"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good."

"Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area – crime, education, housing, race relations – the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them."

~ Thomas Sowell from his 1993 book Is Reality Optional?

"Emotion has its place. You might argue that it was appropriate in crisis situations like the pandemic, the Christchurch shooting, and the White Island eruption. ...
    "But emotion can only go so far, because wanting something to be true, because it's kind, is not the same as it actually being true."

~ OJB from their post 'I Blame Women!'

"It is not kind to keep borrowing against future generations’ futures. It isn’t kind to promise the world and deliver sweet F all. Remember Ardern was going to house all of NZ’s homeless within 4 weeks of becoming PM, end child poverty, and build 100,000 houses? How wonderful! And what happened? ..."

~ Ani O'Brien

'Politicians’ words'

"Whether in politics or in the media, words are increasingly used, not to convey facts or even allegations of facts, but simply to arouse emotions.
    "Undefined words are a big handicap in logic, but they are a big plus in politics, where the goal is not clarity but victory -- and the votes of gullible people count just as much as the votes of people who have common sense."

~ Thomas Sowell from his 2015 column 'Politicians’ words'

"Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty..."

"Since wealth is the only thing that can cure poverty, you might think that the left would be as obsessed with the creation of wealth as they are with the redistribution of wealth. 

"But you would be wrong."

~ Thomas Sowell from bis 2006 column 'Political left has no interest in creating wealth' [hat tip Ira P]

"What 'social justice' advocates want is not justice, but to be in charge of deciding who gets what."

"What 'social justice' advocates want is not justice, but to be in charge of deciding who gets what. They want to substitute their own decisions for the decisions of millions of other people freely interacting in the marketplace. 

"That is why they speak in terms of results rather than rules – of ending up with equal incomes or equal outcomes rather than everyone being equally free to make is their own choices. It is not justice; it is power."

~ Thomas Sowell interviewed on his new book: 'Social Justice Fallacies'

SOWELL: 'The Fallacy of Redistribution'

“The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty.” 

~ Thomas Sowell on 'The Fallacy of Redistribution'

15 YEARS AGO: Two sentences that sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict

Here's a NOT PC post from 15 years ago, quoting the great Thomas Sowell, that could have been written yesterday ...

Two sentences that sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict

If two sentences could sum up the Israeli-Gaza conflict, it would be these from Thomas Sowell:

"Since everybody seems to be criticising Israel for its military response to the rockets being fired into their country from the Gaza strip, let me add my criticisms as well. The Israelis traded land for peace, but they have never gotten the peace, so they should take back the land....
    "Those who think 'negotiations' are a magic answer seem not to understand that when A wants to annihilate B, this is not an 'issue' that can be resolved amicably around a conference table."

Read Israel vs. Hamas: Pretty Talk and Ugly Realities. THOMAS SOWELL

AND another post from 20 years ago talking about that 'land-for-peace' deal ... 

Rewarding terror

Israeli settlers are being forcibly removed from their homes. And Hamas leaders view the forced removal of Israeli citizens from their own property as a Hamas victory, and as an endorsement of their tactics of terror.

Says an ebullient Ahmed al-Bahar, a leading Hamas thug in Gaza, 

"Israel has never been in such a state of retreat and weakness as it is today following more than four years of the intifada. Hamas's heroic attacks exposed the weakness and volatility of the impotent Zionist security establishment. The withdrawal marks the end of the Zionist dream, and is a sign of the moral and psychological decline of the Jewish state."

Another spokesman for Hamas terror says of the property eviction that it is "due to the Palestinian resistance operations. … and we will continue our resistance." Talk about rewarding terrorists. 

And you'll be as pleased as Cox and Forkum to note that the evictions have brought Hamas leaders together and out of hiding in a bid for control of the Gaza Strip, which puts them in direct conflict with the Palestinian Authority, who have recently been making moves of moderation.

Israel is playing into the hands of Hamas, and in the process is betraying the property rights of its own people and the moderates in the Palestinian Authority. Shame.

Let’s call ‘taxing the rich’ what it really is: Theft

Picture of New Zealand's richest man. Guaranteed a reaction
 against his success by a certain sort of commentator ...

EVERY SO OFTEN A PIECE of dross comes over my monitor that just cries out to be fisked. Like this rant against the latest NBR Rich List by someone called Dr Neal Curtis. His piece argues that "as society groans under the weight of wealth inequality" (can you hear the groans, readers?) there should be a "different slogan to ‘tax the rich'." The one he favours: "reclaim the wealth'."

Yes, he's an ultra-redistributionist. Aka, a thief. Walter Williams knows the type:

Dr Curtis's piece is of course a reaction to publication of the NBR Rich List, which without fail gets a certain sort of person to hyperventilate.

Dr Curtis is that sort of person.

And this screed vomiting forth at Newsroom is the result.

Dr Curtis, by the way, is said by his bio to be "a comics scholar and critical theorist with wide-ranging interests." Lead item on his Areas of Expertise is: Comics. So let's just call him Mr Curtis.

MR CURTIS BGINS: THIS Government, he says, is "gutting government departments and cutting public services."

I wish this were true instead of comical. (Spending is now higher under Nicola Willis than under Grant Robertson. Full-time employees under the Luxon Government was 64,222 when elected, and is now 63,238. There have been cuts, it's true, but none anywhere near as big as I would hope.)

But his beginning is only a drive-by to pass off his credentials. Three paragraphs in we get to the meat. So it's here that I'll begin my fisking.

MR CURTIS: [There are] three central assumptions of current economic dogma that those who question are branded as ‘radical leftists.’ These assumptions are underpinned by the beliefs that wealth trickles down; deregulation is good for business; and the state should stay out of the market and everything should be privatised.

Should I cry "strawman" this early in the piece? Each of these pieces of alleged dogma is both fly-blown and overblown. No-one outside a piss-poor public-choice lecture would anyone say everything should be privatised. (Courts? Police? Army?) And no-one anywhere advocates so-called "trickle-down." His point here is not to make sense, however, it's simply to damn the rich so he can later advocate their being eaten.

So he ploughs on regardless, challenging each of the assertions he's just straw-manned. Like his logic, let's looks at each of them in reverse.

MR CURTIS: ...the state has always been an economic entrepreneur funding all kinds of technological innovation, such as the internet, but this often goes unreported in the dominant economic journalism.

"Always" is doing a lot of work here. There's a reason so much government entrepreneurialism goes unreported in any economic journalism: it's because it's so rare. Sure, the government defence project ARPANET linking dozens of people was transformed into something that now links five billion. But that wasn't a Ministry of Doing Shit that did that. It was private entrepreneurs who turned the great idea into a GREAT IDEA. 

MR CURTIS: ... seen from a purely corporate perspective deregulation is no doubt a path to profit. However, it is also socially disastrous as costs of deregulation are outsourced via public bailouts following financial crises, for example, that are directly caused by the rolling back of legislation designed to safeguard the wider economy.

Without going too much further than this one paragraph (though we can if you wish), let us agree that there is more than one kind of deregulation. There is the kind that mandates safety and (may) safeguard the wider economy. There is regulation that protects intellectual and real property, and that allows for the enforcement of contracts. And then there is regulation about how curved a banana should be, or how far apart hairdressing salon seats should be. You'll notice how carefully Mr Curtis conflates these. And why.

MR CURTIS: ... wealth, especially when given away in tax cuts, does not trickle down. It stays at the top. Ever-increasing wealth inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient or any study of income trends show this.

Now, it's Mr Curtis who insists this to be economic dogma, i.e., that wealth "trickles down." Yet the author of Basic Economics,  Thomas Sowell, insists that there is no-one anywhere outside a lunatic asylum or a comics convention who holds it to be true, let alone as dogma.

Years ago [writes Sowell, I] challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this “trickle-down” theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a “trickle-down” policy. They could never name that somebody else and quote them, though.

[Mr Curtis] is by no means the first [person] to denounce this nonexistent theory. Back in 2008, presidential candidate Barack Obama attacked what he called “an economic philosophy” that “says we should give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else.”

Let’s do something completely unexpected: Let’s stop and think. Why would anyone advocate that we “give” something to A in hopes that it would trickle down to B? Why in the world would any sane person not give it to B and cut out the middleman? All this is moot, however, because there was no trickle-down theory about giving something to anybody in the first place. 

Sowell wrote a whole book exposing the nonsense of those who believe this trickle-down fantasy. [It's free, you can DOWNLOAD IT HERE.] And as I've pointed out myself on occasion, if there is a trickle-down system in operation it's the one whereby large gobs of your own money are taken from you by government, and trickled back down to you in the form of favours, and subsidies and social welfare for working families and the like.

There is an argument however for having capitalists keep their own capital, however— an economic argument, as well as the strictly-speaking moral argument that it's their goddamn money. Mr Curtis et al would like to think that if the "one percent's" capital were not stripped from them it would perhaps be baked into pies or used to light cigars—or would be emptied into money bins so that, like Scrooge McDuck, the owner of capital can spend his time rolling around in it.

This is truly a comic-book version of reality that only one ignorant of the division of labour could hold. 

Because, as George Reisman explains,  the vast majority of the wealth owned by the so-called “one-percent” is not held in the form of chocolate bars or champagne bottles or pies, but in the form of the capital goods and equipment that produce the consumer goods on which we (and Mr Curtis) all depend—capital goods that only come to represent wealth to the extent they are used to produce the goods and services people, in their capacity as consumers, really want. Per-Olof Samuelsson observes: 

"The productive rich (think Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, etcetera, etcetera) actually flood the rest of us with wealth (and themselves become wealthy in the process). Taxing or expropriating them simply means to dam this flood. And this may make it appear 'trickle-down'— because governments and politicians will only allow a small portion of this wealth to trickle down to us; the rest of it lands in their own pockets."

Many of the wealthiest people on earth hold their wealth in the form of a financial asset, like stock in a successful company. And the very wealthiest have no time to swim in cartoon-style money bins because they're also successfully running these companies.

[Mr Curtis and his readers] have no awareness of this, because they see the world through an intellectual lens that is inappropriate to life under capitalism and its market economy. They see a world, still present in some places, and present everywhere a few centuries ago, of self-sufficient farm families, each producing for its own consumption and having no essential connection to markets.
    In such a world, if one sees a farmer’s field, or his barn, or plough, or draft animals, and asks who do these means of production serve, the answer is the farmer and his family, and no one else. In such a world, apart from the receipt of occasional charity from the owners, those who are not owners of means of production cannot benefit from means of production unless and until they themselves somehow become owners of means of production. They cannot benefit from other people’s means of production except by inheriting them or by seizing them.

But in the modern world (at least, to the extent that the so-called “one-percent” are not simply milking government subsidies and bailouts, which is how so many seem to think business should work), all of us benefit from the private ownership of their means of production whoever owns them—just as long as the owners are left free to produce and innovate. We all get the benefit of their production, both as buyers of the products of those means of production, but also as sellers of labour employed to work with those means of production.

The wealth of the capitalists, in other words, is the source both of the supply of products that non-owners of the means of production buy and of the demand for the labour that non-owners of the means of production sell. It follows that the larger the number and greater the wealth of the capitalists, the greater is both the supply of products and the demand for labor, and thus the lower are prices and the higher are wages, i.e., the higher is the standard of living of everyone. Nothing is more to the self-interest of the average person than to live in a society that is filled with multi-billionaire capitalists and their corporations, all busy using their vast wealth to produce the products he buys and to compete for the labour he sells.
    Nevertheless, the world [Mr Curtis and his readers] yearn for is a world from which the billionaire capitalists and their corporations have been banished, replaced by small, poor producers, who would not be significantly richer than they themselves are, which is to say, impoverished. They expect that in a world of such producers, producers who lack the capital required to produce very much of anything, let alone carry on the mass production of the technologically advanced products of modern capitalism, they will somehow be economically better off than they are now. Obviously, [they] could not be more deluded.

AND IT'S NOW, WITH HIS three dogmas exposed, that we can see Mr Curtis's error more plainly. Like many who are branded as "radical leftists," not only is there an inherent wish to damn the rich, all of them, there is also a paucity of understanding of how the deserving rich got that way. 

Yes, there is more than one way to get rich. One may pull favours and subsidies from government, as cronies all try to, or one may be the government and sell Shitcoins (as one particularly egregious entity is currently doing). Or one may sit tight and rely on central banks inflating monetary assets (what is often called the Cantillon Effect, after the eighteenth-century ex-banker who called attention to this phenomenon of long-term capital consumption). But neither of those examples is any more than short-term, and no amount of short-term skimming is going to get you to the top of even a New Zealand rich list.

Even in this small pond, it does take an entrepreneur risking his or her own capital to really roll in the big returns.

Mr Curtis would like you to conflate all three, as he proceeds to draw his conclusion.

But first, his corollary: that it is government spending that makes us all rich. Mr Curtis phrases it this way.

MR CURTIS: All this [leaving capital in the hands of its owners] results in top-heavy, financially starved economies as governments continually try to make the wealth giveaways fit into a budget by stripping support for public services or selling off public assets at knockdown prices. ...
    The fact that the global economic outlook as well as specific national economies remain so fragile and unstable ... is surely enough evidence that the principle of continually moving wealth upwards doesn’t work...

He really does think that money in the hands of government grows economies, whereas money in the hands of those who made it simply squanders it. 

It's deluded.

And sure enough, having made his three points of alleged dogma, and delivered his corollary, he gets to start eating his meat. 

MR CURTIS: Just as there is no economic justification for structuring an economy in which only the very wealthy are the true beneficiaries, there is also no moral justification.... As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich.

Mr Curtis is, of course, in favour. And now, bringing together what passes for his argument, is his payoff:

MR CURTIS: Instead of a call to ‘tax the rich’, the call should be to ‘reclaim the wealth’. I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created. It is also a call to give back even just a small amount of what was taken through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few.

You can see his own dogma peering out from under his comical version of how an economic system works:

"Commonly created."

"Give back."

"Reclaim."

One question should be enough to puncture the deceit, and with it we return to Walter Williams at the top of this post. The question is: Who created this wealth?

Nick Mowbray is an almost perfect example here. 

The wealth represented by Mr Mowbray's Zuru Toys quite literally did not exist before Mr Mowbray created Zuru's toys. Pre-Mowbray, there was a pile of stuff. Post-Mowbray and his identification of the value to human beings to be delivered by his toys, there's enough value in them to make him this county's richest man.

I know that can be hard to get your head around, but there it is. Value, in the economic sense, is in the eye of the consumer. Consumers' "vote" every day, with their own hard-earned money on their devices, for Zuru's toys creates a socially-objective price for Mr Mowbray's offerings, and allows him to grow his capital. Which he can then use to create more toys, which creates more capital, which .....

All going well, especially if you like children's toys, that's a life-enhancing spiral that costs no-one else anything.

LET'S NOT BOTHER TOO MUCH to investigate further into the mind of someone who would despise that.

Let's ask instead only what they're trying to achieve. For. Mr Curtis, here's his payoff here, he hopes (now with an added noteto identify his errors:

MR CURTIS: As our society is placed under increased stresses and strains beneath the extreme weight of amassed, socially useless wealth [sic] that sits with a very small class of people, there have been increased calls to tax the rich.

I love the use of the passive verb: "there have been calls..." instead of "I and my colleagues have been demanding..." 

MR CURTIS: In keeping with the dogma [sic], conservative supporters have made tax a dirty word [I wish! -Ed.]. Rather than tax being an individual or corporate contribution to the maintenance of a functioning society, the corporatist right has over the past four decades tried to make it a synonym for theft [I wish - Ed.]. The idea that taxing the rich is really a form of theft also makes it easy for the dogmatists [sic] to present the call as a form of envy; a petty resentment of the successful.

And isn't it envy? Envy, for example, that one person making toys that delight people will earn more in his lifetime than someone with pretensions to intelligence making his living from analysing comic books and posting snide articles on a web page. The envy fair oozes out this piece, and other similar rants by the usual suspects.

MR CURTIS: Instead of a call to ‘tax the rich’, the call should be to ‘reclaim the wealth.

Ah. Here we go: an all-but explicit claim from the mire that "you didn't build that." Which in the next sentence is made explicit:

MR CURTIS: I believe this phrase more adequately represents the request to return a greater share of what was commonly created.

So, in what will no doubt be a surprise to Messrs Mowbray, Hart et al, everybody created the toys for which the world is clamouring, the companies made more efficient, the plastics that store food better, the films that folk queue up for ... We all did it, he claims.

In the end, after all the verbage, that's his major claim. That we made it—an absurdity—so therefore we should keep it. A nonsense.

It is also a call to give back [sic] even just a small amount of what was taken [sic] through the design of an economy knowingly and carefully organised to purposefully benefit the few.

The irony is that, if Mr Curtis lifted his head from his comic books and looked properly at the world around him and at the division-of-labour system that allows even sad sacks like himself to survive and even flourish, he'd understand that (even imperfectly) it already is benefitting all of us.

If there's one benefit of watching a US president tearing down everything that made his own country prosperous, it's that his many political enemies are slowly discovering this truth.  

Many are discovering anew that it is actually poverty that is mankind’s natural state, that it is past wealth production (not redistribution) that has been rescuing people from poverty worldwide in ever-expanding numbers—the great (but almost unheard) story of our era that allows today's worker more easily-available health, wealth, and luxuries than even a king enjoyed in all previous centuries—and that efforts to simply legislate higher wages by law amounts to little more than a “loot and plunder” approach to economics.

The fundamental policy tools of statist politicians [explains George Reisman] are clubs, guns, and prisons... What allows statist politicians to conceal the fact that they’re thugs is the belief that they have a special account with Santa Claus. As though Santa Claus, rather than extortion, were the source of the funds extorted by the politicians.
The statist politicians and the leftist “intellectuals” dismiss the teachings of sound economics by calling it “trickle down.” They do not allow themselves to see that their theory of economics is the loot and plunder theory.

Some have realised and reconsidered. I invite Mr Curtis to consider it too.

PS: Mr and Mrs Marx were at least fully aware of how envy towards the rich is a psychological problem, not an philosophical—or economic—one. Writing to their "embittered" son after yet another tantrum at the world, Heinrich Marx said:

Frankly speaking, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word, which all weaklings use to cloak their feelings when they quarrel with the world because they do not possess, without labour or trouble, well-furnished palaces with vast sums of money and elegant carriages. This embitterment disgusts me and you are the last person from whom I would expect it. What grounds can you have for it? Has not everything smiled on you ever since your cradle? Has not nature endowed you with magnificent talents? Have not your parents lavished affection on you? Have you ever up to now been unable to satisfy your reasonable wishes? And have you not carried away in the most incomprehensible fashion the heart of a girl whom thousands envy you? Yet the first untoward event, the first disappointed wish, evokes embitterment! Is that strength? Is that a manly character?

Is it? 

"People are puzzled that so much said by politicians seems remote from reality ..."

 

A reminder ...

“When people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems like discrimination.”

~ Thomas Sowell

 

"Envy was once considered to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins..."

"Envy was once considered to be one of the Seven Deadly Sins, before it became one of the most admired under its new name, 'Social Justice'."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his book The Quest for Cosmic Justice

 

Sowell on "income distribution"

Income 'distribution': "The cold fact is most income is not distributed. It is earned.”

~ Thomas Sowell, from his book Wealth, Poverty & Politics

 

The More Resources We Consume, the More We Have

It seems counterintuitive, but it's true: The freer we are, the more resources we have. And as Marian Tupy points out in this guest post, globalisation supercharges the process of knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination, thereby leading to even greater resource abundance. Humans, he points out, especially those living in the countries on the frontier of innovation, create knowledge that allows us to grow our resources well in excess of the resources that we consume. Turns out that the more we consume, the more we have ...

The More Resources We Consume, the More We Have

by Marian Tupy

It is conventional wisdom that adding billions of people to the global economy must result in increased use and therefore greater scarcity of resources, but that is wrong.

Resources have become significantly cheaper since 1980 relative to wages, thereby becoming much more abundant.

Humans, especially those living in countries on the frontier of innovation, create new knowledge that allows us to grow our resources well beyond our consumption.

Globalisation allows this new knowledge to flow from the countries on the frontier of innovation to the “catch‐​up” nations, leading to improved economic and environmental outcomes worldwide.

Introduction

Common sense dictates that adding billions of people to the global economy—and the subsequent rise in production and consumption—must result in increased use and, therefore, greater scarcity of resources. Many of the academic and nonacademic opinions agree on that point, but they are all mistaken. Relative to wages, resources have grown significantly cheaper since 1980, thereby becoming much more abundant. We thus face a seeming contradiction: the more resources we use, the more we end up with. Resolving that requires us to understand the key role played by the creation of knowledge.

Knowledge possesses a peculiar characteristic: the more knowledge we consume, the more knowledge we have. Furthermore, generation of new knowledge is the exclusive domain of the human mind. So, the more people who inhabit the planet and partake in global exchange, the more knowledge is created. This new knowledge, in turn, expands our resource base. Globalisation—or the process of interaction and integration between people and companies worldwide—supercharges the process of knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination, thereby leading to greater resource abundance.

Empirical Evidence for Falling Resource Prices

The Simon Abundance Index, which I coauthored with Gale L. Pooley, is an annual measure of the relationship between population growth and the abundance of 50 basic commodities, including food, energy, materials, minerals, and metals. The base year of the index is 1980, and the base value of the index is 100 percent. In 2020, the index reached 708.4 percent. In other words, the index rose by 608.4 percentage points over the preceding four decades, implying a compound annual growth rate in resource abundance of around 5 percent and a doubling of global resource abundance every 14 years or so.

The Simon Abundance Index is measured in time prices, or the number of hours that the average worker must work to earn enough money to buy something. To calculate a commodity’s time price, the nominal price of a commodity is divided by the global average nominal wage per hour worked. Between 1980 and 2020, the average nominal price of the 50 commodities rose by 51.9 percent and the global average nominal hourly wage rose by 412.4 percent. So the average time price of the 50 commodities fell by 75.2 percent.

The personal resource abundance multiplier is calculated by dividing the average time price of the 50 commodities in 1980 by the average time price of the 50 commodities in 2020. The multiplier tells us how much more of a resource a person can buy for the same hours of work between two points in time. Pooley and I found that the same hours of work bought one unit in the basket of 50 commodities in 1980 and 4.03 units in the same basket in 2020.

The average worker’s personal resource abundance rose by 303 percent. The compound annual growth rate in personal resource abundance amounted to 3.55 percent, implying that personal resource abundance doubled every 20 years.

Between 1980 and 2020, the average time price of the 50 commodities fell by 75.2 percent and the world’s population increased by 75.8 percent. So, for every 1 percent increase in the world’s population, the average time price of the 50 commodities decreased by almost 1 percent (i.e., −75.2 percent ÷ 75.8 percent = −0.992 percent).

Note that the personal resource abundance analysis looks at resource abundance from the perspective of an individual human being. The question we aim to answer is: How much more abundant have resources become for the average worker?

Population resource abundance analysis, in contrast, allows us to quantify the relationship between global resource abundance and global population growth. You can think of the difference between the two levels of analysis by using a pizza analogy. Personal resource abundance measures the size of a slice of pizza per person. Population resource abundance measures the size of the entire pizza pie.

The population resource abundance multiplier is calculated by multiplying the change in personal resource abundance with the change in global population (i.e., 4.03 × 1.758). The multiplier of 7.08 corresponds to the 708.4 percent increase in the Simon Abundance Index. It indicates an increase in the global resource abundance of 608.4 percent at a compound annual growth rate of around 5 percent. As such, Pooley and I estimate that global resource abundance doubled every 14 years or so.

Finally, let us look at the resource abundance elasticity of population. In economics, elasticity measures one variable’s sensitivity to a change in another variable. If variable x changes by 10 percent, while variable y, because of the change in x, changes by 5 percent, then the elasticity coefficient of x relative to y is 2.0 (i.e., 10 ÷ 5). A coefficient of 2.0 can be interpreted as a 2 percent change in x corresponding to a 1 percent change in y.

Pooley and I found that every 1 percent increase in population corresponded to an increase in personal resource abundance (i.e., the size of the slice of pizza) of 4 percent (i.e., 303 ÷ 75.8). We also found that every 1 percent increase in population corresponded to an increase in population resource abundance (i.e., the size of the pizza pie) of 8.03 percent (608.5 ÷ 75.8).

Knowledge Creation and Resource Expansion

There are several ways in which humans can make resources more abundant. To start, consider the increase of supply. When the price of a commodity increases, people have a monetary incentive to start searching for new sources of that commodity. For example, when the price of petroleum increases, people will look for more oil deposits. Thus, after a century of petroleum use, we have more known reserves of oil than ever before. Moreover, much of the Earth’s crust, not to mention the ocean floor, remains unexplored. The potential for finding much more petroleum when the price of oil is high enough to induce us to dig deeper and explore more exotic locations is very high. The supply of petroleum can also be increased through technological change. Many of the oil fields that were previously deemed exhausted still contain a great deal of oil trapped in underground shale rock. Replacing conventional oil drilling with hydraulic fracturing allows us to get at that oil in an economical way.

Increased efficiency is also important. Efficiency can increase in relative and absolute ways. For example, when the Coca‐​Cola can first appeared on the market in the late 1950s, it contained three ounces of aluminum. Today, it contains half an ounce. Of course, it is possible to decrease the amount of aluminum in each soda can while producing so many cans that the absolute amount of aluminum used increases. Remarkably, Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that the total amount of resources used by the US economy peaked in the first decade of the new millennium and then started to decline. To be precise, 66 out of 72 resources tracked by the US Geological Survey were “post‐​peak” when McAfee wrote his book More from Less in 2019. In the meantime, the US economy continued to expand. Similar trends could be observed in the United Kingdom and some other advanced economies.

Dematerialisation helps to explain why economic growth and resource use reduction can go hand in hand. Most readers will be familiar with thick blue copper cables that ran from the walls of most hotel rooms in the United States until recently. That cable enabled hotel guests to access the internet—a task that can now be accomplished via Wi‐​Fi. No cables are necessary, and all that saved copper can be used somewhere else. The iPhone is another example of dematerialisation, for it replaces (or substantially decreases the need for) calculators, satellite navigation, watches, torches, radios, compasses, cameras, postal mail, telephones, voice recorders, stereos, alarm clocks, and many other things. In addition to the materials not used in the process of making an iPhone, we must also add the energy not used in the mining of the resources that are no longer needed and in the running of all the separate devices that the iPhone replaces.

New knowledge can also help us create ever more value from the same resource. Around 5,000 years ago, someone in Mesopotamia noticed that when sand is heated to 3,090 degrees Fahrenheit, it melts and turns to glass. Our distant ancestors’ first use of glass was for decorative purposes, such as glass beads. Sometime later, they started to use sand to make glass jars, cups, and, later still, windows. Today, we use glass in fiberoptic cables and microchips. With every step of the way, the value we derived from a grain of sand increased, and no one knows what marvelous innovations will rely on sand in the future. The US economist Thomas Sowell is thus surely correct to observe that 

“the cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today, and the difference between their standard of living and ours is a difference between the knowledge they could bring to bear on those resources and the knowledge used today.”

Consider also our ability to turn a previously useless or even harmful resource to our benefit. In the early 20th century, when oil was the primary target of drilling operations, natural gas was often seen as a byproduct with little or no economic value. As such, gas was frequently vented into the atmosphere or flared (burned off), which was wasteful and environmentally harmful. Moreover, natural gas leaks were a significant hazard, particularly in oil fields, where accidental ignitions could lead to explosions. Today in advanced economies, we have the technology to capture, transport, sell, and use gas in great volumes, thereby increasing our resource base and reducing our carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere.

Substitution is a crucial economic concept that’s much underappreciated by the public. Generally, we don’t care how we obtain a good or a service, so long as we get it at an acceptable cost. Thus, humans felled forests to get the wood they needed to heat their homes and slaughtered whales to get the lamp oil for illumination. Today, many of us heat and light our homes using electricity derived from a variety of sources, including mostly carbon‐​dioxide‐​free nuclear fission, with the added benefit that both forests and whales have rebounded. Those concerned about resources that are currently in high demand (such as lithium, which is needed to make batteries for electric vehicles) should take substitution into account. No one knows what resources will be needed to make batteries in 50—let alone 100—years’ time. But new technology‐​driven surprises are almost guaranteed.

We can also recycle and reuse our resources. The aforementioned copper internet cables, for example, were almost certainly recycled and turned into something else—perhaps copper pipes used in residential plumbing. The 14,000 tons of US government silver, which was used in electromagnets needed by the Manhattan Project to make atomic bombs, was similarly recovered after the end of World War II and added to the stock of precious metals that propped up the value of the US dollar. The point is that atoms of copper, silver, zinc, and much else are only temporarily assigned to perform a certain task. If necessary, they can be extracted and reassigned to make or do something else.

While humans have explored only a tiny fraction of our planet, it is theoretically possible that at some point in the distant future we could encounter an acute shortage of a resource, such as the very rare rhodium, which is currently used in catalytic converters. Let us further assume that the limits on the natural supply of that metal cannot be overcome via increased efficiency, dematerialisation, substitution, recycling, or anything else.

In such a case, our descendants could turn to transmutation. Transmutation, which was once a province of alchemy, became real in 1919 when scientists turned nitrogen into oxygen. According to an article I coauthored with University of Oxford physicist David Deutsch, 

“Today, transmutation is everywhere. The smoke detectors in our homes, for example, contain americium—a manmade radioactive metal produced by plutonium’s absorption of neutrons in nuclear reactors. Specialists transmuted lead into gold many years ago—though the process is currently uneconomical, for it requires far too much energy to replace mining.”

The key to transmutation, then, is plentiful, reliable, supercheap energy, which could be provided by, for example, future fusion reactors. Lest we forget, it was via fusion (nucleosynthesis, to be precise) that many of the elements we use on Earth were created in the first place. Incredibly high temperatures and pressures inside different stars transformed lighter elements into heavier ones, and the heavier elements dispersed throughout the universe after supernovae. Some of those elements eventually helped to form our planet and can be mined in Earth’s crust.

By the time humanity needs to resort to such sophisticated measures to increase our resource base, we may well be a spacefaring civilisation, mining the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter by ourselves or with the help of AI robots. The belt is rich in resources, including water. Water, which covers 71 percent of our planet, is key, for it contains hydrogen, which also happens to be the most common element in the universe. The Big Bang only created the lightest elements, primarily hydrogen. All other elements are derived from those. A combination of hydrogen and fusion, therefore, could allow us to create everything else we need de novo—indefinitely.

Globalisation, the Spread of Knowledge, and Resource Creation

In the 2021 edition of the Simon Abundance Index, Pooley and I found that the time price of wheat fell by 76.1 percent between 1980 and 2020. That means that for the same number of hours of work that would have bought our worker a pound of wheat in 1980, he or she could have bought 4.18 pounds of wheat in 2020. Resource abundance of the worker rose by 318 percent, growing at a compounded annual rate of 3.64 percent, thereby doubling every 19.4 years. (The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian war on Ukraine affected these numbers negatively, yet Pooley and I found that the trend still holds in the 2024 edition of the index.)

Over the same period (1980–2020), the world’s population rose from 4.44 billion to 7.82 billion, or by 76 percent. Put differently, for every 1 percent increase in global population, the time price of wheat fell by 1 percent. In addition to population growth, the latest round of globalisation, which is generally taken to have started in 1980, added billions of new workers to the global economic exchange. These factors contributed to a massive increase in resource consumption and output not only in the countries on the frontier of innovation, such as the United States and those in Western Europe, but also in the “catch‐​up” countries, such as Bangladesh, Brazil, China, India, Vietnam, and the nations of the former Eastern bloc. Personal incomes and consumption rose.

Yet wheat, a staple eaten all over the world, became much more abundant. Here the salutary effects of globalisation are easily discernible because several Western companies have been at the forefront of the agricultural revolution that provided technologies, seeds, and farming practices that enhanced wheat productivity in the catch‐​up countries. Consider some real‐​life examples:

• Syngenta’s disease‐​resistant wheat varieties. Syngenta, a global agribusiness company headquartered in Switzerland, has developed wheat varieties that are resistant to common diseases and pests. For instance, in parts of Africa and Asia, Syngenta’s disease‐​resistant wheat varieties have helped farmers combat issues such as wheat rust, a major threat to wheat crops. These varieties have not only increased yields per acre of land but also ensured more stable wheat production.
• John Deere’s advanced agricultural machinery. American company John Deere is known for its advanced agricultural machinery. The adoption of this machinery in countries such as India and Ethiopia has revolutionised wheat farming. Mechanised tractors, planters, and harvesters have increased the efficiency of planting and harvesting wheat, leading to higher yields and reduced labor costs.
• BASF’s agronomic solutions. German chemical company BASF provides various agronomic solutions, including fertilisers and pesticides, which are crucial in wheat cultivation. For example, in countries such as Mexico and Pakistan, the use of BASF’s fertilisers and pesticides has resulted in better wheat crop health and increased yields by controlling pests and enhancing soil fertility.
• Bayer’s crop science innovations. Bayer, following its acquisition of Monsanto, has become a key player in agricultural technologies. The company’s development of integrated crop solutions, including advanced seed treatments and chemical products, has improved wheat yields. For example, in Brazil and parts of Africa, Bayer’s products have helped farmers grow wheat more efficiently, even under challenging climatic conditions.
• DuPont’s hybrid wheat seeds. DuPont (now part of Corteva Agriscience after a merger with the Dow Chemical Company) has developed hybrid wheat seeds that are tailored to specific climatic and soil conditions. These seeds have been particularly effective in Eastern Europe and parts of Asia, where they have helped boost wheat yields through improved disease resistance and stress tolerance.
• CIMMYT’s collaboration with Western companies. The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), though not a commercial entity, collaborates with Western companies to develop high‐​yielding wheat varieties. CIMMYT’s work in countries such as Kenya and India, often in partnership with Western agricultural companies, has led to the introduction of wheat varieties that are well‐​suited to local conditions, resulting in significant yield improvements.

The results of the spread of information and technologies from the countries on the frontier of innovation to the catch‐​up countries are readily discernible. In 1980, wheat productivity measured in 100 grams per hectare was lower, sometimes substantially, in the catch‐​up countries relative to the United States and Western Europe. By 2020, some had overtaken the United States, while all of them, including the United States, remained less productive relative to Western Europe. Still, all the selected catch‐​up countries experienced greater productivity gains than the United States and Western Europe between 1980 and 2020.

Environmental Benefit

The period of globalisation saw absolute poverty (the threshold of which is considered to be earning wages of $2.15 or less per day) measured in 2017 dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity decline from 43.8 percent in 1981 to 8.9 percent in 2019. Concomitantly, the calorie supply per person rose from 2,497 in 1981 to 2,928 in 2018, or by 17 percent. In Africa, the world’s poorest continent, the calorie supply per person rose from 2,238 to 2,604, or by 16 percent, over the same period. That’s higher than the Portuguese calorie supply in the early 1960s. This trend is likely going to improve in the future, raising the obvious question: What will happen to the animal and plant habitats as humans strive to produce more food and other resources? The answer is once again counterintuitive.

Writing about US corn production in 2015, Jesse H. Ausubel, an environmental scientist at the Rockefeller University, said, 

“The average yield of American farmers is nowhere near a ceiling. In 2013, David Hula, a farmer in Virginia, grew a US and probably world record: 454 bushels of corn per acre—three times the average yield in Iowa.… In 2014, Hula’s harvest rose 5 percent higher to 476 bushels, while Randy Dowdy, who farms near Valdosta, Georgia, busted the 500‐​bushel wall with a yield of 503 bushels per acre and won the National Corn Growers Contest. ... If we keep lifting average yields toward the demonstrated levels of David Hula and Randy Dowdy … then an area the size of India or of the United States east of the Mississippi could be released globally from agriculture over the next 50 years or so.”

A similar story can also be told of wheat, rice, barley, potatoes, casava, beans, and other crops. There is no obvious limit on our ability to produce ever more staples per hectare, thus returning ever larger chunks of the planet back to nature, except for the generation of knowledge and its dissemination to (and acceptance in) the least developed corners of the world. Whether lab‐​grown meat can alleviate the environmental footprint of cattle, chicken, and pig farming is still an open question. At present, the knowledge to make lab‐​grown meat economical does not exist. But knowledge is not stagnant. It grows, and those who are betting against lab‐​grown meats may yet lose their shirts. Finally, the exploitation of raw materials has grown much cleaner in recent decades, a trend that’s likely to continue as nations develop and, per the environmental Kuznets curve, place greater emphasis on environmental quality.

Conclusion

Humans, especially those living in the countries on the frontier of innovation, create knowledge that allows us to grow our resources well in excess of the resources that we consume. Consequently, resources have grown much cheaper relative to wages and, therefore, more abundant. In terms of overall human well‐​being, however, it is globalisation that allows the new knowledge to flow from the countries on the frontier of innovation to the catch‐​up nations. Finally, the planet and its biosphere benefit as catch‐​up nations adopt best practices and begin to approximate the care for the environment that’s characteristic of innovative societies.

* * * * 

Marian L. Tupy is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, coauthor of the Simon Abundance Index, and editor of the website HumanProgress.org.

First published at the Cato at Liberty blog, part of their series Defending Globalisation.

"Whenever there is a proposal for a tax cut ... "

"Whenever there is a proposal for a tax cut, media pundits demand to know how you are going to pay for it. But when there are proposals for more spending on social programmes, those same pundits are strangely silent."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 1999 book, Barbarians Inside the Gates [hat tip Cafe Hayek]

 

Reporting news, or manufacturing propaganda?

"If people in the media cannot decide whether they are in the business of reporting news or manufacturing propaganda, it is all the more important that the public understand that difference, and choose their news sources accordingly."

~ Thomas Sowell, from his 2012 column 'Mixing news and propaganda' [hat tip Thomas Sowell quotes]

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

Growth, Progress, and the Physical Fallacy

 

I keep hearing ignorant stuff from environmental folk about how economic progress (or "growth" as some economists insist on calling it) is somehow finite because he planet is. That we need "degrowth." That we can't just keep on producing more stuff — and there's be a tipping point some time if we do.

This is an example of what Thomas Sowell used to call "the physical fallacy" —i.e., "the view that a given physical object always has a given value, regardless of its time, location, or even to whom you are asking" — a very good example of how too many folk misunderstand that economic progress consists essentially, not in producing stuff,  but in producing more value. (Just another reason that measuring economic progress by measuring GDP leads to error*.)

Art Carden explains:

A popular and pernicious fallacy that Thomas Sowell calls “the physical fallacy” holds that you’re not creating value if you’re not turning material stuff into another kind of material stuff. In this view, you take some stuff, hit it with something enough times that it becomes other stuff, and presto! You have created wealth. And industrial policy doesn’t seem to account for any other kind of creative value, leading to the all-too-common, and clearly fallacious, claim that “Americans don’t make things anymore.”

The statement that we only create wealth by creating physical objects is wrong in both tenets. Just because you’re making something doesn’t mean you’re creating value. You could very well be destroying it, as someone does when he raises cattle on land that would be more profitably used for housing and office space. And conversely, someone creates wealth when they move assets from a lower-valued use to a higher-valued use. Everyone selling things on eBay is creating wealth — or trying to — by matching things with people who want them at prices that make the sale worthwhile to both parties. I’ve been buying a bunch of junk on eBay recently that I find very meaningful. Other people might disagree.

Or as George Carlin used to say, "my shit is stuff; your stuff is shit."

* Alasdair Macleod: "Economists confuse growth in gross domestic product with progress. Growth is the expansion of a balance sheet total, reflecting an increase in the amount of money spent in the economy between two dates. Progress, on the other hand, is the improvement in living standards we get from more efficient production and technology."

50 years of welfare breaking up families

 

Welfare commentator Lindsay Mitchell reminds us that today marks the fiftieth anniversary of the one welfare measure responsible more than any other for supporting family break-up, and creating generations utterly dependent on largesse from the Welfare State.  In her measured words, 

the growth of the sole-parent family dependent on welfare has correlated with more poverty, more child abuse and more domestic violence. Each of these was intended to be reduced by the introduction of the DPB.

After fifty years, it's time to recognise that the opposite has happened. 

In 1966, in her summary

there were 922,349 dependent children under 16 years of age. 883,239 depended on married men or 96 percent of the total. A further two percent (19,829) depended on widows or widowers. The remainder had unmarried, separated, divorced (and not remarried) parents, or were orphans.

So, seven years before the DPB was introduced fewer than five percent of New Zealand children were in a one-parent situation. More than ninety-five percent of children lived in two-parent families.

After a "temporary" Domestic Purposes Emergency benefit was introduced by Holyoake's National Government, the Kirk Labour Government made it permanent, "having been hurried along by a National private member’s bill to the same effect." At the time, the new benefit barely even attracted any attention. But numbers soon exploded" 

'Children with a parent on DPB increased from 4% of all children under 18 in 1976, to 17% in 1991, and to 19% in 1996.”

And now: New Zealand has 1,123,500 children, 404,700 of whom , over a third of New Zealand's children, are living with a sole parent who is largely or wholly dependent on 'the benefit.' 

And "in the most deprived neighbourhoods," Lindsay notes, the percentage is much higher."

In the words of David McLoughlin, whom she quotes, the Domestic Purposes Benefit (DPB) has been a "disaster."

A temporary "emergency benefit," based on "need" was replaced with a permanent benefit based on a so-called entitlement, inviting -- nay, encouraging! -- generations to rely upon it as a way of life. Disastrous for them, for their offspring, and for those who pay their bills. And also for what some commentators refer to as "social cohesion." As Thomas Sowell reminds us:

“One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”

And when thwarted, niceness can turn to anger. To deprivation and resentment. And to Entitle-itis -- including encouraging parents to split to increase their welfare income. (“'Perversely, because benefit eligibility reflected individual circumstances, and benefit rates and means testing were based on family income, many families were better off financially to separate.' One parent would claim the DPB while the other claimed the unemployment benefit.)"

Lindsay's post lays out the history of this most disastrous of welfare schemes, and today's tragic result of family break-up. Right now, she summarises:

• Benefit-dependent single parents are on the rise again. 
• They proliferate in emergency housing. 
• Single parents have the lowest home ownership rates, and the highest debt-to-income ratios. 
•  Police report that family violence is at record levels – 
• single welfare-dependent females are the most vulnerable to partner violence, according to victim surveys. 
• The correlation between substantiated child abuse and appearing in the benefit system is incredibly strong. 
• Child poverty now drives both a public and private industry of people who claim to be helping to alleviate poverty. 
• There are domestic child sponsorship programmes, KidsCan, Variety, etc. Forget famine-stricken African nations.
• While benefits became more generous ... remaining obligations to the taxpayer became passé. 
• There is no sign whatsoever that a resumption of deserving and non-deserving considerations will make a comeback. In fact, morality is ever more remote. 
• Widows who become sole providers through no fault of their own are no longer differentiated from gang women who produce children as meal tickets. 
• No distinction is made between reasons for ‘need’:the taxpayer is expected to like it or lump it, despite the fact that fifty years of trying to solve social problems with cash payments has only made them worse.

The DPB has changed its name, but not its outcomes -- which have only deteriorated. Despite that, there is zero pressure to change it, and no political courage anywhere to even reform it. "When reforms do occur," she concludes, quoting US commentator Charles Murray, "they will happen not because the stingy people have won, but because generous people have stopped kidding themselves.”

    >>READ LINDSAY'S WHOLE POST HERE.

"We cannot demand justice from the cosmos"

“'Whatever the condition of human beings at the beginning of the species,' writes Thomas Sowell in his new book Social Justice Fallacies, 'scores of millennia had already come and gone before anyone coined the phrase social justice.' And during those vast expanses of time, 'different peoples evolved differently in very different settings around the world, developing different talents that created reciprocal inequalities of achievements in different endeavours.' They did so 'without necessarily creating equality, or even comparability, in any of those endeavours.'
    "The social-justice movement has changed all that, turning the quest for equity into a salient feature of Western culture and politics. The past century has seen this pursuit shift from the fringes of political discourse to the heart of the mainstream, and its narrative now exerts a profound influence on the arts, education, and even religious institutions. In large parts of society, it has instilled the notion that human disparities are entirely the result of oppression, exploitation, and discrimination, and that a remedial equality of outcome must therefore be pursued at all costs. But the attractive vision of an equitable future can only be constructed by ignoring evidence and repeating a litany of fallacies.
    "The gist of Thomas Sowell’s new work is that the flawed assumptions of social-justice activists are endangering Western societies....
    "The singleminded pursuit of [social] justice at all costs is not justice at all, Sowell argues, and will often result in injustice. The results sought by social-justice activists are what Hayek used to call 'cosmic justice,' and they are not attainable 'when there are differences in human fates for which clearly no human agency is responsible.' ...
    "'[W]e cannot demand justice from the cosmos'..."

~ Hannah Gal reviewing Thomas Sowell's latest book 'Social Justice Fallacies'

Slavery

“What was peculiar about the West was not that it participated in the worldwide evil of slavery, but that it later abolished that evil, not only in Western societies but also in other societies subject to Western control or influence. This was possible only because the anti-slavery movement coincided with an era in which Western power and hegemony were at their zenith, so that it was essentially European imperialism which ended slavery. This idea might seem shocking, not because it does not fit the facts, but because it does not fit the prevailing vision of our time.”

~ Thomas Sowell, from his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals

Another highly-paid beneficiary

John Tamihere shares a joke at taxpayers' expense

"The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites." 

~ Thomas Sowell, from his column 'Human Livestock'

"[John Tamihere's] Waipareira Trust has grown significantly and become a key service provider for Whānau Ora.
    "Whānau Ora was created in 2010 under the oversight of Dame Tariana Turia ... In essence, Whānau Ora is described as a Māori approach to delivering social and health services to whānau ... commissioning agencies that would invest [sic] directly in their communities....
    "There are only three Whānau Ora commissioning agencies in the country.... For the North Island, the Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency is actually the trading name of a company called Te Pou Matakana Limited. The Patrons of that entity include Dame Tariana Turia, Merepeka Raukawa-Tait and John Tamihere’s father-in-law, Sir Mason Durie. The chief executive is John Tamihere and the chief operating officer is his wife, Awerangi Tamihere....
    "The Whānau Ora Commissioning Agency, NUMA [John Tamihere's so-called National Urban Māori Authority] and the Waipareira Trust are all located at the same Henderson commercial address and share administrative and back office support....
    "[U]nder the current Labour government, the Waipareira Trust has had a golden run.... In its most recent accounts for the year ended 30 June 2022, the trust had revenue from services [i.e., money doled out from government] of $69,544,616, and had cash or term deposits of $50,379,806.... Over [the last] six year period ... remuneration and benefits for senior management have increased from $2,013,194 to $4,390,413 ... [and] annual management fees [to] $6,000,000...
    "The management fee alone is an eye-watering amount and seems difficult to justify ...
    "[M]any Māori believe that not enough funding from Whānau Ora is making its way to those in need. Their concerns seem to be justified."

~ Thomas Cranmer, from his post 'John Tamihere and the Waipareira Trust'

NB: WHAT WE SAID IN 2010:

"If stimulus and bailouts are welfare for bankers-who’ve-failed, and Kiwisaver is welfare for suits-with-nothing-in-them, then surely the new politically-correct Whānau Ora scheme is just welfare for 'welfare providers,' isn’t it? Welfare that is primarily to keep the likes of John Tamihere and Rongo Wetere in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. Welfare for a Browntable of well-heeled ambulance chasers. Welfare that will end up costing us all more in the long run than the current welfare bill."

'Welfare for Everyone' - NOT PC, April, 2010

AND WHAT WE SAID IN 2015:

"[W]hat Whanau Ora is, as I said when it was announced, is simply welfare for separatist welfare providers.
    "In short, a scam.
    "That much is fairly clear even from the Auditor General’s findings on funding, to whit: 'During the first four years, total spending on Whānau Ora was $137.6 million…. Nearly a third of the total spending was on administration…' 
    "You see? A very well-paying scam … if you’re inside that tent clipping the ticket.
    "What Whanau Ora is primarily, is welfare for separatist welfare providers....
    "So what has the scam achieved?
    "It has achieved a great deal indeed … for all those inside the tent.
    "What it achieved for the Maori Party was to buy them the backing of welfare providers – and as you can see I mean 'buy' in the very literal sense. Sure, it’s been hard to keep the backers inside the tent as bigger game seemed to appear elsewhere, but for a while at least it bought support for the new party.
    "And what it achieved for the Key Government was to buy the backing of the Maori Party – 'buy' here being used in the very political sense of buying the Maori Party’s votes, with which it was able to stay in power.
    "So quite a great deal indeed was achieved, if you’re one of the ones in power."

'The Whānau Ora Scam' - NOT PC, May 2015