Scoop has an Ethical Paywall
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 8]
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 >>
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 >>
