Mr Eslake,
I searched through the statistics to try to find out how our economy was serving the people of Tasmania.  How much healthier are we?  How adequate is our housing?  Is our food becoming more nutritious and is everyone getting enough?  How well are we served by public and private transport?  Are our medical services of sufficient quality and available to all? Is our natural environment beautiful?  Is our natural capital being preserved as much as is possible?  Are we protecting our wildlife?

I couldn’t find any answers to these fundamental economic questions in your document.  Instead what I found was repeated references to extremely controversial methods of measurement.

For example, you refer to ‘productivity’ yet again.  Many economists find the simplistic definition that you use as extremely unhelpful as a tool in ascertaining economic performance.

‘Productivity’ when defined as simply a measure of output in industry per unit of labour (as you do) doesn’t appear to make any sense.  It would be inevitable to ask why any entity that uses such a term as a measure of things - be they a person, corporation or government - if they are, in fact, displaying strong sociopathic tendencies. 

Because the definition of productivity is devoid of any reference to ethics, morality, social welfare and environmental sustainability.

I note our new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, suffers from the same fondness for more output per unit of labour.

A demand for ever-increasing ‘productity’ would result in the following:

Native forests would be ripped out of the ground as fast as is possible.  Without any reference to the rate of nature’s replacement for those trees.  This would result in the permanent loss of biodiversity.  Does this sound familiar?

A ‘productive’ farmer would move from natural methods of pest control (avoidance of large monocultures, hygiene in fruit orchards, companion planting etc) to the use of toxic industrial pesticides.  The seeking of ever-increasing ‘productivity’ would drive him to go from ground spraying operations to aerial spray operations where he knows his community would be poisoned.  Does this sound familiar?

Moreover, if workers were to seriously adopt ever increasing ‘productivity’ in industry they would be cutting their own throats.  To clarify this point I refer to a reference to Professor James Meade’s book ‘Efficiency, Equality and the Ownership of Property’ :

  “..he is arguing that in an advanced industrial society the rising stock of capital and technical innovation will steadily raise output per worker. But the main factor determining real wages is not average production per head, but marginal production - the amount you get by employing one extra man. And if this marginal addition is low, as it will be when average output is already very high, then wages paid will no longer from a large proportion of total output, or of total income. They will shrink, and the remainder, which goes effectively to property owners in the form of profits or rent, will rise. And this where the continued sharp inequality in the ownership of wealth assumes its real force….the system will tilt further and further in the direction of the wealthy minority.”

‘Ever increasing output per unit of labour’ A small part of the ideology of our single ideology state. 

“Human well-being is the *goal*, not a *side effect*, of social and economic life. This seems to be common sense. But few economists can subtract: no consensus exists on how to account for harms done to man or world, or to human potential discarded. How do we get beyond ‘wealth’ to understand ‘value’?” Craig Hubley

Give it up Brenda, you’re worse than a broken record.

Care to address any of the issues Brenda raises, ACIWTB?  No?
Didn’t think so.

Brenda,

Presumably dead babies would be an acceptable metric for the benefit of economic progress?

Taking the ‘evil’ CIA factbook which has easy to access statistics, you can run your ruler over the GDP per capita vs infant mortality stats.

In log terms, a 10% increase in GDP per capita will reduce infant mortality (per thousand live births) by approximately 7%.

While there are outliers such as Equatorial Guinea (which shows distribution matters) the relationship is absolutely clear.

The reasoning should be obvious, if our factory and farm workers are more productive, overall, privately or publically, we can afford to employ more teachers and health workers.

I recently read a comment on TT slamming into ‘activists and protestors’, saying they are just a nuisance.

It is very fortunate for the world that they exist, and despite the annoyances to the people in authority, they are the only controlling factor we have. Without them, the world would already be totally in the hands of corporate ownership. They are the thorn in the flesh that draws attention to the ravages of the environment by these corporations that are driven purely by greed and a desire for greater and greater profits.

For instance, without these activist, we would have had the Franklin River dammed and the forests which are now World Heritage would have been logged. Without the action of these dedicated people, the world would have been the poorer.

It must also be remembered, that these people act not out of a motive of profit, but out of a deep conviction of concern for what they are trying to protect. They have not got the finance or influence of these large corporations, and are frequently in danger of incurring penalties from both the authorities and the the corporations themselves. Their activism is a selfless act and is generally done for the benefit of society as a whole, so it ill behoves anybody to level criticism against these people. Quite often it is done knowing the full risks to themselves, and they carry out actions that authorites, who are supposed to be acting for the public refuse, or are paid not to do by these corporations.

When something like this is pointed out, then people should be grateful that somebody still cares and is prepared to stick their head out of the throng and risk official opprobrium on their behalf. It demands encouragement, not censure, and the critics should be aware that their actions are only an encouragement towards the further destruction of our planet by corporations and governments who don’t give a stuff about the effects and the misery they cause, provided their profits remain high.

This is the current face of Tasmania, and I for one, would thank people like Brenda Rosser for trying to draw some of these corporate shortcomings to our attention.

Brenda is certainly entitled to her view, although I think we are well aware of what that is by now, such that I think I could write her responses to anything Mr Eslake writes. I think that it is time to move beyond primitive ideas of capitalism and look forward to the potential gains that will come from broadened development and the opportunities that may arise in Tasmania as well as other parts of the world. Technological innovation and improved capacity for manufacturing has lifted many countries out of a largely third world status. The issue for us in Tasmania is where we see our place in a progressively more globalized, interconnected and competitive world. If we don’t, then we may find that other States may get a bit weary in subsidizing our standard of living. I am perhaps a tad more pessimistic about Tasmania’s potential into the future as this current Government has demonstrated little interest in fostering more technologically advanced industries (with some notable exceptions - eg InCat, Roaring 40’s, some aquaculture groups), so we will likely be behind the eight ball if mining and forestry go off the boil. Our low base of educational attainment and rapidly ageing population is also going to hold us back.

The only shortcoming that Gerry M has mentioned in relationship to corporations is that we have too few either based here or interested in investing here in other than primary industries.

Now I wait for the rejoinders indicating that we can sustain our quality of living and jobs for future generations by either stopping the pulp mill, halting forestry and/or encouraging hordes of tourists to tramp around our national parks while selling them huon pine knick knacks that we have constructed in our backyard workshops. Yawn.

6: Yawn, fair comment Tomas, but unless we move on from being obsessed with things like pulp mills how the hell is this little island ever going to get anywhere? Tasmania has a lot to offer and could be a beacon but somethings going to have to change!

Brenda,

I am afraid that the questions that you have posed in response to the Saul Eslake article do not all support the point that I think you are trying to make.

Tasmanians are getting healthier over time, this is demonstrated through our rising life expectancy.

There is some housing stress at the bottom of the income distribution, however show me an advanced society that doesn’t have some level of housing stress.  It should be remembered that home ownership levels are very high in Tasmania and the rest of the nation (in world terms).  This is the “housing settlement” that we have in this nation of home owners.

Tasmanians have plenty of healthy food options and there is certainly no evidence of widespread malnutrition.

We are served just fine by private transport with a decent road network, especially for the size of our population.  I take the point that public transport is patchy but we are a sparsely populated island.

Medical services are definitely available to all.  If you have a medical emergency then you will be able to get access to a high standard of treatment and care, there is a strong network of GP’s and we have a high number of hospitals for our population. With regard to non-life threatening matters there can be a wait but I would call on you to identify any nation that has delivered a health system where there isn’t a need to prioritise.

I would rate our natural environment as extraordinarily beautiful.  There is a high proportion of world heritage and national parks, our air is clean and most of our waterways are likewise.  Again, in world terms we rate pretty highly.

Tasmania is protecting its wildlife and authorities generally go to extraoridnary lenghts to preserve threatened or endangered species.

The presentation from Saul did rightly identify the poor record of Tasmania with regard to education outcomes.  This is clearly an economic (and social) indicator that requires significant attention now and into the future.

If you were to criticise the presentatiuon from Saul Eslake it would be around his lack of equity data in the slide show.  For example, he could have shown how Tasmania is performing with regard to wealth distribution as shown by the GINI coefficient.  I believe that economists and especially policymakers do have a responsibility to ensure that economic growth is not achieved at the expense of equity.

Economic growth does generally go hand in hand with improvements in the standard of living.  Productivity is an appropriate measure to use so long as it does not become the overriding focus at the expense of other indicators.  I don’t want to live in a state that is going backwards economically as this will encourage a flight of both people and capital.  I hope that this isn’t the type of state that you are advocating.

I appreciate Daniel J’s observations in #8. And it’s a fair point he makes that there is no analysis of equity issues in the presentation I gave to the Economics Society forum. That was partly dictated by the theme of the forum itself, and partly the result of the fact that I had spoken about a range of social and equity issues to a meeting of Tasmanian Centrelink leaders the day before (although that was a closed session).

I agree completely with Daniel that “policymakers have a responsibility to ensure that economic growth is not achieved at the expense of equity” - although equity is a very subjective concept and means different things to different people.

I have written and spoken about equity issues in Tasmania on other occasions, for example my talk to TasCoss in October 2005 which can be found on Tas Times here http://www.tasmaniantimes.com/downloads/pearce.pdf with slides here http://www.tasmaniantimes.com/downloads/pearce-slides.pdf.

I have some sympathy with “Gerry Mander”‘s views on the role played by activists, having myself played a very minor role in opposing the construction of the Gordon-below-Franklin dam in the early 1980s.

I’m not sure that Ms Rosser’s persistence in Googling for barely relevant quotes on the Internet, trying to initiate semantic debates over fine points of definition, and calling people whose perspectives are different from hers ‘sociopathic’ or (as she has done on another occasion) ‘autistic’, does much to advance the causes she identifies with. But it’s a free country, still, and thank goodness for that.

Daniel J, you do not appear to take into account the negative effects of our ‘private transport with a decent road network.’  Low population density is not an issue in our cities, yet public transport there is poor and there is no real incentive for people to stop using private motor vehicles with one person per vehicle.

I would agree with you that ‘economic growth should not be achieved at the expense of equity’ but surely neither should it be achieved at the expense of the environment.

No responsible economic survey can ignore the imminent threat to our economic future posed by our lack of adequate auditing and budgeting of water supply.  Nor can it ignore the consequences of pretending that global warming will just go away.

To compare Tasmania with other parts of the world in such matters as housing affordability and public health is to miss the point that with our advantages we should be doing much better.  Government priorities (State and Federal) can be adjusted so as to improve these aspects of the quality of life of all Tasmanians without negatively impacting on other aspects.

As for your final point, the real issue is where that capital is invested and how those people are living.  Productivity per se is nowhere near as important as what is being produced, who is controlling the production and who is benefiting from it.

Daniel,
Having lived here for the last 25 odd years I can see that public transport and rail have declined, as have the number of medical services available ... perhaps over the last decade. Many small schools have closed, rural towns are shrinking, electrical and telephone infrastructure has all but disappeared from the plantation hinterland. I have seen one wage survival become two wages and five 7.5 hour days become 12 hour shifts, weekends disappear and support for mental health vanish into the housing and prison crises. Have you tried a public dentist? The forests near me have disappeared, the saw mills with them, our eagles, ring-tails, finches and devils are in decline. Despite enormous volumes of information we still cannot expect our regulatory systems to do the right thing with water, sprays… or land use and energy planning. I must admit that the explosion of Pitt St farming has led to an increase in weeds. The rates have risen and the services further concentrated to within 10km of the council chambers.

I suspect I could go on, but dont have the statistics to back it up - not that your statistics necessarily have relevance to people outside the capitals.

I wonder if these losses are subtracted from productivity to give us a real idea of how wealthy we have become…

Estlake still has not addressed the issue of infinite growth in a finite planet.

He hasn’t mentioned the consequences of trading in invented products for the sake of economic activity (ie the chance to be the winner of unequal exchange.)

He hasn’t addressed the fact that our current financial chaos is the result of financial institutions regulating themselves - then passing on the costs as interest rates. Costs that are multiplied by the number of derivatives they have invented to trade, costs incurred when they don’t trust each other enough and stop buying “paper”.

We could just shorten the working week with our gains in productivity… totally non-inflationary. We get to save effort and improve the quality of our lives, without an extra cent being printed (and creamed off for speculation on Credit Default Swaps).

There are a lot of things he doesn’t ever mention, not just equity statistics.

Alex Wadsley writes:  “Taking the ‘evil’ CIA factbook which has easy to access statistics, you can run your ruler over the GDP per capita vs infant mortality stats.  In log terms, a 10% increase in GDP per capita will reduce infant mortality (per thousand live births) by approximately 7%. While there are outliers such as Equatorial Guinea (which shows distribution matters) the relationship is absolutely clear.”

Where are your references, Mr Wadsley?  Let’s look at US GDP versus GDP in Nigeria and Ecuador. From 1964 - 1994 the Texaco oil company drilled for oil in Ecuador.  To save money they dumped the associated toxic water straight into rainforests instead of pumping it well below ground.  The indigenous people now live in cancer zones.  In Nigeria the oil fields that Shell drills in are in the areas of the highest population density - the Niger Delta.  It, like Ecuador, is heavily polluted as a result.  Interestingly, although these nations have been oil rich, the people in them suffer from extreme poverty.

We can see that the multinational corporations exploitation results in higher GDP for Western Nations and lower ones in these oil-rich countries along with a much higher death rate in the latter associated with the activities of the oil corporations.  So a mere examination of relative GDP figures amongst nations does not provide the actual reason for the higher infant mortality.

To understand human well being we need to examine how and what goods are produced, the state of the environment,how income is distributed, as well as lifestyle and service provision.  Measures of relative GDP are not enlightening because powerful nations often raise their GDP at the expense of less powerful ones and (as stated above) GDP income does not provide the reason for higher mortality; despite your opposing assertion.

As another example, you may find it interesting to compare the health and mortality statistics for Cuba versus the US and Canada at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/gailontheweb/341860281/

By the way, Cuba’s health and economy minister no longer accepts a measurement of GDP as appropriate for that nation’s economic performance.  ‘‘Health and education are included if they come with a price, but not if they are provided free,’’ he says.

Tomas said: “Now I wait for the rejoinders indicating that we can sustain our quality of living and jobs for future generations by either stopping the pulp mill, halting forestry and/or encouraging hordes of tourists to tramp around our national parks while selling them huon pine knick knacks that we have constructed in our backyard workshops. Yawn.”

What ‘quality of living’ are you referring to Tomas? Or are you really talking about a set of social priorities imposed on us by a relative handful of rich and powerful people?  20th Century consumer culture; living on impulse. Plundering for ease and convenience, with dire consequences.

That awful tomorrow, that day that so many warned about for decades, is now here.  Polluted air, soil and water.  Environmental illness. Absolutely vast tracks of destroyed native forest. Climate change, massive species extinction. Peak oil. Peak water. Peak food. Peak minerals.

Yet, despite the urgency, Tasmanians are still largely oblivious to these present and immanent catastrophes. We can thank a corporate duopoly media that has vulgarised and brutalised our culture for that.  Tasmanians are still working in largely meaningless jobs that are well outside the circle of life. Spending long hours behind a counter in large corporate mega-chain stores such as the likes of Bunnings or MacDonalds.

Think outside the isolation ward of neoliberal economics, Tomas.  We can avoid annihilation if our future is shaped by the work, care and love we give to the planet and the collective of peoples’ effort that sustains us. Not in current jobs and lifestyles that entail senseless and frightening risks to our biosphere. 

Think about it.  How did we manage to feed, clothe, house and entertain ourselves before the days of the giant multinational corporation?  Before unceasing, ubiquitous advertising?  Before cheap oil?

“Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they want.”—John Kenneth Galbraith

Many people try leaving Cuba for the U.S.A but not THAT many Pro rata and those that do generally do so in the hope of earning more income in order to send home or eventually return to set themselves up in some enterprise or another .
   
    One has to ponder that for a country so poor ,why the longevity of life ?  it is known that medical facilities and access are free, it is known that the doctors are very good and proficient so why have they not sought greener pastures ?
   
  The Bias over the many years against Castro and in the main orchestrated by the U.S.A is a result of a country who in general, love Castro and his leadership in spite of the many sanctions over many years.
 
    Also i’d love to get my hands on some of those cars !
                d.d.

(14)
    OK! SO THE LAST SENTENCE WAS A BIT (F——D UP)
BLAME THE DRUGS I,M ON AT PRESENT , BUT YOU GET THE GIST !
          D,D,