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November 3, 2019 7:00am by David Farrar

200 years of progress

The doom merchants would have you believe everything is getting worse and poverty etc is increasing. The opposite is of course the case.

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International Politics
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Komata

The problem is not that things have got better, BUT that the socialists / globalists have very successfully convinced a generation of children (Now young adults) that everything has got WORSE, and that only THEY (the socialists) can lead them into the nirvana where everything will be sweetness and light and so long as they do what they are told, life will be wonderful.

They have, by intention, become surrogate parents.

I believe the phrase used to describe those that will be ‘rescued’ in this way is ‘Willing slaves’.
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November 3, 2019 7:05am
Mobile Michael

The people claiming that things are so wrong are doing so as it suits their narrative of trying to enforce a fundamental change to democracy to totalitarianism and from market economies to communism.

They happily ignore the misery this has repeatedly caused, from Russia, Mao’s China, Eastern Europe, Africa and Latin America. (Most recently in Venezuela.) They’ll get right next time they claim!
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November 3, 2019 7:12am
- farbeyond
  
  You will have to add Ecuador, Bolivia and most recently, Chile. Far away from Venezuela’s awful situation… But give it time… And a dose of false hope of equality of outcomes.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:08pm
rightoverlabour

Yup definitely progress. The Bokke won the World Cup…..
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November 3, 2019 7:22am
mandk

There is a brilliant TED by Hans Risking on the same theme.
Humanity has never had it so good.
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November 3, 2019 7:23am
- mandk
  
  Apologies – his name is Hans Rosling
  
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  November 3, 2019 8:10am
  - fernglas
    
    Hans Roaming? Wasn’t he at that Labour youth camp?
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:25am
- krazykiwi
  
  His book ‘Factfulness’ is a must. I’ve purchased and gifted 5 copies to people in the doom and gloom camp.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:20am
Odakyu-sen

How much of this could be attributed to the narrative of: “Globalism has lived the starving masses of China and India out of poverty and disease.”
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November 3, 2019 7:26am
- Jack5
  
  Yep, bullshit is being flung on both sides of this argument.
  
  If things are improving so quickly, why are millions trying to crash through the borders of the developed world?
  
  Globalism increasingly looks like a levelling down, and, worse, even the possibility of making the concept of nations obsolescent.
  
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  November 3, 2019 8:19am
  - The Proper Ghandi
    
    The developed and civilised First World is deliberately being flooded with Third Worlders. The competitor to Globalism is sovereign nation states, with their characteristic cohesive cultures and common value structures. Intact, they are too strong to allow the Globalist doctrine. Therefore, they must go.
    
    By bringing in incompatible cultures who typically out-breed Westerners and don’t assimilate, in short order the original inhabitants who built those nations from nothing through blood sweat and tears will be the minority. It won’t be tomorrow, but it will eventuate. The mathematics demonstrates this.
    
    Although they are ideologically antithetical, Islam and the radical egalitarian Leftists have an unholy alliance based on the common goal of subverting the West. They are collectivist, totalitarian, authoritarian ideologies, where the sovereign individual is subsumed into the mass. The illusory and abstract ‘greater good’ have preeminence. We are being forced, having given no mandate to do so, to accept this as inevitable.
    
    If you want to see the future of NZ, look at Canada and Europe particularly. The future is not looking too rosy at this stage.
    
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    November 3, 2019 10:27am
mjw

“The doom merchants would have you believe everything is getting worse and poverty etc is increasing. The opposite is of course the case.”

I agree. New Zealand is doing really well. The economy is strong, unemployment is low. Health outcomes are improving. There are more police. Poverty has been alleviated. The foreign investment heat has gone out of the housing market. Crises like mycoplasma bovis are being dealt with decisively. Hundreds of millions of trees have already been planted. I could go on … but it seems we are on the same page.

🙂
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November 3, 2019 7:26am
- Billy Collins
  
  Just 200 years ago, if you wanted a family, most women had to constantly be pregnant just to have a chance of getting 1 or 2, maybe 3 of their children to survive to adulthood. Our species survived by shear number of attempts to reproduce. Besides the 1%, pregnant women were constantly dependent on men, and men were constantly dependent on work.
  
  Things aren’t perfect now, but even the poorest of people are living dramatically better than the vast majority of people 200 years ago.
  
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  November 3, 2019 10:34am
- Overworked
  
  And 100% of our children leave school literate because they are actually taught to read. The 10% illiteracy rate is a myth.
  
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  November 3, 2019 11:07am
- Jack5
  
  “New Zealand is doing really well”.
  
  Not we ain’t, MJW. Follow Michael Reddell at his blog, CroakingCassandra, and you see how far behind we are falling.
  
  A key comparative measure is GDP per capita, not just GDP.
  
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  November 3, 2019 12:00pm
- farbeyond
  
  Are you talking NZ until late 2017?
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:14pm
MCos

The democracy graph is extremely misleading.
There are plenty of countries that are nominally Democratic, but have a constitution that ensure a particular elite always remains in control.
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November 3, 2019 7:26am
- srylands
  
  What countries did you have in mind?
  
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  November 3, 2019 7:57am
  - Warren Murray
    
    Singapore is a very successful and prosperous faux democracy.
    
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    November 3, 2019 9:42am
  - theoldbloke
    
    starters for 1.
    Try Cambodia as an example. Nominally democratic.
    
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    November 3, 2019 9:51am
  - MCos
    
    A number in SE Asia, ME, Africa . . .
    
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    November 3, 2019 10:49am
  - GJM
    
    Well,there is NZ, with Labour, or Labour Lite in an elected dictatorship. If voting ever changed anything it would be illegal…
    
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    November 3, 2019 9:33pm
KH

In New Zealand low income people once could buy a house. No more.
How did we manage to organise that when the world overall is doing well?
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November 3, 2019 7:31am
- Happychappy
  
  Have you ever thought that young people today are big on luxury, like everything they buy is new and they want the best. You have to crawl before you walk and give up the pleasures that people in my day never had, and work hard to achieve what you want.
  
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  November 3, 2019 7:47am
  - srylands
    
    You are missing the point. New Zealand housing prices are insane. Wellington is on track to overtake Auckland. And I disagree that young people are looking for luxury. That is just a smug myth making exercise by a generation that bought cheap housing 30 and 40 years ago.
    
    Young people in Wellington are paying 600,000 for shit boxes in Upper Hutt. It is not their aspirations for luxury that are making life hard.
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:47am
    - Happychappy
      
      Your missing the point as in them days you had double digit interest rates, most people had two mortgages but we still managed to scrape up a deposit without help from our parents.
      
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      November 3, 2019 2:04pm
- Aunty
  
  You must have lived in a very different New Zealand to me because low income people were never able to afford to buy a house in this country. That’s why we had State Houses, and lots of them too!
  
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  November 3, 2019 7:50am
  - Jack5
    
    Aunty, you’re right, it’s the middle class and upper working class who have been squeezed.
    
    A taste of an article linked to below:
    
    “Stagnant incomes and falling wages have meant that fewer Americans are growing up to be better off than their parents. Upward absolute intergenerational mobility was once the almost-universal experience among America’s youth. No longer.
    
    “Among those born in 1940, about 90 percent of children grew up to experience higher incomes than their parents, according to researchers at the Equality of Opportunity Project. This proportion was only 50 percent among those born in the 1980s …”
    
    The article:
    
    https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2018/06/05/seven-reasons-to-worry-about-the-american-middle-class/
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:33am
    - Aunty
      
      It looks like you live in a very funny New Zealand as well, one called America!
      
      Your article isn’t relevant to NZ, we are very different countries economically speaking, and with very different histories and institutions.
      
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      November 3, 2019 12:33pm
      - Jack5
        
        Fair enough, Aunty, but compare NZ with a close neighbour, Australia.
        
        Australia has been pretty much parallel tracking NZ for a century. So see the link at the bottom.
        
        When it comes to the effects of globalism, I see some similarities between NZ and the United States. Clothing industries moved from both to Asia. Slabs of electronic assembly move from from America to Asia rather than expand within America; new silicon foundries or fabricators that could have been built in America emerge in Ireland, Israel, and other countries.
        
        Meanwhile, in New Zealand, much if not all of our wool scouring and much of our tanning industry moves to China. Our dairy technology pretty much has been shared with China without commensurate benefits for NZ. That’s apparents from Fonterra’s problems. China wants to control the supply chain, and we’re happy to oblige.
        
        Globalism is one way. Try buying into what is still China’s core industry – steel. Try buying land to develop for dairy farming in China. You can’t get freehold property.
        
        Your statement is questionable – “low income people were never able to afford to buy a house in this country.”
        
        Savings banks, building societies, State help such as allowing capitalisation of family benefits — all helped tens and tens of thousands of low-income New Zealanders to own homes.
        
        A well-known economist on productivity and other things between NZ and Australia:
        
        https://croakingcassandra.com/2019/10/25/productivity-lack-of-it-and-other-things/
        
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        November 3, 2019 3:17pm
- The Proper Ghandi
  
  One significant reason, but not the only one of course, is mass immigration, for which I blame the Government, not the immigrants. It also keeps wages down for lower income people, because there is an over supply of labour. You get a doube-whammy effect. To attack immigration is to attack policy, which is why we are not allowed to talk about it.
  
  There should be a slump in house prices, because there has been a drop in fertility rates. That is part of a natural boom/bust cycle. However, if the price of housing falls, the bank’s assets thereby drop in value, loans will have to be called in, people will not be able to pay them due to the high amount of other personal debt they have, and the whole ponzy scheme will collapse, taking the whole economy with it. It is called “extend and pretend” and every developed nation is doing it. Nobody wants to be at the helm when the shit eventually hits the fan. They need artificial demand from incoming adults and families who need housing.
  
  Make no mistake: nobody except people wanting to get onto the property ladder wants to solve the ‘housing crisis.’
  
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  November 3, 2019 7:52am
- srylands
  
  Because New Zealand has long been in decline relative to the rest of the world. So while New Zealand will become more prosperous, other countries will become even more so. By 2040 Australia will be much richer than New Zealand. (I can’t see the current trans tasman travel agreement lasting another 20 years.)
  
  The problem is that public policy is getting worse, and designed to make us poorer. The gas exploration ban is the best example, but there are at least 50 others.
  
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  November 3, 2019 7:56am
  - Jack5
    
    Definitely our political choices are holding NZ back relative to Australia.
    
    Possibly also, we are just too small an economic unit.
    
    Switzerland and Singapore are small nations that are beating us economically, and you have to face it, as groups of people the Swiss and the Singaporeans seem to be just smarter than us NZ’ers.
    
    Another example: Israel and NZ a decade or two ago were pretty much level pegging in technology industry. Now Israel is, per capita and even outright, one of the top technology nations, and we are lagging way behind, largely just stuffing around with talk fests and bureaucratic hype, and yapping about what we’re gonna do.
    
    Look at our immigration policy. Developed nations compete to get the most skilled immigrants. Here, the international student industry has classes of foreigners here for the residency possibility. There are computer-type classes for them where you will find 90 per cent or more have no plans to work in the computer industry. They can’t wait to get into real estate, or electricity selling, or the fast food industry.
    
    Where I live, once there was one dairy within walking distance struggling to survive against supermarkets. Now there are three, all uneconomic, and run by Indian or Chinese immigrants doubtlessly here on business visas.
    
    We, as a country, are thick.
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:41am
    - Aunty
      
      I do agree with your comment that as a country, we are far too often thick in our policy settings and choices.
      
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      November 3, 2019 12:41pm
- JimBobJoe
  
  In times gone by people focused on getting a house over everything else. Spent most of their time at home…didn’t spend everything on flash anything…
  
  People 50..60 years ago bought cheap houses and worked hard to get ahead…
  
  And even then house ownership wasnt universal…not even close. It reach its peak after NZs big post Korean War boom, as NZ earns moonbeams for primary products… everything change at the end of the sixties in terms of market access… and then our Governments just borrowed for nigh on 15 years through the 70s into the 80s and eventually it popped and with it went the cheap loans from the government to finance homes…
  
  Have a look at the historical graphs re house ownership… always been a large renter population… our buoyant economy through 40s to 60s allow the government subsidy of housing through loans and state provision and that along with the welfare state running out of control broke our economy when first the UK ditched us and then OPEC gained monopoly control of oil and pushed inflation through the roof.
  
  Your meme fools the under 30s who have no memory of how shit NZ was in the 70s and 80s…but the older generations know how stifling the hand of the State in NZ was from the 30s through to the mid Eighties
  
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  November 3, 2019 7:59am
  - kevn
    
    @JimBob… Ah yes, the 1980’s with 20+% interest rates on home mortgages. Try that today…
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:53am
  - theoldbloke
    
    Well remember having to apply to Reserve Bank for overseas funds. Even for an “”overseas trip””
    
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    November 3, 2019 10:30am
- Warren Murray
  
  I read only yesterday of a Large single income family buying their first home in Christchurch.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:43am
  - mandk
    
    The story is here: https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/homed/houses/116431062/on-the-ladder-family-of-eight-cooked-on-gas-stove-to-save-on-power
    
    Admirable family.
    
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    November 3, 2019 12:03pm
- MCos
  
  The home ownership rate in NZ is around the same as the UK, USA, & France, but far ahead of Germany & Switzerland and far behind China.
  It is also 10% less than it was here thirty years ago.
  Problem is our not so new houses are crap and the land is eye wateringly overvalued in popular locations. So for the price you’d pay for any old house one the waterfront in Mangere Bridge would buy you a big house with with all sorts of swimming pools, multi bathrooms etc at Phuket. If you want to live there.
  
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  November 3, 2019 11:16am
  - ISeeRed
    
    You can’t buy a house or land in Phuket or anywhere else in Thailand unless you marry a local woman and register under her name. You can, however, buy a condo as a foreigner.
    
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    November 4, 2019 12:10am
Aunty

Looking at those graphs, it appears that poverty has reduced in ‘lock-step’ as literacy and basic education has gone up, with the rate of increasing literacy showing the closest inverse relationship with the rate of poverty reduction.

Not surprising really but it highlights the power of reading and writing as the means to facilitate the flow of information and ideas among and between people, and as a tool for allowing people to fully participate in and contribute to society and its economic progress.

Those who value literacy and basic education and who work hard to achieve both will do well, those who do not, or who make insufficient effort to do so will not. And we see that in our own society here in New Zealand among our various ethnic groups.
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November 3, 2019 7:42am
- cmm
  
  “Looking at those graphs, it appears that poverty has reduced in ‘lock-step’ as literacy and basic education has gone up,”
  
  Well, it could be that one causes the other, or it could be that both are the result of some other factor which causes both.
  
  Do not confuse correlation with causation.
  
  For an analogy, you might notice that more people who eat KFC have cars that fail WOF. Does this mean eating KFC somehow damages your car so it fails WOF? Or does it mean that failing WOF causes you to eat more KFC? Nope, some external factor causes both.
  
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  November 3, 2019 8:30am
  - Aunty
    
    There are none so blind as those who do not wish to see!
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:42am
Stephen Russell

It takes time to build things. But things can often be destroyed very quickly. So the constructive stuff goes unnoticed while destruction grabs headlines – even though what is built far outweighs what is destroyed.
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November 3, 2019 7:45am
- srylands
  
  Also people notice relative decline. eg Why can Australia fund lots of sophisticated medicines that New Zealand cannot? People don’t notice that New Zealand has access to medicines that did not exist 20 years ago. They just notice that Australia has access to more.
  
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  November 3, 2019 8:01am
  - KevO'Brien
    
    Australians also pay higher medical contribution as payroll taxes.
    
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    November 3, 2019 8:46am
  - tf78
    
    Aussie about 20 million people opposed to NZ’s 5 million could be the answer.
    
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    November 3, 2019 10:11am
JibberJabber

Thomas Sowell
Activism is a way for useless people to feel important, even if the consequences of their activism are counterproductive for those they claim to be helping and damaging to the fabric of society as a whole.
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November 3, 2019 7:52am
- alloytoo
  
  That’s our government in a nutshell.
  
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  November 3, 2019 8:55am
- RW Capitalist
  
  eg riots in Greece against austerity.
  YEAH smashing and burning stuff that has to be replaced or repaired with money you don’t have.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:50am
dave53

Crime rates are also massively down, both in recent decades and in the past 200 years. But most people think we live amidst a crime wave, thanks to our media and politicians.

And nor is the planet about to burn to a crisp or be flooded by melted ice. These are the most absurd fantasies of any of the many millenium doom cults ever known; yet the media fanatically portray this nonsense as terrifying fact and more and more people believe it. Jesus wept.
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November 3, 2019 7:59am
- RW Capitalist
  
  and NASA are confused as to why the, denison of the 90’s, ozone hole above the Antarctic has SHRUNK to it’s smallest size since they started measuring it.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:48am
- cmm
  
  Is crime really massively down since, say, 1960s?
  
  There’s certainly a hell of a lot more low level crime. I don’t recall burglar bars, domestic security, etc in the 1960s in South Africa, but now people have gates INSIDE their houses.
  
  When I came to NZ in 1992 there was almost no tagging except for a small amount in S Auckland. Now it is everywhere.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:48am
  - Dan
    
    Maybe it moves around, but I’ve lived in Manurewa for 30 years, and there is a lot less tagging now than there has been in the past.
    Armed hold-ups of my local dairy; well that’s another story.
    
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    November 6, 2019 3:48pm
- tf78
  
  You can tax potential doom.
  
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  November 3, 2019 10:12am
David George

Steven Pinker’s great book “Enlightenment Now” explores these themes – well worth a read.
A couple of excellent recent essays explain, in part, our propensity to see doom just over the horizon.
“Several explanations have been put forward to explain the reluctance of environmental activists and sustainable-development theorists to change their minds when confronted with contradictory evidence. Without claiming any specific knowledge of, for instance, David Attenborough’s thought processes, his writings and speeches suggest that, like many biologists, he simply cannot acknowledge the fact that humanity has reached the top of this planet’s food chain by developing unique characteristics. These include everything from the ability to exchange physical goods (and the attendant division of labour) to the ability to innovate by combining existing things in new ways, which, among other things, has allowed humans to replace resources extracted from the surface of the planet (for instance, fuelwood or wool) with resources that ultimately originated from below (for instance, plastics and dyes).

At the root of eco-pessimism, then, is always a deep-seated disillusionment with technological , economic and social progress. So faith-like is the disillusionment, so ingrained is the misanthropy, that no amount of good news can dispel them.”
https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/25/the-long-history-of-eco-pessimism/

“A favourite nostrum of many environmentalists is that you cannot have infinite growth with finite resources. But this is plain wrong, because economic growth comes from doing more with less. So if I invent a new car engine that gets twice as many miles per gallon, I’ve caused economic growth but we’ll use less fuel. Likewise if I increase the yield of a crop, I need less land and probably less fuel too. This “growth as shrinkage” happens all the time: think how much smaller mobile phones are than they once were.”
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-biodiversity-crisis/
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November 3, 2019 7:59am
- The Proper Ghandi
  
  They have a false and disjunctive view of nature and humans. In reality, this is an artificial and politically convenient distinction. There is no distinction.
  
  For instance, every factory that has ever existed is a part of and development of nature. An entrepreneur takes his reason, his work ethic and his ambition, and combines it with raw materials to create a better life for himself and others (by making a profit via satisfying consumer demand). An analogy is a beaver building a dam, or birds building their nests. They exploit and enhance the existing environment for their benefit.
  
  Everything on this planet is either an unaltered natural phenomenon, or a natural phenomenon that has been modified by another natural phenomenon (i.e humans). It is a fully self-contained system.
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:38am
mikenmildagain

Alwyn Poole has $1,500 against your $100,000 if you want to bet that all these trends will be reversed within 10 years.
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November 3, 2019 8:02am
G152

Those who once stood on street corners with their placards declaring that the world was coming to an end are still with us but with the connivance of fake news and strident children…
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November 3, 2019 8:11am
KiwiRupes

A better link here, click the image to see it larger https://datarep.tumblr.com/post/155121583798/the-world-as-100-people-over-the-last-200-years
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November 3, 2019 8:19am
Fentex

I haven’t noticed anyone complaining that any of those stats are getting worse.

The current most common worry seems to be about the stress the wealth measured there is putting on the planet.

Which pointing out how much more wealth there is does not rebut.

Besides which it’s a silly thing to complain about – that people say that they want more. The drive to want more is the very thing DPF extols when he asserts capitalism and competition is the way to encourage more, through allowing the will to work for more freedom to proceed.

And it’s a bit of a wilful misunderstanding of those folks who argue there are good things extra wealth should be put to work on.

I was recently thinking about this sort of thing when I noticed I seem to see a lot of people saying that the worlds economy doesn’t work properly and we need a new type of economics that doesn’t reward destructive exploitation (always written without any suggestion of what that might be) – it makes me think about my favourite philosophical conundrum: ‘Did we discover, or did we invent, mathematics?’.

Did we discover, or did we invent economics? If we discovered it there is no ‘different economics’ – anyone wanting to change what happens needs to work within the world we discovered.
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November 3, 2019 8:39am
The Proper Ghandi

Our prosperity and excess wealth is what allows the fools to take pseudo-moralistic stances on wide scale social issues such as the environment. Without the prosperity from which they directly benefit, they would be too busy up to their elbows in mud and shit on some farm attempting to sustain themselves. Because they live in unprecedented luxury, it affords them the opportunity to bitch about the very system that created it.
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November 3, 2019 9:29am
RW Capitalist

You don’t have to look back 100yrs.
Take my life time 1960 – Now (so far so good)
In the 60’s, in NZ, the average HOUSE HOLD did not have.
a car
a washing machine
a fridge
a microwave
holidays abroad (or even very far in NZ)
computers
a phone (land line at the time)
TV
Now we have ALL of these things and some in multiples
Imagine if we all lived as they did in the 60’s …
there would be no whining about young folks not affording a house.
Now check of all those things they didn’t have in the 60’s, that they have now……that are “necessary” to living…….really necessary.
Shit 12 year olds would have investment properties.
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November 3, 2019 9:42am
- RW Capitalist
  
  My point
  The “poor” are richer than they have ever been
  and the “rich” are more plentiful than they have ever been.
  Q: So why is Labour always trying to tear it down and around?
  
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  November 3, 2019 9:44am
  - KevO'Brien
    
    The present commie-socialist NZ regime has to tear everything down so they can take control.
    They know what’s good for us much better than we can imagine. Also it make an exciting time for them playing with other peoples’ lives.
    Never let a socialist near a washing machine it will get agitated.
    ☑️☑️
    
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    November 3, 2019 4:32pm
emmess

So we are not all going to die in 11 years?
How dare you?
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November 3, 2019 11:07am
Greg Ettridge

I told a little story of our great great grandmother to my grandchildren who think life is tougher today than it was in past generations.
Evelyne is our Teresa of Avila, my great great grandmother.
She was born eldest to a sheperd and his wife in 1869 near Port Lincoln in South Australia.
By 1883, her third sister had been born along four brothers.
The wheels fell off the family and her mother left to go housekeeping in Adelaide. She went onto have three children to her new employee.
The four youngest ended up in a Industrial school despite Evelynes best efforts.
Evelyne at 15, was looking after her 7 siblings, at 17 housekeeping for my Great Great grandfather.
His wife had died and left 6 children motherless.
By 19, she had her first child to him, went on to have 6 children and die at just 28 years old.
I guess this may still occur today somewhere in the world, but not sure it does.
My Grandfather went on to have two children,
became an incredibly successful business man after being raised by his half sister when Evelyne died when he was just 4 years old.
His two children in turn had three.
I am totally unconvinced that there is anyone walking around in NZ or Australia, that have had a harder life than Evelyne and her siblings.
There is opportunity out of adversity, my grandfather proved this beyond doubt.
No good grizzling about how bad things are, get out and do something about it.
Incidentially, today Port Lincoln has the highest number of millionaires per capita in Australia.
There was thousands and thousands of Evelyne’s.
Today is a much different poverty, much easier to pull ones self out of poverty today compared with 150 years ago.
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November 3, 2019 12:28pm
farbeyond

Is anybody else amazed by the 14/100 not vaccinating? I would like to believe this is because a lack of access… But… I fear otherwise.
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November 3, 2019 9:20pm

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