Oliver Marc Hartwich: Losing sight of the lucky country

This is going to be my last column I will be writing from Australia. After nearly four exciting years at the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney, I am moving to Wellington to head a new think tank, The New Zealand Initiative.

I have moved countries several times before, and each time it felt like I was closing a chapter and beginning to write a new one. As I make my moving arrangements, I am excited (and even a bit scared) about this plunge into the world of ideas in New Zealand. The only certainty at this moment is that this chapter of my life in Australia is about to end. Although I have had a fantastic time here, and feel nothing but great affection for and indeed gratitude to Australia, I am leaving with an underlying sentiment of disenchantment.

Oliver Marc Hartwich: Incentives are life and death

If there was one word to sum up the whole body of economic theory, it would have to be ‘incentives.’ People act on incentives. As William Stanley Jevons (1835–82), one of the founding fathers of neoclassical economics, put it, the whole economy is ‘a calculus of pleasure and pain.’

Greece is playing out a most macabre application of incentives. Greece may be the madhouse of the world economy, but there is method in its madness. According to a report in The Lancet, the number of HIV infections in Greece has skyrocketed. The increase was partly due to the termination of drug rehabilitation and street-work programs as a result of government austerity measures. But there was a more chilling explanation.

Oliver Marc Hartwich: The PC empire strikes back

Former career civil servants and central bankers seldom have star potential. Their work rarely excites the public and their pictures do not usually appear on front pages. This would have been Thilo Sarrazin's fate as well. A former state treasurer in the city of Berlin and director of the German Bundesbank, Sarrazin was mainly known to political insiders.

All of this changed last August when he published the book Germany abolishes itself (Deutschland schafft sich ab). Within months the provocatively titled tome of 464 pages, laden with statistics and footnotes, became the best selling non-fiction book in German post-war history. More than 1.5 million copies have been printed to date. Its author developed into an unlikely media star whose name recognition in Germany now surpasses the Pope and the chancellor.