Posts by Tze Ming Mok
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Speaker: Identification strategy: Now…, in reply to Russell Brown,
The distant panicky noises I hear suggest to me they’re not as well prepared as they would be if they’d planned it this way.
Which is worse, conspiracy or incompetence? I mean, in my post, I concluded the former. The latter still is pretty painful though.
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Speaker: Identification strategy: Now…, in reply to BenWilson,
After some discussion with my house-loving dad in Roskill, I think that as long as the National Party stonewalls on bringing in data collection on foreign ownership (to avoid political problems with the PRC); the Labour Party will go to even more ridiculous lengths to try to put a number on foreign PRCs owning houses – and the local Chinese population is going to always get stuck in the middle of their flawed calculations.
I totally admit that there *might* be no difference in cultural behaviour and propensity towards house-buying among different ethnic groups; but no-one has bothered to find out if this is the case. If we want to figure out the impact of foreign PRC buyers - or more to the point, foreign anyone buyers - on the housing market without the straight up government data, you should probably just do a large-scale sample survey on house buying with a lot of ethnic minority oversampling. Then you could actually have a baseline from which to say that ‘local Chinese buy X%, local Indians buy Y%, local white people buy etc etc etc’ (amazing, ASKING PEOPLE whether they bought a house recently, revolutionary approach I know), and THEN I suppose you could compare the percentages from your slightly dubious ‘name provenance’ analysis, (BUT this still can’t accurately show the extent to which we are talking about PRC buyers, but in this case it would be ‘likely’ Chinese buyers from countries other than China, such as Taiwan, Singapore and, horror of horrors, white countries too, who would be tarred with the ‘crazy PRC money’ brush). Costs money to do a survey though. But then, how much this just cost the Labour party in Chinese donors? Like I said, I suppose they did the numbers.
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Oh yeah, and here's the last chunk of my submitted post that Russell probably cut for brevity, so that everyone could start doing the Frequentist vs Bayesian debate (personally, I LOVE that I've kicked off a thread that has descended into a Frequentist vs Bayesian debate):
Man, for Chinese immigrants in the West, buying houses is almost on a par culturally with food. It’s like you’re giving us shit for eating.
With Phil Twyford lying in a bloody puddle somewhere, my stats rage is somewhat cooler. But my old friend race rage is creeping back. It doesn’t matter if 90% of those ‘Chinese sounding names’ really are PRC hot-money investors; for the rest of us under suspicion of being foreign, we know Labour was ready to throw us under the bus.
The Labour study is one of those bits of analysis that comes together because no other data is available to answer the question you really want answered; and is convenient simply because – and this is very important – Chinese people are identifiable.
If your identification strategy for locating the cause of the housing bubble boils down to ‘What minority group can we effectively single out because of their weird names?’, this is NOT SOMETHING YOU SHOULD EVER ADMIT. Not only does it make the Labour Party sound inherently racist and not to be trusted, it makes social science sound inherently racist and not to be trusted. In a perfect world, I’d be able to love them both unconditionally, and stats rage and race rage would not be a problem.
I can’t actually remember the last time that this much effort has been put by any political party into singling out Chinese people (as opposed to ‘Asians’) for their probability of being ‘foreign’.
And if Labour put this much effort into programming an algorithm to identify us, I wonder if it also estimated how many New Zealand Chinese votes this study would cost them.
The real question is not ‘oh, ha ha this doesn’t look like a very reliable method for guessing whether someone is Chinese.’ (It probably is). It is not ‘could local Chinese possibly be buying all of these houses?’ (It is possible, but not very likely).
The real question is what did the Labour Party think it was doing taking this public. If they just fucked up, so far so familiar. If they did this on purpose for well-calculated reasons – and it works – we Chinese-sounding named people are in way more trouble in New Zealand than we ever thought we would be again.
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OnPoint: My last name sounds Chinese, in reply to Tim Darlington,
Yeah no. I'm pretty confident that the 'Chinese sounding names' are actual Chinese names; their technique may be the most credible bit of their methodology. The names on the top most part of the list are clearly Mainland Chinese surnames using PRC-standardised spellings, while lower down you have the non-PRC Chinese spellings. It's just the extrapolation to residency status that is moronic, as Keith notes above.
And, no, I don't know any Southeast Asians who would think Ng is a Vietnamese name. It's a very common Cantonese Chinese name. Maybe you are thinking of Nguyen, which is the most common Vietnamese surname.
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What the actual fuck. Unbelievable, if not only for forgetting about that other stereotype about Chinese people being good at maths. FATAL ERROR.
On the upside, this is a great excuse for telling the Labour Party to stop spamming me with petition emails.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Goff has been Roskill's MP since time began (barring those weird few years with Gilbert Myles) and he's to the right of the Labour Party.
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Hard News: The sole party of government, in reply to Bart Janssen,
Not sure which bit of the screen you are looking at there, but to me it looks like the. Nat party vote in Roskill actually decreased on 2011. Same pattern in Mt Albert.
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From out here, with Key looking ahead to a fourth term and the whole National campaign being based seemingly on promises to do as little as possible while invoking the name of Aunty Helen (not, if I recall correctly, a National Prime Minster), they are at least going to stick to the rhetoric of the centre if not the substance. I expect slow erosion and piecemeal sops like PPPs for muesli bars in schools.
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I was surprised to be deprived even of the schadenfreude of National being forced to deal with Winston.
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I remember this case working its way through the Human Rights Review Tribunal way back when I worked for the HRC, with the Crown Law reps cock-blocking all the way. Mad bitchfacing action. And that was under Labour. I seem to recall (happy to stand corrected) that they threatened even then to just bypass the Tribunal result with legislation. So much for our democratic recall. Fuck this fucking bullshit.