The hemline index

Many years ago I remember reading a sci fi book where the author talked about the intersection between the price of gold, hemlines and men...

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Costing women's work

As Lucassen says, "women’s work is often overlooked compared to men’s" (2021, p. 1): I have written about this before (here), but ...

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The VIX index

Volatility is effectively a measure of predictability... or lack of it. And it is a term most often used in markets. Predictability is good:...

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Utopia versus slavery

I was re-reading Lucassen's book  The Story of Work last year, where he talked about a dichotomy of views in his introduction which led...

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What is a Veblen good?

Have you heard of a "Veblen good" (Boyle, 2024, 1:50)? I hadn't until late last year. A Veblen good is one which, despite an i...

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Jevons' paradox

I had not heard of Jevons’ Paradox before the DeepSeek AI scare in late January 2025. So why did I hear then? Well, Jevons' paradox is t...

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Women's work

I was reading "The Story of Work" (Lucassen, 2021) this week, encountering "Today, most people on this planet spend more than...

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The Aotearoa real estate multiplier

A spate of articles earlier this year looked at whether house prices doubled every ten years (Church, 2022; Edmunds, 2024; McKnight, 2024). ...

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WEIRD societies

OK. So who has heard of WEIRD societies? I ran across this term while reading a library book about colour recently (Parkinson, 2023). This a...

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Aotearoa through the Great Depression

Isn't YouTube a trove of information? Last year I ran across a partial episode from the documentary series, Frontiers of Dreams. This ...

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Doing Business in New Zealand

I answered a question on Quora (2021) a while ago about how New Zealand compares to other nations in the ease of doing business. It was easy...

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The Big Mac Index

"Burgernomics" logo (The Economist, 2018) Way, way back in 1986, The Economist decided to create a rather tongue-in-cheek inde...

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Acts of Terrestrial and Extra-terrestrial Leadership

'Sustainability' arose from the concept of 'sustained yield' in the 1980s which describes agriculture and forestry practi...

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