Where's my hockey rink?
Treasury has updated its CBAx cost-benefit analysis tool to bring in some of the measures from its new Living Standards Framework. And I think I can get a proper* hockey rink out of it. Let's walk it through. According to the CBAx tool, being able to expres...

Hard Spirits
I write a lot of columns. I rather like how this one turned out. It was up at Newsroom Pro yesterday ; it's ungated here , and copied below. Hard Spirits It was during the discussions of measuring spiritual capital that the ghost of Sir John James Cowperthw...

Every time a NIMBY cries...
How do you get a housing crisis? One blocked building consent at a time.  The Court of Appeal has quashed resource consents granted for a $500 million development in Wellington at Shelly Bay. The Court found the Wellington City Council made an error of law ...

Trivialising vocabulary
A teacher provides a defence of not expecting kids to know the word trivial , and not using hard words like trivial on NCEA exams.  And yet the incidence of an apparently innocuous word causing such consternation amongst exam candidates speaks to a number o...

A regulated market model
Over at Newsroom Pro ($), I make the case for basing legislation and regulation for cannabis markets on our existing rules for spirits . The government has to have a referendum on cannabis by November 2020 and might want to have it earlier than that to not ...

Micro costs of macro prudence
A few months ago, I was at one of the typical Productivity Hub roundtable sessions where Wellington-types mull over why something in markets isn't working the way they'd like and how they could nudge markets around to improve things. That time, it was about...

Census woes
I don't know what normal people talk about at drinks. For the past few months, whenever I'd catch up with other economists over drinks, it's been rumours about just how bad things are at Census.  The mess hit the front page of the Dom Post today. Documents ...

Disgraceful
This is absolutely not how a member of a government that is trying to defend the World Trading Organisation's rules-based framework should be behaving.  From Question Period late yesterday: David Seymour : Has the Minister had advice in any form that some o...

More than trivial
Despair : Students sitting the NZQA Level 3 History causes and consequences paper on Wednesday were confronted with the word in a quote from Julius Caesar: "Events of importance are the result of trivial causes." Students were asked to analyse the extent to...

Carbon Calculus
If you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve the ETS and use it to buy-back and retire credits rather than mucking about with sector-specific stuff.  Me in this week's NBR print edition. A snippet: The New Zealand government has committed to redu...