“Productivity isn’t everything but in the long run it is almost everything,” observed economist Paul Krugman. “A country’s ability to improve its standard of living over time depends almost entirely on its ability to raise output per worker.” This is bad news for New Zealand. Read more

In Greek mythology, the Cyclops were a race of giants, each with great power yet with only a single eye. According to legend, the Cyclops traded their second eye for the gift of prophecy. Read more

Last month France celebrated the storming of the Bastille, an assault that became a flashpoint for the French Revolution. As a fortress and prison, the Bastille was emblematic of the French monarchy. Read more

While New Zealand is in political Neverland, I am taking refuge in rural France. Just an hour north of the vineyards of Bordeaux, it is no great hardship. Read more

After 11 years as a cowboy in America’s wild west, Clark Stanley claimed to have created a medical cure-all from secrets learned from a Hopi medicine man. He began marketing his Snake Oil Liniment in the early 1900s. Read more

Literacy rates in New Zealand present a paradox. Our renowned Reading Recovery programme is an international export success. Read more

Is it possible to have too both too much and too little of something at the same time? This may sound like a problem posed by quantum physics but the question arises with something much more prosaic: bus drivers. Read more

“Local competition” is among factors cited by dairy owners for wildly varying prices for every-day grocery items like baked beans. The issue came to light in a leaked email from a dairy-owner in the lower North Island to her partner. Read more

Tracey Martin wants to regulate the meaning of a commonly used word. It is a breath-taking ambition, even for a politician. Read more

Does it matter if businesses do not respect their regulators? According to Finance Minister Grant Robertson, it does. Read more

Next week Parliament will have its first chance to debate Commerce Minister Kris Faafoi’s new Commerce Amendment Bill. If passed, the Bill will grant the Commission’s wish - and allow it to use its powers of compulsion to undertake ‘market studies’ into the state of competition in any market. Read more

In Franz Kafka’s The Trial the chief cashier of a bank, Josef K, is unexpectedly arrested by two unidentified agents from an unspecified agency for an unspecified crime. At one level, The Trial is a satire of bureaucracy. Read more