Utopia, you are standing in it!

An earlier article, featured here at the Talkshop said ‘artifacts have come to light thanks to a warming climate, proving that a mountain pass served as an important trade network’. We’re told ‘The pass was in use between the years 300 and 1500 AD, and most active around the year 1000. Its use declined with […]

Norwegian archaeologists are salvaging priceless artifacts from melting glaciers—why were they found there?

This week marks the ten-year anniversary of this Sex, Drugs and Economics blog. Here’s my first post (from 8 October 2013), briefly explaining my rationale for blogging, including:…this blog is a way for me to create a discussion space for my students, and help them to recognise the value in the economic approach to looking…

Ten years of Sex, Drugs and Economics

It turns out that readers here can’t subscribe to Tom Gross‘s email newsletters, as they’re intended for people in media and politics. Tom has, however, kindly agreed to send the newsletter to me and allow me to reproduce the contents on this site. Here’s his latest newsletter, with his words indented. 90-year-old Czech-born Holocaust survivor Gina […]

Today’s post by Tom Gross on the war

Libertarian reform isn’t at the top of the headlines in New Zealand, but there are a few things you might expect in that direction: – Reforming pharmaceutical approvals so products with approval in two other trusted peer countries get automatic approval in NZ. Relevant because of the relatively slow approval time for Covid-19 vaccine in […]

From the comments, what will happen in New Zealand edition?

Last night, many of us responded to the statement of Leon Panetta, former CIA Director in the Obama Administration, that he “has no regrets” about signing the now infamous letter of 51 former intelligence officials suggesting that the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. Even more unsettling were his comments that he believes it could […]

“Denial Ain’t Just a River in Egypt”: Panetta Repeats Debunked Russian Disinformation Claims on Laptop

Below is my column in the New York Post on issuance of superseding indictments for Sen. Bob Menendez, his wife, and associates to include new charges related to his alleged work as unregistered foreign agents. The new charges not only highlight the alleged corrupt practices of Sen. Menendez, but also the absence of such charges […]

How About Hunter? Justice Department Adds FARA Charge to Menendez Prosecution

Although if I were a Kiwi I’d probably be a member of the Labour Party, I have criticized them strongly for their education policy: a policy that has constantly tried to insinuate Māori “ways of knowing” (Mātauranga Māori ) into school science curricula (it’s fine if taught as history or sociology).  Labour has also been […]

New Zealand votes out woke Labour government by a big margin

These come from a newsletter that is not online but is received by Andrzej and Malgorzata. As Wikipedia notes, Tom Gross is. . . . . . . a British-born journalist, international affairs commentator,and human rights campaigner specializing in the Middle East. Gross was formerly a foreign correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and New York Daily News. […]

From Tom Gross: more photos and videos related to the war

TweetDavid Barker, writing in the Wall Street Journal – and appropriately praising my GMU Econ colleague Dan Klein’s remarkable journal, Econ Journal Watch – exposes just how very shoddy some eminent “scholarship” really is. Two slices: Climate change hurts the economy, according to a celebrated 2012 paper by economists Melissa Dell, Benjamin Jones and Benjamin…

Some Links

A few weeks ago I wrote a post surveying the range of fiscal indicators (local ones and IMF/OECD metrics) to look at recent New Zealand fiscal policy across time and across countries. I included in that post this chart, which I had cobbled together using IMF April data for other countries and their estimates for […]

One last pre-election fiscal post

There is a headline in the Washing Post (in an entry in their live blog today) that says, “Netanyahu and Gantz form unity government.” This is misleading. No new government has been formed; therefore, there’s no unity government. All ministers of Bibi’s narrow right-wing/Haredi coalition remain in place. Benny Gantz and a couple others from […]

Israel has not formed a “unity government”

For her work explaining Gender Gaps in wages and employment.  From the Economist:Since around 2005 the wage gap has hardly budged. Here Ms Goldin’s work questions popular narratives that continue to blame wage discrimination. Instead, in a book published in 2021, Ms Goldin blames “greedy” jobs, such as being a consultant or lawyer, which offer…

Claudia Golden wins Nobel Prize in Economics

Earlier in the week a journalist asked me for some thoughts on which political party in government had managed the economy better – in overall macroeconomic terms – over the years since we moved to MMP. My initial response was that the answer would be pretty dull. Pressed to write something anyway, I outlined briefly […]

Productivity growth….or lack of it