Abortion

Maybe it's just because it gives the fundies another opportunity to exert their disproportionate influence in this country. Maybe it's simply the reminder of how misogynistic we still are. Maybe it's because rhetoric will quickly crowd out facts - again.

But the rekindling of the whole abortion debate just depresses me. And this is in spite of the fact that the most likely outcome, I think, will be that our law ends up more sensible - with a social clause along with the mental health one in the appropriate statute.

Anyhow, the issue was covered - fairly poorly? - in Insight on Radio National this morning (link to audio and will break eventually). Afterwards I send them the following email.

Dear Chris,

Absent from your discussion on abortion this morning was one key point.

A recent, comprehensive, survey conducted by the World Health Organisation and the Guttmacher Institute found that abortion rates vary little between parts of the world where the procedure is legal and those where it is not. It is surprising, given this fact, that those who see abortion as morally wrong do not do more to concentrate on non-legal and effective means, such as sexuality education and contraception, to reduce its incidence.

At the same time illegal and unsafe abortions lead to the deaths of over 70,000 women every year.

It surprises me that an organisation which calls itself Right to Life would want to bring this problem to New Zealand.

Kind Regards

Terence

On re-reading I was worried that this email would suggest that abortion is morally wrong and that my only quibble with Right to Life is how best to reduce its frequency.

So I thought I'd expand things here.

Like Deborah I'm sceptical of rights claims made in an absolute sense. I support human rights not because I think they are God-given or afforded to us simply by virtue of being human but rather because they provide us with a sound framework for reducing suffering and increasing wellbeing. I'm a (sortof) rule utilitarian who thinks that rights, when well-thought out, are very important rules.

Having said all this, much of my thinking (in other words: much of my muddling through within my own head) on abortion has been in terms of rights (rather than some sort of crude utilitarian calculus which is kind of what is going on in my email above). Which is fine, although to be consistent at some point of time I should pin these rights back to wellbeing, but that won't be today. So, in addition to my standard disclaimer (IANAPNAE - I am not a philosopher nor an economist - just someone who worries about things) I should add that my thinking here is incomplete.

But here goes...

Should abortion be legal?

In answering this I want to start with two positions which I think can't be correct. 1. That a woman has an unconstrained right to do what she wants with her body and 2. That, from the moment of conception, the fetus has a full set of human rights, equal to its mother's.

The first position flounders in the same way that libertarian arguments for absolute self-ownership do. I can't have absolute control of my body because in doing so I can violate your control over your body. Quite rightly our society prohibits me from using my body to do violence to others. Likewise it prohibits me from putting my body behind the wheel of a car and driving drunk. Obviously, despite this, I maintain considerable rights over what I may do with, and what may happen to my body, but they aren't absolute. To an extent, my rights are constrained by the impacts of my actions on the rights of others.

Which means that, if we can show that fetuses are entitled to full human rights we're going to want to do our best to eliminate abortion*. But should fetuses be entitled to full human rights (position 2 above)?

To me such a position seems acutely counter-intuitive. If you choose the moment of conception as the moment where a full set of rights are bestowed you are effectively granting equal rights to a collection of cells who may someday become a recognisable person, over the needs of an actual living woman. And these needs, when we consider the medical risks of pregnancy, not to mention the impact on the life of the woman in question are not insignificant.

Similarly, seeing as you have declared the fetus as having equal rights as its mother then, to be internally consistent, you must also ban abortions where there is a risk that the mother may die giving birth (certainty of the fetus's death versus probability of the mother's). All this despite the fact that what we are talking about here is a few cells that are in no way recognisably human. (True they may come to be recognisably human in time, but as you have decided to convey full human rights from conception you need to explain why they apply to the entity that exists the moment after conception).

If you want to see how ugly rights at conception are in practice have a read of the following article on El Salvador in the New York Times.

So if both the first position (that a woman has absolute rights) and the second (that a fetus has the exact same set of rights as a full human being) are wrong, then what is the alternative.

To me, at least, it makes sense to do the following.

1. Deal with the issue as one of competing rights sets. So a pregnant woman (like everyone else in society) does not a have absolute rights over her body and, in the case of abortion in particular, her rights need to be weighed up against those rights that we give to a fetus.

2. (And this is the important bit). The rights of an entity change as an entity changes across it's existence. There's no need to worry about 'big bang' moments such as when human-hood starts (which is going to be hard to pin down, I think). Just worry about when entity X has a sufficiently significant rights-set for these rights to restrict the actions of entity Y.

If it sounds strange for me to advise not getting caught up in when human-hood starts consider the following. Not all human beings have the same rights. This may seem appalling but it's just a statement of fact. We don't afford babies the right to vote, or children the right to choose where they live. We force teenagers to stay in school, but we don't force adults to stay in work. And so on... Of course we do afford all living human beings some core rights (not to be murdered, for example**) But the central point is that there is already a perfectly reasonable precedent set here - that people's rights sets change as they change.

And so what's left for us to decide is when does the developing fetus develop sufficient rights for these rights to prohibit its mother from having abortion? The short answer to this is never. Or, at least, its rights are never so significant that they should stop a woman from having an abortion when carrying the pregnancy to term would put her life in real danger. We don't legally oblige men to leap into burning buildings to save their children when doing so would be a risk to themselves (not even in El Salvador). Why should we compel women to take the same risks for a fetus? Of course we do compel parents to take due care of their children, when this doesn't involve risking their lives and, similarly, we are right, I think, prevent abortions in non-life threatening situations for a fetus close to term.

But we would be wrong to prohibit abortions in non-life threatening circumstances right from the moment of conception. We would be wrong in doing this because, even when we aren't talking about a life threatening pregnancy, having a baby is something that will have massive consequences for the woman involved and as an actual living individual her right to have control over something as significant as this takes precedence over those rights that the fetus has developed.

At some point in time this balance changes of course, and then the some of the fetus's rights (like the right to a chance at life) take precedence over some of hers (the choice about pregnancy in non-life threatening circumstances, in particular). For a variety of practical and biological reasons (the subject for another post maybe) sometime around viability seems like the best time for this switch.

For now though, I want to make one final point, this is that the whole idea of competing rights sets (and the idea that fetuses are in the process of acquiring rights) does mean that, while I support the legal provision of abortion, I have a strong preference for preventing unplanned pregnancies in the first place. And I would definitely prefer to live in a country that taxed its wealthy more and used the money to provide people with decent sexuality education and which did more to encourage contraceptive use and so on...

Ok - that was my first attempt to write down the product of an internal ongoing conversation I've been having about all this. I don't know if it worked, but I do know that I want to get outside and catch some Southerly Storm in Cook Strait. So enough for now.

_____________________________________________________________
*Which, of course, doesn't necessarily mean outlawing it as laws aren't always the best way to achieve societal ends.
** Except in cases of the death penalty which I oppose and self defence, which seems more reasonable.

Freedom of Speach and its Discontents

Both Ethical Martini and Poneke think Frog was wrong to recommend to its readers that they not watch, or consider a Broadcasting Standards complaint, over the Great Global Warming Swindle 'Documentary', which was screened recently on prime TV.

Ethical Martini, which is an interesting and worthwhile blog, would have preferred that Frog Blog encouraged its readers to argue the issues. I'm not so sure. Debate is great, but what debate is there actually to be had in the case of this documentary? What would really been achieved given that the long, long list of errors and falsehoods in Swindle have been pointed out many times without to-date causing its producer to resile from his position; nor stop media outlets from showing something they must now know to be dishonest, albeit good for the ratings.

Poneke's objection is less hard to glean but a generous reading of his or her post would suggest that Poneke's primary problem is Frog's attempt to stifle free speech through the threat of a BSA appeal.

As a defender of free speech I have been mulling over an abstracted version of this argument over the last few days and here's what I think:

First let's start with human rights. As some sort of rule utilitarian I support human rights, not for deontological reasons, but rather because I think they lead to a better world, which contains less suffering. They provide a basis for a sensible social contract where the individual is afforded protections from the collective; and history provides us with ample evidence to show that their violation leads to tragedy and horror.

Free speech is a particularly important human right - if it is prohibited, we can't even speak out to defend other rights. Free speech is essential to democracy too; indeed it is inherent to democracy.

Freedom of speech is also not so simple an issue as some of its defenders would make it seem.

The primary reason for this is that, as I have written previously, rights can be rivalrous. In other words, me making use of my rights can lead to you being deprived of yours. I can use my right of free speech to call for you to be silenced, for example.

In the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda radio stations were a key tool in mobilising the genocidaires in their attempted extermination of the Tutsi. Do we really want to defend free speech even when this speech is calling for genocide? Probably not. And, indeed, most nations don't - they have laws on their books that prohibit incitement to murder.

This is a clear infringement of people's right to free speech, but it seems justified.

And there are other ways that most democracies limit free speech to protect people. Lying, as we all learn one way or other, can be harmful. Not so harmful that we'd want to outlaw it, of course, at least in most instances. Yet in some cases it can be particularly harmful - say if a major newspaper were to accuse someone of being a foreign spy with no evidence. For this reason we have liable laws. Similarly, if a car dealer sells me a car which he claims to be 'as good as gold' while knowing it has dangerous faults, this could cause me physical and personal harm. So we have laws about that too.

When you think about it there are many ways in which democratic and apparently free societies restrict free speech for what appear to be quite justifiable reasons.

None of this is to say that some of these restrictions aren't problematic: liable laws, for example, (or threats of) are used all the time to silence what may well be reasonable criticisms. This is a real issue but few people would use it to argue the case that we should eliminate libel laws altogether - instead we just need to get the balance right.

Laws curtailing freedom of speech can also be dangerous through their unintended consequences - regulation, which may well-intentioned, could subsequently be used to silence genuine political dissent. Hate speech laws, and the recent debate around them in the UK, are a good example of this argument being played out. For this reason, and the danger of the ever-present slippery slope to authoritarianism, we need to be very wary about introducing new laws which may impede free speech.

So it's not simple. But this doesn't change the fact that we already restrict free speech in quite a few ways, most of which seem justifiable.

The relevance here to the Broadcasting Standards Authority, and our broadcasting laws, is that they too are a way of stifling certain types of speech. Frog provides us with the relevant section of New Zealand law:

Broadcasters should refrain from broadcasting material which is misleading or unnecessarily alarms viewers.

Setting aside the unnecessarily alarms bit (which I'm not at all sure is justified) this law reasonable enough. Less so now, perhaps, in the age of the internet, but for much of New Zealand's history, broadcasters occupied a particularly privileged position in New Zealand discourse. Often the enjoyed a near monopoly in information provision or, at the very least, were likely to be the only source of information for most people on most issues. Which puts them in a position of considerable power. Power which when abused can cause considerable harm.

Imagine, for example, if a New Zealand broadcaster produced a series of documentaries which claimed to show, without justification, that vaccinations caused cancer. And that this led to a significant number of New Zealanders not vaccinating their children. Herd immunity is perilously easy to loose and even if not everyone watched or believed the documentaries we could see a situation where epidemics broke out again and people died. To me it seems perfectly reasonable to stop this from occurring.

Just to be clear though: I don't think that anti-vaccination campaigners should be silenced. They should be free to speak their minds and to try and prove their claims scientifically (good luck to them, but that's another topic). But until these claims can be backed by fact they shouldn't be broadcast as such. The risk of harm is too great.

It's true that broadcasting laws can be abused and that slippery slope arguments against them are plausible enough but, once again, I think that these aren't arguments against their existence. Instead they show why we need to take time to get them right.

I'm open to being dissuaded from this stance - just as free speech itself is problematic so are almost all restrictions on it - but one thing that really doesn't wash is to start implying that someone is trying to silence free speech by using a law which has been long established without first making a coherent case, outside of one's views on the specific context, against the law.

--

As an aside, Prime could probably defend any BSA complaint by arguing that that they held a panel debate after the documentary showing, but I'm not sure. Firstly, is this really balanced? You've already given one side of the 'debate', surely balance would suggest giving the other side equivalent space, not sound bites in and amongst an argument. Also, in terms of public broadcasting and the complexities of science, is the hurley burley of a debate really the best way to let these be presented? Why not have let David Wratt (the only climatologist on the panel) simply outline the errors in an uninterrupted segment afterwards?

[Update: in comments Ethical Martini points out that he didn't claim Frog was wrong to recommend BSA complaints. In my original post, I didn't suggest this, I noted that I thought that this point was at the centre of Poneke's problem with Frog's post (although, to be fair to Poneke, I can't even say this with 100% certainty - it's hard to figure out what his/her actual problem with Frog's post is). I thought my original post was clear in its distinction here, but perhaps not - so I'm adding this update just to make doubly sure.]

The Standard has the numbers on benefits...

...and they show that the conservative talking point that "unemployment has only dropped because people have been moved onto sickness benefits" is total nonsense.

To very, very good posts...

...on the Hand Mirror. Read 'em.

Hmmm...

...does David Farrar really understand the pros and cons of relative poverty measures?

[Update: changed the wording of the post. Also, for what it's worth, I think that my own post is unduly harsh on relative poverty measures, and that CPAG is well within their rights to use them. They're following international norms, the type of measure is eminently justifiable, and DPFs example chosen to illustrate their flaws (where wealthiest 50% of New Zealanders become bankrupt overnight) is an example of a reductio ad absurdum which is, of its own accord, absurd.]

Insight?

Rightwing newspaper the National Business Review has discovered aid and development. As one might expect the results aren't pretty nor, despite the name of the blog in question, in any way insightful.

Social Democrats rate countries on their foreign aid donations, which is why rich Nordic nations are held up as exemplars.

...and there I was thinking that the Nordic countries' domestic social models had something to do with Social Democrats love for them. As for rating countries on their foreign aid donations, the people who do the most of the OECD. The OECD aren't exactly a Social Democrat pressure group as far as I'm aware - their main interest in rating countries is holding their wealthier members to the commitment, made in 1970 and reaffirmed several times since, to giving 0.7% of GNI as aid.

But foreign aid statistics throw up some strange facts: the US, Japan and the countries of western Europe give by far the most.

...which is solely because these countries have larger GNI's. It's easier for them to give more - because they are bigger. But in terms of effort (what they give as a proportion of what they could give) the USA ranks down the bottom of the OECD donor countries.

But Swedish economist Stefan Karlsson has estimated the largest is, in fact, China based on its low yuan policy of transferring vast amounts of wealth to foreign countries by undercharging for its exports.

...Swede? I think we're more likely to be dealing with a turnip. China's undervalued yuan isn't an aid programme. It is, in effect, a subsidy for Chinese businesses. Sure this makes its exports cheaper. And sure consumers in other countries benefit from this. But producers don't - it undermines their ability to compete. And for most developing countries, which need to produce something before they can start consuming, this simply holds back their development.

The US Institute of Peace calculates that Palestinians, better known for their terrorism, are the world’s largest recipients of foreign aid per capita.

No they don't, they state the Palestinians were the largest recipients of foreign aid per capita. (Aid was curtailed once the Palestinians elected Hamas). You've got to love the logic though. Some Palestinians are terrorists. Therefore no Palestinians are human. Therefore aid given to Palestinians is not humanitarian. Yup, we're orbiting in the outer edges of the lunisphere now.

The debate over the effectiveness of government aid has long been a topic of concern to economists, with the most compelling criticism coming from Professor William Easterly, of New York University.

William Easterly does offer a credible critique of the way that much aid is given (he still supports its giving though) but Easterly's arguments are far from perfect.

Finally, the article criticises NZAID (our government aid body) on the weight of the auditor general's report. But this report, while identifying some real accounting issues, doesn't change the fact that - as the Council for International Development notes - NZAID's actual aid giving practices are universally considered to be some of the best in the world.

Aid and development are complicated topics and if this is the depth with which they are going to be addressed it would be better if the NBR simply didn't bother.

What Have Unions Ever Done For Us?!?

Via DailyKos, this is great. It's Australian but most of it's true (terminology differences aside) for us here in NZ

The Shorter Mike Moore

Forcing the people behind anonymous well funded political smear campaigns to declare their names = silencing dissent.

Oh, and I am a very, very important thinker. I speak French and I has read Volataire.

What the Huck?!? Bill Ralston Edition

Doing his bit for the long decline in public discourse on economics Bill Ralston tries to convince Herald readers of Labour's economic ineptitude.

Historians will look back in a couple of decades at the decline and fall of the Labour Government and lay much of the blame on Michael Cullen and his dead hand as Minister of Finance.

In his eight-year reign, the Government has amassed huge surpluses through over-taxation, putting pressure on the disposable incomes of already struggling households. His tolerance of high interest rates has strangled economic growth, his approval of record levels of Government spending has led to a huge growth in bureaucracy, waste and heavy compliance costs for business. His obstinate refusal to cut taxes will be seen as another long nail he inserted into the coffin of Helen Clark's three-term administration.

...

At the same time, voters will see 3.5-4 per cent inflation gnawing away at their income and savings while the value of their biggest asset, property, shrinks.

Far be it for me to critique the the arcane science of Ralstonomics but isn't there just a slender chance that interest rates are high because our economy is suffering inflationary pressures and that were it not for 'over taxation' both interest rates and inflation would be higher still. And I suppose it's just churlish to suggest that public spending isn't all about bureaucrats but also other things such as doctors and nurses. (Or that, in the case of the RMA, for example, more having bureaucrats actually helps reduce compliance costs).

What I would like to know though is what Bill Ralston, were he in Michael Cullen and Alan Bollard's shoes, would propose doing. Would he (the list is in decreasing order of plausibility):

• Liberate Iraq to lower oil prices and reduce inflation?
• Invade China to lower oil prices and reduce inflation?
• Lower interest rates and reduce inflation? (While at the same time developing a perpetual motion machine to compliment his defiance of the laws of economics with equal defiance of the laws of physics)
  
• Lower interest rates and taxes and reduce inflation? (While using the spinning corpse of JM Keynes to drill a hole to China to facilitate the invasion).

Ralston continues: (Click here to read the rest of this post...)

They [Labour] also triumphantly point to low unemployment, ignoring the fact that business is starved of labour and the high rate of employment is because more than a million Kiwis have fled to greener pastures overseas.

So what's he saying? That we should have high unemployment just so business can have surplus labour again. Boy that sounds like a vote winner.

I do have to concede that Ralston is right when he says that low unemployment only exists because 'more than a million' Kiwis have 'fled' overseas though. After all, as we all remember, when unemployment was through the roof in the late 80s and early 90s immigration was just so high and our population well over million more than it is today. Oh - hang on.

The economic genius of Ralstonnomics is not that it bares any relation to the real world but rather that he actually gets paid to write this stuff.

[Update: I added the bullet points this Monday morning; they weren't in the original post. Meanwhile Keith Ng engages in Ralson-watching par excellence at Public Address. As I said in comments under his post, public debate on economics in New Zealand would be much better served if Keith was a columnist for the Herald and Bill Ralston reduced to commenting on Deborah Coddington's blog]

The Case for Economic Debate

No Right Turn has a link to an excellent Listener column by Brain Easton talking of the pros and cons of privatisation. Which reminded me of another recent Easton column on the quality of economic debate here in New Zealand.

Easton argues that:

The economic debate has moved from the general pages into the business section, limiting the public to the sterility of such questions as whether we should have tax cuts. There is no discussion about whether we have the production to pay for them. Celebrities and crime are given greater prominence. Occasionally, when there is a crisis, an economics story appears on the front page. The world financial system has been under severe stress since last August. But where do you see that mentioned in your paper, except when it gets close to home in the form of a local finance company collapse? Even then, little international context is given to the parochial story.

Instead of a vigorous public debate there is ignorance and self-promotion. Participants are out of touch with the general public. (Who would have guessed that a November AC Nielsen poll found those supporting increased public spending were more than double those prioritising tax cuts? The answer may be Helen Clark.) There are hardly any serious attempts to inform the public. We are back to the 1970s and 1980s: “Trust me – I am acting in your best interests.” Yeah, right.

When some hard decisions have to be made – and the international financial crisis is likely to require them – the public will be unprepared and uncomprehending, and will want to return to ineffective anti-market interventions.

My own personal fear is not so much of anti-market populism but rather of knee-jerk conservatism and blame the victimism when things go really wrong. But I do agree that New Zealand is incredibly poorly served by the quality of its public debate on economics. We have business groups with disproportionate voice, media conglomerates who (in the last election at least) appeared to be playing the role of the tax cut lobby, an unwillingness to discuss trad eoffs and an alarming degree of economic illiteracy in parts of the punditocracy. And we also have some major challenges ahead of us. Challenges which we will only overcome with sensible and inclusive economic debate in which the public can understand and own policy.

Here are two such challenges:

1. Climate Change: despite what proponents of extreme discounting think, people really do care about the fate of the planet and about the world they will bequeath to their descendants. The trouble with climate change policy though is that it requires short term costs for long term benefits. And this is something that is politically very hard to sell. Unless people have a real understanding of why policy is being made and why it is necessary. Right now, for the most part, all we get is anatomically inaccurate names for taxes and tractors on parliament.

2. Government spending: from health care to prisoner rehabilitation New Zealand struggles to deal with its social problems in part because we simply do not spend enough to tackle them. We don't spend enough because we don't have the tax revenue to do so. Now perhaps New Zealanders really prefer an individualist let them eat cake economy and low tax rates. Good for them if they do but, when discussing tax cuts (and why is it always tax cuts rather than tax raises?) let's at least openly examine the need for spending.

There are many more - the challenges of globalisation, local resource management, poverty - and the problem is that we just don't seem to be able to discuss these issues in a meaningful manner. (Not to mention race relations). And we really need to. At least if we want to continue inhabiting a country worth living in.

This is not an argument against the Electoral Finance Act

New socialist blog, Socialist Democracy has a post up against the Electoral Finance Act.

Amongst other points they argue:

My friend Bryce Edwards over at liberation has already set out many of the arguments why increased regulation of the electoral process is not necessarily a good thing, pointing out for example that the United States despite having one of the most restrictive sets of electoral finance laws in the world still in[sic] the political sphere is completely dominated by the rich and powerful.

Such hand waving tells us little of use. For a start is says nothing about how much worse things might be if the Unites States had no legislation. (Click here to read the rest of this post...)

Also, the legislative process in the United States is dramatically different from our own, meaning that laws need to pass a bicameral legislature and the the executive before being enacted. And neither of the main political parties in the US has anything near the internal discipline of our own. This means that law-making in the USA is messy in the extreme, with compromises and exemptions being appended to many laws. In the case of electoral finance law this makes it likely that laws will be riddled with loop-holes and quite possibly ineffective.

Finally, the fact that US has a political elite that is incredibly powerful, wealthy and politically active means that - quite possibly - even the best laws won't work there. In New Zealand, which is still a very unequal country but nothing like the US in terms of political inequality, it is on the other hand possible that effective constraints can be put in place.

If you want to argue about the Electoral Finance Act leave the US out of it. Concentrate on what the act will do here. Will it achieve it's desired ends. Will it have unintended consequences. Is it going to impede on key political freedoms. Socialist Democracy do some of this later on in their post but I'm still not convinced.

As far as I can tell, the act - while flawed - will make it harder for the wealthy to unduly and anonymously skew our electoral process. Some of the unintended consequences are more concerning, but I certainly don't buy the curtailing free speech argument. People will be as free as they have always been to speak on political matters. What will be changed is the extent to which wealth can be used to project this speech - a different matter altogether.

Housie

There are essentially two types of people in my life right now*. Both are equally worried.

The first type are in possession of a house (or houses) and a mortgage large enough to deserve its own acronym. They pay much more in interest each year than I do in rent; and their 'investment' is only a good one if house prices continue their climb, and the Chinese their saving. Whenever the subject of the housing market comes up, their voices take on tones of forced confidence and their eyes start to twitch. "Housing prices have increased 300% over the last 5 years," they opine, "I see no reason why this won't continue".

The second type have neither a home nor mortgage, nor much prospect if ever having either unless they take the plunge as soon as possible. At social engagements they can often be heard making anxious statements such as, "crazy to buy at this price", "it's a bubble for sure, mate" and "what goes up must come down".

The question that keeps both types up at night is, obviously, 'what will house prices do now?' If you don't own a house and prices trend over the next 5 years as they did over the last, then you may never do. On the other hand, if prices stagnate (or even drop) then you've bought a real bad investment. Likewise, if interest rates rise significantly.

The answer to the all important question question of future price trends all comes down to the degree that we are in a speculative bubble. If it's a bubble, it ought to deflate eventually. If it's not - if some underlying reality of the housing market has changed - then things could continue indefinitely (perhaps not rising as fast, but still going upwards).

For what it's worth. I think it has to be a bubble. Have a look at this graph from this Brian Easton comment if you don't believe me.

But, then again, I would say that: I don't own a home.

___________________________________________________________
*There's also a third type, who I try not to think about, who bought their home some years ago at a farcically low price and now wander round with Buddha like serenity.

Relative and Absolute Poverty

When Jim Bolger famously claimed that there was no poverty in New Zealand he was echoing a common conservative talking point in which it is argued that, because we don't see deprivation matching that in the Third World, we aren't home to people who are truly poor.

As a version of the claim has been made again recently (this time as part of John Minto Hate Week and with the United States as the target country) I think it's worth having a quick look at poverty measures and the debate about its absolute and relative definitions.

While I'm not a statistician I've delved into this subject fairly thoroughly (indeed, I've given lectures on poverty measurement in the past); yet even I still find succinct explanations hard to give. This is, in part, because measuring poverty requires you to define poverty and - like so many elements of development - while we can all recognise poverty when we see it, rigorous, resilient definitions prove surprisingly elusive. Definitional consensus is, as this Google search shows, unlikely in the near future.

In order to keep things clear I am going to start by discussing poverty definitions first and then move on to the poverty lines that follow from them. (Click here to read the rest of this post...)

I will finish by discussing alternatives to monetary poverty measures.

Absolute Poverty
The standard definition of absolute poverty revolves around a set of basic needs. One is said to be absolutely poor if they do not have the means to meet this basic set of needs. In it's most minimal conceptualisation this set of basic needs is often equated with the basic nutritional requirements for survival, or more 'generously' adequate health. More 'generously' still shelter and other elementary necessities are often added into the equation.

An interesting exercise to try for yourself is to assume that our purpose as concerned citizens is to quantify suffering stemming from material deprivation (presumably because we want to reduce it). Starting with this assumption and considering only those aspects of wellbeing that can conceivable be altered by material means (so excluding things such as whether one's government respects human rights or not) try and list the basic needs that ought to be quantified in defining absolute poverty.

Here's my own list based on minimal requirements: nutritional needs; warmth and shelter; basic medical care; money to catch the bus to see one's relatives and have some sort of social existence; some small amount of savings so I am not worrying where my next meal will come from; an element of security.

Yours is probably different. Indeed, amongst all the absolute measures of poverty out there, there is no one formula. And this is part of the trouble with defining poverty in an absolute sense. The term absolute poverty sounds scientific and certain, yet this belies the fact that it is ultimately underpinned by value judgements which are anything but.

Relative Poverty
English researcher Peter Townsend provides us with the textbook definition of the alternative to absolute poverty - relative poverty:

Individuals, families and groups in the population can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or are at least widely encouraged or approved, in the societies to which they belong. Their resources are so seriously below those commanded by the average individual or family that they are, in effect, excluded from ordinary living patterns and activities. (Source: This PDF of the first chapter of Ruth Lister's book Poverty)

Townsend is often credited with bringing to prominence the idea of relative poverty; yet, as is so often the case, Adam Smith got there years before:

By necessaries I understand not only the commodities which are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even of the lowest order, to be without. A linen shirt, for example, is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct.

There is a strong case to be made for a relative rather than an absolute definition of poverty. As I noted above, despite the appearance of objectivity, absolute definitions of poverty are themselves the products of value judgements - relativities, if you will.

It might plausibly be possible to use the developing science of happiness to come up with set of basic needs based on factors scientifically shown to lead to reduced suffering. But, if we were to do this, and if current research is to be believed, the first thing we would probably stumble across is the next argument in favour of a relative definition of poverty. Simply put this is that human beings are inherently social creatures and our own wellbeing is inextricably linked to our ability to participate in society around us and act within societal norms. If we don't have the means for at least minimal participation then we will suffer through loneliness, ostracism and loss of opportunities. Moreover, the necessities required for normal social participation change as society changes. To illustrate this, consider the following: once upon a time, only the wealthy had telephones. Society accordingly, reflected this fact, and one could participate in it with relative ease without one. Now, only the poorest do not have phones and once again, society reflects this - if you don't have ready access to a phone a surprising number of things become remarkably difficult (contacting friends and family, making appointments, making inquiries, seeking work...). Things that not only would be easy if you had a phone, but also if you lived back in the days when no one else had one.

Given that humans as social creatures suffer when excluded from society around them and given that our purpose stated above was to quantify material deprivation which leads to suffering it seems reasonable then that our concept of poverty should include the want for resources to allow us to normally be part of society around us.

Even those totally unconcerned with the wellbeing of others may still find it prudent to be concerned with relative poverty. Social exclusion, after all, contributes significantly to crime. Minimising it, it would seem, is even in the interests of the wealthy.

There are other arguments - including those based around fairness and justice - which might also lead us to relative definitions of poverty lines but, to me, the points above are sufficient to make me a supporter of a relative definition of poverty. This isn't to say that there aren't problems with relative poverty measures though. And it's measures that I now turn to.

Poverty Lines
Actually measuring poverty accurately is a tricky business, but - fortunately for us - defining poverty lines is easy enough.

All you need to do is work out the dollar value of your poverty line and then declare anyone who earns less than this poor.

Ok, so actually it's not that easy. You also have to choose whether you are going to use an income poverty line (if you earn less than it you are poor) or a consumption one (if the dollar value of the goods you consume is less than the line you are poor). This difference is particularly important in subsistence economies where people may earn little but still have an adequate lifestyle through the goods they gather from the land.

Then you have to decide whether your line is to be person or household based. And, if you're using households you'll have to worry about something dreadful called household equivalence ratios.

Finally, you'll also have to take into account the fact that in different places different goods will have different costs. The large variation in housing costs between regions in New Zealand is the reason why our government's low income lines are calculated based on income after with housing costs removed. The World Bank's gyrations over purchasing power parity reflect their attempt to control for the differing costs of goods in different countries.

Phew! And these are only the most basic issues.

Absolute Poverty Lines

Once you've accounted for everything listed above, constructing an absolute poverty line is relatively easy. Define your necessities, price them and, viola, you have a poverty line. Between locations this poverty line should only be adjusted to reflect differing costs of necessities (and possibly to reflect differences in needs such as those that exist between rural and urban dwellers) . Over time, the poverty line should only be inflation adjusted (possibly on the CPI/possibly on the prices of the necessities in question).

Relative Poverty Lines

Relative poverty lines are constructed, as their name suggests, by choosing a level of income (or consumption) relative to a society's average income (or consumption). Most typically the type of average chosen is the median. A figure one commonly sees is 60% of median income. The value of the line is rarely arbitrary; often the percentage chosen will be based on other research about the costs of minimal social participation (this is what Stephens and Waldergrave did in their research on poverty in New Zealand). Over time, this poverty line is then moved as the median moves.

The Problem(s) with Relative Poverty Lines

Relative definitions of poverty are better than absolute ones, in my opinion. But relative poverty lines are not without their faults.

First up, they are more easily dismissed by those who, for ideological reasons, don't want to believe the poor exist.

They are also meaningless for comparisons between countries with significantly different median incomes (comparing a poor by somewhat equal country such as Vietnam with a wealthy but unequal society such as the US, for example, could produce farcical results)**.

Similarly, they don't give credit for long run increases in GDP (and median incomes). If Germany's median income was to double over 20 years but its distribution of wealth was to stay the same you would see no decrease in poverty measured via a relative poverty line. I'm in favour of measuring poverty in relation to societal norms but it does also seem that some credit needs to be given to overall improvements in the standard of living.

And, paradoxically, if during a recession, median incomes fall but distribution is unchanged a relative poverty line will record no rise in poverty. This can't be right.

So what are we to conclude then - should we discard relative poverty lines. No, they still have their uses. One, ideal, solution is to use both sorts of lines. Carefully analysing the two so that they compliment each other's weaknesses. Maybe you'll get lucky and find poverty dropping under both measures. Or - if this isn't possible - use the tool most relevant to the task you are involved in. Or use whatever measure you have, but beware of, and upfront with, it's limitations.

Beyond Monetary Poverty Measures

"Money," Cindi Lauper once wrote, "changes everything". Unfortunately, alas, money measures, on the other hand, don't quantify everything. And there's a good case to be made about the limitations of quantifying poverty using monetary measures at all. It's too detailed to go into here and now, but I do want to point out that much recent research has gone into ways of measuring poverty in terms of outcomes rather than incomes.

Some examples of this are the UNDP's Human Poverty Index and New Zealand's Economic Living Standards Index. Amartya Sen's work on conceptualising poverty as capability deprivation is a related theoretical framework. In the long run, I think improvements in poverty measurement will come through these initiatives (not that they are without their problems).

And Finally
Lets be done with some poverty measurement silliness.

1. The New Zealand government's low income lines are not relative poverty lines. They are absolute ones. The appear to be relative because they are shown in the Social report as percentages of median income in 1998. However, for subsequent years, they have only been adjusted for inflation, they haven't been adjusted to reflect changes in median incomes. As such they should be properly considered an absolute poverty line. Particularly as the 60% figure is close to other research on what a family needs to earn in NZ to avoid experiencing deprivation.

2. Relative poverty lines aren't just measures of inequality, and poverty could be eliminated under these measures. Relative poverty lines are similar to inequality but they aren't (unlike true inequality measures) impacted on by changes in distribution of incomes over the median level. This means that you could (simply by raising the wages of those earning under 60% of the median wage) eliminate relative poverty while still having society wide inequality (differences between the median and the top and among those above the median).

3. If Bill Gates moved to a country with a relative poverty line, poverty levels would not discernibly increase. Or at least they wouldn't if the poverty line was based - as almost all are - on a percentage of the the median income. All he would do would be to shift the line by one person.

Some Links

ODI
Poverty Terms Defined
Lister's Book (Chapter 1, poverty definitions)
Krugman on Relative Poverty
New Yorker Article (not yet read but looks good)

__________________________________________
*I cut a whole heap out from this section of the post to try and keep things simple. If you want more you may be interested in the following: Alan Botton's Status Anxiety; better analysis can be found in Richard Layard's Happiness [these speech notes may be ok] and Richard Wilkinson's the Impact of Inequality [review here].)
**Note, however, that John Minto never did this despite what David Farrar and Owen McShane would have you believe.

A Grand Coalition

I'm no good at election predictions so this post needs to start with the disclaimer: only the most idle of speculation follows.

Speculation which starts with the proposition that the Maori party ends up in the position of government-maker after the election (i.e. neither major party can form a government without their support).

What might this mean? (Click here to read the rest of this post...)

Probably not a National-Maori Party Government. While both parties have made occasional noises suggesting that they could work together, I think that this is very unlikely. For a start, the Maori party will want legislation in exchange for votes, and much of what they ask for (such as the repeal of the Seabed and Foreshore Act) will be anathema to National Party voters. For National, the price paid for such a partnership would be vote loss big time. Also, even with the Maori Party, National may well still need the support of other right of centre parties to form government. Something that may simply be impossible if NZF and ACT have policy bottom lines which clash with those of the Maori Party. Finally, Hone Harawira at least, has distinctly leftwing policies on a whole range of issues, not just those relating to Maori. And while Pita Sharples and some other Maori MPs have shown a willingness to flirt with National's economic policies in the past, if push comes to shove I think they would find it very hard to stomach any real rightward economic lurch. Harawira, I imagine, would be almost impossible to keep on the National side of the floor. As a coalition it would be an unstable one, to put it mildly.

Yet, as Colin James points out, partnering with the Maori party might be little easier for Labour. There's the obvious animosity between Helen Clark and Tariana Turia. And while I imagine that, in their ideological hearts, many Labour MPs would love a coalition that saw more pro-Maori policy, I also think that their vote counting heads would quail at the thought of what it might do to their support in 'middle New Zealand'. Finally, if the coalition is anything other than Labour, the Greens, and the Maori Party, the problems noted for National above about coalition partners might be just as extreme for Labour.

Having said all this, I think a Labour-Maori partnering is more plausible than a National-Maori one. There's an ideological divide there but at least it isn't quite so deep and doesn't cut across as many issues.

So maybe we will see Labour, the Maori Party and the Greens in power after the next election. If it's workable, I'd love it.

There is, however, one other coalition possibility that no one seems to talk about but which, to my mind, could plausibly come about. This is a National-Labour grand coalition - something similar to the current situations in Germany and Israel.

Given the absolute absence of love lost between the two big parties at present, such a partnership might seem like a total non-starter. But I'm not so sure. First, there's the German and Israeli precedents. Second, there's the fact that on some issues the parties aren't really so far apart. There are others, of course, where the divergence is great (and that's why I really hope National doesn't end up in government) but, purely in terms of supporters lost, the two parties might actually sustain less damage hitched together than partnered with the Maori Party. And the votes they lost would tend to scatter towards the parties on their ideological flanks (Act and the Greens). Parties whom they could form future coalitions with.

Anyhow, I'm no beltway insider - I have no idea how likely this outcome is, even assuming that election night produces a situation which makes it possible.

And I am certainly not saying I want it to occur. (Indeed, the only aspect I'd enjoy would be the episode of collective pant wetting engendered in the Right blogosphere).

All I'm saying is that it does seem to be a possibility. If not at the next election at least at some point in our MMP future.

What the Huck! (Owen McShane Edition)

Recently, writing about the farcical level of inaccuracy in a Garth George 'column' Gareth Renowden pondered whether the Herald's fact-checker was on leave. Self professed scientist Owen McShane adds weight to this speculation with a Huckabeean display of innumeracy in his most recent column.

The target of which was --- wait for it --- John Minto and his heretical views on property rights. For what it's worth, my own views on the role of property rights in economic development may, quite plausibly, be closer to McShane's than Minto's. But if you are going to opine in New Zealand's paper of record on property rights and poverty it helps if you have a clue.

And Owen McShane quite clearly doesn't. (I'm being nice here, it's also possible that he does and that he is simply being dishonest)

The catalyst for McShane is Minto's claim that:

The US has the highest levels of poverty in the Western world (more than 30 million) despite one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. Why would this be?

...and so McShane races to the US's defence:

Minto tells us that such Americans can only create poverty because "the US has the highest levels of poverty in the Western World (more than 30 million)" and asks, "Why would this be?"

Well, the answer is simple. The United States Official Poverty Rate (the OPR) is based on calculations that are available from 1959 onwards. For the total population of the US, this rate declined by nearly half over this period, from 22.4 per cent in 1959 to 12.7 per cent in 2004. It seems Americans do know something about reducing poverty.

Also, millions of Americans can be declared to be in poverty because the UN poverty index is based on the percentage of the population with disposable incomes of less than 50 per cent of the median.

Astute readers will notice a subtle segue here. McShane starts by talking about US official poverty stats before moving on to those compiled by the UN, which he then goes on to criticise because they are based on a relative poverty line (50% of median income). Now there's actually an interesting debate to be had about the respective merits of absolute and relative poverty lines, but McShance sure isn't interested, and I don't have the time to go over it in detail so it will have to wait for another post. The important point here though is that Minto's number of over 30 million isn't based on any UN estimate - it's based on the US's own official poverty stats [large PDF file]. And the United State's poverty line is not a relative line in any sense. It is absolute, based on inflation adjusted basket of basic needs.

McShane, who one bets has never experienced anything like poverty at any point in his life then adds that:

American families not only have hot and cold clean running water, flush toilets and electricity but typically have one or more cars, at least one television, several telephones and even own their own homes.

So, what he essentially saying here is that - in the richest country on Earth (and one which gets rather cold in winter I hear) - you may well not be poor, even if you don't have hot water, a flush toilet, and electricity. And, if he considers a car a luxury, he should try getting round without one in your typical public transport deprived US city.

Next up is a true clanger:

The UN test means that when the median American household income reaches US$1 million a year, a family living on US$499,000 a year will still be deemed to be living "in poverty". Using the New Zealand index, they could be earning $600,000 a year and still be "in poverty".

Which is just factually false. New Zealand (to our shame) doesn't have official poverty lines. Rather 'low income' lines are used, based on 50% and 60% of the median income in 1998 (adjusted for inflation). This may seem like a relative poverty line, but it is not. God only knows why MSD use percentages to reflect what is actually an absolute figure (based on a dollar value in 1998 thereafter adjusted for inflation) but the fact of the matter is that, assuming the methodology stays the same, if - 20 years from now - median income has increased to $US1M a year, NZ's the low income lines will not have gone up accordingly - they will have been adjusted for inflation, that is all. (Reference: here). Also, these 50% and 60% figures aren't entirely arbitrary; research by Charles Waldergrave and others came up with a needs based poverty line for New Zealanders that was roughly the same as the 60% figure.

This out of the way things just gets worse:

I am not at all sure why Minto assumes that Americans are experts on creating poverty rather than wealth. Some poverty indices have truly bizarre outcomes - especially those which focus on where families sit relative to average income. Minto bewails the fact that the very rich in the US have very high incomes.

One way to reduce poverty might be to persuade them to up stakes and take their wealth to other less fortunate nations.

However, if Bill Gates decided to migrate to a poor country like New Zealand, his settlement here could increase the number of New Zealand families officially living in poverty because his vast income would considerably increase the average household income. And hence throw hundreds, if not thousands, more families, and even their children, into poverty.

Which would only be true if New Zealand, or any country for that matter, used a poverty line based on mean rather than median incomes. (Otherwise Bill Gates's big move would only shift the poverty line ever so slightly). For what it's worth, I have heard about poverty lines based on mean incomes but I've never seen them used in practice and none of the poverty lines that McShane mentions in his column are based on means. So why does he start talking about them now? Either because he doesn't know the difference between means and medians or, more likely, because he is being utterly slippery to try and obfuscate the fact that the United States does, indeed, have a serious poverty issue.

Why he felt the need to write this tosh I don't know, but it's hardly to the Herald's credit that it chose to publish it.

Updates

In comments David Farrar has replied to my post on Moore, Minto and himself. He writes:

Oh I didn't advocate property rights alone is the answer. I do advocate that it is a necessary element though as without them no economy has even shown much ability to lift people out of poverty.

Once you have property rights, then there is other stuff to do.

In the broadest possible sense I agree with him, I guess. What I really need to do now is write a full post on what is complicated topic...

Also, In a recent post on climate change, I wrote the following, starting with a quote from a denialist climate quack letter to Ban Ki Moon:

The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.

Which may be true (I haven't double checked) but even so - so what? Once again: we know that we are increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, we know that - everything else being equal - more C02 will mean higher temperatures, and we know that temperatures are increasing in a manner that we can't attribute to any natural phenomenon. Why - given all this - would we need a faster rate of warming than ever observed before to provide us with proof of AGW?

I've just been browsing Gareth Renowden's wonderful website Hot Topic and I read this (written about the same letter):

The current rate of warming is roughly 20 times faster than the last period of rapid climate change, when the world warmed by 5C (on average) over 5,000 years as we emerged from the last ice-age. The current rate of warming is much faster than “natural variability”

So either our letter's writers were spinning utter bullshit or they were disingenuously selecting the one record (satellite data) which might have allowed them to "honestly" make such a claim. Either way there is only one appropriate reply:

Quack!

Flat Tax? Fat Chance

In a display of bipartisan contempt for bad methodology both NoRightTurn and David Farrar have criticised ShapeNZs poll, undertaken for the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, which Peter Neilson recently enthused about in the Herald on Sunday.

Neilson wrote, citing suvey data:

But a cut in personal and corporate taxes to a flat rate of 20c will draw more approval than disapproval among Green-Maori-New Zealand First-Act voters because major cuts like these would be paid for by new forms of revenue, such as increasing GST from 12.5 per cent to 20 per cent, while fully compensating people on benefits and lower incomes for the price rises and other day-one impacts.

As both NoRightTurn and DPF point out, the survey Neilson relies on is unreliable because of its self-selecting population sample. Also, if this press release is to be believed the survey itself smells rather fishy:

ShapeNZ asked people to chose between three tax reform options: cutting top personal income tax rates from 39c to 30c; cutting the top personal and corporate tax rates to 28 cents, or introducing a single rate of 20 cents, paid for by increasing GST from 12.5% to 20% (while fully compensating people of low incomes and benefits for price rises resulting from the GST increase).

So, when asked to choose between three tax cuts, people chose - wait for it - a tax cut! Well I never. It's hard to escape the feeling that one way or other the survey in question was going to lead to a column about tax cuts.

Survey aside, the economics behind the idea of a flat tax are poor too.

Despite what proponents claim, there is little evidence that flattened tax structures stimulate economic growth. What they will achieve though is rising inequality. Something that is harmful for a number of reasons.

Moreover, given the significant rise in GST, for most Kiwi's the 'tax cut' is not what it seems:

• For the approximately 16% of New Zealanders who's top tax bracket is 33c/dollar there's no guarantee that they would end off much better off as the drop in income tax may well be offset, for the most part, by a rise in GST.
  
• And for those New Zealanders who currently earn between $9,000 and $38,000 (nearly half our population) there'll be next to no improvement on the income tax side of things, while some/many/most/all of them will end up worse off thanks to the rise in GST*.
  
• And for country's least wealthy: they may be compensated for higher prices caused by GST but that won't change the fact that the income tax they pay will increase. (Source for all statistics).

The tax cut would be a wonderful windfall for our most wealthy though.

I bet they didn't tell you that in the survey.

_____________________________________
*Whether it is some, many, most or all will depend on where the low income threshold for GST rebates is set. If it's set low then it may be all of these tax-payers. If it's set high, fewer will be worse off but taxes themselves will also have to be raised to offset the fiscal loss.

Dick's Quacks

Via Tumeke's blog index we discover that one time runner and now Manukau City Councilor Dick Quax has a blog. Good for him. Unfortunately, Dick has been duped by the climate change deniers quacks.

He writes (or more accurately cuts and pastes):

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee’s office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.

Let's set aside for a moment the fact that the report is the product of Republican senator James M Inhofe, a perennial climate change denier who, purely by coincidence, receives rather a lot of money from the oil and gas industry and who once called novelist Michael Crichton to provide expert testimony on climate change to the senate. Even taking this into account, 400 dissenting experts ought to be reason doubt the science.

Um, no.

The report, you see, is the product of the following methodology (or something very similar). One of Inhofe's staffers appears to have simply trawled the internet for dissenting positions on climate change from anyone who might reasonably be called a scientist. Not climate scientist mind you but scientist. This includes social scientists such as economists as well as TV weathermen, and theoretical physicists (one at least who appears utterly batty). There are some bonafide climatologists on the list but they are a small minority. They are also a very small minority in their own profession. There is also our very own Dr Vincent Gray, who is noted as an IPCC expert reviewer. Which sounds pretty impressive. Or it least it would, if it weren't for the fact that anyone can become an expert reviewer of the IPCC reports. You just have to ask. As far as I can tell Gray isn't actually a climatologist either.

So - to summarise - Inhofe has, from the millions of public proclamations made around the globe by our planet's millions of scientists, managed to find 400(!!!) instances of different people casting doubt on the existence of anthropogenic climate change. This sounds like more like an exercise involving Avogadro's number than a serious challenge to any scientific consensus.

Quack.

Mike Moore! Defender of Democracy!! (oh, and property rights)

Via an excited David Farrar, we discover Mike Moore writing something that is not utter nonsense.

The source of this excitement is a Herald column in which Moore comes out in favour of democracy, if not coherence.

The article by Mary Dejevsky in Friday's Herald suggesting that a benevolent authority is better than democracy couldn't be more wrong.

Poor democracies have always outperformed authoritarian societies. Democracies score 20 to 40 per cent better even in poor nations, whether it be life expectancy, infant mortality, or farm production and clean water.

Democracies are less corrupt, more efficient because leaders are held accountable, and an active civil society and free media are the watchdogs, the cleansing air of transparency, and the adaptability of democracy drives up better results.

There has never been a famine in a democracy, no two democracies have even gone to war, and where there are democracies the numbers of civil wars go down. No evidence was produced to back up the claim that dictatorships do better.

Democracy is more than having a vote, it's also about freedoms such as property and human rights. This interests me because I'm a congenital do-gooder and know-all.

Some of this is correct.

As DPF points out, democracies have, depending on how you define the term democracy, waged war against each other*. And regardless of how you define democracy, it's hard to escape the fact that at least one democracy has waged covert wars against others it disliked (USA take a bow).

And, in terms of economic growth, there is only weak evidence to suggest that democracies perform better.

There is no evidence, however, that they perform significantly worse. And there is empirical evidence that shows that democracies are more resilient to economic shocks and that they pay higher wages compared to non-democracies with the same GDP.

Democracies, as we know from Amartya Sen's famous work, are also much less likely to experience serious welfare catastrophes such as famines (indeed, IIRC, Sen's work shows that there no democratic country with a free press has ever experienced a severe famine).

The bit I really don't get though is Moore's bundling of property rights into the democratic package. Most human rights of course are integral to democracy. You can't be a true democracy with out freedom of speech, for example. But property rights? In my opinion, any country voting to abolish them would be making a massive mistake. But, so long as they did this via the democratic process, with the chance of future repeal via the same process, how would this be un-democratic?

___________________________________________________
*The actual claim (quite probably still wrong) that you see in books on democracy is, I think, more along the lines of "no two democracies have gone to war since WW2".

Bedtime for Conservative Canards

One of the many, mostly silly, conservative talking points that pop up with dreary regularity in the Great New Zealand Debate is the claim that speed cameras and speeding fines are simply a government revenue gathering exercise. (DPF obliges with examples here and here*).

The nonsensical nature of this claim is revealed by the following statistic:

All fees and fines put together contribute a whopping 1% to crown revenue. This figure is made up of much more than just speeding tickets too, meaning that the actual contribution of speeding fines to government revenue is trivially small. The government could eliminate all speeding fines tomorrow and still run a comfortable surplus.

So why don't they?

Presumably because the actual reason for levying speeding fines is the official one: to punish people for breaking the law** and to try and make our roads safer.

____________________________________________

*To be fair to David Farrar I should note that he does - grudgingly - approve of speed cameras in some circumstances. This is more than can be said about many NZ conservatives.
**And while we're on the subject, have you ever noted the way that law and order conservatives tend to be all for the strict enforcement of all laws except those that might conceivably inconvenience their mighty selves.