Come the next pandemic, we are going to be in the same stupid mess that we were in during the last one. Trusted pharmaceutical regulators overseas, like those in Australia, Canada, Europe, and the UK, will have given provisional approvals for vaccines that are safe. Read more

There’s a fragility to rules-based orders that has been around for as long as those orders have. So long as people generally agree that it is good to be bound by the rules, and that trying to change the rules is better than ignoring or breaking them, a rules-based order can persist. Read more

Many economists make international trade seem more complicated than it needs to be. Stephen Landsburg had a simple way of explaining it all. Read more

About a quarter century ago, my to-be wife introduced me to a card game called Flux. It was popular among the computer science and engineering students in Pittsburgh. Read more

I am always glad that I am not an economic forecaster. Most people’s exposure to economists is radio or newspaper bits from bank economists making their best guesses about economic growth, the unemployment rate, or the track for interest rates. Read more

The pendulum theory of politics suggests that policies often swing from one extreme to another without finding a balanced middle ground. Consider New Zealand’s supermarkets. Read more

Imagine that you had to sell your house in a desperate hurry – Melbourne beckons, and the job there starts soon. Some things that would help the sale go ahead would be well worth doing. Read more

New Zealand’s planning processes have been breaking Wright’s Law for too long. Yesterday’s resource management reform announcement goes some way to fixing things. Read more

If for some ghastly reason you wanted to hit two birds, and you had two stones, trying to hit both birds with each stone would be pretty silly. You can throw both stones, so why not target things a bit more closely? Read more

It isn’t the congestion charging scheme that I would have most-preferred. But the best congestion charging scheme is the one that can get across the line and enjoy durable political support, so long as it can work. Read more

Late last year, online newsmagazine The Spinoff asked the usual suspects for their one-sentence summary of the year ahead. I stole a line from Gramsci, or at least a paraphrased version of it. Read more

New Zealand has one of the world’s most centralised governments. Centralisation has some advantages. Read more