I noticed this during my trip down the internet: New Zealand needs to get out of the “childish mentality” that wide-ranging benefit reforms which come into force today are punitive, Finance Minister Bill English says. And also this via Kiwiblog: Work and Income says the results are “some of the best from any case management […]
I was excited to see Eric mention that there was a new economics (Economics New Zealand) blog by Donal Curtin – welcome welcome!! I mentioned the blog last week when talking about the NZAE 2013 conference, with Donal providing feedback on two of the keynotes (Obstfeld and Quiggin). However I’ll be sure to keep an […]
Economists love wagers on beliefs – say as a tax on bullsh*t. We have seen a wager in the past here between a series of economists on inflation. Well here is a wager between journalists – Rob Hosking (NBR) saying that the RBNZ will lift the OCR by Christmas, and Bernard Hickey (Interest.co.nz, Herald columnist) […]
Via Twitter: When I told Tyler I was confused in PhD Macro I, he said, “Good, that means you understand.” Ahhh macro. I think we can all take a lesson from this and recognise the limits of our knowledge – if the specialists that spend their entire lives and focus on hefty amounts of data […]
So last week was the New Zealand Association of Economists conference for 2013. Rock and roll. I am disappointed that people were not tweeting furiously about it – maybe next year. Bill from Groping to Bethlehem is the new President, while Seamus from Offsetting Behaviour is the Vice President. This implies that the organisation is […]
The rant isn’t here – it is over on interest.co.nz. I’d note that I’m relatively sensitive about the idea of prejudice and how social norms form against “groups”. Policy that is formed in this sense has a massive institutional weakness – namely that it relies on using an “indirect signal” to try to transfer, a […]