Posts by Sacha
-
Hard News: We are all Twitter, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
we actually like the serenity
+1
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to John Holley,
how little most of them knew about local government
matching the Minister perfectly..
-
Legal Beagle: Voting Referendum: Jus' Sayin', in reply to BenWilson,
Who stars in it?
Bloody Hugh Grant, I imagine
-
Hard News: We are all Twitter, in reply to chris,
do away with the law, problem solved
You've been living in China too long, sir.
-
Hard News: Someone has to be accountable…, in reply to nzlemming,
we can all stay perfectly calm, in either case
-
Hard News: Three months after, in reply to Kyle Matthews,
Maybe there are only X people who can drive the demolition machines
Surely not workforce planning issues exacerbated by cutting industry training programmes and apprenticeships? Or failure to operate a real market economy where pay rates go up until demand is filled (by people from other countries in this case). Or does that only apply to CEOs perhaps?
-
Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to Lilith __,
Why is it that so many Ministers in the current government seem allergic to expert advice or evidence?
Politicians of the right often see themselves as the "deciders" - it is a different model of leadership and power. Refer George Lakoff, etc.
-
Tapu Misa on the continued disinformation about minimum wage impacts on employment, especially after the world's financial collapse.
It would be nice to think that economists had become more humble about the limitations of their field.
Yet economic myths (that tax cuts lead to growth, or magically "pay for themselves") continue to be trotted out as scientific truth, rather than articles of faith.
So what's the truth about minimum wage increases and the effect on employment? It's a lot more complicated than Key suggests.
The international evidence is mixed, as the Department of Labour noted in its advice to the Government.
It's true that most economists have believed that higher minimum wages invariably reduce employment among low-paid workers. A number of US studies from the 1970s had suggested a significant negative link between the minimum wage and youth employment.
But more recent studies have undercut the conventional view, and questioned the evidence on which it was built.
One large study which analysed 64 US minimum wage studies found not only that there was bias in the selection of published studies towards those which showed negative effects on employment, but that once the bias was removed there were actually positive effects.
Probably the strongest and most influential challenge to the traditional worldview came from the work of David Card and Allan Krueger, whose wide-ranging analysis of minimum wage increases in the US in the late 1980s and early 1990s turned conventional economic wisdom on its head and suggested, as one economist wrote, "that economists know less about what the invisible hand is up to than they let on".
In New Zealand, a study in 2007 by Dean Hyslop and Steve Stillman which looked at the effect of increases of between 41 per cent and 69 per cent in the youth minimum wage found "no major robust evidence of adverse effects on youth employment or hours worked", in fact, there was an increase in hours worked for those aged 16 and 17.
-
Some demolition company chiefs are apparently unfamiliar with the notion of shiftwork.
After a brief visit to the city, international agency Architecture for Humanity chief executive Cameron Sinclair yesterday told the Sunday Star-Times he was shocked at the slow pace of deconstruction work in the quake-damaged city's centre.
Mr Sinclair, who helped with rebuilding New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, said the city could not afford to take weekends off when there were so many buildings that needed to come down before any reconstruction work could begin.
Around 1000 buildings in central Christchurch have been identified as needing to be demolished.
However Southern Demolition director Alan Edge said the comments were ridiculous.
"You can't work men seven days," he told The Press. "Whoever said they should be working seven days is ridiculous. People have families and life outside work."
-
Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to George Darroch,
the belief that a trickle down effect and rising inequality will lift all boats
That has been the core idoelogy of McCully and his fellow travellers for decades - and NZ's dramatic inequality is probably seen by them as a measure of success. All evidence challenging that belief will be ignored by these dolts.