Hard News by Russell Brown

I'll experiment with presenting them at images in our photoblog template, but the embeds here will do for now. Not that you can click them to see a bigger version.)

I noted the access to bigger versions as I read this, thanks.

I noted too what would be tempting to call the parallelism of the first two, manufacturing as percentages of employment and of GDP 1989-2012/13. But then that their declines are not parallel - instead the systematic shift from the employment percentage being below the GDP percentage to above it. That is, that manufacturing has shifted from having lower than average GDP-output per employee to similarly above average.

And it might be tempting to attribute this to a positive choice and policy intent by successive governments. But no - suggest not a result of 'intelligent design' but instead an analogy to evolutionary change driven by 'natural' selection - lower-waged lower-productivity manufacturing has been less able to survive in the economic environment of these decades than higher productivity manufacturing.

I guess this was a small part of what Paul Callaghan was on about. And the point of these graphs - to stimulate analysis and discussion.

Thanks for that, Russell. Combines nicely with another site - gapminder - which has a lot of comparative information about New Zealand . I only discovered it this week.:)

Some of those graphs are really depressing.

I wonder whether some of the reduction in manufacturing employment is due to better and more efficient equipment. Even if that is true is indicates manufacturing is not a growth area in NZ. The other part of the equation is that with the rise and rise of dairy it dominates most of the numbers in one form or another.

The R&D graphs I am all too familiar with. It's the reason I get grumpy every time an MP touts their wonderful record on science and innovation funding. The numbers tell the story and yet the reporters are happy to let politicians get away with the fiction that governments believe in and support research.

Also interesting to see how a few countries dominate our exports. I'm not sure if thats good or bad but it is interesting.

The lack of input to research and development is also part of the reason why we always show up poorly in productivity comparisons - we're working longer hours for less output because a lot of companies aren't willing to invest in new plant / new processes because they don't get a return out of it.

For most of the time graphed, NZ governments have been pumping fairly large amounts of money into favoured industries: big-budget films, big sport, tourism. Doesn't seem to have got us very far?

a lot of companies aren't willing to invest in new plant / new processes because they don't get a return out of it.

Especially when they can pay a pittance, secure in the knowledge that the taxpayer will top up their employees' meagre incomes to a level which makes it nearly possible to exist. If the monkeys must be paid in macadamias instead of peanuts, the incentive to pay for technology which gets the same output from fewer monkeys becomes much greater.

Tremendous information. Thanks for pointing that out, Russell. I'm tired of banging my head against a wall without data, now I can head-bang with it!

Noting that technology costs are themselves driven by the cost of employees in the technology sector, so it's really a race between the ultimate productivity of different skill sets. At least in theory.

Good capitalists are always putting some poor bugger out of a job, after all, unless the entrenched interests can stack the deck in their own favor.

I will admit, putting together data sets to run my own analyses of questions in the media is basically a recreational activity of mine. I'll have to keep in mind this is a option for sharing what I've come up with, though most of the data I use would take quite a bit of adjustment to get into a form that would suit this wiki.

And, on the off chance, I will ask if anyone knows where to find a time series that the is either the total value of Australian housing stock, or anything it can be derived from (for instance average dwelling price divided by average household income I could work back from). Australia is completely impervious to my google-fu (I can find things like the 8 cities series, but I really need a countrywide measure, ideally for the last two and half decades, for a comparison I have been doing).