Dr Michael Bassett: Poverty - The modern man-made monster

Are you, like me, getting sick and tired of the endless stories in the Mainstream Media about poverty, with self-appointed “experts” arguing for more money to be spent on the problems they describe? They show no signs of understanding the serious nature of the country’s fiscal deficit. Worse, the journalists reporting these “experts” fail to examine the fact that many of the complainants they quote simply farm the poor and rely on their continued existence for their own personal incomes.

Clive Bibby: The Sugarbag Years

I once read a book called the “Sugarbag Years” by Tony Simpson.

It was a collection of personal interviews of people who had experienced real poverty in this country during the Depression of the early 1930s. 

Those evidence based testimonies probably epitomised the opinions of those involved in the nationwide movement that lead to the election of the First Labour Government and the welfare reforms that followed. And subsequently, a greatful nation continued to re-elect Labour for successive terms until the public mood changed after the ill judged “Wharfies strike” in 1951.

Hanna Wilberg: Forcing people to repay welfare ‘loans’ traps them in a poverty cycle

The National Party’s pledge to apply sanctions to unemployed people receiving a welfare payment, if they are “persistently” failing to meet the criteria for receiving the benefit, has attracted plenty of comment and criticism.

Less talked about has been the party’s promise to index benefits to inflation to keep pace with the cost of living. This might at least provide some relief to those struggling to make ends meet on welfare, though is not clear how much difference it would make to the current system of indexing benefits to wages.

Peter Hemmingson: Maori Socio-Economic Disadvantage

The propaganda claim to a collective [part-] Maori socio-economic disadvantage has become one of NZ's most enduring tropes.

Adolf Hitler’s “big lie” technique: repeat a lie loudly and often enough and it becomes the ‘truth.’

As I will demonstrate below, aggregates are politically useful but factually vacuous.

Roger Partridge: The inequality debate we should be having

The debate about inequality is one of the most impassioned in contemporary politics. It touches on core beliefs about justice, rights and the ideal structure of society.

Important philosophical differences fuel the debate, each stemming from divergent worldviews and principles. Equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome. Individualism versus collectivism. Meritocracy versus structural determinism. The debate spans the gulf between the political left and right and between advocates and opponents of the politics of identity.

John Campbell: The politics of poverty

On Thursday afternoon, Chris Bishop, a former university debating champion whose performances in Parliament’s Question Time tend to span a continuum between controlled outrage and being really f*#@ing outraged, asked the Associate Minister for Social Development and Employment about people sleeping in cars.

It’s almost impossible to know, exactly, how many people sleep in cars. “None”, would be the best answer. But this isn’t a “best answer” world.

One measure is how many people on the Housing Register (essentially a waiting list of people assessed as eligible for public housing, but not yet in it) give their address as a car.

Lindsay Mitchell: The price of reducing poverty

The benefit system was originally about providing secure income for those genuinely unable to work. That inability to work did not include causing one's own incapacity or having dependent children.

It has since evolved to become a government tool for equalizing incomes between the employed and unemployed and advancing other ideological goals like the financial emancipation of the female parent from the male parent.

To some degree benefits have become an alternative source of income for those uninterested in the obligations and constrictions involved with being employed. Those who disagree with that statement argue nobody would willingly choose to live on a meagre benefit income.

That may hold water for single people. But the latest incomes monitoring report from MSD shows a couple on a benefit with two or more children receives over $800 weekly after housing costs. Additionally,

Peter Jackson: National’s boot camp plan promising start to solution

Education the long term answer to poverty

We’re told that the fundamental problem is poverty. Well guess what? The only sure path out of poverty begins with education. Lotto isn’t going to do it, and nor is social welfare.

I understand that some of us ordinary folk might have difficulty with the extraordinarily complex idea (not!) of taking kids out of a toxic environment and giving them a chance to learn skills and develop attitudes that will change their lives for the better. The media, though, has no excuse.

Lindsay Mitchell: Relationship between poverty and foodbank use

MSD's annual tome of poverty statistics was released last week.

The NZ Initiative provides a good summary here. Eric Crampton wryly notes:

"Spin machines revved up quickly, trying to find the least indefensible ways of using the data to support whatever position they had before they’d opened the report."

 

For mine, of interest, was a new section on foodbank use. I have graphed the data below interested in the relationship between foodbank use and child poverty.

Roger Childs: Comrade Jacinda and 2 years of the Covid Crutch

The arrival of the coronavirus in New Zealand in March 2020 gave the prime minister the ideal opportunity to increase her power and popularity. The Labour/NZ First/Greens Coalition was struggling in the polls and Jacinda Ardern gratefully seized the opportunity to give her government emergency powers and effectively close the country down.

With her excellent communication skills and winning smile, backed by the confident Director General of Health, Ashley Bloomfield, Ardern had the nation watching daily press conferences to learn about the latest developments. Phrases like the team of five million and be kind to each other struck a chord with most. Most businesses had to close down, but the Finance Minister subsidized these with wage subsidies and through them provided payments for people who had lost their jobs.

The four to six week lockdown was obediently accepted by the vast majority as the price that needed to be paid for keeping covid 19 at bay.

Karl du Fresne: Piketty - new poster boy for the Left

Hands up all those who have read French economist Thomas Piketty’s best-selling book Capital in the Twenty-First Century. As I thought – not many of you. Perhaps you were put off by the fact that it runs to a dense 685 pages. I admit I haven’t tackled it either, but I’ve read enough reviews to have a pretty clear idea what the book is all about.

The English translation was published only two months ago but already it has made Piketty the international poster boy for the Left. He contends that unequal distribution of wealth – a current political preoccupation throughout the Western world – is the inevitable result of a system which, over time, concentrates economic power in the hands of a tiny few.

Lindsay Mitchell: Asian incomes rising rapidly

Prompted by the NZ Herald sob-series on Closing the Gaps I thought I'd take a look at Asian incomes. They are rising rapidly. In only 5 years they have gone from having the lowest median income to second highest.

The chart below shows the median income for individuals aged 15 and older.

Fiona Mackenzie: Our Fatal Flaws

I’ve just read a great book – “Why Nations Fail…….the Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty”.  Based on 15 years’ research, it’s no light read but it has much to say that is relevant to New Zealand. I hesitate to condense it, but feel some key messages are important.

The book dispels the arguments that wealth and prosperity can be due to climate, geography or culture. Rather it’s the openness and accessibility of institutions a country operates under (both economic and political). These determine whether people feel they have a chance of being heard and, most importantly, whether it’s worth investing their time, effort and resources in trying to achieve anything. Fundamental human psychology, really!

Karl du Fresne: The elimination of poverty will just have to wait

The team of Key and English may go down as one of the more effective political partnerships of modern times. John Key is the schmoozer, the salesman. His incorrigibly sunny disposition infuriates a lot of people, who see it as smarmy and ingratiating. But it’s hard to argue with his poll ratings, which have held up extraordinarily well after one and a half terms during which the government has had to grapple with one crisis after another.

Matt Ridley: 17 Reasons to be cheerful

April's Reader's Digest carries an article based on excerpts from my book and an interview with me: "The world has never been a better place to live in," says science writer Matt Ridley, "and it will keep on getting better."

1. We're better off now
Compared with 50 years ago, when I was just four years old, the average human now earns nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), eats one third more calories, buries two thirds fewer children, and can expect to live one third longer. In fact, it's hard to find any region of the world that's worse off now than it was then, even though the global population has more than doubled over that period.

Mike Butler: Somebody else... to blame

Maori health researcher Dr Fiona Cram blames poverty and racial discrimination for Maori child abuse, according to one of two Families Commission reports that show that 52 per cent of all New Zealand children who have been taken into state care from abusive or neglectful parents are Maori. Dr Cram said:

"Around the world, indigenous children are over-represented in child welfare systems for many reasons: systemic racism, the application of white, middle-class standards and values to [indigenous] communities, and inter-generational fragmentation of the family and community structure."

I would say there are two sides colonisation. The white coloniser brought blankets, British bureaucracy, and endless little pay-offs to keep the colonised happy. The colonised had Stone Age technology, warrior values, and much fear and superstition. Some academics blame the missionaries for introducing corporal punishment, but Maori culture had a tradition of killing unwanted children. Unfortunately, Dr Cram is of the “some one else is to blame” school of thought, which means the abusive, neglectful parents are not responsible and don’t need to change their behaviour.

Lindsay Mitchell: Greens plan is a blueprint for poverty

The Greens plan to lift 100,000 children out of poverty is unworkable and defies reason on a number of counts.

First the definition of poverty is relative. It puts a number of children below a specified threshold. Arbitrary thresholds are exceedingly troublesome in their own right. The US is currently grappling with a new and better way to measure poverty. In the UK not so long ago hundreds of thousands of children were lifted out of poverty overnight simply by moving the threshold! A move no less silly than the Green's proposal as we shall see.