Utopia, you are standing in it!

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

Universities and colleges across the country have become embroiled in a debate over free speech in the aftermath of the massacre of Israelis by Hamas terrorists this week. Various student groups have expressed support for Hamas or their cause while condemning Israel. Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapters have even shown the image below of one […]

Anti-Israel Statements After the Massacre Trigger Free Speech Fights in Higher Education

Now that the horrors committed by Hamas in Israel are being revealed in detail, colleges and universities are issuing statements about the Israel/Palestine war. As I adhere to the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles of institutional neutrality, I don’t think any such statements should take sides, even though I think that there’s a clear right-and-wrong […]

How uber-Woke colleges respond publicly to the horrific slaughter, rape, and kidnapping by Hamas

At this link you’ll find two letters from Harvard administrators about the war. The first, from October 9, is signed by virtually all Harvard administrators and is what the tweet by Pinker below, with the linked letter, is aimed at. Harvard faculty have taken severe issue with what the Harvard administrators said. The second statement, […]

Harvard weasels on the Israel/Palestine conflict; many of its scholars push back

I was very excited to read that Claudia Goldin (Harvard University) was awarded the 2023 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (aka the Nobel Prize in Economics) on Monday, “for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes”. There are several reasons I was excited. First, it is welcome…

Nobel Prize for Claudia Goldin

While I’m by no means an uncritical worshiper of the Israeli government, neither will I blame the war and its carnage on Israel’s “apartheid” policies. If there is an apartheid state among the two, it’s surely Palestine, which won’t allow Jews to live there (in contrast, I was just in Israel and saw that Jerusalem […]

Another reason why Palestine is largely responsible for its own plight: its leaders get rich taking money from the people