CoveragePost
December 21, 2021
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Public policy has a number of biases. One is that certain real or alleged emergencies require (or seem to require) an urgent policy intervention. The result is a consortium of elected politicians, bureaucrat officials, and expert technocrats get on board, and assume a drivers’ role in a society which would otherwise ... <a title="Keith Rankin Analysis – Visualising a Way out of the Pandemic" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/12/21/keith-rankin-analysis-visualising-a-way-out-of-the-pandemic/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Analysis – Visualising a Way out of the Pandemic">Read more</a>
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October 28, 2021
Analysis Keith Rankin. In its pandemic response, the New Zealand government has consistently been tardy, and then found itself playing catch-up, having to ‘go hard’ (indeed a ‘world-leading’ hardest) on account of its lack of preparedness. Further, having gone hard, there has always been an ambivalence about when the emergency period is over; an unwillingness ... <a title="Keith Rankin Analysis – Covid19: Revaccinate Now, and address Influenza too" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/10/28/keith-rankin-analysis-covid19-revaccinate-now-and-address-influenza-too/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Analysis – Covid19: Revaccinate Now, and address Influenza too">Read more</a>
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October 21, 2021
Analysis by Keith Rankin. A commentary from Melbourne – Megan Gold, Melbourne embraced zero-Covid, now isolated as world bounces back, NZ Herald 16 Oct, originally published in the UK Daily Telegraph – notes that “even high vaccine uptake may not protect the most vulnerable from Covid; let alone the other illnesses that could ravage Australia ... <a title="Keith Rankin Analysis – Debt, Community Debt, and Immunity Debt" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/10/21/keith-rankin-analysis-immunity-debt-a-case-of-community-debt/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Analysis – Debt, Community Debt, and Immunity Debt">Read more</a>
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September 3, 2021
Analysis by Keith Rankin. Dynamic living processes get into feedback loops. The most common is a negative feedback loop, whereby processes self-regulate; when something happens then something else happens, in response, to offset the initial event. If it gets cold, we put on another layer of clothing. If a consumer good becomes scarce, its price ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Pandemic Feedback" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/09/03/keith-rankin-essay-pandemic-feedback/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Pandemic Feedback">Read more</a>
CoveragePost
August 13, 2021
Analysis by Keith Rankin. In our age of unnuanced media reporting, cynicism, and political correctness, words and meanings are subject – perhaps increasingly – to an effective process of cancellation. It’s not a new process, in the past certain words might be replaced by others – eg ‘race’ replaced by ‘ethnicity’, ‘illegitimate’ replaced by ‘ex-nuptial’, ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Loss of Language, and the Future of Science" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/08/13/keith-rankin-essay-loss-of-language-and-the-future-of-science/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Loss of Language, and the Future of Science">Read more</a>
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August 3, 2021
Analysis by Keith Rankin. We have this pretty fiction that the world is made up of approximately 200 politically autonomous nation-states. This in the entrenched ‘Wilsonian’ view of the political world that, in particular, was sort-of realised after World War One; a view that rendered the national empires (such as the British Empire) of the ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Territorial Fundamentalism in our Post-Globalisation Era" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/08/03/keith-rankin-essay-territorial-fundamentalism-in-our-post-globalisation-era/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Territorial Fundamentalism in our Post-Globalisation Era">Read more</a>
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July 16, 2021
Analysis by Keith Rankin. It is true that New Zealand – and the rest of the world – now faces substantial inflation pressure. As the 2020s unfold, the biggest macroeconomic story – as in the 1920s after World War 1 – is likely to be about how we address these pressures in a context of ... <a title="Keith Rankin Analysis – Inflation Fears, Bullshit Costs, and Inappropriate Policy" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/07/16/keith-rankin-analysis-inflation-fears-bullshit-costs-and-inappropriate-policy/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Analysis – Inflation Fears, Bullshit Costs, and Inappropriate Policy">Read more</a>
CoveragePost
May 4, 2021
Essay by Keith Rankin. We humans seem to have a need to coalesce into tribes, and we do this by identifying – and sometimes demonising, or holding in condescension – others who are not us. We also like to anthropomorphise, treating both animals and nations as if they were humans. Thus, ‘Peter Rabbit does this’; ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Calling Out China" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/05/04/keith-rankin-essay-calling-out-china/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Calling Out China">Read more</a>
CoveragePost
March 30, 2021
Essay by Keith Rankin. Getting the Language Correct Aotearoa New Zealand has a housing problem; a very big housing problem, and a problem not unique to New Zealand. While political leaders and privileged commentators do acknowledge the problem, the discussion remains befuddled, presumably largely because of the compromised political and financial interests of those who ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Solving the Housing Crisis: Making Homes" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/03/30/keith-rankin-essay-solving-the-housing-crisis-making-homes/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Solving the Housing Crisis: Making Homes">Read more</a>
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March 30, 2021
Op-Ed by Armida Salsiah Alisjahbana. The world is emerging from the biggest social and economic shock in living memory, but it will be a long time before the deep scars of the COVID-19 pandemic on human well-being fully heal. In the Asia-Pacific region, where 60 per cent of the world lives, the pandemic revealed chronic development ... <a title="Op-Ed: COVID19 a wake-up call to address development fault lines in Asia and the Pacific" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/03/30/op-ed-covid19-a-wake-up-call-to-address-development-fault-lines-in-asia-and-the-pacific/" aria-label="Read more about Op-Ed: COVID19 a wake-up call to address development fault lines in Asia and the Pacific">Read more</a>
CoveragePost
March 23, 2021
Essay by Keith Rankin. “If the nations of the world fail to honour the pledges they made in Paris, the climate could return to Pliocene conditions when okapi-like creatures and giant vipers thrived in Europe. … Ernst Haeckel’s name for our Neanderthal ancestors, homo stupidus, may yet have some validity – for us.” Tim Flannery, ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Homo Stupidus?" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/03/23/keith-rankin-essay-homo-stupidus/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Homo Stupidus?">Read more</a>
CoveragePost
March 16, 2021
Essay by Keith Rankin. “What psychologists call apophenia – the human tendency to see connections and patterns that are not really there – gives rise to conspiracy theories”. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apophenia The Gordon Riots “June 1780 [witnessed] the worst mob riots of the eighteenth century. Lord George Gordon was a born incendiary of extreme, almost insane, views. ... <a title="Keith Rankin Essay – Apophenia" class="read-more" href="https://eveningreport.nz/2021/03/16/keith-rankin-essay-apophenia/" aria-label="Read more about Keith Rankin Essay – Apophenia">Read more</a>
