Posts by BenWilson
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Russell Brown,
This guy Spector, did he have a white cat?
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Ross Mason,
The idea of central government shaking up local body is quite scary, to me. Local body is democratically elected, after all. If we had a constitution, it would be likely to be unconstitutional. We didn't actually elect central government to set the priorities of local body at all. The feelings of Epsom residents on the management of the Invercargill local government should be nearly irrelevant.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Angus Robertson,
That is not neo-liberal.
Might have to agree to differ on that. It's not the self-image of neoliberalism, but it's what a world run by neoliberals looks like. I'm not going to be the one to say they're never hypocrites, or that their position is at all consistently applied.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Sacha,
I don't think it's controversial to say that it has been over half a century since western nations moved out of a predominantly industrial economy that made stuff, into a service and information based one
That isn't controversial. But the question of whether it was actually good for those economies, in a capitalist world, is controversial. Very much so. Because we still need stuff, we still consume stuff, and it still has to be made somewhere. I question very much whether or not average wealth levels in western nations have been on the rise over that period, at anywhere near the level that they have been on the rise in the countries to which they have given up that industrial economy, and to which they can also lose the service economy too, even more rapidly (and have been doing so). Both means and medians are important here.
Which shouldn't mean my own preference is to move back towards industrialization. It's more that we should move away from neoliberal capitalism. But given that we're actually rolling back our state in favour of more neoliberalism (is that a given? Do you dispute it?) are we not also in the direst danger of totally screwing up our capitalist economy too, and finding ourselves in similar straits to Eastern Europe emerging from communism, with a highly skilled population that's destined to clean toilets for countries that have plenty of skilled people themselves, and also an industrial base to support them?
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Sacha,
so, last century's economy then?
I guess we'll see. It's a bit early to be calling the 21st century economy.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
I agree!
I thought so. This is a very easy discussion to get into cross purposes over.
What is the `real' economy?
Big question. I can't formulate exactly what I mean with that right now. I'm thinking it's a straw man on my part, particularly since you say now that you think law as an export is fanciful. Essentially, I guess I do mean an economy that derives back to a product rather than a service. So the word "real" is unfair. Fair call.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to ScottY,
I wonder if the problem here is that you are placing a value on only one form of creativity?
Nah, it's because when talking about economics, one has to generalize. It's a huge topic, and I'm already talking at far more length than I intended to. Adding caveats to everything would only make it longer.
I don't dispute anything you are saying, unless you are hoping to contend that legal services are in themselves an exportable product that we could invest more heavily in for big returns. The things you're talking about are growing the real economy, the legal work is funded by the products of the other organizations.
Indeed, I kind of feel like talking about a legal sector of the economy is like talking about the mathematics sector of it, or the writing sector. These are skills that people learn how to use, and can be used in any business. Computing is like this in spades - it's now a basic skill expected from a wide range of graduates. Computer programming is something that is learned in many faculties, and I've known many people who became programmers without any training at all, just to make an idea of theirs happen. Also, people in all walks of life are capable of becoming conversant with history, not just historians, who have a much more specific role.
Essentially, I think trying to drive economic growth by targeting sectoral educational outcomes is ridiculous. Business has to exist for graduates to move into, or they will move out of the country to find it, or squander their education on low paid work. To try to hold the education system accountable for the failure of NZ society to find work for the graduates is nuts. It's guaranteed to kill the diversity of our education. Instead, the focus of government should be on growing the economy, so that the diversity of education we already produce can find work here, rather than taking the skills offshore with them.
And that's worth doing, regardless of education. For a heck of a lot of people, their job is not their life anyway, nor have they ever wanted it to be. They'd be happy doing whatever work needs to be done, so long as it was paid enough for them to live comfortably on. It is a very poor outcome that NZers need tertiary education to get decent wages. It's a massive squandering of potential, tens of thousands of people who think tertiary is a waste of their lives, but they are told that they have to do it. So they have to take on debt, and lose years to end up doing something that 3 weeks on the job training would have been sufficient for.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to ScottY,
I am oversimplifying, for sure, ScottY. I'm well aware that legal services do a heck of a lot more than just represent in courts. I fully agree with you that they're facilitatory services that make the system work. But that's really the point - they facilitate. They aren't the product in the end, they are services that make other industries work. If those industries die, those facilitatory services also die. And is there any real indication in NZ of a shortage of lawyers supplying services to industries that need them? Or is the shortage before that point - a shortage of industry for lawyers to facilitate?
They can even help to "grow the pie" (even if I despise that term) rather than merely divide it.
Practically every lawyer I know has expressed a wish that they could do more of this, because being a servant is not really what they had in mind when they went to law school, but it's what they end up doing. Their problem is almost always that they don't actually have any ideas about that, though - that's simply not what they're trained to do, to think of products, and build the infrastructure to make them. This is their own words, not mine. They see brilliant ideas crossing their desks every day, patents they wish they'd thought of, businesses with products they can see are valuable (after they become valuable) etc. But the idea generation and building part, that's tech work.
I don't deny that lawyers occasionally contribute even quite big new ideas. But it doesn't happen that often because it's not their interest or training, mostly. If it was, they'd have become engineers, or just turned capitalist and made whatever product they had thought of.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
You have a really weird division between real things and fake things which has no economic or factual foundation.
Perhaps we have a fundamental difference of opinion on economic facts, deriving from a fundamentally different way of accounting for them. I'm not sure, I don't really know your position.
I don't think that one shouldn't have accountant or lawyers, or that such things have no value at all. But to speak of them as export industries, and then to quote something so damned tiny in such a rich, powerful country as the UK suggests to me you have no sense of scale at all. JK Rowling on her own exported nearly as much as the entire industry you are talking about. That is because she made an actual product, which was mass produced, and then people purchased it. That is what makes capitalist countries rich. Exporting services could only possibly make a tiny country rich, and it would probably need to be rich in the first place to pull it off. To be a banking center, you have to have powerful banks. We have almost no local banks now. To be a legal center, you have to have powerful political influence - NZ has next to no political influence.
But I'm not sure if you're really suggesting that NZ actually intensifies the process of growing the already growing non-productive industries. Really, I'm not. Are you?
(Suppose an accountant tells me not to make a thing no one wants, so instead I make a thing someone does. Has he contributed nothing real to the economy? Surely he has contributed more than I have, given he has saved us the existence of an unwanted thing and caused the existence of a wanted thing, whereas all I have caused is the wanted thing!)
I have an accountant and he's never done any such thing. It's not what he does. Instead, he gets paid to make sure my taxes are done properly. On the whole, that usually saves me a little tax, sufficient to cover his costs to do something I really don't want to do. Overall, it costs the country, because they don't take that tax from me - it goes to him.
IF he was the kind of guy to research my products and make a wise choice about the prospects of a piece of software I was writing, then yes, that would have been a valuable money saving service. But that isn't what he does. That's what market researchers do. It's not the skill set of the accountant at all.
-
Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
but these days the production of large numbers of physical objects is not a route to economic prosperity.
At a personal level, that is true. You can make plenty of money as a person doing other things. But at a societal level, if your society is not making things, it's not going to be very long before it is beggared.
Which is why I asked if you're taking the piss. You could just be talking at cross-purposes here, pointing out that individual economic prosperity does not lie down the path of investing in sciences and humanities, and one would be much better off to become an accountant or a lawyer. I would not deny that at all. I don't think others have, either.
But to extrapolate the conclusion that we should therefore grow these industries for social wealth is totally fallacious. The actual contribution to the creation of real wealth by legal and finance professions is nil. They are the ultimate pie-dividers rather than growers - the accountants count the beans, they don't grow them. The lawyers resolve disputes about who gets to own the beans or where they can plant them. You need people to do these things, but if you have a farm with only accountants and lawyers on it, they will starve, until they start doing some actual farming.
Yes, on the farm, it's likely the accountant or the lawyer might be paid more than the farmer. That's usually a sign that things are going badly, that the person producing the wealth is less valuable than the people distributing it. It disincentivizes being a farmer, meaning there is less food being made.
To suggest legal services could save the economy is laughable. 3.2 billion pounds barely registers on the GDP of the UK, and their lawyers are in the most prime position to exploit any possible income, since common law was invented by them, spread by them at gunpoint, and they retain the highest court for a number of the ex-colonies. NZ does not have any of that. Ergo, if you want to make money as a law exporter, trained in the UK tradition, you go to the UK to do it. Which is exactly what vast numbers of legal trainees do, costing us their training for no return to our country at all.
The same goes for the sister profession, finance. You might as well take what you've learned overseas. The perfect example of this is our very own Prime Minister, whose training cost was socialized, and who profits were expatriated and privatized. You can stay, and you'll be paid better than most. But you have nothing to export except the produce of other people in your society, really. Which is precisely what the finance industry think they are doing by selling off our power companies. It's like they actually paid for the things in the first place, or built them with their own hands. They've got all sorts of delusions about how what they're doing is a form of productive capitalist enterprise, when actually it is taking stuff away from others.
Last ←Newer Page 1 … 442 443 444 445 446 … 1066 Older→ First