Can’t You Just Feel the Wellbeing, NZ?

Robert Muldoon used to brag that exporting New Zealanders to Australia raised the IQ of both countries, but lately, Australia’s importing a lot of garbage from New Zealand that’s making us dumber. And I’m not talking about Russell Crowe, phony “asylum seekers”, or sundry criminal bikers.

What I’m talking about are the slew of dumb ideas gibbered by the New Zealand left, and taken up in a cacophonic chorus of parrot-screeching by the dumbest birds on the other side of the Tasman.

Possibly topping the list is the witless squawking of “Wellbeing, not GDP!”

First off, let’s get out of the way any notion that these idiots actually understand economics.

Gross domestic product — the benchmark of the nation’s economic performance — only measures the reconstruction of the house […]

That’s blunt but it’s the reality, according to researcher Dr Cressida Gaukroger.

“GDP doesn’t measure harm. It just measures money.

Well, no shit, Sherlock. Of course it just measures money: that’s what it’s meant to do. Just the same as IQ only measures an individual’s intellectual abilities and potential.

Yet, IQ is strongly correlated with a whole bunch of other outcomes that are far more difficult to measure as objectively: income, education level, health, even longevity. In the same way, a completely objective measure, GDP per capita — in a word, wealth — is strongly correlated with reporting of a completely subjective measure: happiness.

“Wellbeing” is likewise a totally subjective measure. That hasn’t stopped some economic illiterates from prioritising it.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers has revealed the budget — which sets out what the government will spend its money on in the coming year — will measure its decisions against their impact on the wellbeing of the Australian people.

It might sound radical, but countries like Scotland, Wales, Ecuador and New Zealand already do it.

And how’s that working out for them? Scotland and Ecuador’s GDP per capita is falling. Wales has some of the lowest GDP per capita in Western Europe.

I don’t need to remind BFD readers just how New Zealand’s going.

Yet Jacinda Ardern made “wellbeing” the centrepiece of her government’s economic planning. How’s it working out for you, New Zealand?

Dr Gaukroger points to how authorities in Glasgow shifted a persistent and deadly spate of stabbings in Scotland’s biggest city. A traditional approach to knife crime was to increase police intervention and focus on law and order.

Instead, knife crime was approached as a public health problem and police worked with social services to help people most at risk of being involved in crime: helping them into accommodation and employment.

“This had an incredible response. After a decade, knife crime was reduced in the city of Glasgow by over 60 per cent,” she says.

ABC Australia

This is cherry-picking and false correlation. In the last decade, violent crime has fallen in all Scottish cities in roughly the same manner. Glasgow remains far worse than even the next-most crime-ridden city, Edinburgh. Even discounting a slight uptick in the last couple of years, the story is the same across the UK: violent crime soared to a peak in the early 2000s, from which it is falling, but still has a long, long way to go before dropping to levels last seen even in 2000, let alone earlier decades.

So, there is clearly something going on other than hugging criminals.

After all, the US has spent the last few years adopting “alternative” models of law-enforcement, and “community-based policing” — and crime is soaring.

The way things are going, New York will soon be as dangerous as South Auckland.

But, hey, at least the criminals feel good about themselves.