Hard News: National Exuberance
118 Responses
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Act would be better for a few more idealists.
As opposed to the tragic bunch of malcontents they've currently got you mean... I don't know that they need more ideals, they're not currently very pragmatic, or at least that's not obvious when the answer to every policy question appears to be to adopt a flat tax.
There's space for idealists in Parliament but they're of the Nandor variety; hard-working empiricists, navigating political divisions for something sustainable rather than the Stephen Franks variety who aspire to a pulpit for the fullscale public conversion (and yes I know that Franks has left Act, but that's just pragmatics not politics).
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But I fear that Rodney gave his new recruit a glimpse into the real soul of the party.
Really Russell, I'd be more afraid if he didn't.
And Shawn Tan an idealist? If he has any trade union ideals, surely they are entirely contradicted by the Act Party, which has vociferously opposed everything that might benefit wage workers for its whole existence. So perhaps he is a gullible idealist with very little information. And if he didn't have any trade union ideals, why would he work for one?
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There's space for idealists in Parliament but they're of the Nandor variety; hard-working empiricists
I’ve got nothing against Nandor, and I agree parliament does need idealists.
But I’ve never seen him being called hard-working before.
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But I’ve never seen him being called hard-working before.
That's what I'm told by people I know who work inside Parliament but I can't claim personal experience LB. My reading of his contributions, in various forms, suggests he was however an empiricist (at least in his work in justice related issues).
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Getting back to the Public-Private Partnership issue, here are a couple of Monbiot pieces on nightmare outcomes in the UK. Monbiot's basic argument is that, without rigorous contractual oversight, private-sector partners can and will take public entities for the proverbial ride.
For anyone interested, this is the Office of the Auditor General's 2006 report on PPPs in the New Zealand context.
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Caleb, excellent, thanks for the links. Monbiot's argument is consistent with most of the Australian commentary also.
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I’ve got nothing against Nandor, and I agree parliament does need idealists.
But I’ve never seen him being called hard-working before.
I'm reliably informed that the Green MPs are a hardworking bunch, with the exception of Ian Ewen-Street. I understand that during the 2002 - 2005 term, the two parties putting in the hard yards were Green and Act, often being the only ones still working late at night at parliament.
Getting back to the Public-Private Partnership issue, here are a couple of Monbiot pieces on nightmare outcomes in the UK. Monbiot's basic argument is that, without rigorous contractual oversight, private-sector partners can and will take public entities for the proverbial ride.
And of course, rigorous contractual oversight is impossible due to the strictures of sensitive/confidential/privileged information. The problem with PPPs is that it is absolutely in the interest of the private partner to load all the risk onto the government, and obscure the arrangement behind confidentiality. By the time the public find out what the arrangements, it will be likely that the project has failed.
Michelle Boag on RNZ's Panel this afternoon, of course, presented PPPs as a way to outsource the risk to the private sector. Why don't I believe her ?
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Caleb, excellent, thanks for the links. Monbiot's argument is consistent with most of the Australian commentary also.
Thanks, Paul. I really do wish there were more NZ journalists reporting on and critiquing this stuff, seeing the way both Labour and National seem to be going on the issue.
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OK, I take that back about Nandor. I didn't realise that.
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The problem with PPPs is that it is absolutely in the interest of the private partner to load all the risk onto the government, and obscure the arrangement behind confidentiality.
Oddly, the Sydney Cross City Tunnel did some but not all of this - the risk didn't ultimately rest with the public when it failed but much of the detail was not known until it failed. Key, however, said he'll guarantee a rate of return which effectively means National intends to privatise profits and socalise loses; how nice of him.
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That's what I'm told by people I know who work inside Parliament but I can't claim personal experience LB. My reading of his contributions, in various forms, suggests he was however an empiricist (at least in his work in justice related issues).
That's my impression too. While he might not have had the stomach for some of the "work" of politics, Nandor stood out in his willingness to apply himself intellectually to important issues. He was only an observer on the Commerce select committee, but I got the impression he had a better grasp on the Copyright Amendment Bill than most of his peers.
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I'll throw in an anecdote here: some years back ran into a lawyer I know who'd just been to a meeting with various justice & law reform committee members. It may have been on the Supreme Court Bill, but I'm not sure after all this time.
This lawyer is, incidentally, an activist Nat, very much on the liberal right of the party.
Said Nandor was the brightest one there, and one of the most sensible too. This guy kept saying to me 'I never thought I'd be saying this, but....'
And in case anyone hasn't picked this already, the day I vote Green will be the day Satan is iceskating to work.
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Said Nandor was the brightest one there, and one of the most sensible too.
Isn't this the point rather than how hard they work? Act's results so far don't seem to bear out any formula that say the harder you work the better the outcome.
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...it is absolutely in the interest of the private partner to load all the risk onto the government, and obscure the arrangement behind confidentiality.
As somebody who has worked for various suppliers in the past, it's my view that commercial confidentiality isn't as necessary as is made out. I don't believe that if all public sector contracts were required to be made public, companies would close down their public sector divisions. Costs would maybe increase slightly as suppliers made sure everything was double-checked, but that might be no bad thing.
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Ah yes, toll bridges built and run by private companies. Scotland has been there done that with the now infamous Skye Bridge. When it was built the car ferry across Kyle Rhea was forcibly closed to prevent competition. The toll was GBP5 which is no small sum of money. There is in the summer months a car ferry just down the Minch, but the roads too and from on both sides are um picturesque, meaning long, narrow, winding and on the Skye side single lane with passing places.
Needless to say the bridge was imposed on a sullen Scotland by a Tory govt and it took a LibLab Scottish parliament to buy out the contract and make it free.
I would say that it is far, far too easy for the private company to make, *representations* to a receptive minister to cause a reconsideration of minor details of the 'wider' project. After all buses fall under the same minister don't they? so no competing cabinet level bus champion. Bad scenario.
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<quote>Everything is a distortion. Only believers in the doctrine of the Perfect Market think otherwise.<quote>
<quote>I've never quite got round to having this argument with someone who cares, but it has always struck me that the free market naturally tends toward monopoly and price fixing, rather than introducing competition, reducing prices etc.<quote>
I've had a debate about perfect competition with an economist friend, and recently read "Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics" by Paul Ormerod - an excellent read, which really nails the reason I gave up on Economics after Stage 2.
I was fed up with "assuming all things were equal" or homogenous, when they almost never were. People measure "utility" in different ways (think brownie-point scores in a relationship!)
Ormerod used the example of John Nash, who when testing a theory, found that even mathematician/economists responding to the incentives did not act in the rational way, concluded that the users of the system were irrational rather than the model was at fault.
In the book (my imperfect recall of it anyway) Ormerod looks at the theory of perfect competition, and rival theories. He says that Economic Textbooks present the demand and supply curves as economic fact, rather than as the theory that won in the early part of last century.
In reality, they are seldom smooth, and equilibrium is not necessarily reached swiftly. A striking example I recall was that markets almost never reach equilibrium, and that the time a particular market would take to get there was around 200 years (or a similarly large figure).
Most markets are, by definition, imperfect (there are 5 criteria, and as I recall from ECON 101 or 204, only the midwest wheat markets are likely to meet them - those were pre organic/GM days!)
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Everything is a distortion. Only believers in the doctrine of the Perfect Market think otherwise.
...
I've never quite got round to having this argument with someone who cares, but it has always struck me that the free market naturally tends toward monopoly and price fixing, rather than introducing competition, reducing prices etc.
I've had a debate about perfect competition with an economist friend, and recently read "Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction and Economics" by Paul Ormerod - an excellent read, which really nails the reason I gave up on Economics after Stage 2.
I was fed up with "assuming all things were equal" or homogenous, when they almost never were. People measure "utility" in different ways (think brownie-point scores in a relationship!)
Ormerod used the example of John Nash, who when testing a theory, found that even mathematician/economists responding to the incentives did not act in the rational way, concluded that the users of the system were irrational rather than the model was at fault.
In the book (my imperfect recall of it anyway) Ormerod looks at the theory of perfect competition, and rival theories. He says that Economic Textbooks present the demand and supply curves as economic fact, rather than as the theory that won in the early part of last century.
In reality, they are seldom smooth, and equilibrium is not necessarily reached swiftly. A striking example I recall was that markets almost never reach equilibrium, and that the time a particular market would take to get there was around 200 years (or a similarly large figure).
Most markets are, by definition, imperfect (there are 5 criteria, and as I recall from ECON 101 or 204, only the midwest wheat markets are likely to meet them - those were pre organic/GM days!)
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Workers of the world unite - Support comrade tan!
You're enjoying this, aren't you?
Can you tell?
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Ormerod looks at the theory of perfect competition, and rival theories. He says that Economic Textbooks present the demand and supply curves as economic fact, rather than as the theory that won in the early part of last century.
Rachel, thanks for the heads-up. I'd not realised Ormerod had released a new book. He'd developed some initial theoretical thinking about non-linear market dynamics in an earlier book, did he elaborate these further in this book?
The idea of perfect markets, even if they did exist (presumably for commodities like energy), is over played in areas where it doesn't readily apply.
In my own area, education, there's a significant push for more market mechanisms to improve particularly allocative efficiency. In aspects of the broad market, it makes genuine sense as a strategy to redress provider-capture and historical advantages around capital formation, but it other parts of the market, it simply does not. For instance, where there's low levels of user demand and/or thin labour markets or high entry costs (often associated with the costs of capital e.g. dentistry).
Nevertheless, the crudeness of approach generally doesn't acknowledge the imperfections of the markets and simply adopts settings that assume perfection... I think, often, the market approach is prefered because it (a) has lots of adherants and (b) is simple. The complexity of alternatives is a put off.
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Didn't someone post recently about how overly simplistic economic theories tell you what type of people are attracted to become economists? <ducks>
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And how often does the Herald ever agree with me:
Peter Lyons: Free market trip to lower wage future
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/466/story.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10529142&pnum=0
New Zealand's experiences over the past few decades should be a warning that a pure free market economy exists only in textbook models and the mathematical imaginings of academic economists.
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A S,
Didn't someone post recently about how overly simplistic economic theories tell you what type of people are attracted to become economists?
The common flaw with most theories like the free-market (cue sideways look at marxism and communism also) is that they completely fail to account for the selfishness of human nature and peoples ability to behave in utterly irrational ways...
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Free market trip to lower wage future
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. National ensured that we would remain a low-wage economy when they busted the unions and vested all the power with employers. I don't think it's healthy for the unions to be overly powerful, and Australia certainly has problems, but unions that are too weak is no healthier.
For a very small number of uniquely-talented, highly-skilled individual, the power to negotiate is equal. For the rest of us, it's a distinctly asymmetric relationship.
We will also remain a low-producing economy for as long as we're cheap labour. Where's the incentive to invest in technology to improve production when you can just hire more people to do the work?
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Also on the free-market thing, I asked in another thread but I'll ask it here, too, since the discussion seems to be heading the same way:
Can anyone explain to me why people get so incensed about us signing an FTA with China, but desperately want us to get one with the US? I know all the human rights issues, but, really, is the US that much better? I guess it doesn't help that most people here have no idea just what went down with the AUS-FTA. Ignorance is bliss, huh?
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Can anyone explain to me why people get so incensed about us signing an FTA with China, but desperately want us to get one with the US? I know all the human rights issues, but, really, is the US that much better?
Well, yes.
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