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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 12]
Extending Democracy; A Path-Dependent Process
Wednesday, 2 September 2020, 4:34 pm | Keith Rankin
In practice, democratic political reforms are usually incremental, though typically seen as part of a process leading to wider and more embedded improvement. Reforms are 'evolutionary' – indeed, in a technical sense – in that they improve the More >>
The Two Policy Silos: Reserve Bank And Treasury
Thursday, 27 August 2020, 4:28 pm | Keith Rankin
Macroeconomic Policy Macroeconomic policy is largely the art or science of the governance of economic imbalance. Some of the words that indicate imbalance are 'recession', 'inflation', 'deflation' and 'contraction'. Another word, 'stagflation', represents ... More >>
Epidemic Costs And Responses: Coronavirus And Tuberculosis
Thursday, 20 August 2020, 4:21 pm | Keith Rankin
Early Identification and Action We are now learning, from Covid19, one thing above all else. With epidemics, it is early identification and action that matters. When our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, says that New Zealand's government approach is ... More >>
Messaging And Masks
Thursday, 13 August 2020, 4:36 pm | Keith Rankin
Jacinda Ardern is Prime Minister for a good reason. She is an excellent communicator. She got the message about mask-wearing almost bang-on in her speech yesterday. She was correctly reported as saying: Aucklanders should use a mask if they leave the ... More >>
Money: Where Does It Come From, Where Does It Go?
Tuesday, 11 August 2020, 5:15 pm | Keith Rankin
"I think you have to recognise money comes from somewhere. It doesn't just come from a big money tree." Judith Collins 2020 "Someone has to pay the bill – there aren't little pixies at the bottom of the garden printing cash." ... More >>
Counting The Cost Of Government Action And Inaction
Thursday, 6 August 2020, 4:13 pm | Keith Rankin
Money as an Unfortunate Metaphor for Cost Especially but not only in election years, when any new policy is proposed by a major party, a ubiquitous refrain follows: "what will it cost?"; "where will the money come from?". The context is ... More >>
Rob Muldoon And Judith Collins
Friday, 31 July 2020, 11:46 am | Keith Rankin
Rob Muldoon was a pugnacious and abrasive prime minister of New Zealand who was treated unkindly by commentators – and even historians – in the aftermath of his period in office (1975 to 1984). Hopefully, future historians will treat him ... More >>
Optimising Work-Life Balance In The Wake Of Covid-19
Friday, 24 July 2020, 1:23 pm | Keith Rankin
Changing Income-Relaxation Balance as a sequence of Pie Charts On June 30 ( Chart Analysis on Evening Report ) I promised to elaborate on the economic policies that would underpin the new optimisation of work-life balance. I argued that economic ... More >>
Universal Basic Income: Left, Right, And Centre
Thursday, 16 July 2020, 11:24 am | Keith Rankin
1. Representative Democracy On 26 June, I attended a zoom webinar called 'Modern politics – 20thC to MMP', run by Auckland Libraries and Ancestry.com. The speakers were politics' academics Grant Duncan and Toby Boraman, from Massey University. Duncan ... More >>
Duty Of Care And Economic Citizenship
Tuesday, 7 July 2020, 9:38 am | Keith Rankin
Three Citizenships The concept of 'citizenship' has both general and specific meanings. The most specific and familiar I call passport citizenship . A passport citizen of a country is a person holding a passport for that country, or with unambiguous entitlement ... More >>
Green Party Tax-Benefit Policy Is Not Helpful
Thursday, 2 July 2020, 4:49 pm | Keith Rankin
Socialism versus Progressive Capitalism I was disappointed that the Green Party continues to reject a distributive Universal Basic Income (UBI) in favour of a redistributive and polarising Guaranteed Minimum Income (GMI) model. GMI is the antithesis of UBI. More >>
Imagination, Science, And Day-to-Day Magic
Friday, 26 June 2020, 12:18 pm | Keith Rankin
Fundamental Magic The fundamentals of existence are difficult to explain, which is why we need to fall back on abstract 'creators'; ie beings sufficiently abstract that they themselves do not need to be explained. Here is my big three list of origin ... More >>
Foreign Lives Matter
Tuesday, 16 June 2020, 5:07 pm | Keith Rankin
Foreign lives matter, especially (but by no means only) when they are our foreigners. As intimated on 15 March 2019, our foreigners include all non New Zealand citizens in New Zealand, at a given point in time (the 'present'). And our foreigners include ... More >>
Goldmining As Our Metaphor For Economic Activity
Thursday, 11 June 2020, 5:44 pm | Keith Rankin
Imagery: Metaphors, Symbols, Analogies As a species, people use symbols to facilitate understandings of the complexities of the world. In the last millennium in Europe, the highest subjects of learning were 'classical studies' and 'theology'. It was ... More >>
A Plague Of Pandemics, Including A Pandemic Of Plague
Tuesday, 9 June 2020, 5:25 pm | Keith Rankin
How many current pandemics? The word 'pandemic' is not entirely defined on narrow public health criteria. (Likewise, an economic depression has no technical definition.) In an important sense it is a word of history, a word to describe significant health ... More >>
Economic Impacts Of Pandemics
Friday, 5 June 2020, 11:45 am | Keith Rankin
The conversation around the 2020 covid19 pandemic has been widely framed as 'health versus the economy'. It has been quite political, with people leaning to the left emphasising 'health', and people leaning to the right emphasising 'the economy'. ... More >>
Mindframes And Doughnuts
Wednesday, 3 June 2020, 2:33 pm | Keith Rankin
When things go wrong with economic life, it's easy to blame economics; that is, the academic discipline called 'economics'. We all live economic lives, and use metaphors to give meaning to that amorphous thing we call 'the economy' and to our individual ... More >>
Deeply Negative Interest Rates
Thursday, 28 May 2020, 4:44 pm | Keith Rankin
On Project Syndicate – and in other places in recent months – orthodox US economist Kenneth Rogoff has presented the case for deeply negative interest rates . Another financial sacred cow falls; yes, interest rates can be negative, even substantially ... More >>
Government And Money During A Major Economic Downturn
Tuesday, 26 May 2020, 3:43 pm | Keith Rankin
from an interview with Geoff Bertram , on The Panel, RNZ 22 May 2020 Wallace Chapman: "Are we setting up our future generations, our future children, to be born into a life of national debt?" [He mentions the on-line Fabian Society discussion ... More >>
Unpacking Our Fear Of Government Debt
Thursday, 21 May 2020, 5:16 pm | Keith Rankin
Budget-related Economic Chatter Last week in New Zealand was Budget week, and the chatter the burden of government debt reached a crescendo. I will highlight here comments made, on Monday 11 May, by four economists with substantial media profiles, ... More >>
