dani Rodrik has been arguing that the mistake many economists, and non-economists, make is to look for “one right model” – when in truth economics is a form of craft, where you have a multitude of models and need to know what is appropriate in different circumstances (ht Economist’s View). To anyone who has studied […]
Recently we discussed the idea of the equity-efficiency trade-off in very broad terms. As we noted, in order to discuss such a concept we need to think about a series of issues about groups. Some of these are easier to conceptualise than others – one of the simplest (albeit not simple) is poverty. Now anti-poverty […]
With the Living Wage idea cropping up around the place, I’ve noticed a couple of places where there have been criticisms of the result: A review by Brian Scott, where he points out that many of the defined “needs” required to get this wage are in fact not things some people in society would put […]