New Zealand is a small, isolated nation and needs to design itself accordingly. We should avoid uncritically imitating larger nations.
Among the news websites I read is a British daily which once a week interviews a local writer on the books they grew up reading and which influenced them. That’s fifty-odd a year; most interviews are of high quality – rarely are the subjects mediocre.
If a New Zealand news-site were to do the same, it would struggle, on a per capita basis, be able to identity such four attractive writers a year; the remainder would be mediocre – which my thesaurus couples with ‘banal’, ‘indifferent’, ‘pedestrian’, ‘undistinguished’ and ‘uninspired’. Fortunately, no local news-site tries but there is a tendency to assume that many more of our writers have achieved levels as good as that British fifty.
True for our politicians. It is unreasonable to assume that we have the same number of competent ones as larger democracies. Not surprisingly Stuff recently concluded that the majority of a New Zealand cabinet is very average. (Even so, many would think that the grades were generous or Stuff’s average standard was low.) That has been true for just about every cabinet I can recall. Yet we pretend that most New Zealand politicians are of some ability.
That is also true for our business leaders. This is not to argue that we have no world-class writers, politicians or business leaders (or economists for that matter), but we have far fewer than we pretend. With 46 weeks or whatever to fill in, we upgrade a lot of mediocrities to a significant eminence they do not deserve, debasing the currency.
As M. K. Joseph wrote 70-odd years ago, we ‘worship the mean, cultivate the mediocre.’ But by doing so, we downgrade our exceptionals and discourage striving to achieve better, insulating our judgement from international standards while pretending we are up there with the best.
Sport offers a different approach. We do not select politically correct mediocrities for our national teams. Because we care about sport, we do relatively well (and women and the disabled seem to do even better because we have put more effort into promoting them relative to other countries).
In some sports we are near the top – rugby for instance – because most other countries do not play them to the same extent. Soccer is perhaps the most universal sport (if we allow for a relative lack of interest in the US – it’s growing). I am not uncomfortable that the All Whites are currently 87th and the Football Ferns 35th in FIFA’s world rankings, given the nation’s size. (Of course we have had some international class soccer players, but they play overseas.)
It’s not just population. NZ soccer has hardly a competitive local league. Or to go back to the opening example, it would be difficult for a NZ journalist interviewing four excellent writers a year to hone the skills the British equivalent does on fifty. Moreover, there are at least a dozen capable British journos pressing to do the job instead.
High quality is not merely innate ability but there also has to be an environment which cultivates excellence. It is a miracle that we have world-class writers and businesspeople and even politicians who live here. On the other hand, if we promote mediocrity we will achieve mediocrity; the best will tend to emigrate.
Sadly, the mediocre often have the power to block excellence. When did you see an average professor make way for an up and coming academic? It is not only that we have little career development for public servants; some get blocked and go overseas, while we import some not very successful chief executives. (The quality of management is probably a key factor in explaining why we have poor productivity – but this is not a matter for public discussion.)
The small size can mean we end up with monopolistic gatekeepers who control a key topic and allow no competition. In one case, an eminent academic said they would not have approved a doctorate if they had known the extent to which the holder ended up controlling the public discussion. One is haunted by Ronald Hugh Morrieson, one of our top novelists who said ‘I hope I'm not another one of these poor buggers who get discovered when they're dead’. There are others like him who will be remembered long after the gatekeepers who suppressed them are forgotten.
While competition is a key element in promoting intellectual excellence, it must be a culture of creative innovation rather than lazily promoting a conventional wisdom which lags behind the changing world. It needs to avoid the colonial-inferiority mentality where so often the mediocre lapse into imitating uncritically the fashions beyond our shores.
Similarly, competition is not always a solution to our economic woes. When it was proposed to break up the Electricorp monopoly, I looked around for evidence of the optimum size of a firm in the industry. (In a competitive market all mature firms will be operating near the optimum.) The US electricity market is reasonably competitive – there are caveats. The typical size of one of their businesses was about the same size as the entire New Zealand industry. It did not make sense to imitate the American electricity market. We did.
Older readers will recall the opening of home milk delivery to competition (younger ones need to know that once a monopolist delivered bottles of milk each morning). The promise was for lower prices; the reality is that home delivery no longer occurs. Rogernomes repeatedly promised lower prices from competition. They never happened. (Sometimes there were gains in the quality of the services being supplied.)
An extra player when there are only a few businesses in the market may add to ‘competition’ but it usually does not lower prices. Adding an extra commercial bank or supermarket chain is unlikely to lower prices or profits. Oligopolistic markets do not behave like purely competitive markets with lots of players and ease of entrance and exit. After the new entrant arrives, we will still be grumbling about the banks and supermarkets.
New Zealand is going to have fewer players and less effective competition than the economies we admire. Rather than mindlessly imitating, we need to devise our own, perhaps unique, form of market regulation. We have to think small when we are designing New Zealand systems rather than imitating the big. It may be small, but thinking for ourselves is ambitious – and it is hard.