Get up-to-speed with some of the biggest challenges facing New Zealand with this bundle of high-profile BWB Texts. These four works are combined into one easy-to-read e-book, available direct and DRM-free from our website or from international e-book retailers. Seventy-five years after Labour’s social security reforms of the 1930s, Paul Dalziel and Caroline Saunders argue in Wellbeing Economics it is time for a major shift in New Zealand’s economic perspective. In Growing Apart, Shamubeel Eaqub highlights the changing economic fortunes of people in different parts of New Zealand – the growing gaps between our regions. Max Rashbrooke’s The Inequality Debate provides a succinct introduction to income inequality in New Zealand using the latest data. The meaning of The Piketty Phenomenon for New Zealand is explored by a diverse range of economists and commentators addressing the relevance of Thomas Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’. BWB Texts are short books on big subjects by great New Zealand writers. Commissioned as short digital-first works, BWB Texts unlock diverse stories, insights and analysis from the best of our past, present and future New Zealand writing.

Migration and the movement of people is one of the critical issues confronting the world’s nations in the twenty-first-century. This book is about the economic contribution of migration to and from New Zealand, one of the most frequently discussed aspects of the debate. Can immigration, in economic terms, be more than a gap filler for the labour market and help as well with national economic transformation? And what is the evidence on the effect of migration not just on house prices but also on jobs, trade or broader economic performance? Building on Sir Paul Callaghan’s vision of New Zealand as a place ‘where talent wants to live’, this book explores how we can attract skilled, creative and entrepreneurial people born in other countries, and whether our ‘seventeenth region’ – the more than 600,000 New Zealanders living abroad – can be a greater national asset.

In an era of populist politics, Brexit, Donald Trump, 24-hour news cycles and perpetual election campaigning, how do we govern well for the future? How do we take the long view, ensuring that present-day policy decisions reflect the needs and safeguard the interests of future generations? In this timely BWB Text, acclaimed policy scholar Jonathan Boston sets out what ‘anticipatory governance’ might look like in New Zealand. Confronted with a world becoming more uncertain by the day, this book is essential reading for anyone questioning how democratic societies can tackle the unprecedented challenges ahead.

‘I am 29 years old. I was born just before the Kyoto Protocol was signed, and since then global mean temperatures have risen by an estimated 0.2°C per decade . . . in my lifetime I am likely to experience a world that is 2°C warmer, perhaps as much as 4°C, and has more droughts, fires and floods.’ Sylvia Nissen Climate crisis is upon us. By choice or necessity, New Zealand will transition to a low-emissions future. But can this revolution be careful? Can it be attentive to the disruptions it inevitably creates? Or will carefulness simply delay and dilute the changes that future people require of us? This timely collection brings together eleven authors to explore the politics and practicalities of the low-emissions transition, touching on issues of justice, tikanga, trade-offs, finance, futurism, adaptation, and more.

The task of living in modern New Zealand – and especially in modern Auckland – is not just to understand how to live with different peoples, but how to adapt to the future that has already happened. New Zealand is a nation that exists on Pacific Islands, but does not, will not, perhaps cannot, see itself as a Pacific Island nation. Yet turning to the Pacific, argues Damon Salesa, enables us to grasp a fuller understanding of what life is really like on these shores. After all, Salesa argues, in many ways New Zealand’s Pacific future has already happened. Setting a course through the ‘islands’ of Pacific life in New Zealand – Ōtara, Tokoroa, Porirua, Ōamaru and beyond – he charts a country becoming ‘even more Pacific by the hour’. What would it mean, this far-sighted book asks, for New Zealand to recognise its Pacific talent and finally act like a Pacific nation?

Few books have had the global impact of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. An overnight bestseller, Piketty’s assessment that inherited wealth will always grow faster, on average, than earned wealth has energised debate. Hailed as ‘bigger than Marx’ (The Economist) or dismissed as ‘medieval’ (Wall Street Journal), the book is widely acknowledged as having significant economic and political implications. Collected in this BWB Text are responses to this phenomenon from a diverse range of New Zealand economists and commentators. These voices speak independently to the relevance of Piketty’s conclusions. Is New Zealand faced with a one-way future of rising inequality? Does redistribution need to focus more on wealth, rather than just income? Was the post-war Great Convergence merely an aberration and is our society doomed to regress into a new Gilded Age?

The parlous state of our freshwater ecosystems is just one signal that we face a more widespread, and unprecedented, environmental crisis. New Zealand’s dairy industry is big business. But what are the hidden – and not so hidden – costs of intensive farming? Evidence presented here by ecologist Mike Joy demonstrates that intensive dairy farming has degraded our freshwater rivers, streams and lakes to an alarming degree. This situation, he argues, has arisen primarily through governmental policy that prioritises short-term economic growth over long-term environmental sustainability. This BWB Text is a call to arms, urging New Zealand to change course or risk the wellbeing of future generations.

‘It is there, in the background. Always. Increasingly urgent. Its ominous hum is the soundtrack to every other story we tell.’ The devastating summer of Australian bushfires underlined a terrifying sense of a world pushed to the brink. Then came Covid-19, and with it another dramatic lurch away from business as usual. Some observers are worried that the all-consuming effort to control the pandemic will distract us from the long-term challenge of limiting catastrophic climate change. At the same time, many people are hoping for a ‘green Covid-19 recovery’: a cleaner, fairer and safer world. This BWB Text brings together mātauranga Māori and Pasifika perspectives, voices from academia, activism, journalism and economics to bear witness to these troubled times.

The book focuses on how to enhance the political incentives on democratically-elected governments to protect the interests of future generations.