When a new pharmaceutical is so successful that it blows out the national income accounts, it’s probably safe to call it a wonderdrug. Semaglutide, marketed as Ozempic when treating Type II diabetes and as Wegovy for weight loss, turned a half-year 0.3% decline in Danish GDP into a 1.7% year-on-year increase. Read more

“There is no alternative” is a powerful framing if you want your alternative to prevail – even more so when regulations make it too easy for other options to be far too hard. Wellington’s Council got a dose of it over the past week. Read more

No election platform survives contact with post-election coalition negotiations. But one outcome of the current negotiations seems rather obvious. Read more

The true state of public finances is not meant to surprise any incoming government. The Public Finance Act 1989 aimed to prevent any outgoing government from handing an incoming government the kind of horrors David Lange and Roger Douglas found in the books in 1984. Read more

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard. At least according to the Sage of Baltimore, journalist and essayist H.L. Read more

If punters at Australia’s Betfair are right, there’s an eighty-nine percent chance any government formed after Saturday’s election will have a National Party Prime Minister. But the things Betfair can’t tell us makes me miss our missing election stock market. Read more

Pro-housing policy generally tries to find ways of outflanking NIMBYs – the Not In My BackYard objectors to new development. It’s an approach well-supported in academic research and reflected in New Zealand policy. Read more

As a proud Canadian, I am occasionally compelled to draw Kiwis’ attention to the wonderful service that my homeland provides to the world. The election here has been tedious. Read more