Surprise Santa – “Say no to naff”

This Christmas don’t go to the $2 shop or other purveyors of useless plastic objects to buy something for a colleague, friend or family.

Go it alone or club together and get something meaningful – “Say no to naff”.

Buy polio vaccinations for third-world children, books, colour pencils or water purification tablets instead of some piece of junk that everyone will think is funny at the time, but will end up in the bin come the New Year.

The “Say no to naff” campaign is the brain child of Unicef (the UN’s children’s aid agency). It aims to reduce “the amount of naff and unwanted Christmas gifts that we all receive every year, but that no-one appreciates.

“Instead, why not get a gift that will be appreciated by your loved one as well as by kids in developing countries, the kids that have nothing much at all.”

Prices range from $10 for a mosquito net to $703 for a water pump.

It’s only the third year Unicef has run its alternative Christmas gift giving campaign, but it looks to be really hitting its straps this festive season.

Naff said. Do your bit.

HT: StopPress

The economy dragging its sorry butt along a “false flat”

Cycling has a great term to describe how your eye can fool you about the gradient of a section of road, meaning you are working hard, but you’re not going as fast as you think you should.

It’s called a “false flat”. That is, it’s the flat you’re on when you’re not on a flat, probably a gradient of just 1 or 2 percent.

And it looks like the NZ economy is stuck in one of these dispiriting stretches at the moment with flukey side winds thrown in to really piss you off.

The “false flats” I can think of, for example the straight into Havelock on the Marlborough Graperide, often happen after a down hill – the bike’s momentum just dies when you’re thinking you should be cruising.

But the economy’s one has come after a bugger of a climb – it’s crested the hill and a flat ride into the distance beckons and maybe a downhill around the corner.

Oh happy days.

Except not. We’re going faster than before, but not as fast as we think we should be. And as on the bike, you think you’re in the wrong gear, or there’s a been an equipment failure (eg. brakes rubbing).

And all around you, everyone is getting shitty.

I’m picking the “false flat” our economy is part of the international topography. Maybe the bike could be tweaked to go a little bit faster, perhaps we should have taken on more fluids or eaten that energy bar earlier, but basically we are a shit bit of road.

Australia’s in the same spot.

There, business conditions dropped to their lowest level in more than a year in October, which the Sydney Morning Herald says suggests the Australia’s economic activity is faltering.

The National Australia Bank business conditions index dropped to 2 in October from 7 in September, well below the long-term average of 6. It was the lowest monthly level since July 2009, when business activity was still recovering from the impact of the global financial crisis.

The profitability index dropped to -4 from 6, going into negative territory for the first time in more than two years as prices weakened.

The trading index dropped from 13 to 4 over the same period, NAB said, while retail conditions trended down for the first time since September 1997.

NAB business confidence also slid to 8 in October from 10 in September, while remaining well above the levels seen during the financial crisis.

The results of NAB’s October survey were taken before the Reserve Bank surprised the market by lifting the official rate to 4.75 per cent from 4.5 per cent in November.

What if greenies are right? (part 2) Why Mad Max gets in way of seeing the future

What would a future in which we changed our ways and didn’t trash the planet look like?

How about a 1960s lifestyle where we consumed less but had computers and the benefits of clean technology? But it’s hard to get a handle on how this, or alternative liveable futures, would look.

In part this is because the world’s filmmakers have been totally crap at depicting desirable and believable future worlds.

They’ve favoured dystopian (ie repressive ugly worlds) a la Mad Max and my old fav Blade Runner, rather than anything approaching utopian, or if utopian then it’s only on the surface, hiding an ugly truth lurking below (eg. Logan’s Run when life is all fun and games till you turn 30 then…).

And it’s when you start thinking about what the future should look like that Tim Jackson’s ideas, at least for BigCake, start to come unstuck.

Re-reading my last post on Jackson, I think the guts of the parting of ways is in Jackson’s portrayal of mankind’s choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.

Is it an either or? Or is it I’m in some form of denial about what needs to be done, like an alcoholic who realises they have a problem with drink, but figures they can manage it?

For sure we are in danger of trashing the planet. But do we need to trash the system to stop this happening?

Not convinced.

We need to do more (a hell of a lot more) to save our beloved planet, but Jackson’s argument reminds me a lot of the old expanders versus restrainers argument.

UK Guardian correspondent George Monbiot sees climate change as the first great battle (a battle to “redefine humanity”) between these two camps.

Framing the world this way is both useful and a waste of time. Useful because at simplistic level it captures the guts of the debate. But in the end it’s about as much use as capital versus labour, left v right, good v evil, black v white.

In the real world there are grays. Like BigCake you can be a restrainer and a expander at the same time..

So trash the planet or trash the system? Don’t think so, maybe trash the planet a whole lot less and trash the system a whole lot more.

Anyway this is by way of a (long) introduction to the final part of the Tim Jackson talk on TED where he looks at solutions.

He asks: What’s the point of living?

Are we “these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like [a] selfless altruist…”

Psychology says there is a tension between self-regarding behaviours and other regarding behaviours. And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots. So selfish behaviour is adaptive in certain circumstances – fight or flight.

A look at the map of the human heart reveals the crux of the matter. “What we’ve done is we’ve created economies. We’ve created systems, which systematically privilege, encourage, one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded.

“And in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because this isn’t, therefore, about changing human nature. It isn’t, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It is about opening up.

“It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the debt and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.”

Now if I was in the audience, Tim would be losing me. He’s turning all utopian.

He asks what would economies look like if they had a vision of human nature at their heart?

One example he gives is the 4000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution. He gives an example a company that gives 80 percent of its revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon.

It’s a different kind of enterprise for a new economy. Investment isn’t about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth. Investment has to be a different beast, protecting and nurturing the ecological assets, investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures.

We have to invest, in fact, in the idea of a meaningful prosperity, providing capabilities for people to flourish with prosperity meaning more than having food, clothing and shelter. It has social and psychological aims — family, friendship, commitments, society, participating in the life of that society.

And this too requires investment, investment, for example, in places, places where we can connect, places where we can participate, shared spaces, concert halls, gardens, public parks, libraries, museums, quiet centres, places of joy and celebration, places of tranquility and contemplation…

All things the bad old system does,  but yeah could do more.

What if greenies are right? Growth: we can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Another great TED talk

Sometimes I get scared that the hardcore greenies might be right.

There’s a challenging talk up on my old fav, TED.com, by Tim Jackson who studies links between lifestyle, society and the environment. Basically he’s an economic growth sceptic.

In the talk he has a great line: “This is a story about us being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, to create impressions on people we don’t care about.”

And that’s a modern economy in a nutshell. Debt, free markets, consumerism, advertising etc simply help keep the show on the road.

The TED talk also touches on a number of BigCake themes:
• The growing gap between rich and power
• The coping mechanisms of more debt and more work to maintain living standards and
• The allure of the ‘zombie’ economy’.

But it also confronts another belief – that the human race is smart enough to recognise that modern economies have created a hole and that we are clever enough to dig our way out.

BigCake’s always believed we can do this within the current system.

But Jackson reckons the human race has a choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.

What follows is an edited version of the first 10 minutes of his 20-minute TED talk. Part 2 to come.

Imagine, he says a world in 2050 of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western incomes.

How fast do we have to move – how clever do we need to be – to deliver our carbon targets?

Our current carbon intensity of economic growth [that is emissions per dollar of real gross domestic product] is about 770 grams of carbon.

In 2050 it has to be 6 grams of carbon – a 130-fold improvement.

That is 10 times faster and further than anything we have ever achieved in industrial history.

May be we can do – who knows.

Believing these numbers is crucial if you want to buy into Jackson’s argument. I haven’t been able to find any arguments to the contrary and anyway, he’d have to by way out to be wrong, so I’ll go with them for now.

Also as he writes elsewhere “efficiency improvements are continually offset by increases in scale”.

Back to TED Jackson says the only thing that has remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last decade is recession.

We are caught in a trap – a dilemma – of growth. We can’t live with it; we can’t live without it.

Our best avenue to escape from this is a kind of blind faith in technology, in our cleverness and in efficiency.

But shouldn’t we just check first that the economic system we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement.

The system works thus: Firms produce goods and provide us with incomes and then we can spend those incomes on goods and services.

This look harmless enough. The key feature is investment which equals a 5th of national income in most economies. It stimulates further consumption growth.

It also seeks out novelty – a process of creative destruction, continually chasing expanding consumer markets.

Human beings apparently love new stuff (and ideas and experiences). In every language, stuff is a symbolic language we use to tell each other stories, for example how important we are.

This ties in with the posts I’ve been writing about growing inequality based on the book ‘The Spirit Level’ which roughly says problems in rich countries are not caused by people not being rich enough, but by the scale of material differences.

So, says Jackson here’s a system that is locking economic structure with social logic. It’s an engine of economic growth driven by a sense of anxiety, what Adam Smith called “a life with shame”.

Now you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the net book, the ipad…[The zombie economy]

And even if we don’t want them, we need to buy them because if we don’t buy them the system crashes.

To stop it crashing over the last decades we have expanded the money supply – expanded credit and debt so we can keep buying stuff.

But is this really how people are?

We run up against a couple of anomalies.

In the crisis what do people want to do – they want to look to the future, they want to hunker down. Spend less and save more.

But saving is exactly the wrong thing do from the system point of view.

The system is at odds with who we are as people.

[More to come]

Hat Tip – NZ Institute

Sharing – the way to go in our frugal resource-nervous times

One reviewer called it a “new competitive logic”.

The idea is businesses and organisations sharing stuff often with the help of the web and social networks or the “mesh”.

The bible of  sharing  is entrepreneur Lisa Gansky’s book The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing.

It’s also called p2p (as in person to person).

Gansky predicts that over the next decade “ this model will conspicuously shape how we think about our lives and work and will shake-up the buy-and-throw-away economy”.

There are already heaps examples around – bikes, houses, various exchanges, perhaps even the good ol’ second hand shop. Trademe?

At one level this may seem to be just a fashionable fad among hippy-types, but it’s also one that captures the frugal resource-nervous mood of the times.

The zombie economy (the complete and utter madness and waste done in the name of the consumer) has become uncool. As Trendwatch says “mature consumer societies are changing … an increasing number of consumers are no longer (solely) obsessed with owning or experiencing the most and/or the most expensive. “…traditional status symbols (BMW’s X6! Marc Jacob’s latest eyewear! Emirates’ Airbus 380 Suites!) are no longer every consumer’s wet dream.”

If you’ve got to have one, how about sharing?

HT – boingboing via Richard Florida

State businesses creep into new pastures – nationalisation by stealth as we say no to asset sales

If you think of the country’s commercial sector as the board of the NZ version of Monopoly, then the state owns Cathedral Sq (4th most expensive location), Fenton St (8th), Cameron Rd (9th), Devon St (14th) and East St (20th).

That’d be Air NZ, Genesis Energy, Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power and NZ Post representing a quarter of the country’s top 20 businesses that are majority NZ state owned.

None of these can be sold at the moment with Kiwis dead set against state asset sales. A recent TV3 poll showed 80% of respondents opposed state asset sales.

But more worrying is the way houses and hotels are being put on these and other streets as the state stealthily expands its hold on what used to be private assets, or moving into new private sector pastures, not forgetting the occasional street purchase.

So while the Government has been focusing on restraining the size of central government, its businesses have been merrily expanding away. [Afterthought - this is not a criticism of the individual businesses. Standing still = slow death]

For sure the former aims to contain costs and the latter could be viewed as sources of income, but BigCake reckons there’s been a scary creep in the size and reach of state businesses. At last count they were worth a total $25 billion (versus Fonterra $14 billion).

And BigCake’s pretty sure this is not a good thing.

He won’t to try to nail every bit of this state expansion (haven’t got the time), but here’s a flavour…

Not so secret have been the returns of KiwiRail and Air New Zealand to the state fold. And now we also have the Government looking at taking a stake in Telecom’s network arm Chorus.

But in the background state-owned enterprises (SOEs)have been building commercial empires, adding houses and hotels if you like. For example:

NZPost
NZ Post has a business arm, ECN, who’s job it is to invest in technology and service businesses to replace or enhance New Zealand Post’s traditional postal and payments services. The NZ Post empire now includes communications, courier, logistics and retail companies. And of course KiwiBank.

Between 2006/07 and 2008/09 NZPosts’s assets more than doubled to $11.3 billion.

Quotable Value (QV)
NZ’s largest valuation and property information company. QV last year bought DTZ’s commercial valuation business in NZ. It businesses also include QV Australia which provides valuation and property consultancy services in New South Wales. Other QV subsidiaries include:
o Darroch (bought 2005)- one of New Zealand’s largest commercial and industrial property service businesses.
o PropertyIQ (joint venture) – a web-based residential property information service.
o Egan National Valuers – market valuations for the commercial and industrial markets.

Along the way it has also bought Hamilton-based Attewell Gerbich Havill Registered Valuers (2006).

Landcorp
Since 2000 the state farmer’s assets have increased more than three fold from about $500 million to $1.7 billion in 2008/09. Over this time, land under its control has slowly increased from 369,000 hectares to 375,000. Now it is famously interested in buying the Crafar farms.

Among Landcorp’s subsidiaries is Landcorp Estates which sells residential sections.

Mighty River Power
Between 2004/05 and 2008/09 Mighty River’s assets increased from $2.6 billion to $4.4 billion. The SOE’s businesses include one of the country’s largest energy retail businesses, Mercury Energy, and a meter reading service.

In 1987 there were 14 SOEs; today there are 17.

Anyway, you get the picture. The above is just a snap shot of what’s been happening among state businesses over the past decade or so.

BigCake’s sure there are more examples of state (and local body) business creep out there, perhaps even larger and more significant ones. Let me know if I’ve missed anything important.

You could take the view that this growth is sh!t hot. These businesses represent (mostly) good assets and sources of government revenue through dividends. And the Government has indicated it wants more of the latter.

Nationalisation is a bit of an exaggeration, but where’s it going to stop?

What the hell is the state doing expanding into courier companies, retail and real estate.

BigCake is a small government kind of guy, but not in an ideological way. He has no problem with some SOEs remaining in state hands – including KiwiBank – but given state business expanionism, a blanket ‘no’ to state asset sales is just dumb.

How about making sale decisions on their merits?

Heaps of former state assets (VTNZ, Works, State Insurance, National Film Unit, Government Print, NZ Steel…) are now happily ensconced in the private sector; but sale opponents focus on the few that were cocked up.

Of the 45 or so asset sales (worth $19 billion), only a couple – Air NZ and Rail – and maybe Telecom, could be regarded as delivering poor results. Bank of NZ did initially, but came right.

Yet it’s these “failures” that asset sale opponents appear to obsess about.

Can the state run all of its businesses better than the private sector? In the long run, I wouldn’t bank on it.

Has the Recession mortally wounded the supersize era? Cars, McMansions, debt and death all down size

The Recession is behind us, though like a pitbull on an extending leash it can still take a hunk of flesh.

But mostly the truly bad times are over. And what have we learned?

Are we now more in tune with the globalised, interconnected, fast moving and uncertain realities of 21st century life?

BigCake reckons the answer is perhaps yes. (It’s not certain we won’t revert to previous stupid behaviour).

Here’s a list of good things that have come out of the Recession:

Small is the new big
We are starting to think small, though rising energy prices probably should take some of the credit for this particularly with vehicles. Anyway we are downsizing our lifestyle expectations.

• Cars: Six years ago large cars were a quarter of the new car market, now they are just 14%, the smallest segment in the market. Small cars (1.3 – 1.5 litres) are the biggest. For sure some of this is down to the price of fuel, but as I’ve posted before, when Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson starts worrying that a large car (BMW’s X6) now looks ridiculous (“…built by a world, for a world that doesn’t exist anymore.”), the marketplace as we knew it is clearly shattering. Though we remain stubbornly attracted to SUVs.

• Houses: I haven’t been able to find NZ stats on home sizes, but over in the US the McManions are shrinking. In 2006, 35% of new US homes were more than 223 sq metres compared with 18% 20 years earlier. Don’t think size of households increased over this period. Anyway latest US figures show that the McMansions are being de-sized. The National Association of Home Builders says the average size of a new US home completed in 2009 fell to 230 sq metres, the first statistically significant drop since 1982. BigCake has always thought unnecessarily large houses were one of the more stupid manifestations of the Zombie economy sucking up exorbitant amounts of space, resources and heat.

Save, save, save
At last we’re cutting back on our high debt levels. Since 2000 we’re spent on average $1.09 for every $1 we earned.

That number is coming down (though unlikely to go positive anytime soon) as credit cards are being locked away, hire purchase spurned and mortgages reduced.

The Reserve Bank picks we’ll continue to save more, but is a tad concerned over how long this household fiscal rectitude will last.

The zombie economy becomes uncool
Trendwatch says “mature consumer societies are changing … an increasing number of consumers are no longer (solely) obsessed with owning or experiencing the most and/or the most expensive. “…traditional status symbols (BMW’s X6! Marc Jacob’s latest eyewear! Emirates’ Airbus 380 Suites!) are no longer every consumer’s wet dream.”

However, Trendwatch points out that “Bigger, better and harder” still has a strong hold and where it has lost ground, countries like China and India are stepping into the breach.

Better health
A story in the Canadian Medical Association Journal says economic downturns are connected with better health. In rich countries, “economic recessions have paradoxical effects on the mortality trends of populations…mortality is pro procyclical, meaning it goes up with economic expansions and down with contractions”.

I consulted my health stats geek on this and he is dubious because he figures recessions are not long enough to make any meaningful statistical claims.

Is that another positive?

Anything else to add to the list?