Robin Grieve: Go easy on the Greens, they can’t help it

In a reportedly testy exchange between Chloe Swarbrick and David Seymour on the AM show, Chloe Swarbrick took issue with David Seymour’s criticism of the Green’s rental cap policy. David called it right when he said that “Chloe is nice, she will smile and it will sound great, ‘we are fighting for you’, but her policies will have the opposite effect of what they promise, that is why they are so dangerous and that is why they must be kept out of office” he said.

I have never met Chloe Swarbrick but she does seem nice and I believe she genuinely believes that the best way to help renters is to have more control and more regulation. David Seymour is similarly nice and just as earnestly believes that the best way to help renters is to remove controls and regulations so that more people will be landlords and renters will get a better deal because they will have more choice and landlords will have to compete by providing better value to renters.

How is it that two nice people who both seem intelligent have such different and opposing views? We all know that David is intelligent, and Chloe seems perhaps not his equal but no slug, so why can they not look at the evidence and agree? The reason is because they have different types of intelligence.

Jim Flynn, who was an internationally acclaimed New Zealand intelligence expert at Otago University, explained this well when he said there are two types of problems that we need to apply logic to solve. Concrete problems and abstract problems. 

Applying logic to solve concrete problems would require us simply to be able to do what our ancestors could do and apply logic in a simple way. “I want a good dog for hunting, beagles are good hunting dogs, therefore I should take a beagle”, was the example Flynn used to describe it.

In our modern world, however, we need to be able to apply logic to more abstract and complex problems that are not as simple as what dog to take hunting. A modern education system should be able to enable that and free up more people who can use logic on the abstract, but Jim Flynn was concerned that our education system is too narrowly focused, and we are not capitalizing on this ability.

“For example”, he said, “very few New Zealanders could say why rent controls are almost always a bad idea. And that is, of course, they’re meaningless unless the rents fall below market value. And if they fall below market value, no one will invest in rental housing, and you’ll have a rental-housing shortage.

It’s that inability to capitalise on what the modern mind is capable of that I think is the real scandal” he said, referring to our education system.

Chloe Swarbrick is smart, but a product of that education system. She can apply logic to concrete problems very well and the fact David Seymour cannot agree with her is no doubt very frustrating to her. ‘Rents are too high, a rental cap will make rents lower than they would be without one, therefore we need a rent cap’. Problem solved, why can you not see that? Then comes David Seymour who applies his smart mind in an abstract way and says that if you cap rents, landlords will sell up and there will be a shortage of rental houses and rents will go even higher. Chloe with her concrete logic is unable to follow David’s argument and the problem for David and the right is that many of the solutions they propose require voters to be able to apply the same abstract logic that Jim Flynn said, most can’t.

David’s solution to the rental crises is for the Government to ‘remove controls and regulations so that more people will be landlords and renters will get a better deal because they will have more choice and landlords will have to compete by providing better value to renters.’

That is far too abstract for most people, and hence we have a big problem in New Zealand. Most of the policies that ACT propose require several steps to achieve them whereas our concrete logic population can only take one step.

Kiwibuild was a great policy to get votes because it was just one step. ‘There is a shortage of houses so we will build 100,000 homes.’ Problem solved. Put that policy up against what National and ACT were proposing at the time which was; ‘there is a shortage of houses, so we will reform the RMA and urban planning laws, so that land will be more available, so that will make land cheaper , so people can afford to build cheaper houses on the cheaper land without overcapitalizing the land, so that will mean more affordable houses’. Problem solved; but how many steps is that?

The Greens are probably not capable of abstract thinking, otherwise they would see the folly of their ways, but even if they could they are on a winner because as Jim Flynn sadly pointed out most voters are not able to follow the multistep process needed to solve most of the problems we face today. These voters will only vote for parties which offer a solution to a problem that is simple and only one step, and that means these problems will never be solved.

If you want to solve poverty, just give the poor more money. Problem solved say the left. If you want to solve poverty; reform education and welfare and cut government expenditure and taxation to encourage business and increase prosperity for all. Problem solved say the right.

Say what? Say the left.

Robin Grieve, a tutor, orchardist and retired farmer, is Chairman of Pastural Farming Climate Research HERE.