A closing of some of the browser tabs: Eli Dourado on NEPA - America's equivalent to the RMA . Superb seeming primer on how it all works...

The afternoon's worthies: Why do so many policy interventions help women, but not men? All kinds of intervention programmes, not gender...

This afternoon's worthies: Vic Uni's James Kierstead and Michael Johnston in defence of free speech .  Liberalism and democracy, ...

Susan Edmonds canvasses the state of play around poverty, along with a few bits from me on the subject . It's a good piece. Basically,...

UNICEF's new report has made for some damning headlines about child outcomes in New Zealand. In a few cases the critique is deserved; i...

Treasury has put a lot of work into identifying risk factors for future offending and other bad outcomes . Outcomes for kids with two or mor...

My column in last week's NBR went through the latest Oxfam report on global inequality . Among the problems: Any chart showing the ...

I suggest,  in this week's NZ Initiative column at interest.co.nz , that addressing housing affordability could be part of John Key'...

Chris Dillow lays out the basic problem with living wages mandates . While having more money makes people happier, being unemployed is prett...

In my standard classroom account, a smelly person on the bus next to you isn't imposing an externality, or at least not one that can be ...

I love the Greens on civil liberties, or at least relative to most other parties and with a big caveat on their nannying proclivities with r...

Should we measure absolute or relative poverty in developed countries? The former captures real poverty but misses relative deprivation; the...

Minimum wage increases do very little to help the poor, even before correcting for disemployment effects. In short: they're poorly targ...

An article in the most recent PNAS by Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg, "Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory...