Maybe things would be different if somebody had 'invented' prices. We tend not to understand and appreciate institutions, like prices, that emerge spontaneously through human interaction rather than are the product of human design. Because we do not appreciate how they work, it is too easy to miss how they can improve things in areas where they haven’t traditionally been used. Read more

Parables, biblical or otherwise, are excellent instruction. They warn of the dangers of getting what you wish for. Local Government New Zealand might wish to take heed.Midas had regrets.The 1001 Arabian Nights tells of the blind beggar of Baghdad. In that story, a dervish had a magic cream that, if anointed on one eye, would reveal hidden treasures – but would give only blindness if applied to both eyes. Read more

Joel Hernandez and I have been lucky to be spending the past few days at the 60th Annual Conference of the New Zealand Association of Economists. The meetings are always a great way of keeping abreast of what other economists around the traps are working on. Read more

Cabinet shuffles provide great journalistic set-pieces. Read more

Not too long ago, Canada’s Northwest Passage was effectively unnavigable. The ice was simply too thick for sailing ships to make it through during the too-short summers. Read more

Politicians have a lot of privileges, but one privilege that regular folks have over them is the freedom to change our minds. Read more

We all know that best policy is not paying off the kidnappers. Countries that get in the habit of paying the kidnappers encourage the taking of more of their nationals as hostages. It’s a dangerous game to get into because it’s so hard to stop. Read more

Economists, or at least economists of a policy-bent, like to distinguish between outputs and outcomes. Focusing on the former comes too easily at the expense of the latter, especially in the case of KiwiBuild and the Government’s overall housing supply agenda. Read more

At its heart, Kiwibuild was a promise to end the housing crisis. The set of reforms Minister Twyford is overseeing can fulfil that promise, if he has the chance to see them through.The housing crisis has nothing to do with government failing to build enough homes. It stems instead from a nasty mess of perverse incentives facing growing councils, debt limits, infrastructure financing problems, and difficulty in revising district plans under RMA processes – as a starting point.If the prior... Read more

If the Canterbury earthquakes taught us anything, it’s that the immediate response to a disaster is a very different thing from the rebuilding that has to follow.Disaster response is about triage, the good-enough, and avoiding substantial further harm. The rebuild is different. It takes a fair bit of thought about what the place should look like, and a long-term strategy to get there. In the best case, the long-term vision has always been in place and all that needs to... Read more

It used to be the case that the question of firing of public sector chiefs never even came up. Senior civil servants would themselves tender their resignations for catastrophic failures, and Ministers could accept or reject those resignations as appropriate. Read more

There are a lot of promising initiatives in the coalition Government's first "Wellbeing" Budget. But delivering on that promise requires closing a currently open loop in the wellbeing policy process. We need evaluation to help us tell which of the Government's initiatives have proven most successful, and Budget 2019 delivered far less than we might have hoped for on that front. Read more