Posts by BenWilson
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What we do need to hear is the term "stagflation", which is absolutely applicable to our current situation - the economy's stagnant, but inflation is well and truly on display.
Perhaps although it's not a noun that can be used to describe what we are in. We're not in a Stagflation.
It also seems to me that making up a new word to describe "the economy is really fucked" isn't really so helpful. When a Depression is defined in a highly technical way, that means that economists will prescribe measures to avoid it, which could be as bad or worse. When the idea is more general, then they have to fix it more generally too. I just don't see it as something easily measured by some golden ratio.
It's quite possible we could never, never have another Depression like the one in the 1930s, on all the indicators. But we could still have something just as bad. Unemployment probably doesn't need to rise as high as then to make society fall apart badly. We could have full employment, but at shockingly low rates, with runaway inflation, for instance. Then we're poor and getting poorer, but all the numbers are right. Or we could have skyrocketing unemployment, but it would hardly matter if everyone was rich as.
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Christchurch is different to many places in that property values and social conditions diminish as you head towards the sea.
That's really odd. Why, are the beaches shit? The ones I've seen were beautiful, but I didn't search the whole coast. Or is it so cold that the beach just isn't the big draw? Or so small that it doesn't matter, everyone can get there anyway? Or what?
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Che Tibby,
you can have two schools next to each other with different demographics.
Yes, that happens in Auckland too. Kings College is right next to Otahuhu College
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Steve Barnes,
OK Steve you finally made me laugh. Especially the Collins one.
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I know income by suburb is available somewhere, because I was using it as part of sets of demographic data when we were house-hunting last year.
QV has a lot of data. You just have to pay for it.
Income might be interesting, but I expect house prices would give a general indication of the wealth of a suburb.
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Hard News: What Now?, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Auckland's struggling now, never mind in 18-24 months' time when it's finally possible to get tradies to move back north. What's going to happen to the cost of using the services of the few who'll remain in the interim?
We need more houses and we need more tradies. Government can surely help with that. Indeed one helps with the other. If apprenticing was more incentivized immediately, there could be thousands of jobs made tomorrow. They won't be instant sparkies, chippies and plumbers, but they could help a lot, and could be sparkies, chippies and plumbers in a few years, when we will surely still be needing them.
It even hooks into the "work for benefits" mentality that the Government was already trying to push. Except it will be work that is actually needed, which also has a future. Like I said a few days ago, this could be a "tradie-led recovery".
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Hard News: The First Draft, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Yes, but nothing that humanity does (at least as far as solar radiation goes) will cause the source of those to diminish at a greater or lesser pace.
We'll see about that. I know a fella called Maui....
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How do you respond to the objections we've been raising above about what relocating its people would to to Christchurch's local economy?
Well if we're talking about swapping houses, the net effect would be positive because it would be trading an unemployed person for an employed one, who will be spending money locally. Also the unemployed person stands a better chance of getting employment somewhere that isn't destroyed (depending on their skills), so the national economy is doubly improved.
People who have to move because they've lost their house are another matter. I've got to bail now, but I'll think on it. I just wanted to point out that taking things off the table just isn't constructive debating at the moment. Get the ideas out and amassed before lasering the stupid ones down. We're all new to colossal disasters, and solutions could present themselves that just haven't come up before.
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I have to say too, that going on about Darth Brownlee isn't really helping. I don't think the government has been incompetent. They've been human. Disaster management is not something any of them are trained for. Even the people who are trained haven't usually had any actual experience with something this big. Civil defense is about keeping people alive as the first response, not about how to rebuild suburbs.
The case that the Eastern Suburbs are still hurting real bad just hadn't been put loudly enough. The blog that put it out has done those suburbs a tremendous service, by casting off the strictures of the traditional media and getting the message through. I really think the big media people just hadn't realized too, and that's easy to hassle them with 20:20 hindsight, but I can't claim that I knew before yesterday that it was that bad.
Another idea that seized me by the brain today was that the main political parties already have large bases of amateur people who could be pounding the pavements of Christchurch finding out what everyone needs, and giving them whatever information they know, if those people are cut off. They don't need to say what party they're with unless they want to, but just going to houses, talking to people, and finding out what they need most urgently strikes me as incredibly valuable work, and something they have an incentive to do anyway.
Is this already happening? Does anyone know?
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Would require that money be put into the areas to which they would be relocated, and we've already established that Auckland, which will be the prime destination for many of the IDPs from Christchurch with or without official government assistance, is on its own for improving infrastructure to support the refugees.
This is a thread for discussing the ideas, though. Your "given", that money can't be spent in Auckland, is not a given, it's an assumption. Relocation is very much on the table as a concept. There are lots of ways that such a refugee population could be accommodated. Lots of ideas could work.
One that leaps to mind is house swapping. If someone has lost their employment in Christchurch, or the business has relocated, it might make big sense for them to swap houses with a tradie who is needed in Christchurch.
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