"Though it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself."

"[T]hough it's tempting to [always] blame the government for getting in the way of business, there's a lot about Kiwi business that is about getting in the way of itself. ... The Mood of the Boardroom Survey & recent remarks by some of this nation's CEOs reflect on the (dubious) quality of New Zealand's boardrooms more than anything else. Namely that most are woke & weak. ...
    "NZ's Big Corporate CEOs will not themselves push productivity-enhancing reforms in their own firms ... They'd prefer, instead, to be Mr Nice Person. Look at the qualifications of many of them - the typical one being in Accounting. Other than that, its law. Lawyers often get on Boards because Kiwi firms want someone to help with compliance - not a person with imagination about where the future of the company should be. ...
    "Before the Productivity Commission was de-commissioned, it identified lack of 'managerial capability' as a contributor to our low productivity. ... Many of our CEOs & Boardrooms are not capable. ... The staff can't make up for a boss who is the wrong boss. ... "

~ Robert McCulloch from his post '"The Mood" of NZ's (Weak and Inbred) Boardrooms reflects on their own ineffectiveness, which has cut productivity, not on our MPs' quality'

"...capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a 'new class...' "

"Joseph Epstein’s [article] 'Socialists Don’t Know History' ... on the abysmal historical knowledge of young people brings to mind the prophesy of the keenest of economists, Joseph Schumpeter, in 1942 when he said that capitalism would destroy itself by breeding a 'new class: bureaucrats, intellectuals, professors, lawyers, journalists, all of them beneficiaries and, in fact, parasitical on them and yet, all of them opposed to the ethos of wealth production, of saving and of allocating resources to economic productivity.' The 77 years since then has proven Schumpeter a major prophet."

~ Larry W. White, from his 2019 letter to the Wall Street Journal. Hat tip The Dangerous Economist, who reposts a more similar yet more detailed 1992 article by Robert Samuelson 'Schumpeter: The Prophet'

"Much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers ... "

"In [New Zealand], much of the mess we are in can be blamed, in my view, on lawyers (and judges). ...
    "It was Geoffrey Palmer, a lawyer, who designed the original Resource Management Act, and it is David Parker, a lawyer, who's currently drawing up plans to implement wealth and capital taxes as part of the Labour Party's platform for the 2026 election. The current Chair of Kiwi Rail is a lawyer. His Deputy Chair is a lawyer. Most of NZ's big firms have boards dominated by lawyers (and accountants) who have no shop-floor experience in the industry in which "their" company is working. How have they got their jobs? From what I have learned, mostly by networking & schmoozing. Is this a world-wide phenomena? No. Who do companies like Tesla have on their boards? To give you a flavor, folks like Mr. Gebbia, co-founder of Airbnb, and Mr. Straubel, founder of Redwood Materials, a firm working to drive down the costs and environmental footprint of lithium-ion batteries by offering sources of anode & cathode materials from recycled batteries. ...
    "What has been the objective of those sitting in the Auckland law firms quietly earning incomes of way over $1 million a year? To maximise their fee income, of course. The legal & regulatory structures that have promoted monopoly power in NZ, the frameworks that govern race-relations, and the mountains of red-tape we all must navigate, have been made deliberately divisive, deliberately ineffective, and deliberately onerous by Kiwi lawyers, all to generate more disputes & work for law firms and their partners. The profession that has ground NZ's economy to a halt has been our legal profession — all in the name of its ... quest for higher incomes."

~ Robert MacCulloch from his post 'God Save New Zealand from Lawyers'

"Yes, Labour has won a landslide, but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon."

Britain's 'leaders' mourn the death of the Uniparty

"Yes, [UK] Labour has won a landslide [in the British election overnight], but it’s not quite Starmer-geddon. According to the exit poll, his landslide, predicted to be the largest since 1832 in one eve-of-election poll, is in fact smaller than Tony Blair’s in 1997, although not by much (170 v 179). 

    "More encouraging, if the exit poll is to be believed, is that Labour only managed a vote share of 36%, significantly lower than in 2017 under Jeremy Corbyn (40%). 

    "By contrast, the Tories and Reform won a combined share of 43%. [Labour leader] Keir Starmer has won a landslide but not a mandate – his own majority is down by 16,000 – although I doubt he’ll be constrained by that.
    "The Left of the Labour Party will point to the fact that Starmer polled fewer votes than Corbyn – we don’t know that for sure yet, but it looks likely – and dispute that Labour only won this election by tacking to the centre, just as the Right of the Conservative Party will argue the Party didn’t lose by abandoning the centre ground (which is the prevailing orthodoxy among ‘One Nation’ Tories, believe it or not). And they’d both be right, in my view. In spite of Starmer’s victory, technocratic managerialism – or 'stakeholder capitalism,' as Klaus Schwab calls it – hasn’t exactly triumphed in this election. 

    "The Uniparty – that is, the Conservative Party under Sunak and the Labour Party under Starmer – got a bloody nose in the sense that the two main parties received an even lower share of the vote – 62% – than they did in 2010 (66%). That’s a lower share than in 1983 at the height of the SDP‘s popularity (70%) and worse than in either of the 1974 elections. Indeed, lower than in 1923, when the two main parties won 68.7%. You have to go all the way back to 1918, when the Liberal Party hadn’t yet collapsed, to find find Labour and the Conservatives collectively polling a lower vote share (59.2%).

"The superficial take on the result is that the U.K. is bucking the anti-technocratic trend sweeping the rest of the globe, particularly France where we may be witnessing the death throes of the Fifth Republic. But look beyond Labour’s landslide and the real story of the last six weeks is the rise of Reform and the lack of enthusiasm for the two centrist parties. 

    "Indeed, if we had PR in the U.K., as they do in the EU, we might now be looking at a Right-of-centre coalition with a populist leader at the helm and a move away from the Uniparty’s position on immigration and Net Zero, as well as its uncritical embrace of sectarian identity politics. We may have to wait another five years before that happens, but it seems unlikely, to put it mildly, that Starmer’s premiership will breathe new life into this calcified ideology. Much more likely is that a succession of policy failures, leading to a financial crisis, civil unrest and rolling black-outs, will be the death knell of technocratic managerialism. 

    "In 2029, the British electoral may finally vote for real change."

~ Toby Young from his post 'End of the Uniparty'

"...'A Lister' management types who have no in-depth knowledge of the technical, engineering workings of their industries?"

 

"The Board Chair of Kiwi Rail, David McLean, is a lawyer. He did a Bachelor of Law degree at Victoria University. The CEO of Kiwi Rail, Peter Reidy, has a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Accounting from Auckland University, where I work. 

    "Both were asked about what caused the Inter Island Ferry to crash. I assure you - nothing about how trains or ferries work is covered in law or commerce degrees. 

    "Why is productivity low in NZ? Could it be so many of the Boards & CEO positions in NZ are made up of 'A Lister' management types who have no in-depth knowledge of the technical, engineering workings of their industries? ... 

"Was Google started by accountants & lawyers? Was SpaceX started by lawyers & accountants? Was RocketLab started by lawyers & accountants?"

~ Robert MacCulloch, from his post 'Who does NZ call when its Ferries, Planes and Electricity Supplies are Broken? Lawyers and Accountants (!?)'

"Wellington's consultancy-industrial complex is in a funk." Good.

"[Wellington's] consultancy-industrial complex [is] in a funk, because philosophically and culturally, the change in government has shown up the gulf between them and the government. It has also demonstrated two major issues: The dearth of strategic and intellectual grunt in much of the public sector; and the ideological chasm between many of the ... public servants [sic], and the Government ...
    "[Ten years ago] there was a significant cohort of senior and leadership talent in parts of the public service [sic] that were formidable in their intellectual capability, commitment to ideological neutrality, and interest in an evidence-based approached to public policy.... [along with] a deep understanding of what they did and did not know, and what they could not know. ... They all knew that, by and large, they had no idea how much of the economy worked in any detail. ...
    "The beginning of change in that culture happened under the Clark Government, which was much more pro-active and wanted to 'do more.' ... the Ardern/Hipkins Government put it into overdrive, and the Luxon Government will be seeing the signs of it. ...
    "The elections of [Tory Whanu as mayor], Tamatha Paul as MP of Wellington Central and Julie Anne Genter as MP for Rongotai provides a sign of what has happened to the Wellington public service [sic] over that time. ... The Wellington public service [sic] grew enormously in the past six years, drawing upon enthusiastic graduates, predominantly coming with ... left-wing enthusiasm for state intervention, regulation, spending and taxation, with suspicion around ... the views of significant portions of the public, including those of more senior civil servants, because of identity factors (e.g. race, sex, gender &c.) ...
    "None of that would matter one iota if they could put that to one side and be highly-competent public-policy analysts, but that competence is wanting ... lacking historical knowledge and being weak on analytical capability.
    "As a result the mood today in many government departments ... is one of fear and depression, as a workforce of relatively young public servants [sic], most of whom did not vote for this government, struggle to cope with being asked to implement policies they don’t agree with. ...
    "[T]here is significant scope to scale down the numbers of people doing policy in government in Wellington ... because there is a distinct lack of talented, capable and clever people, who put aside their personal political biases in favour of evidence-based policy advice. Most importantly, there are few who will admit to Ministers 'we don’t really know how to do that' or 'we don’t know how that part of the economy works' or 'we don’t have the knowledge or experience on that issue ... '
    "[T]he government appears willing to lean down on the state sector (albeit not enough), which should provide ample opportunities to send blinkered ideologues with mediocre intellectual grunt to a new life not serving a government they hate."

~ Liberty Scott, from his post 'Wellington is in a funk'

The FAILURES of the Anointed

"[I]n the vision of the anointed, there is obviously a very expansive role for government and for the anointed in prescribing what government should do. ... Characteristic patterns have developed among the the anointed for dealing with the repeated failures of policies based on their vision. ... 

    "This pattern typically has four stages:

"STAGE 1. THE 'CRISIS': Some situation exists, whose negative aspects the anointed propose to eliminate. Such a situation is routinely characterised as a 'crisis' [climate, racism, hate speech, child poverty, children's lunches, smoking rates, microplastics &c.] even though all human situations have negative aspects, and even though evidence is seldom asked or given to show how the situation at hand is either uniquely bad or threatening to get worse. Sometimes the situation described as a 'crisis' has in fact already been getting better for years.
"STAGE 2. THE 'SOLUTION': Policies to end the 'crisis' are advocated by the anointed, who say that these policies will lead to beneficial result A. Critics say that these policies will lead to detrimental result Z. The anointed dismiss these latter claims as absurd and 'simplistic,' if not dishonest. 

"STAGE 3. THE RESULTS: The policies are instituted and lead to detrimental result Z. 

"STAGE 4. THE RESPONSE: Those who attribute detrimental result Z to the policies instituted are dismissed as 'simplistic' for ignoring the 'complexities' involved, as 'many factors' went into determining the outcome. The burden of proof is put on the critics to demonstrate to a certainty that these policies alone were the only possible cause of the worsening that occurred. No burden of proof whatever is put on those who had so confidently predicted improvement. Indeed, it is often asserted that things would have been even worse, were it not for the wonderful programmes that mitigated the inevitable damage from other factors. Examples of this pattern are all too abundant."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his book The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy

"We defeated the divine right of kings, now we have to do the same to the divine right of bureaucrats."

"I would like to think that the cozy post war socialist consensus is coming to a long overdue end. We defeated the divine right of kings, now we have to do the same to the divine right of bureaucrats."

~ Roué le Jour, from their comment on the 'Scorpion State'

"This was the election in which our political leaders declared, very loudly, that they weren’t here to fix the nation’s deep and evident problems."

"[T]his was the election in which our political leaders declared, very loudly, that they weren’t here to fix the nation’s deep and evident problems. They were here to ensure that things remained broken and they were prepared to go against the nominal values of their own parties to do so. ...
    "My contention is that this government was simultaneously too centrist and not centrist enough and I predict the next government will be the same. Instead of an economy that is built around either an interventionist state or free markets we have a hybrid of private and public sector solutions that never seem to solve anything; they deliver little value to the public, vast profits to private sector providers and high salaries to the senior public servants provisioning them, who seem to be completely unaccountable – no matter how dire their performance....

    "New Zealand is a liberal-democratic-free market-social welfare state – Francis Fukuyama’s 'End of History' model. But – as Fukuyama pointed out – all of the institutions that make the model work are vulnerable to oligarchic capture. Over time the people who manage them reorient them towards their own self-interest."

~ Danyl McLauchlan, from his post 'Notes towards an alt-centrist manifesto'

"Wokesters' loyalties are clearly not with the working poor."

"[Wokesters'] loyalties ... are clearly not with the working poor.... [T]his anti-enlightenment movement, popular chiefly among rich whites [is] a movement closer to the far-Right in its dismissal of universalism, militant identitarianism, and fervent support of censorship...
    "[The Woke write] newspaper columns celebrating price-hikes for inner-city car parks, without even a nod as to how crushing they would be for working parents, many of whom are forced to duck out of employment to manage their children at school’s end....
    "[The Woke enjoy] a good chuckle with fellow bourgeois commentator (of which we have no shortage) Moana Maniapoto about the plight of poor white men, oblivious to the deeply conservative subtext of ‘white privilege’ (another gift bestowed upon us by the woke). According to this charmer of a doctrine, if you are white and poor there really is no excuse, because you’re white, and so shouldn’t expect sympathy. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps and just stop being bloody poor and unhappy, will you?! Like so many wokisms, this is reheated conservativism.
    "Their open contempt for the poor is crystal in the central drive of this political project: to concentrate cultural, and all other power within their [professional-managerial] class.... [I]t’s well past time that the obnoxious, rich kids currently boring us all to death were told to pipe down, and the working poor were finally given a chance to speak up."

~ Dane Giraud, from his post 'Attacking woke politics is the most Left-wing thing you can do'

ESG creates a new rent-seeking class

“How many environmental justice majors does it take to calculate the CO2 emissions of a light bulb? This isn’t a joke. Businesses now employ scads of college grads to do this. For years America’s political class has lamented that too many college grads are working in low-paying jobs that don’t require post-secondary degrees. The diversity, equity and inclusion and environmental, social and governance industries—DEI and ESG, respectively—are solving for this problem while creating many others. In the modern progressive era, young graduates are finding remunerative employment as sustainability coordinators, DEI officers and 'people partners.' Instead of serving up pumpkin soy lattes, they’re quantifying corporate greenhouse gas emissions and ensuring employers don’t transgress progressive cultural orthodoxies.”

~ Allysia Finley, from her article 'Bidenomics and the Boom in DEI and ESG Jobs' [hat tip Samizdata]

"The professional class ..."

"The professional class that supports policies like housing regulation and occupational licensing to inflate their home values and salaries has had a worse impact on opportunities for the poor than the 1%, although the latter gets a lot more attention from the left."

~ Chris Freiman