Jun.23 | COVID and perpetual emergency; The Blob II; Give productivity a fair chance; Cornel West for President
The COVID crisis and the state of perpetual emergency
Can we ever afford to treat each other the same way again?
We seem to be awash in crises. There’s a climate crisis, a housing crisis, a nursing crisis, a cost of living crisis, a mental health crisis, a disinformation crisis, and, just to switch up the terminology, an obesity epidemic. And, of course, we’re living in the aftermath of the COVID crisis and will be for years to come. If you’re in glass-half-full mode, all these crises present opportunities. As Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff to President Obama, famously said at the outset of the Global Financial Crisis, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.” But what kind of opportunities are they? Perhaps a necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention opportunity to innovate—or, according to some scholars reflecting on our COVID response, an opportunity for panic and authoritarianism with far-reaching consequences. (Click to keep reading)
Beware the Blob II
In which I warn against the agglomeration of elite opinion, thanks to The Common Room
Time to give productivity a fair chance
What do you think the Productivity Commission cares about? You might think the answer is productivity, at least until you read the report it released last week. Its “Fair Chance for All” inquiry has so little to do with productivity that the word doesn’t even feature in the list of nearly 50 “commonly used terms” in the report, although “assumptions”, “colonisation”, “equity,” “mindset”, “NGOs”, and “racism” all make the list.
Instead, the Commission has devoted its energies to investigating the causes of persistent disadvantage, a field that is densely populated with reports and working groups these days. Now its final report is out, we can see whether the Commission has actually added any value to this crowded landscape.
The Commission was established in 2010 to advise the Government on how to improve productivity, which the Commission says means producing better results at less cost. This is something we’ve been struggling with for decades. In fact, back in 2019, the Commission said our economy “is like a car stuck in first gear” and more recently told us our national economy is “one of the least productive in the OECD.” As the experts responsible for productivity, the Commission should be pretty focused on this important problem.
To be fair, it was the Government that told the Commission to investigate persistent disadvantage, but you’d think the Commission might have tried harder to link its work to the reason it exists. The report just says vaguely that “productivity and wellbeing are interrelated in a complex way,” and moves on. Unfortunately, things don’t get any better from there.
Despite warning us about the danger of assumptions, the report seems blind to its own. As a result, it rests on a fairly shaky base. Let me give you four examples. First, it’s eye-wateringly utopian. The Commission’s chair, Dr Ganesh Nana, writes of creating “foundations for a future without disadvantage”, which is about as likely as world peace.
Second, the report argues that government agencies need to hear the voices of people experiencing persistent disadvantage and actively involve them in reform. Ironically, the Commission chose not to do this itself because it didn’t want people “to have to repeat their stories to this inquiry”.
Third, the report also treats the people it professes to help as strangely bloodless abstractions—not as human beings with agency and responsibility and decisions to make, even if limited, but as subjects of an impersonal system erecting barriers to hold them back. This seems, at best, like a partial truth. In fact, in an interim report the Commission noted that Māori and Pacific peoples are more likely to experience persistent disadvantage, but also that “nearly three-quarters of Māori or Pacific peoples did not experience persistent income poverty or persistent exclusion in 2013 and 2018.” It’s an intriguing reference. Why do some people become disadvantaged while others in the same group don’t? Are there clues here about resilience, about helpful behaviour, about effective policy? Who knows, because the Commission doesn’t seem to have followed this rich vein of inquiry.
Fourth, its very first recommendation is to “give effect to te Tiriti o Waitangi”, but it’s not clear how well the Commission grasps the role of te Tiriti / the Treaty in our system of government. For example, it says that we have an “unwritten constitution (other than te Tiriti)”, which is true if you ignore the Constitution Act, the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, the Electoral Act, the Official Information Act, and all the other elements of our constitution recorded in writing—statutes, court decisions, and conventions—that you can read about in any introduction to the constitution.
Other recommendations also raise question-marks. Some just seem redundant—for example, the Commission says we should “invest in data collection”, which is a well-known problem. Others seem a lot more complex than the Commission realises, like the recommendation to create a Commissioner for Future Generations to represent the interests of (you guessed it) future generations. But what exactly do future generations want? It’s not like we can ask them, so who decides? How can we be confident this won’t just reflect the assumptions, beliefs and priorities of today’s decision-makers?
The report is sprinkled with cliches (did you know we were the first country to give women the vote?) and statements of the blindingly obvious (“not everyone in Aotearoa New Zealand is experiencing mauri ora”). Towards the end, the Productivity Commission says it should be resourced for a follow-up review in three years’ time. After wading through the report, it’s hard to see why any government should do this. As the Commission itself has said in the past, it’s “people with the fewest social and economic resources” who wear the biggest costs of unproductive economies—people experiencing persistent disadvantage who, more than any of us, need the Commission to get back to productivity.
For more on the Fair Chance for All inquiry, see my previous posts here and here.
Best. Political. Video. Ever.
Cornel West for President.