What is the difference between a letter and a pizza? Well, we have become used to receiving the former only three times a week. Read more
Eminent UK economist and Financial Times columnist John Kay reportedly believes that the global financial system is broken and that there is a simple remedy. It is broken because bankers have lost the plot. Read more
We should laud, not vilify, the actions of a Wairarapa school that has taken the brave step to ban students (and presumably staff too) from climbing trees on school grounds. Management have quite correctly noted that trees pose a health and safety risk to those playing in them, and have acted wisely to shut down any possibility of this risk eventuating on their watch. Read more
Steve Keen’s article Could Turnbull be the last of the neoliberal leaders? published on Business Spectator this week deserves a reply. Read more
In principle, a Universal Basic Income, as floated by the NZ Labour Party, sounds great. It’s once you start looking harder at implementation that things quickly become, well, messy, writes Eric Crampton. Read more
Everyone has heard a variant of the story of the student who goes to the guru in India to ask how long it will take to reach enlightenment. The guru says, “It often takes three or four years but, because you are working so hard at it, it will take 10.” There are lessons in this for the Labour Party. Read more
Lamenting your loneliness? Forget taking advice from Dale Carnegie’s How to win friends and influence people, and carry on listening to Eric Carmen’s All by Myself. Read more
It would take a world champion wowser to declare last weekend’s CubaDupa festival anything but an outstanding success, replete with two days of street food, live music, street artists, and throngs of happy attendees. If such a po-faced complaint were to be made it would probably focus on the number of drunk people wandering the streets late at night, and the menace they represent (noise, fights, minor crime and so on). Read more
It is hard to put a number on some things – like how many refugees the government should admit. If you asked how many software engineers the government should let into the country per year, I would have a hard time coming up with an answer. Read more
If you are a born optimist, you may have concluded by now that the euro crisis is over. Indeed, we have not heard much about it lately. Read more
Spurred on by the Labour Party’s recent pledge to deliver three years of free tertiary education (should they be elected in 2017), New Zealand’s student unions are again calling for universal free education. But in praising countries where universal free tertiary education exists, advocates often gloss over what makes free tertiary education possible in the first place – like higher taxes. Read more
Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of New Zealand’s political system in the Key era is its broad stability. That is not to say New Zealand politics is boring or there was no movement in the polls. Read more
Talk to a teacher at a state school and most will tell you competition is a dirty word. When it comes to relationships between schools, cooperation rules. Read more
Take a good look at the person sitting next to you at work. They might have a lot more influence on your life than you give them credit for. Read more
The late Ronald Reagan once said “There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination and wonder”. At The New Zealand Initiative we share his optimism. Read more