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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 13]
Universal Versus Targeted Assistance, A Muddled Dichotomy
Tuesday, 19 May 2020, 4:17 pm | Keith Rankin
The Commentariat There is a regular commentariat who appear on places such as 'The Panel' on Radio New Zealand (4pm on weekdays), and on panels on television shows such as Newshub Nation (TV3, weekends) and Q+A (TV1, Mondays). Generally, these panellists ... More >>
Pie Economics: A Way To Understand Economic Balance
Wednesday, 13 May 2020, 10:51 am | Keith Rankin
Economies as Pie Charts Most of us are familiar with the expressions 'economic pie' or 'economic cake'. The 'pie' metaphor is probably best, because pies represent a holdall food item, less homogeneous in their finished forms than are cakes. Further, ... More >>
Can Our Grandchildren Be Our Creditors?
Thursday, 7 May 2020, 4:52 pm | Keith Rankin
"We are borrowing tens of billions of dollars from our children and grandchildren to get us through the Covid crisis…". ( James Shaw in interview on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon, 23 April 2020) Debtors and Creditors Literally, for me to ... More >>
Smart Treatments In A Pandemic; Lessons From The Black Flu
Tuesday, 5 May 2020, 6:42 pm | Keith Rankin
Surviving the Black Flu It has been interesting for me to look back and investigate the Black Flu pandemic of 1918. The 1918 pandemic is widely regarded to have been the world's worst pandemic since the Black Death of the late 1340s. (It was commonly More >>
Universal Income Flat Tax: The Mechanism That Makes The Necessary Possible
Thursday, 30 April 2020, 7:11 pm | Keith Rankin
Fact Checking On Mondays – or Tuesdays after public holidays – National Radio's Kathryn Ryan runs a session called 'Political Commentators'. On 28 April, from the right was regular commentator Matthew Hooton. From the left was Neal Jones who is ... More >>
Will Covid-19 Remain A First-World Disease?
Tuesday, 28 April 2020, 4:07 pm | Keith Rankin
Predictions It is dangerous to predict how pandemics will pan out. In Covid19 by the Numbers , Anatole Kaletsky (writing for Project Syndicate on 10 March 2020) used what looked like advanced analysis to conclude that at most 750,000 outside of China ... More >>
Systemic Behaviour, And The Challenges Of The 2020s
Thursday, 23 April 2020, 4:48 pm | Keith Rankin
The System – The Whole Good systemic behaviour is acting for the good of all, not by making altruistic sacrifices but by following the golden rule ("behave towards others as you would have them behave towards you"). Or put another way, ... More >>
'Europia' And The Spread Of Covid19
Thursday, 16 April 2020, 1:18 pm | Keith Rankin
I should be at Iguaçu Falls today, in Brazil and in Argentina. In mid-February I booked my domestic flights in these two countries, believing that the Covid19 epidemic was under control in Asia, and was unlikely to become anything like as serious anywhere ... More >>
Northern European Mercantilism And The Covid19 Emergency
Thursday, 9 April 2020, 12:06 pm | Keith Rankin
What is Mercantilism? Mercantilism is the form of public policy that was dominant in Europe – especially Northern Europe – in the 'early modern' period; meaning in the period loosely between 1500 and 1800 (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries). ... More >>
Universal Basic Income (or Basic Universal Income) And Covid19
Tuesday, 7 April 2020, 11:15 am | Keith Rankin
Once again it was very disappointing to hear a radio programme poo-pooing the idea of a Universal Basic Income by misrepresenting it. Refer: (The Panel, National Radio, 6 April 2020) https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/thepanel/audio/2018741718/a-universal-basic-income-to-all-its-citizens ... More >>
Money, Public Debt And The Covid19 Emergency
Thursday, 2 April 2020, 8:11 pm | Keith Rankin
What is Money? Money is a mystery. To most of us we receive it, we spend it, we save it, we borrow it. And if we don't have enough, we are in trouble. Many of us think of money as if it is tangible, like gold; something that is naturally scarce, ... More >>
Coronavirus – A Malthusian Event?
Friday, 27 March 2020, 6:58 pm | Keith Rankin
Malthusian checks The 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic has all the visible hallmarks of a Malthusian pestilence, a necessary positive check visited upon an overabundant humanity. Indeed, that is a likely future interpretation of this event. It's an important ... More >>
Universal Basic Income And Covid19
Wednesday, 25 March 2020, 8:37 pm | Keith Rankin
I keep hearing rather unfortunate 'expert' comments in response to questions asked about Universal Basic Income (UBI) as a way of responding to the Covid19 economic contraction. These comments all relate to a 'straw man' concept of UBI that is obviously ... More >>
Economic Emergency 2020, Will There Be A Resumption Of Normality?
Thursday, 12 March 2020, 4:47 pm | Keith Rankin
For a few weeks now, awareness has been growing that the global economic consequences of the Covid19 epidemic (that WHO today notes has "characteristics of a pandemic") may be greater than the medical consequences, even if the European death rates fail ... More >>
Keith Rankin: Another Option for Auckland's Port
Thursday, 12 December 2019, 2:21 pm | Keith Rankin
The case for a complete relocation of Auckland's Waitematā Harbour freight port is far from established. Nevertheless, Auckland will grow over the long term, and the freight operations need to move away from the area close to the downtown Ferry ... More >>
Liberal Mercantilism and Economic Capitalism
Friday, 28 September 2018, 10:32 am | Keith Rankin
Most of us realise that there is something wrong with capitalism as we know it. We also accept that capitalism is here to stay; the only practicable alternatives are evolutions of capitalism, not from capitalism. More >>
The Government's New 'Employment' Contract
Wednesday, 28 March 2018, 10:07 am | Keith Rankin
The government has got it badly wrong with the new Policy Targets Agreement , its contract with the Reserve Bank about monetary policy. Perhaps inadvertently, the emphasis is now on maximising employment, not living standards. Maximising employment ... More >>
Public Equity and Tax-Benefit Reform
Thursday, 14 December 2017, 5:55 pm | Keith Rankin
Public Equity is not a difficult concept to understand. Equity is about ownership. And equity is about equality. Equal owners own what they own equally. Two equal owners of a house own that house equally. Two people with equal shares in a business have ... More >>
UBI as a Reconceptualisation of Income Tax
Thursday, 24 March 2016, 1:13 pm | Keith Rankin
I am worried that too much of the recent talk around the introduction of a universal basic income has been unhelpful. The concept – defined in 1991 – is still not understood by the politicians and journalists who represent the public's main source ... More >>
Predicting the World Economy through Financial Balances
Thursday, 8 October 2015, 11:33 am | Keith Rankin
In my most recent Charts for this Week on Evening Report , I have published charts of average private sector and government financial balances (surpluses/deficits) for a wide range of countries for two decades of financial excess ( Spread of Financial ... More >>
