Kiwi News and Views

The Sorry Story of Earthquake-Prone Buildings.

The Treasury requires that when new or amended legislation is proposed, a Regulatory Impact Statement (RIS) be provided – ‘a high-level summary of the problem being addressed, the options and their associated costs and benefits, the consultation undertaken, and the proposed arrangements for implementation and review’.

In its hurry to get back to the 2017 policy framework within 100 days, the new Luxon-led government announced it would not require RISs for its legislation. Perhaps the flouting of requirements could be justified if they were repealing recently passed legislation and could use the old RISs. But equally it could be argued that when it wants to, the Government ignores the whole exercise and that the RISs are only fig leaves to give the impression of quality decision making.

To see how ineffective RISs can be, look at their record on the 2016 Building (Earthquake-prone Buildings) Amendment Bill, which changed the way earthquake-prone buildings are identified and managed under the Building Act 2004. Up to 20,000 buildings may have to be retro-engineered or demolished as a consequence. The problem is particularly intense in Wellington, our most earthquake-vulnerable city, where there are almost 600 buildings on the city’s Earthquake-prone Building register.

As required when preparing legislation, the Ministry of Building, Innovation and Employment (MoBIE) produced an RIS. (Here) It is a fairly straightforward RIS until one gets to its cost and benefit analysis. CBAs are really no more than collecting together what is known about the economics of a project, in a systematic framework, typically using data from other disciplines (such as engineering). (We do not know when an earthquake will occur, so the analysis uses risk assessments provided by geologists.)

CBAs can be tricky. (Sorry folks, if this is quite demanding.) This CBA compared the cost of doing nothing to strengthen the building, against strengthening it to a seismic standard related to the New Building Standard (NBS). Here is my account based upon my reading of what the NBS rating means; where I have no expertise, I’ve had it checked out by qualified engineers.

The percent NBS rating is a measure of a building’s potential seismic performance when compared to the seismic performance of a similar new building constructed under current standards and codes. In Wellington, new buildings are designed and constructed to reliably withstand earthquake shaking with a return period of one in 500 years. A seismic rating of 34% NBS means the building should perform similarly to a 100% NBS-rated building at about a third of the level of shaking; buildings with a 34% NBS rating should withstand a one-in-41-year earthquake with a similar level of reliability. (Smaller earthquakes occur much more often than larger ones.)

The New Zealand Society for Earthquake Engineering considers buildings with a rating above 67% NBS, which can withstand a one-in-200-year earthquake, to be acceptable in terms of seismic risk. Buildings with an NBS rating below 34% are deemed to be ‘earthquake prone’ and are usually required to be demolished or strengthened.

To simplify, a 34% NBS-rated building is thought to have 10 times the risk of a human fatality of a similar new building. However, before the below 34 percenters rush out to live in a tent on the back lawn, they should observe the probability of a fatality is low.

The CBA concluded that if there was no further strengthening, the likelihood was that there would be up to 8.1 New Zealand deaths a year from earthquakes (they would tend to be clumped in particular years of big earthquakes). But if high-risk buildings were upgraded to the 34% NBS standard, there would be only 5.8 deaths in an average year. (If they were all upgraded to 100% NBS, there would be 2.4 deaths; the reason the death ratio is 2-3 times and not 10 is because many buildings are already above the 34% NBS standard.)

The figures are trivial compared to say, the annual deaths from the road toll (about 350) or cancer (about 9,500). But every life is precious, so we should try to reduce all deaths, providing the resources used cannot be better deployed somewhere else.

The CBA uses the Net Present Value (NPV) method to calculate the cost of the upgrading. It involves some heroic assumptions. The NPV calculated to upgrade all buildings to 34% NBS in 15 years was $1,717 billion. That number is not transparent so I simplify it to paying out $216m per year in construction costs for each of the 15 years.* That spending would reduce deaths annually by 2.3 (8.1-5.8). We would be spending approximately $10m strengthening buildings to avoid one death.

That is a much higher outlay than we spend in the health and transport sector to avoid deaths. We could save many more lives by spending the $216m in those sectors than on earthquake strengthening. So we are wasting money in the strengthening which could be used to save lives elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the CBA is not a very easy read, but I have yet to meet an economist who has looked at the RIS and was not outraged that legislation went ahead given its Cost-Benefit-Analysis. Economic considerations are not decisive but they should surely be taken into account, especially as the RIS alerted that there were expensive consequences.

I do not have the record of how MoBIE or the Cabinet Ministers discussed the CBA but I can tell you about Parliament. The bill got referred to a select committee, which received accompanying papers from the ministry, including the RIS as Appendix 2. Following submissions, the bill was reported back and then went through the various stages of debate until it became law.

None of the select committee members mention the RIS, nor did the minister (Nic Smith). Only one MP, ACT’s David Seymour, did. He was the sole MP to vote against the bill becoming law, primarily because of issues related to the CBA. Except for him, the CBA was wasted on Parliament.

If the MPs could ignore the costs, owners of earthquake-prone buildings could not. Many residents of affected apartment buildings are not able to afford the cost of strengthening to 34% NBS or higher and will lose their homes. Those that do strengthen have to suffer severe disruption during the construction work and are also likely to be out of pocket finding alternative accommodation (in one case I know of, for a year). Such costs were not included in the CBA.

Moreover, an earthquake-prone designation reduces the value of the building for sale. Even an engineer who understood the meaning of the NBS would be reluctant to purchase one because a subsequent sale is likely to be compromised. The Wellington apartment market is in chaos.

To round the policy story off – alas not for those owning earthquake buildings – it was intended to review the NBS in 2022. However, the review was delayed until 2027, but the incoming minister is bringing the review forward. Any revision is unlikely to resolve the difficulties that owners of earthquake-prone buildings face. These are not solely engineering matters but also involve economics and regulation and a bit more gumption from Parliament.

* I simplified by ignoring that the strengthening will also save lives in earthquakes occurring after 15 years. (I used a 10% p.a. discount rate.)

Public policy towards tobacco consumption remains politically sensitive.

In 1983, a young researcher was told by a medium-level Treasury official that Treasury policy was to abandon excise duties on tobacco. The senior Treasury economist that I consulted, famed for his commonsense, snorted ‘we need the money’. He explained that no-excise-duty was the ambition of a couple of very ideological Treasury officials – later we would call them ‘Rogernomes’ or ‘neoliberals’ – who objected to state intervention.

I recount this incident to remind you that tobacco policy has an ideological dimension as well as being affected by lobbying from the commercial tobacco interests, which are not particularly ideological but pursue their self-interest. A ‘Socialists for Ciggies’ lobby would be generously funded too. (One may suspect the funding of favourable lobby groups tobacco interests is because they do not want New Zealand successes to set an international example.)

Understanding the ideological dimension explains why some not very impressive arguments are trotted out to justify reducing tobacco excise. It is common for an ideological justification to be clothed in practical garb. Understanding the commercial lobbying explains why alcohol excise is not also under review. The liquor interests cannot be spending enough on the right-wing lobby groups.

Tobacco excise duties are still Treasury policy; it still needs the money. But there is a sound economic justification for excise duties on tobacco. Smoking damages smokers’ health, compromising heart and lungs and triggering cancers. The tobacco excise contributes to the cost of health service treatments. (The revenue actually exceeds annual costs. However, if everyone stopped smoking tomorrow, they would experience some health gains immediately, but would still have higher treatment costs for some decades. So the duty is covering future costs, just as taxing carbon emissions is intended to offset global warming which lasts centuries.)

The priority of revenue collecting is demonstrated by the fact that currently the level of excise duty is indexed to general consumer prices. As prices rise, so does the tax (although there are some in the current government who would like to end this practice). The indexation arose because it was such a hassle for Treasury to get the Minister of Finance to raise the excise rate; now it is automatic. The small incremental changes probably don’t have a lot of effect on smoking, whereas holding off the increases and then having a big increase encourages more smokers to give up.

Another economic dimension has been the smoke-free legislation. Once smokers had the right to pollute others’ airspace, which many non-smokers found offensive. The realisation that passive smokers could also suffer health damage led to a law change which removed the right for a smoker to infringe the airspace of others. The health damage from passive smoking is quite small compared to that from active smoking, but it provided the political lever to introduce the smoke-free legislation.

Over the years the amount of smoking has decreased. In 2011 the government set a target of only 5 percent of smokers in the population by 2025. That seemed ambitious at the time but it looks as though the target will be attained.

The big difference may be the introduction of vaping which enables the tobacco addict to switch access to a nicotine source which appears to be less harmful, because there is less poison in the inhaling. We cannot be sure how less harmful it is. It took decades to track how much tobacco damaged health and we have insufficient data to be sure of vaping’s long-run effects. (The medical advice is that addicted smokers should switch to vaping, but non-smokers should not take it up.)

The neoliberal’s ideological case is that they object to the state interfering in individual lives, especially when it tries to change behaviour. If people want to smoke, they are entitled to make that decision without state interference. I am not unsympathetic to that general principle, especially if the smokers are paying for their health (and other social) costs and they are not infringing others’ airspace.

The economics discipline is framed by the importance of individual choice. But how addiction fits into the economists’ approach is unclear. Most smokers are addicted to nicotine; many wish they could give up smoking, but they can’t. It is easy to say ‘don’t get addicted’ but it happens with other things we consume. (Kate Shepherd famously remarked that ladies of her time were addicted to cups of tea.)

The economics approach to personal decision making began before psychology as a science was founded. Behavioural economics draws upon modern psychology, but I have yet to see how it incorporates addiction. (Some of the neoliberal arguments are just plain silly. A famous one was that being unable to give up an addiction was akin to saying you wanted to get married but could not find anyone to marry.)

I am uneasy that the (handful of) tobacco companies profit from getting people addicted to their product despite it being harmful. That position is not based on deep economic theory but on the commonsense of a senior Treasury official. In particular it suggests we should target behaviour which results in addiction.

We are not going to stop teenagers trying out a fag, especially if their elders say ‘don’t’. Daily smoking is already low among teenagers, Hopefully they will completely stop by their early twenties. That should be an aim of public policy.

This approach suggests we should not get too agitated about the (diminishing proportion of) older adult smokers. They are paying for the costs of their health care (although sometimes, say for heart conditions, they will not be treated unless they give up smoking because the treatment is not very effective). They are not polluting our airspace. We may be sorry for them; we should give them as much assistance to give up smoking as we can. But they know the risks.

I expect the previous paragraph will cause outrage among some of my colleagues in the health profession. Theirs is a different ideology committed to saving every life they can. Their view is smokers are killing themselves; they should not. It is an approach I respect – it involves a commitment to preserving life well beyond what the advocates are paid. But we all do risky things, like skydiving and jay walking, aware there are dangers.

Indeed, we may be facing a dispute within the anti-tobacco lobby about what to do once the target of five percent smokers is attained. One side will want to reduce the target further; the other will be more relaxed about adult smokers, focusing the effort on limiting adolescent smoking. Meanwhile the neoliberal lobby, backed by the commercial tobacco interests, seems to be in office and perhaps in power. We may be facing a major political wrangle, but a three-sided one.

Interpreting the agreement made at Waitangi as a social contract is a way to move forward on treaty issues.

(This column follows ‘Our Understandings Of Te Tiriti Has Evolved Organically’.)

Te Tiriti is in the form of a social contract of the sort that political theorists have discussed since the seventeenth century to explain how countries should be governed. Philosopher David Hume pointed out that no country had a tangible one on which it was founded. Sixty-four years after his death, New Zealand upended his objection.

Te Tiriti looks like a social contract. It has a prologue, three articles and an epilogue. The articles are at its core. In an early draft, the third article was actually in the prologue, with a ring around it and arrow pointing to a position as the third article.

The third article is the ‘rights’ clause. A good translation of the Māori text is ‘In return for the cession of the sovereignty to the Queen of England the people of New Zealand will be protected by the Queen of England and the rights and privileges of British subjects will be granted to them.’

In standard political theory such an (inalienable) rights clause precedes the next two clauses, exactly where it was originally placed.

The first two clauses are constructed in the form of a contractual exchange. The first says that the signatories accept that the governance (kāwanatanga) of New Zealand will be the responsibility of the English sovereign and her successors, while the second says that, in return, the government will respect and protect the signatories’ rangatiratanga, including their properties and other treasures. This is exactly the way a social contract is constructed.

There is an argument as to whether the Tiriti is a covenant or whether it is about property rights. If it is a social contract, it encompasses both – and more.

‘Rangatiratanga’ may have had a more Iwi/tribal* meaning to some of the original signatories. But that notion seems to have subsequently evolved into everyone having the status of a rangatira – of having the sovereignty of the individual over her- or himself – which is the way a modern social contract would interpret it.

While Te Tiriti was between the English Crown and Rangatira Māori, today it must be taken to involve all of us, whether we have some Māori descent or none. That is the logic of the third article.

Some confused thinking equates the English Crown with the English people. They are quite distinct. Technically the English people were not involved with Te Tiriti (except some were advisers). Describing some New Zealanders as ‘tangata tiriti’ seems to be a misunderstanding of what historically went on.

The text refers to the recent arrivals as ‘Pakeha’. which is how I describe my ethnicity – honouring Te Tiriti. (I do not describe myself as ‘European’ because of its race overtones.)

Te Tiriti does not set up a partnership between the Crown and Māori (Iwi). That was not the interpretation of the Court of Appeal. (The Court said both parties must act in good faith akin to that of a partnership.) If Te Tiriti was a social contract, the Crown would be more like a trustee than a partner.

Hobson’s London instructions give no hint that he was to negotiate a social contract. He discussed the Colonial Office directions with Governor Gipps when he was in Sydney before sailing to Waitangi. Gipps tried to get some Māori visiting Sydney to sign a deal. (They turned it down.) The Gipps’ (unsigned) treaty is not in the form of a social contract suggesting it was not a consideration in the Gipps-Hobson discussions.

The likelihood is that the conceptual notion of a social contract came from James Busby (who mentioned social contract theory in one of his letters) and possibly Henry Williams (who would have certainly known about the theological equivalents – covenants). So there was at Waitangi local input from Busby and Williams which was more sensitive to Māori interests. Te Tiriti is not simply what the Colonial Office envisaged. 

The origins of social contract theories go back to the covenants in the Bible. Here we start with seventeenth-century England, a time of great civil unrest and turmoil. Thomas Hobbes argued then that absent of any political order there would be ‘[n]o arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, in continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.’ He posited the need for a central authority (a ‘Leviathan’).

But, he said, that ‘[t]he obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them’. A few decades later John Locke made the point even more strongly that if the Leviathan failed to look after the interests of its subjects it could be replaced, as had just happened to James II

If a social contract is breached, the signatories have the right to withdraw the authority of the sovereign. This is not to say that they need chop off the king’s head but it does raise the question of how to keep the sovereign authority on track. (The MMP referendum replaced the existing frontrunner ‘monarchy’.)

Evolving here is the notion of a social contract for which the population, concerned by civil turbulence, appoint a sovereign but on the condition that their interests are protected. Which is exactly what Te Tiriti did.

It would be anachronistic to argue that the Māori signatories knew the European political debate but, shortly after, Māori described the agreement as a ‘covenant’, which is a part of the theological origins of social contract theory. So it is not implausible that such notions may have underpinned at least some of the Māori signatories’ thinking; and certainly they have done so in the thinking of many of their descendants.

Te Tiriti being a social contract does not undermine most of the things we do today in its name.

    – The treaty settlements are still remedies to the Crown’s breaches of the second article;

    – The Māori language remains a taonga of the second article (as ruled by the courts) and the Crown is obliged to foster it;

    – Under a liberal social contract, the Crown should practise subsidiarity and devolve as much autonomy as possible to individuals, and to the voluntary groupings which include Māori ones;

    – The Crown should be concerned with social inequality including inequality of opportunity,  not least to promote social cohesion (reduce turbulence), and should be concerned to reduce social deprivation, especially where it applies to identifiable social groups such as Māori.

While Te Tiriti as a social contract is a coherent interpretation of the facts, and seems likely to have been the interpretation of at least one person involved in the events of the day, that does not mean it is a social contract today. That is for us to decide. How can we?

I do not think there is any point in the government declaring Te Tiriti is a social contract – especially the bit about if it does badly, you may ‘behead’ it (although that is the import of the Electoral Act 1993). Rather it is about how each of us thinks about Te Tiriti, like the paradigm shift from ‘Te Treaty is a Fraud’ to ‘Honour Te Tiriti’.

Hopefully an increasing number of people will treat Te Tiriti as a social contract and describe it that way in their public dialogue. Not everyone will agree and there will be differences of interpretation – as there are among philosophers. (Many subsequent philosophers – including David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Rawls – have contributed to the theory.) But we could evolve our thinking towards a consensus which does not just say Te Tiriti is the foundation document of the nation, but treats it as such; which does not just honour Te Tiriti, but does so in a contemporary, historically consistent, practical and intelligible way.

* I capitalise iwi to indicate when I am referring to tribes rather than people.

History is a living thing. The past not only tells us of where we’ve come from, it walks with us today and pushes us down certain paths to the future. It is an active, persistent, demanding presence; a stone in our shoe, a beam of light shining over our shoulders.

Yet as we confront another Waitangi Day full of debate, there are many eager to get out their chisels and carve our history into stone.

We seem to have fallen into a place of either/or when it comes to te Tiriti o Waitangi. Either it is a promise of partnership or a declaration of duties. Either we are ‘tiriti-centric’ or we are dishonouring the treaty. Either we respect cultural rights or universal human rights. Either it is article two or article three. Either it is everything or it is nothing.

My question this Waitangi Day is whether there is still a place to say it is both a founding document of this country upon which our status as a nation rests and a flawed, human effort designed with the issues of 1840 in mind; three short articles that to be relevant to succeeding generations will need to remain a living document open to debate.

Some today – on all sides of the argument – seem to want to say ‘this is what it is and nothing else’. To speak for the signers as if they were there. To leave no room for doubt or compromise. That is a risky way to look at history.

The United States has fallen into this certainty trap, casting its constitution not as an effort to make rules for a government in a certain place and time, but as something sacred and non-negotiable. Something inviolate and holy.

Look at the debate of the right to bear arms in the second amendment. Rather than being seen as a response to an issue from the 1700s it has become for some akin to the word of God.

The result is increasingly polarisation. Why would we wish such certainty on our country? Insisting that we define the treaty and its principles once and for all could lead many places, but it ensures one thing. That the debate on te tiriti becomes a zero-sum game that each side will feel it must win, or lose its voice forever. We are making the stakes too high.

As tempting as it is to want to resolve a debate once and for all, and in politics to get a win for your side that might outlive you, the risk is ongoing bitterness and division, the very thing everyone insists they are trying to avoid.

New Zealand has a fluid and patchwork constitution. That creates its own problems, but it does allow us to adapt and evolve alongside our understanding of our past. And our present. And our future.

This is not to say there aren’t facts and certainties in history. There are. But our understanding of that history and what we do with those facts is always evolving and up for debate. Which is a good thing. Because there’s no more a single correct view of history than there was a single correct view amongst the people gathered at Waitangi in the early days of February in 1840.

If you want to understand the chaotic uncertainty swirling around that day, you only have to read the missionaries’ quotes of the rangatira present or the ‘on one hand-on the other hand’ instructions William Hobson had from Lord Normanby, Britian’s Secretary of State for War and Colonies.

Their concerns and motivations were many. People on both sides wanted to see Maori protected from the worst of a wider world that was about to change them forever. International trade and travel had been a part of life – especially in the north – for a couple of generations, but mass settlement was about to be something new. Maori sailors wanted protection on international ships. There were worries about the criminals coming across from Australia, navigation rights for Maori ships and traders, the impact of the French here and in Europe. Britain fretted about its empire in China, India and Afghanistan, and the rise of Russia. Maori were dealing with the traumatic impact of the Musket Wars, the Crown was wrestling with the potentially traumatic impact of thousands of its people arriving in a land beyond its sway.

So many threads. So many reasons to sign or not sign a treaty. So reductive to think we can boil it all down into a few lines, slogans or principles 184 years later.

The stone of history cannot be just shaken from our shoe. We have to learn to live with it by learning more about our past, listening more intently to each other and accepting that all our arguments are only part of a complex picture. We have to live with our history, not decide or judge it. Put down our chisels. Only then can we learn from it and from each other.

Why try to stop that evolution?

In 1956, historian Ruth Ross presented her investigations of the treaty signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 to a seminar concluding, ‘The [Māori and Pakeha] signatories of 1840 were uncertain and divided in their understanding of [Te Tiriti’s] meaning; who can say now what its intentions were? … However good the intentions may have been, a close study of events shows that [Te Tiriti] was hastily and inexpertly drawn up, ambiguous and contradictory in content, chaotic in its execution.’ The reaction to her paper was scornful. Those at the seminar ‘regarded her approach to the treaty as idiosyncratic and dismissed it.’ Ross said that another historian, a close friend, ‘told me my approach was a waste of time’ and ‘dismiss[ed] my preoccupation with the text as “historically worthless”’.

In 1972 Ross published virtually the same paper in the New Zealand Journal of History. It has since become the foundation paper for historical studies of the signing at Waitangi, fundamentally changing the way that historians (and informed persons) thought about Te Tiriti. One age’s eccentric becomes the sage of a later one.

That story is written in detail in Bain Attwood’s ‘A Bloody Difficult Subject’: Ruth Ross, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, and the Making of History, the most important scholarly book on the subject in over a decade. The book observes that in the early 1980s, much influenced by Ross’s work, the common sentiment that ‘the Treaty is a fraud’ was replaced by ‘Honour Te Tiriti’.

This was the biggest but not the only major development of thinking that has occurred in the last half century. In 1975 Te Tiriti was embedded in New Zealand law in the Treaty of Waitangi Act, whose appendices also included what we call the ‘English version of the Treaty’. It was one of the drafts when the treaty was being developed in preparation for negotiation. Ross does not think it was the last draft – neither do I – but that the last draft in English has been lost in private papers and probably destroyed. We know that after the last English version was translated into Māori there were some changes made to get to the final Māori version (Te Tiriti), but we do not know what they were.

We do know that there was no English text on the Treaty grounds on the day of the signing. We know that shortly after the signing, the US consul, James Clendon, hunted around for an official English text but could find one. In fact, William Hobson, who signed Te Tiriti, forwarded five different English language versions to his superiors in Sydney and London, which surely suggests he did not have an authoritative text. Those translations of Te Tiriti, made for land dealing purposes in Auckland in the following decade, would have been quite unnecessary if there had been an official English language version of Te Tiriti. The claim that ‘the treaty is a fraud’ could be applied to the ‘English version’.

A later major development was the 1987 Court of Appeal decision on the meaning of Te Tiriti. (New Zealand Maori Council v Attorney-General 1987). ACT is both wrong and right when it says Te Tiriti is not a partnership. The Court – all five judges – said that the signatories had to act in good faith akin to a partnership. Earlier courts had talked about the ‘honour of the Crown’, which is an analogous sentiment. But the judges did not say that Crown and Māori were partners like a couple of lawyers in a business. Perhaps the people who jumped to this conclusion have not read the decision.

There are other critical events such as decisions made by the Waitangi Tribunal and the courts, and the Treaty Settlements. But I have said enough to illustrate how our understanding of Te Tiriti has evolved over the last half century, as it did earlier.

To many, the evolution has been a bit frightening; I sympathise with them. We are no longer talking about the treaty we were taught about at school; we can now be more informed. There are two main efforts to stop the evolution of our understanding.

One is ‘originalism’ – that we should go back to the original intention of Te Tiriti. The difficulty is that, as Ruth Ross showed and subsequent scholarship has confirmed, there was no agreed meaning on the day. Hobson had an understanding, but I doubt that either James Busby or Henry Williams, who helped develop the agreement with him, fully shared his view. Māori certainly had a different understanding. It would be totally anachronistic to think that they had an understanding of sovereignty similar to Hobson’s. Moreover, it is most unlikely that the different Māori signatories had a common view about what the agreement meant.

In any case, any original notion about governance was based on the minimalist state. (Look at Colonial Secretary Normanby’s instructions to Hobson.) The modern state, with facets like a large taxation base, considerable government spending, the development state and the welfare state, which we take for granted really got underway later. (Te Tiritihas had to adapt from the conception of  of the minimalist state when it was written to the current highly centralised one; I’d have said ‘with difficulty’.)

Originalism is undermined by social change. The third article says that Māori would be entitled to English rights. In 1840 neither all women nor most men were entitled to vote in England. Is Te Tiriti irrelevant to our universal suffrage? (In 1840 colonial subject’s access to England was unrestricted. I doubt a New Zealander would get very far if they tried to use Te Tiriti as grounds for a British entry permit today.)

There is a quasi-originalism which goes back to an earlier treaty interpretation. An example is drawing attention to a pamphlet by Āpirana Ngata published 100 years ago. (It is historically inaccurate.) In fairness to Ngata, he was a man of his times but he kept up with developments. There can be no doubt that had he read the Ross article and followed the subsequent informed discussion, he would have rewritten his pamphlet.

If originalism does not work then, there is what may be called the ‘new originalism’, which is to set down an interpretation of Te Tiriti which will be a foundation for the future. ACT’s proposed Treaty Bill is an example. If it were passed by a huge majority in a referendum with little public dissent – I do not expect that it would be – it would be a basis for the future, setting in concrete the meaning of Te Tiriti. (Of course there would have to be a version in te reo, and we would have to agree that the two versions meant the same thing.)

ACT is slipping into the bill its own political theories when it reinterprets the second article as being confined only to property rights in a minimalist state, a very New Right approach. I doubt that is how the Māori signatories interpreted the notions of ‘rangatiratanga’ or of ‘taonga’.

Neither do the modern courts.  A really important evolution was when the courts confirmed te reo was a taonga. I would have been a very odd discussion if anybody in 1840 had raised the issue. ACT’s second proposed article overturns the possibility that te reo is taonga.

ACT are not the only new originalists. Many of those who set down what they think Te Tiriti means do so in as equally ahistoric certainty that what they are saying now is (or should be) eternal.

It aint. Given the change in the last fifty years, it is inconceivable that our understanding will be the same in 2074. Whatever the originalists and new originalists try, it will be different. Hopefully, it will come about through the organic evolution like the last 183 years. And true, we may end up with something that I am, or you are, not entirely happy with. But we should try to prepare ourselves. Understanding Te Tiriti’s actual historical evolution rather making up pseudo-history to suit our prejudices would be a good start.

Somewhere in David Seymour’s rhetoric there is a serious debate clawing to get out. In fact, there are a hatful of debates. Seymour at his best has always been an ideas man. His problem in recent years is that rhetoric has tended to get in the way. The politician who so effectively twerked his way into public consciousness and so elegantly built a public and political coalition to pass the End of Life Choice Act has become an angrier and more divisive political figure, undermining his ability to spark more healthy debate.

Yesterday, in his state of the nation speech, Seymour reminded New Zealand of the insightful political mind behind the political persona we’ve seen through the Covid years.

ACT has courted conspiracy and division on its way to the cabinet table and, the closer it got, the more Seymour seemed to lose the charm and sincerity that helped him dig ACT out of its darker one percent years.

But as I’ve said many times, including on the Caucus podcast during the election campaign, ACT is looking to be the most active and interesting spoke in the wheel of this government. On Caucus I quoted Eminem, saying Seymour would not want to miss his one shot, his chance to blow. And lo and behold, Seymour yesterday said precisely that – he had “one shot” and if he didn’t take it, a politician with different values would.

While National as a party seems to be trapped in short-term memory, obsessed with returning New Zealand to the Key years and governing like it’s 2009, and New Zealand First wants to take us even further back – to some imagined halcyon days of the 1920s, 50s, or 70s – ACT is the one to watch. Regardless of whether or not you agree with his politics, Seymour’s speech reminded us why.

Seymour spoke insightfully of a Pacific far from the “benign strategic environment” in which Clark said she governed. A world where “there be dragons” everywhere. And where US political polarisation is bad for smaller countries, from Ukraine to Israel to New Zealand. Critically, he says when trust in democratic institutions erodes, democracy itself is in jeopardy. These are important words.

Seymour also raised the country’s long-term political cycle – the “golden weather” of the 60s and 70s, the change of the 80s, the “good times” of the 90s and early 2000s. He rightly said transformational governments are few and far between in these long cycles. Jacinda Ardern famously claimed hers would be just such a government, before being derailed by New Zealand First, Covid and, arguably, poor politics.

So, without using Ardern’s explicit language, Seymour painted himself as the next great transformational figure. The man of the hour. It’s an ambitious take for a non-Prime Minister with just 8.6 percent of the vote, but is entirely consistent with Seymour’s zeal and ACT’s roots. This is, remember, the party of Sir Roger Douglas and Ruth Richardson, arguably this country’s most transformational political figures of the past 50 years.

Seymour called out this century’s three main Prime Ministers – Helen Clark, John Key and Jacinda Ardern (ignoring Bill English and Chris Hipkins) – as responsible for “lost decades”. He said they marked time and failed to innovate.

He’s hardly the first whose political analysis says that those govenments were defined as much by what they didn’t do as what they did. To point to those Prime Ministers as political managers rather than leaders. (Although, to be fair, it fell to them to damp down the collective political trauma felt after the radical changes led by Douglas and Richardson).

For Seymour, we’re due a new dose of reform.

In some ways it’s too soon to tell if any of those Prime Ministers were transformational. Perhaps Ardern’s government of ‘kindness’, for example, will be remembered as more significant than it is currently, in the shadow of Labour’s election defeat. Reform can be cultural and behavioural, after all.

But for Seymour, reform means policy. Policy based on values, not political management or expediency. It’s a refreshing promise in these cynical and polarised times. Seymour has become a hate figure for some on the left, but even they might welcome a politics based on values.

But which values will hold sway in this coalition? It is here that Seymour’s speech lays out a vital tension at the very heart of this government.

National ran on a conservative platform; it didn’t seek or get a mandate for transformation. The most appealing point for many voters was that they had different faces and may be more competent in political management than the previous lot. Winston Peters – for all his talk – is inherently conservative and New Zealand First is instinctively a ‘back to the future’ party.

Both parties campaigned on taking New Zealand back to imagined better days and there’s nothing in the election results that suggest voters were looking for ACT-style (libertarian-inspired, market-driven, individual rights-based) upheaval. Nothing to suggect his coalition partners want that either.

Ironically, Seymour argued in his speech that many Americans will support Donald Trump in this year’s presidential election because of some belief ‘life was better before’. He didn’t mean it as a complement. Yet the government he is part of is built on much the same promise.

Seymour, for example, spoke critically of rising house prices under John Key. Yet this government is repeating the policies – such as interest deductability and a minimal brightline test – that helped drive price rises. Just as it is set on repeating much from the previous National-led administration. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon idolises Key, one of the manager PMs Seymour called out. And Luxon is, as defined by his career, a manager.

Luxon and his cabinet is not built transformation – explicit or covert. The promises already made to over-turn so much of the Adern agenda will suck up much of its political capital and energy for the first term. There will be little time for the generational reform Seymour is seeking as this government’s ‘first 100 days’ agenda bleeds out in months and years.

Which suggests that Seymour’s grand designs will likely be suppressed by his coalition partners and events. If Seymour is to get anywhere near the transformation he sees as essential to strengthen the state of the nation, it will have been a remarkable act of political will.

ACT’s best chance will be in the portfolio where he has most say – regulation. The one place where he may have caught his opponents and allies alike on the hop is getting control of a new ministry that has licence to reform every bit of state activity it comes in contact with. This is ACT planting its flag exactly where you’d expect it would be – not in the heat of identity or cultural politics, but in that most central of political debates – the size and shape of government.

It’s in reforming the very machinery of government – regulations – that Seymour is best placed to take his one shot at transformation. To make his case for change and reinvention. Which means it’s there his opponents will have to take up arms against him and there – in the dull trenches of regulation – that some of the most important debates of the next three years will come. The outcome of those debates will go a long way to determining the state of our nation in the 2027 election.

And even more from the book it is based upon: “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer” by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.

Christopher Nolan’s award winning film Oppenheimer is based on the 2005 biography American Prometheus. I really liked the title. Prometheus was the Greek god who gave mankind fire, and was punished for doing so. J. Robert Oppenheimer gave us atomic weapons and energy. The ugly and enthralling core of the book and the film is about the story of his success and the resulting punishment.

The film is not quite accurate, but in a related context Oppenheimer justified some changes to other theatrical accounts of his life as legitimate dramatic licence. The 700-page book has to be more scrupulous. There are 85 pages of notes and the bibliography is another 15.

An enquiry was set up in 1954 to consider Oppenheimer’s security status. The book calls it a ‘kangaroo court’. Lewis Strauss, his main antagonist, chose the enquiry panel and kept in constant touch with them and the ‘prosecuting team’. Between meetings Oppenheimer’s rooms were bugged, including discussions with his counsel. It was not a court, so illegally acquired evidence from FBI wire-taps was used against him. Not that Oppenheimer or his counsel always knew because much of the evidence was not disclosed to them. The enquiry was in secret with no independent journalists reporting it.

I was continually reminded of the detestable show trials under Stalin where the conviction was predetermined and the defendant never had a chance. I was appalled, because I have had so much respect for the American judicial system. Of course, it has failed on numerous occasions – there are the terrible stories of McCarthyism at about the same time while those involving blacks go back centuries – but this was the authoritarian state out to get someone. Prometheus was being punished.

The difference from the Soviet Union and similar trials was that there was widespread public uproar from the science community when the verdict was announced; the panel revoked Oppenheimer’s security clearance by a 2–1 vote (while unanimously clearing him of disloyalty). That sort of outrage cannot occur in an authoritarian state, so one was still left with some respect for the robustness of American public life.

Eventually the decision was revoked and Oppenheimer’s official status was reinstated. But he was a broken man when the presidency acknowledged him and dead when his security status was restored.

It is difficult for a film to capture the gruelling detail of the ‘trial’. When I saw Nolan’s film, I did not come away with the knowledge or extreme outrage I had following reading the book. The best that the film could do is juxtapose Oppenheimer’s ordeal with a 1957 senate hearing into Strauss’ suitability to be commerce secretary in an Eisenhower cabinet. You may not have a lot of respect for such hearings, recalling the disgraceful McCarthy ones of the 1950s. But it was in public and there was due process. The Senate rejected Strauss in what was described as ‘one of the biggest, bitterest, and in many ways most unseemly confirmation fights in Senate history’. (The nays included  John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.) The film makes it seem that Strauss was being punished for his treatment of Oppenheimer, but the charge sheet of his misdeeds was longer, including the Democratic majority’s main argument that Strauss’s statements before the committee included semi-truths and outright falsehoods and that under tough questioning he tended towards ambiguous responses and petty arguments; given the way he treated Oppenheimer one is not surprised.) I doubt the outcome gave much comfort to Oppenheimer.

There are a couple of other themes in the book worth pondering, even if there is not room here to explore them. First is the clash at Los Alamos, where the atom bomb was developed, between Oppenheimer, who headed the scientists, and Lesley Groves, who headed the military. The military wanted great compartmentalisation between scientists for security reasons. Oppenheimer argued that a free flow of information was necessary for scientific endeavour. He won, the scientific community shared, and produced a bomb in a remarkably short time. After the war, Oppenheimer argued that scientific communities sharing their understanding across nations was the best way to prevent the misuse of atomic weapons. He lost that one.

Second, I was also struck by the contrast between Oppenheimer’s success at Los Alamos and his lesser achievements at the smaller Institute of Advanced Studies near Princeton which he headed between 1947 and 1966. (However, his insistence that Fellows at the Institute should include the arts and humanities was farseeing; he was well read, with a wide variety of tastes and interests.)

Oppenheimer came to Los Alamos with little management experience (generic managers would be appalled). His success there was because its scientific community had a single common goal (to produce an atomic bomb). There was no such commitment at the IAS, which was staffed by able eccentrics with personal agendas, just like universities. Vice-chancellors might like to reflect on the parallel; it is not just trying to herd cats but sometimes, to be zoologically inaccurate, the cats hunt in packs.

The film Oppenheimer is doing very well in the rankings. It has many strengths, although its sound is not one – the advice is to go to a session with subtitles (if you can find one). But I can’t help thinking that part of its recognition among Americans arises from its representation of one of the nastier shadows in US history – the repeated failure of its justice system to be judicial. The shadow has not gone away. Perhaps many of the film’s enthusiasts are deeply worried about how Donald Trump is using the courts and how he might use them even more malignantly if he became president again.

Footnote: Many images of Oppenheimer (including the cover of the book) show him with a cigarette or pipe. He died of throat cancer in 1966 at the age of 62; I found the book’s description of the treatment gruelling. It is thought that tobacco killed – caused the premature death of – about a hundred million people in the last century with over 25m this one. The number contrasts with perhaps less than a million killed by atomic weapons. Both are unnecessary scourges of mankind.

Luxon has to address the need to maintain and enhance New Zealand’s social cohesion.

Dear Christopher Luxon,

The greatest challenge you face is that of the nation’s social cohesion (rather than the economy). The problem has been with us ever since Hobson arrived.

New Zealand is a diverse society. For over a century we suppressed this truism by relegating women to the kitchen, Māori to the pa, gays to the closet, and ignoring the role of religion in secular life. We practised majoritarianism by a group – who among other things were straight, Pakeha, Anglican, middle-class, male, rugby followers – which pretended theirs was the only acceptable lifestyle and the country should be run in their interests. Those who did not conform to this majority were ignored, treated as quaint eccentrics, or repressed.

Today that diversity is more apparent. Affluence has enabled individuals to exhibit their differences, while social media enables like-minded minorities to join together. We are also importing the fashions of antagonistic public dialogue from overseas, most notably the rhetoric of conflict from the US – a society which seems to be falling apart because it lacks social cohesiveness.

All societies are under these pressures for roughly the same reasons. Some rigidly suppress differences, perhaps emphasising a dominant ethnicity or religion at the expense of everyone else and ignoring that there can be great diversity within the dominant group. Others face, in despair, the terrifying prospect of social unrest and breakdown.

Each country is different and has to find its own resolution (or not). New Zealand has three major differences. We have no significant external threat (except global warming); we are small; we have MMP, which recognises the diversity in a way that Frontrunner/FPP did not (Its electoral system is exacerbating the disruption in US politics).

You, Mr Luxon, will be reminded of MMP every time you enter Parliament’s chamber. You are not there because a majority of the electorate voted to support you. You look at your benches and see three disparate parties, none of which is entirely unified; the other side of the House looks no better.

You know, even if the commentariat does not, that the voting outcome of the 2023 election was not very different from that of the 2017 election except that the parties at either extreme garnered a little more support. But if the electorate did not change much, the government has shifted dramatically (because New Zealand First changed its mind).

So you have not really been given the radical mandate some of your colleagues aspire to. You are tentatively charged by the electorate to govern New Zealand in everyone’s interests; you will be judged by an unforgiving electorate.

The easy approach might seem to be a majoritarianism which attacks any dissenters. As tempting as it may seem, it is unlikely to work. Recall Rob Muldoon. He could argue his abrasiveness got him re-elected. But that was under Frontrunner. Had it been under MMP he would have lost both 1978 and 1981 as well as 1984.

There are numerous counterexamples. Prime Minister Bill Massey (1912-1925), a founder of a key precursor of the National Party, was a member of the Orange Order, notorious for his harsh response to the miners’ and waterfront workers’ strikes in 1912 and 1913. He matured.

He was against the charging of Cardinal James Liston for sedition in 1922; he saw little advantage in sharpening the religious antagonism of the times. A cabinet full of hard-line Protestants overruled him. (Liston was found not guilty.) You may be on Massey’s side, Mr Luxon, but you will not be given a decade to mature.

So how are you going to deal with the tensions and divisions, especially as you have people on your side of the House who revelled in intensifying them when in opposition?

The first obvious action is to talk to your cabinet and caucus about the issue, explaining the importance of not exacerbating social tensions and of healing social divisions. Keith Holyoake gave excellent advice when he told MPs to breathe through their nose – not opening their mouths at inconvenient moments. You need to discuss the same message with the leaders of your coalition parties and ask them to pass it on to their caucuses.

One of the nastiest rising tensions is between media and politicians. What is going on is surely mutually agreed destruction invigorating public extremists; apparently journalists are receiving death threats too. Your press office needs to talk to the press gallery and agree to take a more courteous approach. It must recognise that both sides are doing necessary tasks but they need to avoid abrasive, stupid and useless questions and answers.

Does that deal with around Parliament? You also need to change Parliament’s approach to the wider community. In particular it, needs to resist the temptation to interfere. Apparently over half of the population are opposed to trans-women being involved in women’s sports. (That’s something outside of my expertise.) It is easy for Parliament to pass a law but I suggest that it instead leaves the decision to individual sports bodies. Many will get into a pickle but explain it is their responsibility, not Parliament’s.

Another area to restrain is the nation’s habit of simplifying what is going on into two opposing and antagonistic camps. The obvious current example is Māori and non- Māori. You do not have to be very socially perceptive to know that there is enormous diversity within each group and much overlap. When someone claims to speak on behalf of Māori or whatever, the one thing that is certain is that the speaker is at best, representing just one of the group’s segments.

Take a leadership role; say your government respects all Māori or whatever, will listen to all of them and not just some self-appointed spokespeople, and will govern on all their behalfs. Get your speechwriters to always include a reference to the diversity within any group whenever a speech mentions them.

The issues of delegating down and recognising diversity applies in many other areas. It might be summarised by ‘subsidiarity’, the notion that decisions should be taken at the lowest possible level. It has not been prominent in the thinking of the New Zealand government. For instance, it loves to bully local government, directing what they should or should not do. It is time for the centre to withdraw and leave them to make as many local decisions as possible, even if they make ones with which you personally disagree.

Subsidiarity is about respect for local and individual decisions and tolerance of diversity. As far as I can see, respect and tolerance is the way to maintain social cohesion in a liberal democracy. The alternative is centralisation, majoritarianism and authoritarian repression followed by ugly civil strife.

There is an economic dimension. The market is a very powerful means of decentralisation – of practising subsidiarity. In that sense, I was a supporter of the market liberalisation we associate with Rogernomics (and I wrote about it before 1984). Unfortunately, the neoliberals decentralised very badly. Very often their economics was embarrassingly shonky and they never really understood the issue of market design – getting the right balance of regulation. Paradoxically, they were bullies using their centralised powers to impose their theories – look at the way they treated local government. And a properly working market requires a fair income distribution – instead, the policies increased its unfairness. Ironically, the neoliberals’ arrogance brought on MMP which is designed to reduce the power of the centre.

Mr Luxon, you govern with the consequences of that heritage, and the real danger that, because of the way its institutions operate, you will govern a deeply divided society if you pursue a majoritarian strategy. There has to be a better way. Decentralisation and subsidiarity, respect and tolerance are keys to it.

Yours sincerely, Brian Easton.

The New Zealand economy is struggling; the new government will struggle to implement its economic promises.

There is not a great deal of difference in Treasury’s projected GDP growth patterns between the May 2023 Budget Economic and Fiscal Update (BEFU) and the December 2023 Half Yearly Economic and Fiscal Update (HYEFU). But there are some other important underlying changes which suggest the incoming government has a tougher task than it expected. (I am skipping the September 2023 pre-election update because there is a lot of noise in the series, and the longer perspective gives a clearer account of any changes.)

Surprisingly, for me at least, the more recent HYEFU forecast suggests a slight improvement in the external account compared to the forecast six months earlier. But any difference is well within the forecasting fans, which indicate the inevitable uncertainties. (A footnote below describes how the Treasury may want to change its forecasts in the light of new developments since HYEFU was locked up in November 2023.)

The big difference between the two forecasts is population growth arising from higher immigration than was expected in BEFU. Since the GDP projection has not changed much, that means GDP (output) per capita is lower in HYEFU than BEFU.

This column treats population growth from migration in the standard way where the distributional impact of the new arrivals is neutral. The assumption is probably wrong and I plan to investigate whether the effect is significant. I’ll let you know (if anyone does the job before me, I am happy to report their work first).

As a result of the population growth, private consumption spending per person is falling over the next few years. HYEFU thinks spending will be rising again from 2025/6 but even in 2027/8 the per capita level will be below this year’s level.

You may think the changes are small, but averages can be misleading. Some will get an income  boost, so many of those suffering will experience a greater fall than average. Losers include those facing higher interest rates; on the other hand depositors will be benefiting from the higher rates. Probably well over half the population will experience a fall in their spending power over the next two years.

The HYEFU forecasts are based on government policy decisions made up to November 24,before the new coalition government was sworn in. It reflects the outgoing Labour Government’s policies and did not incorporated the new government’s December Mini Budget decisions. HYEFU comments that they ‘will improve the fiscal outlook’, although the announced changes were small. The Mini Budget included neither the coalition government’s proposed income tax changes nor the offsetting cuts to public consumption. HYEFU says – perhaps piously – that the ‘other signalled commitments … expected to be agreed in the future … would be broadly neutral over the forecast period’.

The centre of those commitments is to give income tax relief, in order to allow some increase in private consumption after June 2024. (We shall have to wait to see how well the relief is are targeted on those most suffering.)

As HYEFU implies, the relief is to be offset by cuts to public expenditure. The Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, has announced that the cuts will be in the order of 6.5 percent and more, but I am not sure of what. (‘Backrooms’ are a nebulous concept.)

My reaction was to recall the 3 percent cutting exercise on 1982 under Muldoon. (Willis had just been born; I doubt many in the cabinet will remember them.) I checked my memory with some on the frontline at the time. One described the outcome as a ‘sham’, with few real cuts.

Admittedly, Ruth Richardson slashed government spending in 1991’s ‘mother of all budgets’ but that was as much about ‘redesigning of the welfare state’ from a European to a minimalist American approach. As well as impoverishing many New Zealanders, the cuts to the health system killed people while they waited for treatment.

Perhaps a more relevant instance was the measures the Key-English National Government imposed after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. They were more a squeezing in which each year government departments were given a little less than they needed. Consequently, government borrowing remained high, coming down only slowly. The public agencies struggled with the under-funding. Part of the increase in government spending under the Ardern-Hipkins-Robertson Government was restoring what had been squeezed. (On the other hand, some of their additional spending seemed to me to be wasteful or ineffective.)

To my surprise – remember it was about Labour’s spending plans – HYEFU forecast a fall in per capita public spending of around 6 percent over the next three years to June 2026. Where Labour expected to get the reductions is unclear. Labour’s already assumed planned squeeze suggests that the Coalition Government is going to be struggling to get the cuts they need unless they have a dramatic (and, thus far, secret) agenda in the way that Richardson had.

We won’t fully know until the May 2024 budget brings the coalition government’s decisions together, although there will be various indications – cries of pain – before then. I have no doubt that Treasury officials will be struggling to meet their political masters’ demands. The real decisions are yet to be taken which is why the December Mini-budget was vague.

Being a member of the Opposition or commentariat is a bit like being a couch fan watching a football match, shouting advice like ‘you should run faster’. Now Luxon, Willis and a gaggle of associate Treasury ministers are on the field. Welcome to the real game.

Footnote: HYEFU observes the following new information since the November forecasts were made: the September 2023 quarterly GDP figure turned out lower than expected (it may be revised), indications are that the December 2023 CPI increase (to be released on 24 January) may be lower than forecast and that house prices rises are also more subdued, while the net migration inflow is higher. My impression is that international thinking about the world economy is becoming gloomier. We await more data and the 2024 BEFU to find out how that will affect the Treasury forecasts.

Robert Solow transformed the way we think about economic growth.

When you are in the trenches, you may not always realise what the war is about. Years later you read an account and see more clearly. Thus it was with me in the 1960s when economic analysis went through a revolution.

My insight came later when reading the budgets in the 1960s of Minister of Finance Harry Lake about whom I had been asked to write. The speeches expressed an ambition to increase economic growth, but the analysis was around capital investment only, which sounds very incomplete to today’s economist. Reflecting, I realised Lake was using the explanation I had been taught in my economics courses.

However, I was also working at the NZ Institute of Economic Research, whose first director, Conrad Blyth, had brought back from his overseas studies a different account of economic growth which I had absorbed into my thinking without realising how radical it was. Later Bryan Philpott and I worked together in the area. The key founder of this approach was Bob Solow, who has just died at the age of 99.

Solow’s key finding was that output per worker rose faster than the quantity of capital in the long run. You may know the standard assumption in classical economics as the ‘falling rate of profit’ as in Das Kapital, but Marx was drawing on orthodox economics, beginning with Malthus and Ricardo in the early nineteenth century, and still held by great economists such as Keynes and Schumpeter in the 1930s.

The decreasing marginal return on capital is really a consequence of the laws of thermodynamics. So the laws must imply that there are other things affecting production as well as capital and labour. Solow was humble about what he found. (It was such a gigantic insight he could afford to be.) His seminal 1957 paper explained the paradox by ‘technical change’:

I     “I am using the phrase ‘technical change’ as a shorthand expression for any kind of shift in the production function. Thus slowdowns, speedups, improvements in the education of the labour force, and all sorts of things will appear as ‘technical change’.” (His italics)

Solow’s paper is the source of the widely quoted claim that 80 percent of economic growth (output per person) is attributed to technology. But only if the word ‘technology’ has Solow’s particular meaning of what we cannot explain. Economist Moses Abramovitz called the unexplained residual the our ‘ignorance’. Today we call it ‘multi-factorial productivity’ (MFP) or Total Factor Productivity (TFP)..

Sloppy thinking has empowered any group – educationalists, managers, scientists, those in the creative sector – to promote its interests by claiming it is making a major contribution to the coefficient of ignorance. Each seizes on their version of the meaning of technology; it makes them seem important and seems to justify spending large quantities of public money on them. (Many of those who argue for increasing our ignorance are well placed to make a contribution.)

Economists have tried to explain MFP/TFP – to reduce the coefficient of ignorance. We have never been able to explain it all. (It has been difficult because we cannot do experiments.) Over the years economists have concluded it is not just a matter of technology in the narrow sense of plans on how to use resources but also covered such things as managerial performance and the speed at which innovations are taken up and adapted to local circumstances. But we have not been able to measure by how much.

More recently, a crucial feature of economic development has hit home. (It is a central notion of my Not in Narrow Seas.) There has been a shift to economic activity in the market from economic activity outside it. Women moving from the kitchen into the factory are included in the calculations, but what about the refrigerators and washing machines which reduced their household grind, making the move easier?

Or consider when in the 1860s New Zealand had the highest productivity in the world as conventionally measured. It was not that we were working smarter or using more advanced technologies then. Rather, we were moving alluvial gold in the river beds outside the market into the market economy – bank vaults. Had the effect been drawn to Solow’s attention, he would have wished he had mentioned the effect moving from outside the market to inside among the ‘any kind[s] of shift’ in his 1957 paper. But in those days, economists were not as sensitive to the resource issue in economic growth (land excepted).

Economists have never said that capital and labour were irrelevant. They are as necessary as classical orthodoxy thought they were, but in a different way. Technology (in the narrow sense of ‘plans’) has to be embedded in capital and labour. So developments in information technology are embedded in personal computers and so on – capital goods. And the developments have to be also imbedded in the skills of the persons using them.

Nor should we ignore the social technologies of how an economy is organised. They range from having a good judicial system, so that contractual arrangements run as smoothly as possible, to how workplace relations are organised.

A curious feature of economic growth is that over a long period the rate of change of New Zealand’s MFP/TFP (the residual contribution to economic growth) does not seem to have changed much. I’ve looked and looked.

Had another go with a new data base a couple of weeks ago and failed, yet again. I was looking for a slow-down in hourly labour productivity growth early this century, as posited by some economists internationally. I thought I had found a slight one but it turned out to be not statistically significant. Bother!

And so to the uncomfortable question of whether we can accelerate the rate of long-run productivity growth. Everyone has been saying that since seven decades ago when we first had reasonable measures of the rate of economic growth. Economists do it as a mantra: ‘adopt my economic policies and the economy will grow faster’. (The commentariat echoes them.) But they provide no systematic evidence that their prescriptions will work. It is more ‘trust me, I know what I am doing’, but since the prescriptions all differ whom do you trust?

The politicians’ slogan is that faster economic growth will mean we can meet the public’s demands for tax cuts and more public spending. It is easier to say this when one is opposition. In government the cruel reality is that no matter what they do, the long-term MFP/FTP growth rate chugs along much as it has for the last century.

It is difficult to identify any New Zealand government that has really changed the growth rate (with the possible exception of the neoliberal policies of the late 1980s and early 1990s which  stagnated the economy; we still have not recovered from their damage). Short-term burst, such as the upswing of a business cycle, can be identified by judicious choices of end points which may satisfy those with an ideological bent. A scientist is less able to find a significant long-term change. (A change of 0.1 or 0.2 percentage points in the growth rate is difficult to identify because of noise in the data.)

Most of the paragraphs of this column could not have been written before the systematic measurement of economic output, led by Simon Kuznets, and the resulting analysis, led by Solow. One honours him for his pioneering insights. In the study next door, Paul Samuelson changed how we thought about economics; Bob Solow changed how we thought about the economy.

He wrote with elegance and clarity – he was drawn into the social sciences by reading great novels in his adolescence. They were spliced with wit. Here are some:

    “Economists are divided between those who look at economic aggregates and those who look at the details. I belong to both sides.”

    “Everything reminds Milton [Friedman] of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of my papers.”

As an economist, Solow liked formal models and mathematics. But nothing too fancy. Over-refinement reminded him of the man who knew how to “spell banana” but did not “know when to stop”.

    “Part of the job of economics is weeding out errors. That is much harder than making them, but also more fun.”

    “Why does a public discussion of economic policy so often show the abysmal ignorance of the participants?”