Down to Earth Kiwi

down to earth thinking from down under

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Sep 30, 2021
3 min

How to Swing Kiwis Right: A Cunning Plan

My latest NBR opinion piece can be found at https://www.nbr.co.nz/node/231503 , or below. Judging by the polls, things are not looking great for the right. Labour and Greens are still on course to gain a majority next election. Most of us don’t buy National’s denial that it has a policy problem. That it just needs to find a popular leader. To the extent people vote with their wallet, Labour’s persistent high support level makes sense. Many low income Kiwis feel capitalism has

Big Pharma, Prime Ministers, Option Theory & Stuff-ups

Sep 29, 2021
2 min

Big Pharma, Prime Ministers, Option Theory & Stuff-ups

Yesterday, DownToEarth Kiwi got drawn into a political row stemming from former PM Sir John Key's opinion that NZ was oh-so-slow to order the Pfizer vaccine, which it was. Yes, our bureaucrats stuffed up, waiting until 8 March, 2021 to order 85% of our Pfizer supplies when the UK was already vaccinating with it in December 2020. The heart of the mistake was revealed in Parliament on 31 August 2021 by PM Ardern who admitted, "I think it's easy to forget that, actually, last ye

Sep 28, 2021
2 min

Newsroom's attempt to refute John Key is off-the-mark

Today Newsroom is trying to make Sir John Key's claim - that NZ could've got our vaccines quicker had we paid more - look wrong. I'm on Sir John's side on this one. Newsroom reports that "[Sir John] said we could have paid for priority delivery of the vaccine - a claim the company [Pfizer] says is incorrect & baseless". The author quotes DownToEarth Kiwi which he believes was the original source of the figures that Sir John quoted. It is an unarguable fact NZ ordered its Pfiz

Sep 28, 2021
2 min

A Crisis of Leadership? The Rules versus Discretion Debate applied to coronavirus in NZ

One of the most profound debates regarding the conduct of monetary policy is whether a central bank should adjust the Official Cash Rate using the discretionary judgements of the Governor and Monetary Committee, or whether it should be adjusted on the basis of a simple rule. An example of a rule would be that for each 1 percentage point rise in the inflation rate, the OCR automatically will be increased by 1.2 percentage points. Proponents of the rules-based approach argue it

Sep 27, 2021
2 min

Why's Auckland Locked Down? A "behind-the-scenes" reason neither Key nor Ardern dare talk about

Sir John Key has hit the airwaves with Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking this morning, again lambasting the government over Auckland's lockdown. Yet when Hosking asked him "what's holding [the government] back [from opening up the country]?" Key ducked the question. As would our current PM. Since the government's hands are tied on this matter. An opening of our borders and relaxation of restrictions at this time would likely lead to an uncontrollable outbreak that would overwhelm ou

Sep 26, 2021
2 min

A Comment on the Slanging Match between former PM Sir John Key and Minister Hipkins

Former PM Sir John Key wrote an opinion piece in the Herald today slamming the government's approach to the pandemic. Minister Hipkins replied that Key's views amounted to an "insult to New Zealanders". Yet to the extent there have been problems in dealing with the virus, both are equally culpable. Here's why. The quarantine arrangements, which Key labelled a "national embarrassment", have indeed been organized too slowly and in too limited numbers. Just like our vaccination

Sep 23, 2021
1 min

Now for some Good News from Prof Dame Sarah Gilbert

At my old college in the UK, one used to have dinner sitting next to often eccentric and rather strange academic types, called "dons". I sometimes wondered what on earth they were up to. On a dark and wintry evening, one of them once told me that he had finally sent his book on the British Empire to the publishers. So I asked him, "When did you start writing it?". Without blinking, he replied, "Oh, 1983". Which at the time was 17 years ago. It turns out that one of the facult

Sep 23, 2021
2 min

Sorry Mr Finance Minister. You're not saving lives. Pfizer is.

This blog tries to be non-partisan. We've commented in the past about National's descent into oblivion. Indeed, it's hard to find what the Party stands for, other than regaining power, which its MPs think is their entitlement. So, having swiped at the Nats, lets turn to Labour to balance things. I've been reminded of some lines from Finance Minister, Grant Robertson's, 2020 budget speech where he wrote, "As the economic carnage of the 1980s & 90s wreaked havoc in our communit

Sep 22, 2021
1 min

The Warehouse Group offers cash-for-vaccinations, just as we recommended

Back in April, my friend & colleague at DownToEarth Kiwi, Brogan Powlesland, predicted the situation we have in NZ now, in which the nation is desperate to push the vaccination rate higher. So in a 'cash-for-vaccines' blog, he proposed: "Offer every adult $250 to take both vaccines. At a total cost of around $1bn, it may be the most cost-effective way of avoiding lockdowns, which have come at far greater cost to the country. The wage subsidy scheme alone cost over $10 billion

Sep 21, 2021
1 min

Did Grant Robertson's economic strategy just unravel?

The defining quality of Finance Minister Robertson's approach to economic management the past 18 months can be summarized by the following line, which he personally wrote in an article run under the heading, "Prioritizing public health in Covid pandemic was best economic strategy", just before Auckland entered its long lockdown: "The Government’s strong public health response proved to be the best economic response as well ... While we are doing well, the world faces ... unce

Sep 20, 2021
2 min

Do the Covid Modelers Add Up?

As we endure these tense times of Auckland's lockdown, a government call is being made shortly whether to continue with the Level 4 lockdown. Now here's one observation which just doesn't add up to me. Last year, on 20 April, 2020, the Cabinet was faced with almost the same decision, namely whether to drop from Level 4 to 3. The Productivity Commission wrote in their report on this decision that daily new cases "had dropped" ... "to an average of 10 for the preceding four day

Sep 19, 2021
1 min

The Decline of Western Civilization: Are the billionaires (partly) to blame?

In an interview conducted at the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, prominent historian Niall Ferguson had this to say of the topic of "doom". "I think the answer must be that we build new institutions. Ultimately, American history is full of examples. Stanford's one of them. So is Chicago. Relatively recent foundations that rapidly rose to be in the very top flight. But the billionaires of our time are not quite like the billionaires of the Gilded Age. They're less goo

Sep 17, 2021
2 min

The Covid Modelers: some more humility, perhaps?

In the economics profession, we're "experts" at making forecasts that turn out to be wrong. And talking of forecasts, today the total number of virus cases arising from the present outbreak exceeded 1,000. And we're still counting. Yet on 24 August one of the lead official government Covid modelers told Newshub, "I would say a best case scenario would be something like what we saw in August last year - probably, higher than that. Maybe 200 [cases] might be the best case scena

Sep 15, 2021
2 min

Having resisted our calls to "show us the numbers", the government finally relents

On 6 September, DownToEarth Kiwi pleaded with the government to pose this question to the Covid Modellers: QUESTION: Once 70% of people are fully vaccinated & assuming NZ then starts unwinding its elimination policy, how big could an outbreak still be? How many hospitalizations could occur in that event? How about if the vaccination rate was 80%? Today, Health Minister Little revealed that "Modelling is being done to try & work out what level of vaccination coverage would pre

Sep 15, 2021
2 min

Is Wellington's Bureaucracy Actually Working?

A few weeks ago a row blew up in the UK when a senior government minister was reported as saying that civil servants should lose pay if they remained working from home. “If people aren’t going into work, they don’t deserve the terms & conditions they get if they are going into work”, the minister said. This is referring to the issue that a big proportion of London's civil servants now wish to work remotely due to virus concerns. The BBC report that their Union hit back, runni

Sep 12, 2021
2 min

Is the NZ Herald Biased? No. Since its Editors tell us so.

Media bias is a big topic in economics these days. Why? Since the media influences people's beliefs, which affects which the party they vote for, how high they want taxes, how much regulation they demand, to mention but a few. And it has been proven beyond doubt that media bias is hugely at play around the world. On that note, the astonishing feature of a recent article in the NZ Herald with the title "Local Media Need to Find their Teeth Again" by Bruce Cotterill, which rais

Sep 11, 2021
1 min

Is economics the kindest profession of them all?

We're often hurt in the economics profession by the jibes that say we put money ahead of human lives, that "neo-liberal" economists care only about GDP growth. That we don't give a damn about the human costs of policies. Well, here's an example of how (un)true are those claims. A simple cost-benefit analysis that could've been done in a day by any competent economist would have shown that the cost of putting in early 2020 orders for vaccines, even when their relative efficacy

Sep 11, 2021
2 min

Efforts to discredit our vaccine claims were made at the highest of levels - now the truth is out

In one of the few master classes of investigative journalism done for some time, Kate McNamara has dug up the truth behind NZ's late order of the Pfizer vaccine in today's Herald. Back in June we argued at DownToEarth Kiwi that the reason behind our bottom-of-the-OECD vaccination rate was the late order. Our claim was repeated in the media by folks like former Minister Richard Prebble and others. The government went into media spin and PR overdrive to discredit those claims.

Sep 9, 2021
2 min

The future of the Kiwi economy, by Led Zeppelin: "Yes, there are two paths you can go down".

It's a fool's game making economic & political predictions, since things change by the day. But recent events have revealed more about how the next year may play out for the Kiwi economy. This past year has been defined by the alignment of good economic with good health outcomes due to our community elimination of the virus. That situation smashed the political divide. It meant the left could argue its policies not only protected health & well-being, but also promoted busines

Sep 7, 2021
1 min

The PM (indirectly) responds to our questions to the Covid modelers: there will be no numbers

Yesterday on DownToEarth.Kiwi we posed two questions to the Covid modelers who've been advising our government, both asking for numbers. The first was about estimating the likelihood of avoiding the current lockdown had the vaccination rate been 70%. The second was to put numbers on what would be the situation once vaccination rates reached 70-80% and 'elimination' was winding down: could there still be significant virus outbreaks that would overwhelm our health system and re

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Robert MacCulloch

rmacculloch1@gmail.com