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Keith Rankin
Political Economist, Scoop Columnist
Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s.
Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like.
Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
Keith Rankin - Latest News [Page 1]
Barbecued Hamburgers And Churchill's Bestie
Thursday, 17 April 2025, 12:16 pm | Keith Rankin
Hamburg was, literally, a dry run for what came later; the aim was to maximise the number of barbecued civilians by, among other things, choosing perfect weather conditions for an experiment in incendiary murder. More >>
Rational Expectations, Intelligence, And War
Thursday, 10 April 2025, 4:23 pm | Keith Rankin
It is through our ManualI – our manual override, our consciousness, our awareness – that we have the opportunity to make rational valuations which incorporate morality. Our AutoI, while rational in its own terms, is also amoral. Our automatic benefit-cost ... More >>
Learning The Correct Lessons From World War Two In Europe
Thursday, 27 March 2025, 5:56 pm | Keith Rankin
While World War Two (WW2) always was a set of intersecting conflicts – with Japan fighting a war of imperialism in East Asia and the Western Pacific – the war in Europe has been cast as the ultimate battle of 'Good' versus 'Evil'. Hence the narrative ... More >>
Donald Trump's Views On The World Trading-system
Friday, 21 March 2025, 11:28 am | Keith Rankin
There is a name for Donald Trump's understanding of international trade: 'mercantilism'. While he is an unreconstructed mercantilist, in some ways the deeper 'reconstructed' mercantilism of miserly politicians like Angela Merkel and Olaf Scholz – and of ... More >>
Geopolitical Fractures, And Untidy Yet Workable Solutions
Tuesday, 18 March 2025, 4:01 pm | Keith Rankin
At present, it would seem, the United States of America, which sees itself as the world's preeminent geopolitical player, is impatient for conflicts in Ukraine and Palestine to end, so that it can get on with its 'game of choice', namely the 'new ... More >>
Invoking Munich, 'Appeasement', And The 'Lessons Of History'
Thursday, 13 March 2025, 6:32 pm | Keith Rankin
The Munich narrative is central to the 'Good War' morality trope, through which democracies (especially the United States) justified wars of aggression; what used to be called 'gunboat-diplomacy' in the British days of empire. More >>
Dodgy Democracy, The Fiscal Double Standard, And The Application Of The Domino Theory To Ukraine
Tuesday, 11 March 2025, 12:12 pm | Keith Rankin
The Russia-Ukraine War is a mucky border conflict between two countries with a long and intertwined shared history, and with more than enough 'stirring of the pot' from outside to convert a regional security dispute into an existential global security ... More >>
Germany's Election 2025: Far Establishment-Right Versus Far Non-Establishment-Right?
Thursday, 6 March 2025, 1:19 pm | Keith Rankin
The result in Germany proved to be very much like that of the United Kingdom in 2024: a slide in support for the two major parties ('the establishment centre'), a consolidation of power to the self-same establishment centre, and a shift of that establishment ... More >>
Judaism, Antisemitism, And Israel
Wednesday, 18 December 2024, 7:09 pm | Keith Rankin
Israel today has arisen as a consequence of two millenniums of antisemitism in its various Christian forms. Israel is a nation-state which must abide by the same rules as any other nation state. Criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. More >>
Al Aqsa Provocation And The Media Game 'Israel Says'
Monday, 9 December 2024, 8:19 pm | Keith Rankin
When Benjamin Netanyahu said 'jump', the media moguls effectively said 'how high?' Since then, like Groundhog Day, media copywriters have been playing the game 'Israel says'. When institutions succumb to narratives of the 'Israel says' variety, they ... More >>
Bidenomics And Luxonomics
Tuesday, 3 December 2024, 10:37 am | Keith Rankin
Bidenomics was functionally the same as 'hitlernomics'. In the meantime, Luxonomics is paralysing Aotearoa New Zealand. More >>
Ancient Ancestry, Israel And Palestine
Wednesday, 25 September 2024, 6:16 pm | Keith Rankin
Why cannot these Levantine people just settle with each other, create a post-apartheid liberal secular state in which all races & religions are constitutionally equal, & compensate the descendants of the dispossessed for the loss of their land? And More >>
Outremer In Palestine: Lessons From The Twelfth Century
Tuesday, 20 August 2024, 6:41 pm | Keith Rankin
If we see Israel as a settler-colonial proxy for its Christian patron, the United States of America, then the current events in the Holy Land can very much be understood as a post-medieval Crusade. More >>
A Personal Tax Credit (PTC) Of $150 For New Zealand
Thursday, 15 August 2024, 5:45 pm | Keith Rankin
My proposal is to pay a personal tax credit of $150 per week to every New Zealand resident aged over 18. More >>
Department Of Mum And Dad
Wednesday, 14 August 2024, 6:00 pm | Keith Rankin
The principal private source of income support for young adults is the Department of Mum and Dad. (The second most important source of private income support is charity; the third most important source is begging and other forms of recipient-initiated ... More >>
Political Crisis In Bangladesh: Lessons For Aotearoa New Zealand
Tuesday, 6 August 2024, 4:48 pm | Keith Rankin
History is history, warts and all; that dictum applies to all identity groups. More >>
Tax Cuts: 1982 And 2024
Wednesday, 31 July 2024, 4:12 pm | Keith Rankin
The official context here is that the income tax scale has been subject to 'bracket creep', meaning that average tax rates have increased because of rising price levels; bracket creep benefits the government's coffers at the expense of wage workers. More >>
Peter Turchin's "End Times"; Some Comments
Friday, 26 July 2024, 10:42 am | Keith Rankin
The essence of the structural-dynamic model is the alternation of integrative and disintegrative long-phases of nation's histories. And, from his earlier work, there's a strong sense that civilisations go through three of four of these alternations ... More >>
Is Inflation Really Too High?
Tuesday, 23 July 2024, 2:19 pm | Keith Rankin
What New Zealand was experiencing earlier this decade was a spike in cost increases resulting from the Covid19 pandemic and from the Russia-Ukraine war. That's not inflation. It was just costs incurred which humanity had to absorb. More >>
New Zealand's Joe (Biden/Ward) Moment
Tuesday, 16 July 2024, 5:34 pm | Keith Rankin
Joseph Ward's 'Biden moment' bisected 1925 to 1933 period, enabling 1929 and most of 1930 to be relatively good years for New Zealand in the midst of a disastrous run of circumstance compounded by unbending economic liberalism of William Downie ... More >>
