Posts by BenWilson
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Up Front: Well, Read Women, in reply to B Jones,
and David Eddings
Which turned out, in hindsight, to have a huge contribution from Leigh Eddings.
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I was at least 20 before I realized Tove Jansson was a woman. I always imagined Tove was more like Moominpapa than Moominmama, that Moominpapa was self-parody. Maybe he still is.
Although reading Jackie Collins, or Shirley Conran, or any of those similar airport bonkbusters at a young age certainly broadens one’s horizons
I found them hard going. Much harder than more cerebral works - it goes to what you fantasize about. I don't fantasize in that way. But when broadening horizons, one must often work at tasks that are not to one's liking :-)
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A few more rising in memory as I sink into sleep.
Hilda Lewis
Rosemary Sutcliff
Jackie Collins (softcore porn by women seems very different to male versions)
Fanny Hill and Xaviera Hollander (hardcore porn, however, is all the same. I'm guessing they write to their mostly male audience)
Simone de Beauvoir (but women write hell and gone the best actual analysis of porn, and sexuality generally. IMHO) -
Early childhood trash I couldn't put down - Enid Blyton. Just in case you thought women couldn't write sexist racist homophobic stuff (most of which I can't say I noticed). No better or worse than similar period children's fiction.
But as tastes developed I've tapped many more, especially in speculative fiction. Many already mentioned, so I'll just fill a few gaps, covering several genre and age levels.
Tessa Duder
Keri Hulme
Judy Blume
Susan Cooper
Leigh Eddings (equally to blame for the invention of Polgara. I read all 13 of them)
Agatha Christie
Mary ShellyCan't say that my reading of female authors ever scored me anything by way of sex. But that wasn't my reason to read them anyway. I read if I like the story.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
It’s a bit chicken and egg, but it’s how it is.
Yup, I've always found it a bit superfluous to seek supply/demand reasons for things. It's a lot like evolutionary arguments - you can always invent one. Fact is, there's seasonal variation for whatever reason. It should be adjusted for in a better analysis.
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to steve black,
But no, I don’t put (much) of my own money into research to do something about it.
Sorry, when I asked "how are you going to fight that?" I didn't mean you personally. By "you" I meant "one". But it feels like such a pompous form of address that I don't use it much.
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to steve black,
Yes, we don’t know which one it is. I personally think it is more likely to be the latter, watching and withholding. I can’t prove it, though – it’s a conspiracy theory. The other way requires me to believe that incredibly smart people are incredibly stupid. I find a conspiracy of silence easier to believe. That could manifest in a deliberate policy to discourage research*, should any bright sparks notice the elephant braying loudly in the corner of the room, but that’s all part of the conspiracy, really.
*ETA which means there's a bit of "not watching" in there. But it's deliberately not watching, which makes it more like watching and withholding than not-watching. Watching and withholding anyone from looking.
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OnPoint: Don't put words in our mouths, Rob, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
then thought the following observation would be less biased if I didn’t look it up
Good on you. So it's like a hypothesis.
However, if investor interest is steady over winter, but the supply of houses for sale is less, then supply<demand means that prices will increase.
But if prices increase then suppliers would probably opt to sell in winter, increasing supply, and dropping prices. They choose spring and summer on advice that the best prices are usually obtained then. So it's kind of hard to reason this thing out from first principles. Only data will actually answer the question of apparent seasonality.
I'd expect it to be real, and statistically significant. But I'd be pretty damned surprised if it went so far as to increase one particular group's contribution by enough to explain a four-fold discrepancy in apparent ethnic distribution. Well worth exploring, though.
Ultimately, all the focus on name-analysis, or overseas-buyer registers, hides the fact that local investors also put home buying out of reach.
Absolutely. Both are problems. But I do think that the potential ability to influence prices is several orders of magnitude greater in the pool of buyers that outnumbers the population of NZ investers by perhaps a thousand-fold. The absolute most that local investors could drive prices up by is ... all the money that those investors can get their hands on. The absolute most that the rest of investors could drive prices up by is ... all the rest of the money in the whole world. One of those sums is probably best measured in billions. The other sum is most conveniently measured in trillions.
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Polity: A week on from the housing controversy, in reply to steve black,
What I proposed is simple in concept, but in no way easy to undertake.
Therein lies the rub, I think. When high quality information is difficult/costly to get, people make do with low quality. That's not something we have a choice about, really. The alternative is analysis paralysis in most cases, and it's simply false to consider this the default position for humans. Not acting is still a choice, and it is very often the wrong choice. Of course a very sensible course of action is to work out what data is needed to make better choices.
This becomes even more complicated when there are parties that have a definite interest in the public not getting such data. It's quite scary to think that the most powerful people this country could have a policy of deliberate ignorance about such an important issue as where the money going into the largest asset class comes from. How are you going to fight that? Spend your own money and time on extremely expensive analysis, just to prove something that is almost bleeding obvious, but not officially provable?
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@ David Hood
I don’t know the exact wording of their official mandate, but it seems to me that house prices and the possible collapse thereof are pretty fundamental aspects of the security of the banking system. At the very least, I’d expect them to be attempting to predict the chances, to the limit of their abilities.
But then that’s just me expecting people to think outside of the tiny box that they might have been put inside, both by others, and by themselves and the dominant economic ideology that probably forms the basis of even getting a job there. I had an impression that outside-of-official-mandate thinking was at least allowed when they began looking at the low equity ratios. It seemed to me that the GFC was a self-teachable moment. But as moar-austerity seems to have dominated at least the European orthodoxy, perhaps that moment has passed, and we can expect our bureaucrats to be completely blindsided by changing conditions, leaving it to people whose job it isn’t to try to make sense of the whole mess on their behalf. People like you, for instance.
Perhaps a better way of putting this: If it’s not the Reserve Bank’s official duty, then whose official duty is it to know what is happening with by far the biggest asset class in this country? Is it really no one at all? Are we really happy to just walk this path in total official blindness to the changing nature of our economic situation?
I hardly think it’s something we can expect the main private gatekeeper to the knowledge to be forthcoming with. It’s not in the interests of real estate agencies at all to allow any of this information to be freely available. Quite the opposite, it seems to me that it’s information that they quite deliberately would not want the general public knowing, even if they do know it themselves. Because if it is true that this is a boom or a bubble, they will want to make as much as possible out of it. They have strong interests that no measures be taken to slow the boom or prick the bubble because that’s all easy profit taken straight out of their bottom line.
ETA: And quite aside from any sinister motives, it's "their data" and private organisations seldom give that sort of thing away, just on principle. It's part of their competitve edge to have more information than their competitors.
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