I grew up in the Ruhrgebiet, Germany’s industrial heartland, during its long transition from coal and steel. I was fourteen when the Berlin Wall fell. That probably explains my distrust of systems that look permanent until they are not.
After studying economics and business administration, I completed a doctorate in law comparing German and Australian approaches to unfair competition. The research took me to Sydney as a visiting fellow; the dissertation earned a summa cum laude.
I have been circling the Anglosphere ever since: London, Sydney, and now Wellington, where I have lived for nearly fourteen years.
The New Zealand Initiative, which I run, is a think tank that argues for free markets, limited government and institutions that work. In New Zealand’s political climate, this makes us permanently unfashionable and occasionally useful.
Before Wellington, I advised a Liberal Democrat peer in the House of Lords, worked at Policy Exchange in London, and then joined the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. David Cameron once publicly suggested I should leave Britain, which I took as a compliment and eventually did.
Housing and urban planning have occupied me since my time in London, where I published my first reports on the subject in 2005. Why cities struggle to build enough homes, and what happens when they do not, remains a recurring theme.
Europe has been another constant: its crises, its institutions, its decline. From 2010 to 2016, I wrote a weekly column on European affairs for Business Spectator in Australia. I now write regularly for Newsroom in New Zealand.
In 2015, I published Why Europe Failed. John Howard called it “a sobering analysis of an ageing Europe, overburdened by the size of its welfare state.” Events since have not made me more optimistic.
More recently, I have been writing about larger questions: the future of the West, institutional decay, what happens when societies lose the capacity to maintain what they have built. In 2025, I published Leonardo’s Legacy, an essay on what the Renaissance might teach us about civilisational renewal. These are not cheerful subjects. They are important ones.
Policy analysis is my main occupation, but sometimes only mockery will do. The occasional satirical piece finds its way onto these pages when the material demands it.
My fortnightly column appears in The Australian, and I have published in most places that will have me. Over more than two decades, that amounts to over 1,500 articles, reports and essays. Enough to know that quantity is no substitute for quality, but also enough to have occasionally achieved both.
Membership in the Mont Pelerin Society means I believe in freedom and am willing to attend conferences about it. My degrees are a Dr. iur. from Bochum and a Diplom-Ökonom from the same institution. I speak German and English, think in both, and live in Wellington with my family.
The best way to understand what I do is to read what I write. More than two decades of it is archived on this site. Start anywhere.