OPINION

In a world without laws about fists meeting noses, it would make a lot more sense to prohibit us from punching someone else on the nose without their consent than to ban us from punching ourselves on the nose. It might make sense to ban both, but it would be ridiculous to start by banning people from punching themselves. Read more

November 1 was the beginning of a new era for the European Central Bank. Former French finance minister and IMF director Christine Lagarde is the new president of the ECB. Read more

Until last week, the East German state of Thuringia was internationally most famous as the home of Martin Luther, Thuringian roasted sausages and the Bauhaus Movement. Now we can add last Sunday’s state election result to that list. Read more

Too many children pass NCEA without being functionally literate. Minister Hipkins committed, in his 2019 NCEA change package, to address this by raising the bar. Read more

I often describe New Zealand as the Outside of the Asylum – the last sane place in a world going mad. But just what should we make of New Zealand’s public health system? Read more

Last Thursday, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank pledged to offer on a daily basis at least $120 billion of cash injections in the short-term money market, up from the initial $75 billion supply agreed last month. Read more

Taken at face value, the government’s zero-carbon bill is a toothless façade. On closer examination, it looks more like a Trojan Horse for dictatorial government by decree. Read more

A Twitter-storm has raged over the last week about Auckland Council’s rules requiring community consultation before private developers can name new roads. Apparently, some Aucklanders believe that holding up housing projects while developers comply with council road-naming requirements is unacceptable red tape. Read more

I don’t know if anyone ever really believed manufacturing televisions in New Zealand made sense. Controls in place until New Zealand’s reforms prohibited importing fully assembled televisions, to encourage manufacture and assembly in New Zealand. Read more

As Karl Marx taught us, history repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. With Brexit we are long past these two separate stages. Read more

Two developments this week on the Government’s flagship Zero Carbon Bill. First, Parliament’s Environment Committee sent its report recommending changes back to the House, having waded through more than 10,000 public submissions. Read more

Suppose I told you that anticompetitive activity right here in New Zealand was behind a transfer of wealth amounting to, at the very least, hundreds of billions of dollars. The victims of the cartel are New Zealand’s poorest, who have had to endure hardship so substantial that its effects are directly visible in New Zealand’s poverty and material deprivation statistics. Read more

Despite all your predictions to the contrary, the children still have not colluded against me. On finding out that the Crampton household’s way of divvying up the chores is somewhat nonstandard, I reported on it in a May 2018 Insights column in case others might find it helpful. Read more

“Our goal is to make sure the fight against poverty is based on scientific evidence,” Esther Duflo said shortly after becoming the second woman (and also the youngest economist, at 46) to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics. Duflo, along with her husband, Abhijit Banerjee, and Michael Kremer, received this year’s top economics award “for their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”. Read more

Imagine, for a moment, the government were about to pass a Zero Carbon bill that takes the most direct path to success on our emissions targets. What would it look like? Read more