Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Why shouldn't we focus on that world class industry, instead of focussing on engineering, where, quite frankly, we haven't a hope of competing with the big boys?
I presume you are taking the piss. More law students produces no economic growth at all. They don't export, they're quite likely to just leave and never look back, and if we had a glut of them, the only thing it would drive down is the price of litigation. Which would mean more litigation. Great. Zero sum game every time, minus costs. It's like saying we need more casinos, which only the locals can play at.
We certainly need some lawyers, there's some basic proportion required to maintain the legal needs of society. But it's pretty obviously a broken society when the number of people doing that kind of business spikes upwards massively. It's not a good sign. They're a lot like soldiers, debt collectors, police. If you have a huge number of them, it's because times are very bad, there's war, or economic collapse, or crime.
Having a massive upspike in the number of scientists is not like this. It's probably a sign that things are going great. Even better, a sign of a very well run society at it's absolute peak of civilization, is when you have large proportions of people also in humanities, art, music, education, architecture etc. Ideally these groups are not mutually exclusive - free humans would not need to specialize unless they actually liked to.
But this would be a symptom. It isn't enabled until the society is organized to enable it. And producing the people without the means to support them, which in capitalism means them having a paid job, is putting the cart before the horse.
There are alternatives to this kind of capitalism, of course.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to mic weevil,
It's a shame that Social Engineering has developed such negative connotations.
Indeed it is. Especially since it is actually what all political positions that don't just say the status quo is sweet-as are trying to achieve. The question is not whether social engineering is being undertaken, but simply in whose benefit. And even conservatives who want no change typically, would like to engineer things to that effect, putting in place brakes to social change. The only people who aren't social engineers are the apathetic, even though of course a huge social change is happening as their position becomes more popular. Mostly to their detriment.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Sacha,
Or teen comedy flicks. Maybe that's the metaphor everyone's really after - NZ isn't growing or dividing the pie - it's actually fucking the pie.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Rob Stowell,
We share doubts, I think, Ben, about whether NZ can reasonably expect to "grow the pie" that much- and for how long.
I think the pie can grow and should grow. But I disagree that it's a completely separate question to "dividing the pie". A very unevenly divided pie can't grow very fast, because neither the people with the big piece, nor those with a very small piece, are incentivized to grow it. A worker, totally alienated from the profits of the company, doesn't really give much of a shit, at heart, about the performance of the company, which is just as likely to sack them in good times or bad, just to make better profits for shareholders. A director, who makes millions whether the company sinks or swims, is in a similar boat. It actually becomes like a tragedy of the commons, without there being any commons.
But yes, I think the idea that we can grow our pie faster than the rest of the OECD, whilst not ever having any original ideas about how to manage that, is just a rhetorical device to justify dividing it unevenly.
In practice, both should happen. Growing, because it works, and dividing evenly because it is fair, and it works.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Sacha,
Interesting post by Gordon Cambell about the knowledge economy yesterday
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Idiot Savant,
You can't just remove entire government functions by changing an organisation chart.
Just watch them.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to Ana Simkiss,
Perople used to be incredulous at the size and variety of tasks of the MED. Imagine this beast!
Presumably that's part of the point. It's a good way to justify downsizing it.
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Hard News: The Vision Thing, in reply to merc,
Meh, tax and spend, how hard is it?
Or even print and spend.
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I'd agree that the best thing about the speech was that it wasn't worse. Also, I'm inclined to think that Labour actually has spotted the strategic possibility of slipping in just to the left of National, leaving huge tracts of voters to move more to their natural allies, the parties further left. IOW, take National's base, rather than declaring war on the Greens and Mana. Let NZF take the rural and racist vote. Fighting with National over the 30% of people who are (or believe they are) benefited by neoliberalism is a reasonably sound strategy for marginalizing the right wing vote space.
I say this in the vague hope that Labour isn't really neoliberal at heart now, which is what this speech sounds like to me. If Shearer actually did nothing more than what he says here, it would only be better than National because it would not involve selling family silver and harsher criminal penalties.
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Up Front: Safety Net, in reply to Morgan Nichol,
Let's say for instance that I've masturbated my long suffering penis into a red raw and very sore state
It's traditional to come up with a humorous cover story. Vacuuming naked, kitten loose in the house somewhere, had to fix TV after getting out of shower, went for a bike ride in very uncomfortable clothes, took a poo in some nettles, etc.
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