My first week in NZ was spent working at the university here – a strange experience I have to say. I spent 14 years at this university, including six on staff, but apart from a couple of hours over the past few years I haven’t been back for 11 years. Most of the people I knew back then are still here (including a number who battled through grad school wth me and some who taught me 25 years ago!). People have given me a great welcome and it’s been fun to catch up with people. I gave a presentation on the Thursday before Christmas and it went very well.
I haven’t taken too many photos around campus yet, but here are a few.
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I spent my first few days in NZ at (my sister) Michelle and Jeremy’s place, which including meeting my new niece Victoria for the first time and experiencing my nephew Thom’s third birthday party. Lots of fun.
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I’ve been pretty quiet here for the past few weeks, but have been accumulating some interesting articles that I’ve wanted to comment on. I’ll try to catch up in the next few days, but here’s one that got my attention today -
An article in the NZ Herald claims an increasing percentage of NZers think the economy is going to improve in the next year – 39.8% compared with 29.9% in August, and compared with 26% who current think the economy is going to get worse.
I think the optimists are deluded – I just don’t believe the economy can sustain the current madness of consumer spending funded by overseas debt. It’s all going to go pear-shaped eventually.
The NZ dollar has been rising strongly in the past week, defying (in my opinion) all logic related to its medium term prospects. The Herald yesterday noted some economists’ predictions that the NZ$ could turn down aggressively in the new year. That certainly makes sense to me. And while that will be good for exporters and contribute to a reduction in the current account deficit, it could be painful for a lot of people – increasing inflation from increased import prices, higher interest rates to curb inflation and from lack of demand for the NZ$ and falling property prices.
That could hit a lot of people pretty hard. Stuff.co.nz reported a few days ago that household debt in NZ has doubled in the past five years, compared with an increase in gross disposable household income of only 23%. And as a percentage of income, debt servicing has increased from 7.8% to 13.1%. The Bank of NZ. At the same time, house prices are high relative to incomes – about 8 times average income, compared with 5 times in the US – suggesting potential for a pretty strong downturn.
In fact a BNZ economist is quoted as saying -
“It’s all grossly unsustainable, but a tipping point doesn’t seem imminent.”
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It is unclear where it will all turn, but he believes the soft landing which every one is hoping for may just become an “abrupt adjustment”.
Yesterday’s NZ Herald reported S&P’s decision to maintain NZ’s current AA+ credit rating. The detail is interesting though -
New Zealand’s current account deficit widened to about 9.7 per cent of GDP in the June year, from an already high 8 per cent in 2005. This compared with a median current account surplus of 2.9 per cent for those countries rated in the ‘AA’ category.
New Zealand’s net foreign debt is expected to be about 190 per cent of current account receipts, compared with the median of 26 per cent for similarly rated countries.
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Mr Curry said the stable outlook also took account of S&P’s expectation the current account deficit would move lower as domestic demand continued to slow and growth is rebalanced in favour of an export-led recovery.
“If this outcome fails to eventuate, however, the ratings on New Zealand could come under pressure.” he said.
And in case you miss the point, “rebalancing growth in favor of an export-led recovery” means NZers will eventually wake up to the painful reality that they can’t afford all the stuff they’re buying and are going to have to start producing things for the foreigners they have unwittingly become indentured servants to.
My ComEd power bill provides a interesting summary of the environmental impact of power usage. Apparently 88% of my electric power comes from nuclear and 9% from coal. The rest is from biomass and natural gas.
Each 1000 kWh of power usage (roughly an average month’s consumption for me) produces, on average, 189.1 lbs of carbon dioxide, 0.4 lbs each of nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, 0.006 lbs of high level nuclear waste and 0.0007 cubic feet of low level nuclear waste.
Barack Obama is a US Senator from Illinois who has been touted as a possible presidential candidate for 2008. A couple of interested quotes have turned up in the past few days, one about him on the PBS News Hour and the other by him on MSNBC’s Meet the Press.
David Brooks of the NY Times made this comment to Jim Lehrer on the Newshour on Friday -
So why does he generate excitement? It’s because he has a deliberative mind. Whenever he sees an issue, he sees all sides of it, and then he works his way through.
And, you know, I’ve had many conversations with him, and we disagree on most things. But you have a conversation with him, and you feel like he really understands your point of view. And he may differ, but he has a deliberative process that goes on in his mind.
And I think it’s because of his background. He comes from Kansas. He lived in Chicago. He lived in Hawaii. He lived in the Pacific. He’s got all these things coming through him in his life story, and he’s had to negotiate between them — poverty, Harvard Law School — and so he’s about negotiation.
And he may be young, but if you have that process going on, I think you’ll be able to magnify the knowledge you have.
Based on my very limited exposure to him, I certainly sense the deliberative thought process that Brooks identifies and I find it tremendously refreshing. That said, I suspect that there are probably a lot of areas in which I disagree with his political views. This comment he made to Tim Russert on Meet the Press this morning struck me as a little odd -
I think that the American people are historically a nonideological people. I think when we operate on the basis of common sense and pragmatism, we end up with better outcomes.
My view is that ideology, i.e. a coherent and intellectually rigorous set of philosophical principles that underpin one’s actions, is actually a fundamental requirement for sound long-term policy-making.
Video of the whole Meet the Press program can be found here.
Keith Olbermann is a news commentator on US cable TV network MSNBC. He can be pretty scathing in criticising people he disagrees with and tends to come across as a bit overbearing. However, generally I think he is a sharp thinker.
Lately he has been very critical of some of the actions of the Bush administration. In an item yesterday he gave a very cutting analysis of the new Military Commissions Act that denies the automatic right to a trial for any person deemed to be an “enemy combatant”. Part of the item involved an interview with a constitutional law professor, Jonathan Turley, from George Washington University.
The whole thing is pretty good reading, and the webpage includes a link to the video of the segment. Here’s an extract that I thought was particularly interesting -
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While I’m on the subject of YouTube, last I remembered a car advertisement I had seen, oh I don’t know – maybe a year ago, that I thought was brilliant. I figured it might be on YouTube (I don’t remember if that’s where I originally saw it) and went looking. Sure enough it was there. Quite cool. Worth a look if you haven’t seen it before. Apparently there are no special effects apart from the bit with the loudspeakers close to the end. They just took a very, very long time to make it all work.
When I need to unwind and laugh a bit late at night I often seem to find myself watching Jon Stewart on YouTube.com – I’m not sure that everything he says qualifies as “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable” (in case you are not familiar, it’s generally very irreverant and bleeped language is fairly common). However, his biting satire is often brilliant in its insight and humor. Poking around the other night I found a clip of the first broadcast he made following 9/11. I found it quite moving.
This is shocking, but in no way surprising to me. An article on cnn.com about the chances of the Democrats taking Ohio in the mid-term elections quotes a 77 year old Republican voter expressing concern about Iraq -
“I was all for Bush going in there because I thought he had prayed about it.”
Am I reading this right – she chose not to have an informed opinion of her own because she believed that President Bush was getting his opinion from God?
This is sad and disturbing, but completely consistent with a very strong strain of Christianity (not just in the US) that encourages people to park their brains and defer to the judgement of so-called leaders.
