Posts by BenWilson
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Check out this story in the Financial Times that talks about his support base:
Paywalled, unfortunately. But you snipped the bit that's the evidence? I can't say I have any feel for how amazing getting 5,000 volunteers is in a country of 64 million people. That it was unexpected doesn't tell me a lot. Something like getting maybe 350 students in NZ to volunteer? 15 from each University/Polytech? I'd be surprised if there aren't 15 volunteers here in Auckland Uni just for the Green Party.
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Speaker: Saying what we actually mean on…, in reply to izogi,
Just to explain what I mean a bit better, you can pretty much count as a dimension anything that you can put a quantity on. So if you ask 50 questions to a sample of people, you get a data set with 50 dimensions in it. Now we find it very hard to even imagine more than 3 dimensions, so we tend to aggregate the dimensions down, or eliminate them, when we try to make sense of such data. Which means we are simplifying down the model, often significantly. In doing so we introduce a lot of bias.
We can definitely do better than that with good software these days. If I only had the data....
It seems likely to me that there are better dimension choices than the Left/Right spectrum for elucidating differences in voter choice here. I know exactly how I could find them, given the right data.
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Speaker: Saying what we actually mean on…, in reply to izogi,
The only alternatives I’ve really seen are variants of the Nolan chart or Political compass, but not much beyond that.
Yes, I haven’t seen a lot either. Ultimately, I think the answer to your question about why it’s so embedded is because it’s easy. The 2 dimensional options you mention just open the multidimensional floodgates. Once you admit even one more dimension than Left-Right, it becomes clear that the choice of dimensions is actually rather arbitrary. I have to say that I don’t think the Political compass is especially illuminating in the NZ context, because most of the data ends up on the diagonal, which means that it’s actually a one dimensional spectrum after all. You want your choice of axes to spread the data around more, for there to be no signal left. The strong signal of correlation between the level of economic and social liberalism just means that actually breaking out those two dimensions isn’t useful (because one largely predicts the other anyway).
It is interesting that they are correlated, sure. But it’s not a graph that helps to show political choice distinction.
We could do a PCA to find better dimensions, if we had a good enough data set. Any political scientists or statisticians (or anyone else for that matter) out there know if that’s been done already? It could be mighty interesting.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Maybe Corbyn does sound old fashioned to baby boomers and gen xers, but he doesn’t to the under 35s who are lapping up the first ideologically coherent voice of hope on the UK left they’ve ever heard.
I'd feel a lot more hopeful about that if you had some evidence. It sounds like wishful thinking.
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Polity: In defence of the centre, in reply to Tom Semmens,
At what point does declining interest and popular disgust at tweedle dum tweedle dee parliamentary neoliberalism destroy democracy itself?
I think the sad answer to that, Tom, is "at no point". Democracy is not a single system with highly specific institutions and a binary level of satisfaction. You could argue that it's a question of degree, but it's not "destroyed" just because of low participation - that's how most democracies began, and spent long periods that way. The actual destruction of democracy only really happens when free voting is prevented. That might not even be needed by oligarchs controlling the system, if low participation does the job for them all by itself. But it could always leap back into action with sufficiently motivating causes. Only if the actual institution of voting is removed or subverted does the system cease to qualify as democratic.
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This is an old discussion, of course. But it's good to have it in one place here, otherwise we just end up having it everywhere.
I think the most fraught part of it is that the moving goalposts means that discussion is always comparing apples and oranges. Because Left and Right wing are relative terms, rather than absolute ones, it's nearly impossible to meaningfully compare from one system to another, or from one time to another in the same system.
I don't know what Left means here. So I'm not sure I like it. So I don't see how or why I could convince anyone else to go there. I only know where my position is.
It's extremely hard for me to relate to any strategy that said NZ Labour should act like Tony Blair. I'd rather have John Key than Tony Blair. I'd probably rather have John Key than Obama. Even though if I was in the USA, of course I'd rather have Obama than any Republican offering, and the same probably goes in Britain wrt Blair, although I'm not so sure of that, so sickening did I find Blair's willful toadying up to Bush.
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Polity: New Zealand and the TPP: “Or…, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Our Country by virtue of size isn’t chilling
It's hard to generalize. In a negotiation where no one has yet actually walked, the first party to walk does certainly make the most impact by doing so, particularly if it's a significant change in their apparent direction. Some small players can be highly symbolically significant.
But do we care? Are we really here to save free trade by killing it? Or just to get a good deal for ourselves? I think it's the latter - I couldn't give a flying crap about free trade in general - I'm sure the idea will carry on just fine, and it's not the best of all possible ideas for all time or anything. It's a theory about how things should be done which is grossly at variance with how they are actually done.
It's not obvious that it's even a correct theory - there are countless examples of nations that have had a lot of their interests severely damaged by freer trade, depending whose interests we are talking about. It's never good for anyone in the business of making something to have trade barriers to their competition dropped. Lots of industry in NZ was killed over the years by free trade. You have to have the theory that they "deserved to die" to just write their interests off as irrelevant. You have to place the consumer rights higher. Even then, you have to ignore some aspects of the consumer rights, like the right to locally produced goods - this might completely disappear if foreign goods crush them in the marketplace.
Quite a lot of the idea of barriers goes to what the model of the government's business in the country even is. Sometimes it actually is to build an industry up that would increase the diversity of the country's offerings, to make it more resilient. For instance, the value added by processing our milk more (beyond producing the raw materials that we currently dominate in) could be enormous, but the industry that needs to be built might need a lot of nurturing first. And we're talking about an industry that's got all the advantages over the rest of NZ industry already. We could, for instance, challenge to be the world's biggest biscuit producer. We could even become a milk importer to that end, if only we had enough biscuit making infrastructure.
I'm not saying we should do this, btw. Just that we could, that it's not axiomatic that we shouldn't. In theory, we could actually make biscuits way more competitively than many countries, due to our dominance of the supply of one of the main raw ingredients. But to build the infrastructure might require quite a lot of favourable government treatment. It doesn't have to be incredibly unpopular - quite the opposite, that's a direction that would contain a huge number of jobs.
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Polity: New Zealand and the TPP: “Or…, in reply to Rob Stowell,
NZ walking away would have a chilling effect on the negotiations.
Not always. Very often the main effect you get from walking away from a negotiation is a massive increase in both the number and the quality of the offers you get. Because walking away is never irreversable and everyone knows that. You can always walk back. But after you've signed up, you've lost your main bargaining chip. You better hope that the consideration you got for it was worth it, since all your remedies are now in the contract, and walking away isn't one of them.
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Polity: New Zealand and the TPP: “Or…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
BOTWA is the same length and just as easy, but. Also, in the length of the underlying phrase it's half as many syllables, and it doesn't require research to understand what it actually means :-).
Of course that's both strength and weakness depending on whether your purpose is to clearly communicate, or strongly obfuscate. When it comes to trade, the jury is probably out on which one is more important.
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Polity: New Zealand and the TPP: “Or…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
It’s that we won’t recognise that our BATNA is better than any of the offers on the table.
Yes, a complicated way of saying “we’re better off to walk away”? Which is not exactly an uncommon scenario. Quite the opposite, it’s the default scenario all the time. How many possible deals are there waiting to fleece us out there at any one time? Far more than the number of good deals, that’s for sure.
Being prepared to walk away is how we conduct our daily lives for most offers – it’s not some wild and vicious position. I walk away from deals on a near continuous basis, as a I walk down the street passing endless wares I don’t need or want.
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