The Big Questions: What is New Zealand’s Future?
Various authors
Penguin Random House, $38.00
ISBN 9780143772378
I’ve been worrying about Trump. Not the man – a lost cause, that – but the movement: Trumpism – the apparently bigoted, intolerant, resentful roilings that are driving apart, not just nations, but people within nations. Why has this happened? What, exactly, has happened? Could something similar arise in New Zealand?
The Fire Economy: New Zealand’s Reckoning
Jane Kelsey
Bridget Williams Books, $50.00,
ISBN 9781927247839
“Imagine,” said the great physicist Richard Feynman, “how much harder physics would be if electrons had emotions!” Harder still, if not just emotions but consciousness, memory and reasoning power. Perhaps they do – I don’t know. I do know that people have these attributes and more, and I have come to appreciate just how difficult that fact makes life for those of us who study the human or social sciences, such as economics.
Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis Max Rashbrooke (ed) Bridget Williams Books, $40.00, ISBN 9781927131510 Judgements of All Kinds: Economic Policy-Making in New Zealand 1945-1984 Jim McAloon Victoria University Press, $50.00, ISBN 9780864738974 Inequality: A New Zealand Crisis is more than…
The Carbon Challenge: New Zealand’s Emissions Trading Scheme Geoff Bertram and Simon Terry Bridget Williams Books, $39.99, ISBN 9781877242465 You will remember Pascal’s Wager. Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a French mathematical prodigy and philosopher who suggested that even if…
Crisis of Identity? The Mission and Management of Universities in New Zealand Wilf Malcolm and Nicholas Tarling Dunmore Press, $39.95, ISBN 9781877399275 Clark Kerr, a great president of the University of California at Berkeley, once defined the university as “a…
Speaking Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals Rethink New Zealand Laurence Simmons (ed) Auckland University Press, $45.00, ISBN 9781869403799 I was thrilled to be asked to review this book. You see, I am a bit of a public intellectual myself, yet…
The Democracy Sham: How Globalisation Devalues Your Vote Bryan Gould Craig Potton Publishing, $29.99, ISBN 1877333506 “Nobody told us we could do that!” So said the Fabian Sidney Webb in 1931 when the new National government of which he was…
Muldoon Revisited ed Margaret Clark Dunmore Press, $39.95, ISBN 0864694652 What were you doing the day Robert Muldoon died? I was in Auckland, very recently returned to this country after 20 years overseas. I watched the coverage of the death…
A World Without Walls: Freedom, Development, Free Trade and Global Governance Mike Moore Cambridge University Press, $75, ISBN 0521827019 The cover of Mike Moore’s new book about his three years as director-general of the World Trade Organization (WTO) shows a…
Slow readers, Tim Hazledine
Economist and member of the 2000 Heart of the Nation Taskforce on the Arts Tim Hazledine asks if we’re feeding public money to the wrong end of the literary food chain. The New York Times once ran a competition for…
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