Written By: - Date published: 10:22 am, December 28th, 2007 - 38 comments
Categories: articles -
Tags: articles
As we contemplate a bad year in the polls for Labour, the signs are pointing to National cruising onto victory in 2008. Or are they? Labour’s mistake may have been that it assumed a booming economy would be enough to carry the day, given that its credentials for a social agenda will always leave National struggling.
But what does National have going for it against Labour’s credentials? They appear to be fresh-faced and will offer tax cuts – that’s about it. No real indication of how they would cope with international relations, the climate-change-challenge, escalating health needs, etc, etc.
But consider this. The fatal chink for National may well be the weakness that is John Key. For me The Standard highlight for 2007 was this YouTube post by all-your-base in August.
I’d be interested in any comments with nominations for the best-of-The Standard in 2007.
Happy New Year.
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Scoopit!
“Incidentally, this is an example of why economics is such a ridiculously narrow discipline.”
You have GOT to be kidding! Economics is a narrow discipline? Perhaps you mean just macro-economics?
“The trickle down political theory as a primary tool of economic development is a crock.”
Yup, the trickle-down theory was an off the cuff statement by one economist in the Reagan years. It isn’t really an economic theory at all and it is used almost exclusively by those who claim to debunk it. It is a straw man.
Economics doesn’t have particularly good ways of assessing long-term downstream risk at either a macro or a micro level. In fact most of the time economic theory seems to spend a lot of effort trying to avoid looking at the downstream cost of anything with scientific uncertainties at all.
Obviously this done to simplify the analysis. There are just too many possible to scenarios to look at, and in most cases the downstream risks are unknown (at least for things that haven’t been done before). But it means that economics is inadequete on it’s own to form economic policy with – unless of course the society is static and doesn’t innovate.
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I said trickle down is a political theory – not economic.. However it was used a *lot* by a lot of the political proponents trying to explain the benefits of removing some of the archaic structural rigidities in various economies.
I actually approve of a lot of the changes and did at the time. Anyone trying to run an efficient business in the inept socialism of the muldoon era would. But it did get up my nose even in the early stages of those reforms here when the ‘trickle down’ theory in various guises was used. That wasn’t the reason for doing it. It was actually done to help this generation, and there was always going to be a hell of a lot of pain doing it.
But that was the result of decades of inept government by the nats. They have a tendency never to institute real changes – just to twiddle about with what is there already. So the system usually gets more and more rigid with more and more hacks. Haven’t noticed the modern nat’s being any different – still a serious lack of intelligence or vision. May be adequete for short-term business objects – not adequete for maintaining a good business invironment over the medium term.
“still a serious lack of intelligence”
OK now you are just being stupid.