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What is a Govt Job?
In hawking around their various positions the government and the media and unions and employers have invented vast and complex debates about how many jobs have been created and/or lost. All fun and games and the source of endless debate and calculation.
It is difficult to get away from the proposition, it seems to me, that from a taxpayers point of view the critical point is simply whether the government payroll, adjusted for inflation, has gone up or down. Whether that payroll should have gone up or down is another matter involving quite separate considerations largely concerned with what value the taxpayer gets from the expenditure and whether or not that “value” is wanted.
There is no doubt great debate to be had over those matters but it seems ill advised to continue to waft endlessly over what should and should not be counted as a job, a vacancy, a newly created job (or vacancy) and the like. Let us at least start with some statistic which reflects what we are seeking – which, depending on what agenda you are pushing, is an increase or a decrease.
A Different Kind of Diversification
The Economist of May 2026 reports that there are now, in American listed markets, more ETFs than there are listed companies. Stock picking is not the game it once was – nor, one assumes, is commission harvesting from broking your picks.
Especially Relevant to NZ
| Read on blog or Reader Marginal REVOLUTION Read on blog or Reader Do Market Reforms Cause Growth? By Tyler Cowen on May 1, 2026 Do market-oriented reforms cause economic growth? This paper revisits this question using a cross-country panel of reform episodes identified from various changes in well-known economic freedom and structural reform indices. We exploit the timing of reforms using distributed-lag and event-study frameworks that trace the dynamic response of per-capita GDP. We find little evidence of immediate growth gains and some short-run adjustment costs following reform. However, growth rises gradually and persistently over time, with economically meaningful effects emerging after several years. These patterns are robust across alternative measures of reform and specifications. The results reconcile conflicting findings in the literature by showing that market reforms generate long-run growth gains despite short-run disruptions. Overall, the evidence supports the view that institutional liberalization operates through slow-moving channels that accumulate into sustained improvements in economic performance. That is from a recent paper by Jon Hartley and Brian Wheaton. Comment |
Eye2theLongRun 