With an election looming you can expect the familiar jobs and growth tropes to be trotted out. Here are five RNZ interviews with thinkers who stray somewhat from the orthodox.
'There's no such thing as fair austerity'
Economist Dr Bill Mitchell Photo: RNZ/Jeremy Rose
Surpluses can be a bad thing, and a country with a fiat currency can never run out of money, according to an emerging school of economics, modern monetary theory.
Bill Mitchell, professor of economics at the University of Newcastle, NSW, is a leading proponent of the theory.
Economists have been "torturing the minds of our youth with lies and ideology made to look like eternal truths", he says.
Questions for a world on the verge of change
David Rothkopf Photo: supplied
"If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask", Albert Einstein once said.
According to David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine, epochal change is coming and we are asking the wrong questions.
He says people have a predisposition to ask questions based on their experience which means we ask the same questions over and over again, leaving us unprepared for future problems.
Have we squandered our paradise?
Photo: Facebook / New Zealand: Paradise Squandered?
New Zealand was once a wealthy, relatively equal country, but is now paying the price of misguided attempts to fix it with trickledown economics, according to an Auckland author.
John Hawkes reckons New Zealand has blown it and he's written a book, New Zealand - Paradise Squandered?, explaining why.
Rogernomics diagnosed the country's problem s accurately, but the prescription has made matters worse, he says.
'We keep building the fire bigger'
James Rickards Photo: supplied
International economic expert James Rickards was one of the few people to predict the surprises of 2016 – Brexit and Donald Trump's presidential victory – and he says another financial collapse will come sooner than expected.
The current financial system is as big and unstable as it was in 2008 and when it collapses it will be beyond the capacity of central banks to fix, he argues.
Rickards likens current state the global financial system to a mountainside before an avalanche.
Failing states, collapsing systems
Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed Photo: Supplied
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an award-winning investigative journalist, international security scholar, author, and filmmaker.
His work is informed by the belief that violence and state failures around the world are the result of a clutch of crises – climate, energy, food and economy.
Globalisation means a failure in one system can very quickly transmit shocks into another, he says.
