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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 4]
Covid Vaccine Policy Fail: Priority Groups Under-protected
Wednesday, 13 July 2022, 1:35 pm | Keith Rankin
Keith Rankin, 13 July 2022 Kathryn Ryan: "Why is there a six-month gap between boosters?" Siouxsie Wiles: "I can't answer that for you. It doesn't make sense based on the data that we have. … In Israel they got it at least ... More >>
Narrow Vision: Subsidised Cars And Street Immunity
Friday, 27 May 2022, 12:31 pm | Keith Rankin
Problems make the world go round . Many of us – maybe the majority of workers, and certainly the majority of well-paid workers – earn our living addressing problems. A problem-free world would represent a major crisis for modern social-capitalism. ... More >>
Liberal Democracy In The New Neonationalist Era: The Three 'O's
Friday, 13 May 2022, 1:37 pm | Keith Rankin
Modern 'western' governments are known as 'liberal democracies'. While each political party in a liberal democracy has a 'policy agenda' which it would like to implement, only single-party governments have a realistic opportunity to fully implement their ... More >>
Problem Of Price Increases: 'Cost Of Living' Versus 'Inflation'
Thursday, 21 April 2022, 10:10 am | Keith Rankin
The new (though not unfamiliar to older New Zealanders) crisis of 2022 (and most likely beyond) has become, alternatively, a 'cost of living' or an 'inflation' crisis. The public discussion treats these two 'enemies of the people' as one and the same ... More >>
Global Warming: Considering The Lesser Evils
Thursday, 7 April 2022, 2:16 pm | Keith Rankin
Earlier this week the final report from the IPCC ( press release ) on climate change was released. While it indicates that it is still technically possible to limit global warming to 1½ degrees; such an outcome is both unlikely and may require more than ... More >>
Nature: Friend Or Foe?
Monday, 28 March 2022, 1:33 pm | Keith Rankin
One of the major themes in my life, as a baby-boomer growing up in the 1960s, has been the relationship between 'man' (aka humankind) and 'nature'. Science – especially applied science, and western philosophy – was presented as a progressive economic ... More >>
Borrowing Hurdles:Unintended Consequences Arising From Wilful Blindness
Wednesday, 23 March 2022, 12:56 pm | Keith Rankin
On 1 December 2021 the CCCFA (Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act) entered Aotearoa New Zealand with more stealth than the Omicron BA2 variant. It resulted in unintended consequences that were (and are) entirely predictable. There are two ... More >>
Rising 'Cost Of Living' And Inflation
Wednesday, 16 March 2022, 4:45 pm | Keith Rankin
The big new story in the news cycle – in New Zealand but not only in New Zealand – is the rising 'cost of living', which is usually conflated with 'inflation'. These topics – together and separately – are, like Covid19, devolved to 'social ... More >>
Fighting An Unclear War
Tuesday, 8 March 2022, 3:01 pm | Keith Rankin
The war in Ukraine possibly represents the most dangerous episode in the history of humanity in historical times; especially but not only because it comes on top of two other overt global crises – climate change and pandemic – and another ... More >>
Cancelling Disabled Children
Monday, 7 March 2022, 11:36 am | Keith Rankin
I watched the very short movie Forgive Us Our Trespasses on Netflix last weekend. Set in Germany in the 1930s, it starts with a schoolteacher giving an arithmetic lesson to a class of children. The question posed was that the cost of caring for ... More >>
Omicron Covid And Political Narrative
Thursday, 24 February 2022, 4:28 pm | Keith Rankin
The mainstream political narrative that emerged in late March 2020 was a 'narrative of fear' which set up the Covid19 coronavirus as a 'tricky' enemy that was out to get us by finding ways through our defences; and that we had to build collective ... More >>
Russian Ambitions? Transnistria And Kaliningrad
Wednesday, 23 February 2022, 11:22 am | Keith Rankin
Having watched Vladimir Putin's somewhat rambling speech on Al Jazeera yesterday, I think we can be sure that he does have a clear ambition to create an empire based on the ethnic concept of the Viking 'Rus' (refer my recent Living with Ambiguity ... More >>
Geopolitics, Russia And Ukraine: Living With Ambiguity
Tuesday, 15 February 2022, 5:02 pm | Keith Rankin
Why is Russia encircling Ukraine with what looks very much like an invasion force? The first principle in answering such a question is that one should never take the simple media-reported statements of any of the major protagonists at face value. ... More >>
Nations, Territories, And Conflict
Monday, 14 February 2022, 4:44 pm | Keith Rankin
At the heart of the present geopolitical conflict centred on Ukraine is a divergent set of views at to what constitutes a 'nation'. Rival Views of Nationality Firstly, 'nation-states' as we know them today arguably date to the 1645 Peace (or Treaties) ... More >>
Unemployment Insurance?
Thursday, 10 February 2022, 4:22 pm | Keith Rankin
The government's latest scheme is a form of government unemployment insurance. Interestingly, both the anti-poverty groups and the neoliberal New Zealand Initiative think tank see this scheme as problematic, very much as a 'solution looking for a problem'. ... More >>
Visualising A Way Out Of The Pandemic
Tuesday, 21 December 2021, 4:05 pm | Keith Rankin
Public policy has a number of biases. One is that certain real or alleged emergencies require (or seem to require) an urgent policy intervention. The result is a consortium of elected politicians, bureaucrat officials, and expert technocrats get on board, ... More >>
Science, Scientists, And Scientism
Monday, 6 December 2021, 9:13 am | Keith Rankin
Science, in the not-so-recent-past, has often had a bad press. It's been personified, particularly by the political left, as Frankenstein, as agents of capitalism, classical liberalism, colonialism, sexism (yang over yin), eugenics, and god-like pretension. ... More >>
Basic Universal Income And Economic Rights
Tuesday, 30 November 2021, 12:37 pm | Keith Rankin
"Broad growth is only going to come when you put money in the hands of people, and that's why we talk about a Universal Basic Income". [Ritu Dewan, Indian Society of Labour Economics]. (From How long before India's economy recovers , 'Context ... More >>
Bulgaria, The Balkans, And Distrust
Thursday, 25 November 2021, 12:17 pm | Keith Rankin
Yesterday morning I awoke to this story about a bus crash in Bulgaria: Dozens killed in Bulgaria bus fire, including children . I thought immediately about how unusual it is in New Zealand to hear a story about Bulgaria. In the context that Bulgaria ... More >>
Who's The Thief?
Tuesday, 23 November 2021, 2:31 pm | Keith Rankin
Cartoon Strip 1 Imagine a two-panel cartoon strip. Each panel has an apple tree and two people. In the first panel, the tree has eight apples, all low-hanging. In the second panel, the apples have all been picked. One person (A) has one apple in ... More >>
