Posts by Katharine Moody
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
But choices about how much stock to run is down to individual farmers, isn’t it? Fonterra don’t get to decide, do they?
Sure it is but read this;
and then this;
http://www.agprodecon.org/node/29
In particular, noting commentary from here downwards;
Some farm sales are more in the nature of an exchange of property between the same bank’s clients. The result is the bank finances a new owner with higher equity and just recovers its exposure while the vendor is effectively wiped out. An argument could be made that such sales do not reflect a true market price.
Rumour again suggests Rabobank tried to sell farms with excessive debt and abandoned the exercise. That is soon going to create problems. What happens if we project the high debt tritile group of dairy farms out 3, 5, or 10 years?
Why you must ask, are Fonterra and those other ptb mentioned above, so resistant of the "marginal cow" analysis? Why, pray tell, would not profit maximisation be the first and foremost thing that they should be most concerned about for society?
And did the Fonterra chaps comments focus at all on rebuttal of the economic science associated with the marginal cow analysis? Nope, not in my reading anyway.And having read those final few paragraphs in the second link - Google "accumulation by dispossession" - the wiki entry pretty much sums it up.
As to answering how the analysis is virtue ethics in nature - will have to leave it for a later post - as gotta head off now.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
Hi Ben, the best example I've seen of an economic analysis that to me seems to be grounded in Aristotelian virtue ethics (i.e., a scientific/mathematical analysis aiming for the 'golden mean' .. that being the midpoint between excess and deficiency) can be found in the "marginal cow" economic analysis (with a bit of work I believe one could also apply such an analysis for the whole of the country, that is for NZ Inc.). Google "marginal cow".
And then note this (and previous) governments (and Fonterra and the financial institutions) policy/objective (i.e., the social or moral choice they have made for society at large) to entirely ignore such an analysis in favour of increasing production (and debt) regardless of what the marginal cow theory tells us.
Why? Apply a Marxian analysis to the choices made/actions of these elite (corporate and politico) classes... and (for me anyway) David Harvey's accumulation by dispossession theory looks pretty spot on.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
Try popping the other hat on for a sec and tell me how it could be made more scientific…I’d be interested to see what you can come up with.
This to me is a bit of the problem with our general view of economics - it is not a 'science' in the sense of Bacon's scientific method. Makhlouf recently gave a speech worth reading;
http://www.treasury.govt.nz/publications/media-speeches/speeches/economics
He uses a phrase borrowed from Keynes which describes economics as a 'moral science'. We have lost sight of this in terms of economics education in my opinion. I've looked at the various uni offerings in economics degrees - and none that I've seen yet require the philosophy of ethics as part of the core papers. In fact you have to hunt down ethics as a subject - and it seems to be totally divorced from the business/economics and/or public policy schools.
What I find in practice is that all the economic analyses I read as part of my work are based on only one 'school' of ethical thought, that being teleological/consequentialism. So, if economists generally don't know of any other moral framework under which to ask questions and seek answers - then it's no wonder economic modelling fails us so often.
Many economists I've spoken to see their questions as fundamentally how to deal with scarce resources. Had they understood other schools of moral thought (say, Aristotelian virtue ethics), their theory and tools would instead have been developed to discover the midpoint between excess and deficiency, rather than the highest value use.
My point is, forget the Baconian method where economics is concerned - that type of 'experimentation' seems to me precisely what Milton Freidman had a go at with Chile.
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Speaker: Inequality: Too big to ignore, in reply to BenWilson,
Which leads to that horrid neck of the woods that sees economics in terms of class struggle rather than assuming that those in control of it actually even want equality, or see it as a good at all.
Why is that a horrid neck of the woods, if it is what it is, better to acknowledge it and understand it - it's your classic Marxian / political economy sort of analysis. They tend (IMO) to be the ones I like to read. David Harvey is a favourite. He coined the term 'accumulation by dispossession' as a means to describe our 21st century brand of class struggle. He's not an economist, rather a political geographer/historian.
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Sacha,
Lorde should win the WOTY, even if only because I’m tired of the corrosive base nastiness of #dirtypolitics.
'Frozen' was much bigger :-).
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Hard News: Public Address Word of the…, in reply to Alec Morgan,
Also referred to as, [bleep] John Key.
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Obfuscation
So common - we don't even recognise it as such anymore.
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Glove-puppets
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I’m not sure what the recommendation here is. Is it, vote ‘no’ in the referendum (regardless of what might be the merits of the proposal), or don’t exercise a vote at all (that is, abstain)?
If one agrees in principle that the legislation itself is bad – then I’d assume the best thing to do would be to participate in the referendum by casting a ‘no’ vote – as that has a better chance of thwarting the intent of the legislation (the intent of the legislation being to improve the chances of amalgamation by allowing for a tyranny of the region-wide majority type scenario).
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Hard News: Dirty Politics, in reply to Joe Wylie,
Thanks, yet it essentially says to me that Key's abhorrent "in honour of..." statement is far, far worse.