The Retro Fashion of the Wealth Tax
Every few decades, the ideas with the worst track records come back into style.
Kristian Niemietz
· 8 min read
Economics
A collection of 106 posts
An Abject Policy Failure
An unorthodox survey suggests it’s time for the Australian government to concede defeat in the tobacco wars. Will it have the guts to do so?
Stephen Dawson
· 8 min read
Net Zero Won't Fix Climate Change. Technology Will
Treat a warming planet as an engineering problem rather than a moral failing, and it starts to look solvable.
John Aziz
· 9 min read
Why Australia Gave Up on Getting Richer
McKinsey's Chris Bradley on why Australia stopped investing—and why he believes the poorest country in the world could live as well as Switzerland does today by 2100.
Claire Lehmann
· 32 min read
Gary Stevenson Is Wrong About Wealth Inequality
Gary Stevenson says Britain's wealth inequality is spiralling out of control. The data says otherwise—and Channel 4 never thought to check.
Kristian Niemietz
· 8 min read
Why Australia's New Capital Gains Tax Is the Best Tax Policy for Crushing the Economy
Fund manager Derek Francis tells Claire Lehmann that Treasury's modelling of Australia's new capital gains tax contains a basic error — one that could push tax rates on shares as high as 70 percent.
Claire Lehmann
· 26 min read
China’s Last Moonshot
China’s ghost cities are like a mocking glimpse of the Chinese century we were told to expect, and for which we are still waiting.
Aaron Sarin
· 5 min read
The Party of the Worker Is Now the Party of the Bureaucrat
The old fight was labour versus capital. The real fight now is between those who create value and those who administer it, and Australia's new budget has picked the wrong side.
Claire Lehmann
· 13 min read
The Destructivists
When the appetite for moral reform becomes an appetite for destruction.
John Aziz
· 8 min read
A Baseless Attack on Friedrich Hayek’s Intellectual Legacy
Author Quinn Slobodian has won acclaim for his attempt to link the famed Austrian economist to right-wing extremists. But his arguments collapse under scrutiny.
Andy Lamey
· 41 min read
Dangerous Losers
It's not poverty that drives men to violence, but the experience of losing status.
Jason Manning
· 10 min read
The Emerging Female Wage Premium
Young women are now outearning young men; this structural shift has consequences that extend well beyond wages.
David Maywald
· 10 min read
The Roots of Recession
As an energy shock looms, a new book reframes recession as the product of historical circumstance, not cyclical inevitability.
Joel Kotkin
· 11 min read
Germany’s Cozy Catastrophe
The German state has been generous to its beneficiaries—but that largesse is becoming increasingly unsustainable.
Andreas Paul John
· 18 min read
The Housing Crisis Is Destroying Homeownership—and Undermining Democracy
Escalating house prices and density rules trap young people in renting, eroding homeownership—a key to democracy.
Wendell Cox, Joel Kotkin
· 12 min read