Posts by Marcus Neiman
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I have to say that I do have a slight bit of sympathy for Labour given the state of the NZ media these days. While there is considerable anti-Labour bias (particuatly in reporting about the political economy), more generally there is simply very little serious coverage of current affairs in almost any media in terms of the length of reporting and the quality of the minds producing it.
(Three year courses at AUT do not seem to produce sharp or courageous minds...)
I actually have some sympathy with some remarks made by Lee Kwan Yew in his autobiography when he talked about the importance of governments being able to communicate with their citizens without having to go through the media barrons (or to extrapolate, the profit-making rationalities at work at TVNZ)
Obviously though, critical and open debate does need to take place in parallell to such communication...
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Or, to be earnest, meaningful jobs or apprenticeships...
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Merc: I think you may have not read me as I intended... but that is a discussion for elsewhere.
You are however quite salient in talking about "getting beyond the politics of obtaining money" - this is a real problem in the grouping of Liberal political economies. While tax rises are generally unpopular, there is a specific resistance in Liberal political economies - the discourse of politics in these countries is particuarly strongly orientated against them. With the death of the post-War national social settlements, there is now even less of place to argue from in the countries for redistribution - witness the ongoing obsession in the media with unaffordable tax cuts - except in the face of comparasions such as the UNICEF study.
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Paul: You are quite right - there is no one single factor, and high levels of taxation are not enough on their own (e.g. witness the former Eastern Bloc).
The common feature of the high achieving countries, as identified by a body of comparative political economic research, is that they are both generally relatively high taxers, and generally score relatively highly in their levels of democratisation.
Simply put, places like Sweden and the Netherlands have more proportional electoral systems, inclusive coalition governments, inclusive political discourse norms, and public sectors that are better skilled at engaging with "the people" than places like NZ's selected role political economic models - generally the UK and the USA.
It's about taking the money, and then respectfully talking about spending it - with the people it is intended to go to.
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While high taxes and deep welfare are important, I think at core it is the liberalism as a political culture that is almost equally important in accounting for NZ's poor performance - norms like that a governing coalition must only have 51% of seats in parliament to rule rather than form what political scientists call "oversized cabinets", the terms of engagement of the state with communities, and so on.
In a soundbite, we just don't know how to care...
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Of course the past is not a "golden" place, but focussing on one or two indicators misses what the aggregated picture that is the point of the report.
The most interesting thing about it as a piece of social research is that NZ - and the other Anglophonic Liberal political economies, with their majoritarian political culture and emphasis on marketisation and commodification as the de facto organising principles of social life - are almost categorically as a set of political economies doing worse than, particuarly the Social Democratic, consensus-orientated political economies of Northern Europe.
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Robert: Fair Cop from the Valid Arguement Police.
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Jason: Yes, perhaps any given statistic may not be interesting on its own, but the report is interesting in terms of its aggregated findings and their fit with political economic research.
In essesence, what Arend Lijphart calls "Consociational" democracies almost catagorically seem to do better than Majoritarian democracies (i.e. the Anglosphere). Or in the the typology of Hall and Soskice, Coordinated Market Economies are doing better than the Liberal Market Economies. Esping-Anderson's Social Democratic Welfare states do better than our cohort of Liberal welfare states.
Basically, this evidence would support other research that suggests our political economic paradigm dosen't deliver the goods and services...
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Robert: In deploying that truism did you have any particular correlation in mind?
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Relative economic prosperity for whom?
I presume you are not a renter, don't stock supermarket shelves, work in retail, don't have a student loan, pick grapes, serve tables...
Gross wealth and income may be growing in NZ, but has increasingly not been going to the wage earners, and entry level salary earners who make up most of the population, further a fair chunk of it is increasingly not even staying in NZ...