tweaking the nose of the West comes with costs While the ANC’s reliance on patronage greatly limits its institutional capacity and its ability to change, we mustn’t underestimate the party’s rising appetite for thwarting our constitutional protections. If 40% of voters favour the ANC in our 29 May contest, as suggested by various polls, is…Continue reading The ANC’s anti-jobs foreign policy

Republican nominee’s personality is annoying but he could make world safer and more prosperous While neither Joe Biden nor Donald Trump would be an acceptable candidate to run a public company, Trump has much potential to be a transformational president – for better or worse. Let’s consider the upside. It would seem that Biden is…Continue reading Trump’s potential to be a great president

The national dialogue sidesteps the truth that ANC policies sustain patronage and undermine job creation Those who want to pretend they have a doctorate should, like a certain high-profile director now under fire, choose international economics and work in SA. They’ll get away with it, because our policy debates take little notice of how the…Continue reading SA’s policy landscape a good place for faux PhDs to hide

SA should have been to Africa what the UAE has been to the Middle East Many politicians and intellectuals insist that this continent’s pervasive poverty is a consequence of colonialism. Rather, it traces to this era’s politicians and intellectuals. Former colonies feature prominently among the 21st century’s most competitive, and thus most dynamic, economies, whereas…Continue reading Why Africa remains poor

By earning zero points, Harvard came in last in a recent survey of free speech across 250 US universities. While free speech is still respected here, both South Africa and Harvard are declining due to how issues are framed On many elite US college campuses free speech has been suppressed to accommodate administrators, professors and…Continue reading How SA’s decline coincides with Harvard’s

Surveys say voters prioritise job creation, the economy, service delivery, and corruption. The ANC wants to emphasise inequality. If we build many large blocks of flats, with each housing hundreds of urban homeless people, while also providing grants so they can eat, what will they then prioritise? For many, the answer is the type of…Continue reading What do we desire?

Workable solutions require that we embrace uncertainty while purging outdated or otherwise costly biases Various commentators maintain we know how to fix the economy and just need to elect a competent, noncorrupt national government. But are they fixating on what they know while downplaying deeper challenges? Which is more critical: fixing the commercial economy or…Continue reading Boosting growth is no panacea for joblessness

The ANC and EFF being excluded from a 2024 coalition government would be a great leap forward. Yet this will remain both unlikely and insufficient in the absence of a robust growth plan. Behavioural economists, like Nobel Laureate and best-selling author Daniel Kahneman, spotlight how the ‘status quo’ bias creates resistance to change at the…Continue reading How focusing on solutions provides a fresh perspective

Few societies have ever been able to fund abundant imports through extracting below-ground riches. Such geological free lunches have recently given way to today’s prosperity-inducing free lunches – which South Africa ignores. We should better understand how broad prosperity is achieved in the 21st century, as a majority of our young adults are unemployed, poor…Continue reading Why SA ignores today’s prosperity-inducing free lunch

Over-prioritising redistribution entrenches poverty. This legitimises racial discrimination which stokes sufficient polarisation to cripple accountability. The pandemic has tested many organisations, with most failing to meet expectations. Conversely, a handful of pharmaceutical companies have vastly exceeded expectations. That these companies remain generally underappreciated shows how accountability can be enfeebled by subjectively indulging values. While countless…Continue reading Why SA leads in politics of polarisation