The UK general election under proportional representation

"Labour gained over 200 seats but their vote share increased by less than two percentage points to 34%"

The UK general election is just a periodic reminder of how unfair and distortional the UK first-past-the-post (FPP) electoral system is. While Sir Keir Starmer's Labour Party have stormed to a large parliamentary majority, it is not bolstered by the knowledge that a large proportion of the British electorate have actually voted for them. The above quote is from the BBC, which also notes that Reform won 14 percent of the vote but only five seats, which is 0.8 percent of the total seats. Notably, the Green party also won 6.8 percent of the vote, but only four seats (0.6 percent of the total seats).

Fortunately the Electoral Reform Society has produced a simulated UK general election conducted under proportional representation, which illustrates that to form a government comprising a majority of voters, Labour (236 seats under PR) would need to form a coalition or other similar arrangement with both the Liberal Democrats (77 seats) and the Greens (42 seats), giving a government of 355 seats. The Conservatives (157 seats) could equally form a coalition with Reform (94 seats) and the Liberal Democrats to give a government of 328 seats. The latter would be a flimsy majority, though.

Source: Electoral Reform Society, 2024

The consolations of electrocution

Hospitals are excellent at responding to physical suffering, but what about suffering from boredom? For many there are long waits which can get boring. It may sound trivial or luxurious doing nothing, but could boredom be a problem that impacts on health outcomes and performance of hospitals? Is this a hidden malaise of hospital life?

Many struggle with doing nothing. A study found over two thirds of men, and a quarter of women, preferred electrocuting themselves rather than sitting in a blank room thinking for fifteen minutes...

- Elizabeth Burns, 'Pass me an anti-boredom pill doctor', BMJ Opinion, 2 March 2017

How chip speed growth has slowed

Year	Processor	Clock speed (MHz)
1971	4004	0.108
1974	8080	2
1982	286	6
1989	486	25
1993	Pentium	66
1997	Pentium II	300
2000	Pentium 4	1500
2006	Core 2 Duo	2660
2012	3rd generation Core	2900

(Click to enlarge)

Source: Adapted from a graphic in Matthew Chalmers, 'Need for speed: Why computers stopped getting faster', New Scientist, 21 February 2015, p.42-3.

Rising inequality and slower growth

The west’s leading economic thinktank on Tuesday dismissed the concept of trickle-down economics as it found that the UK economy would have been more than 20% bigger had the gap between rich and poor not widened since the 1980s.

Publishing its first clear evidence of the strong link between inequality and growth, the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development proposed higher taxes on the rich and policies aimed at improving the lot of the bottom 40% of the population [...]

The OECD said that the richest 10% of the population now earned 9.5 times the income of the poorest 10%, up from seven times in the 1980s. However, the result had been slower, not faster, growth.

It concluded that “income inequality has a sizeable and statistically negative impact on growth, and that redistributive policies achieving greater equality in disposable income has no adverse growth consequences.

“Moreover, it [the data collected from the thinktank’s 34 rich country members] suggests it is inequality at the bottom of the distribution that hampers growth." [...]

Rising inequality is estimated to have knocked more than 10 percentage points off growth in Mexico and New Zealand, nearly nine points in the UK, Finland and Norway, and between six and seven points in the United States, Italy and Sweden.

The thinktank said governments should consider rejigging tax systems to make sure wealthier individuals pay their fair share. It suggested higher top rates of income tax, scrapping tax breaks that tend to benefit higher earners and reassessing the role of all forms of taxes on property and wealth.

- Larry Elliott, 'Revealed: how the wealth gap holds back economic growth', Guardian, 9 December 2014

Notes on the asset sales referendum results

The preliminary results of the asset sales referendum, asking the question "Do you support the Government selling up to 49% of Meridian Energy, Mighty River Power, Genesis Power, Solid Energy and Air New Zealand", show an interesting range of results across the country.

• The overall turnout of 43.9 percent seems reasonable compared with other New Zealand citizen initiated referendums outside of those held on election day: the firefighters' referendum in 1995 had a turnout of 27 percent, and the smacking referendum in 2009 had a turnout of 56 percent.
• If electorate turnout rates are grouped into ranges of 10 percent each, the results are as follows:

% Turnout	No. of electorates
20-29%	5
30-39%	12
40-49%	44
50-59%	9

• The five electorates with the lowest turnout are all Labour or Maori Party electorates - in order, they are: Tamaki Makaurau (28.9%), Hauraki-Waikato (29.3%), Mangere (29.4%), Manurewa (29.5%) and Manukau East (29.7%). Actually, the 10 electorates with the lowest referendum turnout are all represented by Labour, Maori Party or Mana MPs. 
• The nine electorates with turnout rates over 50 percent are comprised of seven electorates with National MPs (Wairarapa, Northland, Napier, Nelson, Waitaki, Coromandel and Otaki) plus two Labour electorates (West-Coast Tasman and Dunedin South). 
• The electorate with the highest turnout was Otaki (54.0%), held by National, closely followed by Dunedin South, held by Labour.
• The mean turnout rate for electorates with a National MP (45.67%) was actually higher than for those with a Labour MP (41.28%).
• The national preliminary result was 32.5 percent 'Yes' (in favour of the asset sales) and 67.2 percent 'No' (opposed to the sales).
• Considering the 'Yes' vote (in favour of the asset sales programme) by electorates:

% Yes	No. of electorates
0-9%	7
10-19%	3
20-29%	19
30-39%	28
40-49%	11
50-59%	2

• The seven electorates with under 10 percent ‘Yes’ votes were all Maori electorates (three Labour, three Maori Party and one Mana). 
• The two electorates with ‘Yes’ votes over 50 percent were Epsom (54.6%) and Tamaki (53.2%), held by ACT and National respectively. (The 'No' vote obviously mirrors the above results, for example with 28 electorates returning 'No' rates of between 60 and 69 percent, because there are only two valid responses, Yes and No).
• Five electorates with National MPs had a 'No' vote (against the sales) of greater than 70 percent: Waitakere (74.2%), Invercargill (73.6%), Whanganui (71.8%), Nelson (71.3%) and Christchurch Central (70.3%). Three of those five electorates are held by Ministers (Paula Bennett, Chester Borrows, and Nick Smith). 
• Two electorates with Labour MPs had 'Yes' votes (in favour of the sales) above 30 percent: Wellington Central (31.7%) and Mt Roskill (30.2%), held by Grant Robertson and Phil Goff respectively.

See also:

Blog: MPs departing Parliament, 7 November 2013

Blog: How the 'man ban' coverage lets us all down, 6 July 2013

Blog: The No vote's disingenuous referendum campaign (UK AV referendum), 6 May 2011

How the 'man ban' coverage lets us all down

Politics is of course a popularity contest as well as a contest of ideas, and that any party that fails to convince the public of the merits of its proposals doesn't deserve to be popular. But that presumes there's a free market of ideas in which the merits of proposals are debated fairly and openly, and the public gets a chance to make up its mind based on an appraisal of all the facts. This week's leaked Labour Party proposal to encourage female candidates in electorate seats struck me of a prime example of how the superficial analysis of the New Zealand media lets down the democratic process.

Clearly, one prime political objective in an imperfect media environment is to make best use of those imperfections to advance your own interests, and Labour's opponents have shown a strong ability to manipulate media interest to pour scorn on a policy they see as politically correct. The numbskull misrepresentation of the 'man ban' slogan is quite artful in its simplicity, and you have to salute the Machiavellian wit who thought up the misleading rhyme to tar the proposal. Not since the debate over the bill to repeal section 59 of the Crimes Act 1961, which was peddled with the much catchier but wholly misleading 'anti-smacking bill' title by its opponents, has there been an idea shut down so rapidly by tabloid sensationalism.

That 'man ban' angle is certainly the narrative that media outlets have run with in the past couple of days, and it has seen Labour leader David Shearer back away from the gender balance initiative. I think this is a pity, because it represents the triumph of tabloid instincts over a real need for equity in Parliamentary representation. It also marks a real, if potentially minor, failure of the democratic process itself.

It's not as if there isn't a real problem affecting the gender balance of Parliament. New Zealand's performance in terms of female representation in Parliament has been poor in recent years, with only 39 women elected to Parliament in 2011 out of 121 - just 32 percent. Labour has traditionally been a bit more proactive in selecting women candidates, while National has lagged in this regard.  This is shown in the composition of each party's caucus at the last election:

	Female	Male	%Female
ACT	0	1	0
Green	8	6	57
Labour	12	22	35
Mana	0	1	0
Maori	1	2	33
National	15	44	25
NZ First	3	5	37
UFNZ	0	1	0

The details above show that only the Greens can say they have achieved a representative (well, slightly over-representative) balance of female MPs. National, the largest party at the last election, does poorly, but then Labour's numbers aren't particularly impressive either. In selecting three women in winnable list positions NZ First has greatly improved its standing, given in past Parliaments its caucus was almost completely male.

Labour hopes to boost its popularity amongst women, and strong female representation should be one good way to achieve that. Clearly the existing candidate selection process isn't delivering equitable representation, so the women-first proposal was devised. And to make it clear, the proposal was a nudge, not a ban: if two potential electorate candidates, all being equal, were a man and a woman, the woman would be selected to address an overall under-representation.

This ongoing under-representation is worse when you consider that by and large women are treated poorly by the present candidacy processes across parties. Candidates selected in the high-prestige winnable electorate seats tend to be men:

	Female	Male	%Female
Electorate MP	19	51	27
List MP	20	31	39

  

The point of difference the Labour proposal was trying to address was that Labour has the opportunity to compete with National in electing a higher proportion of women candidates to electorate seats. Currently there's little difference between the two major parties in terms of gender balance in electorate MPs:

	Female	Male	%Female
Labour Electorate MPs	7	15	32
National Electorate MPs	11	31	26

 

This imbalance won't be addressed by the status quo, because the status quo of setting targets for higher female representation has continued to deliver an over-representation for men, particularly in electorate seats, but also across Parliament. In the rush to trivialise a relatively uncomplicated issue, the media have shown how hard it is to have a balanced debate about important issues like female representation in New Zealand.

Social mobility in America

The American dream is that any child can make it from the bottom to the top. That may still be true in politics; the son of a Kenyan immigrant, raised partly by his grandparents, is now president of the United States. But it is much less true, in economic terms, than most Americans think. Social mobility is less easy in America than in other countries. For example, three-quarters of Danes born in the lowest-earning 20% of the population escape their plight in adulthood. Seven out of ten poor children in supposedly class-ridden Britain achieve the same feat. But fewer than six in ten Americans do so.

Similarly, with rags-to-riches stories. It is far less common for Americans from the bottom 20% in childhood to move into the top 20% in adulthood than it is in Denmark or in Britain. On the whole, America's wealthy prosper while the average citizen struggles; the richest 1% of Americans gained 93% of the additional income created in 2010. The pay workers get has failed to move in line with productivity in the past 30 years. But Americans have yet to realise the extent of this tectonic shift. In a survey conducted in 2011 the average respondent thought that the richest fifth of the population had 60% of the wealth, not 85% as is the case. The respondents' ideal income distribution would be for the top quintile to have just 30% of the wealth.

- Economist, 23 June 2012, in a review of Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers our Future.

See also:

Review: Yvonne Roberts, Observer, 13 July 2012

Interview: Jared Bernstein interviews Stiglitz, Rolling Stone, 25 June 2012

China's 'son preference'

The sex ratio in many parts of Asia in particular has risen way past biologically possible levels. In China and India, census data indicate that the level is nationally around 120 to 100. By 2020, China will have between thirty and forty million more men than women under the age of 19. To put that figure in perspective, forty million is the total number of American men in that demographic bracket. So, within eight years, China faces the prospect of having the equivalent of the whole young male population of America permanently single. One of the dark things about this is that ‘son preference’, as it’s dryly called in the literature, rises with income and with modernisation – which means it’s been rising sharply. That amounts to many tens of millions of missing girls.


- John Lanchester, 'Marx at 193', London Review of Books, 5 April 2012, p.7-10.

The provenance of cider

The other weekend I was walking down Tory Street heading towards Courtenay Place when I saw the following billboard advertisement for Bulmer's Original Cider:

In case you can't see the tag-line at the bottom right, it reads: 'Unashamedly English Cider'.

'Aha,' I thought. 'Here's my chance to be a smart-arse'.  Because in my hazy memory I was fairly sure that Bulmer's was an Irish company, and that the New Zealand advertising agency APN was engaging in a woeful act of misrepresentation from which I could possibly wangle a mention on The News Quiz or in the Guardian.

Unfortunately it isn't quite as simple as that, and ultimately it just goes to show that you should always check your facts. Rather than misrepresenting the provenance of Bulmer's, the hokey graphic is actually correct - the name is English rather than Irish. There is an Irish angle to the story though, and it relates to the well-known cider brand Magner's, the rather pricey Irish cider that's served over ice on hot summer days in Britain.

H.P. Bulmer was founded by Percy Bulmer in Hereford in 1887. The company was successful and grew, and by the early part of the 20th century it was attempting to broaden its market by targeting the more genteel drinker:

Bulmers attempted to secure a high class market for their products. 'Champagne is ruinous in price; Bulmer's cider is the solution', the firm announced and in 1911 received the Royal Warrant as Purveyors of Cider to George V.
- Walter Minchington, 'Competition and cooperation: The British Cider Industry since 1880', in Hans Pohl (ed.), Competition and cooperation of enterprises on national and international markets, 1997, p.128. 

Ireland joins the story in 1935, when Tipperary man William Magner bought an orchard and established the Magner's cider factory in Clonmel. The established Bulmer's firm bought half the factory in 1937 and enlarged the operation, and after the war in 1946 it purchased the remaining half of Magner's share in the company, and dropped the Magner's name in favour of its own. By this stage Bulmer's had become a well-known brand, and one which marketed its products aggressively:

From the late 1940s sales were maintained by a growth of press advertising and, once commercial television had begun, by advertising there too. The Beverley sisters singing 'Bring out the Bulmers cider' was a landmark in this campaign. This advertising aimed successfully to replace the stereotype of the bucolic peasant as the typical cider-drinker. While some beer advertising tended to advertise beer as a man's drink, most cider advertising suggested that cider could be drunk in mixed company and an element of sex (or unisex) was added to cider sales. As marketing developed, a macho element was added in 1960 with a Bulmers brand, for example, being marketed under the name Strongbow.
- Minchington, p.131

The success in these marketing campaigns, and later ones too, can be seen in the rise and rise of cider consumption in the UK, particularly in the past 50 years. For 95 years from 1870 to 1965 the UK consumed a fairly consistent figure of about 20 million gallons of cider per year. But then the market took off: in the five years to 1970 the market grew by half (to 31.4 million gallons); in the next 15 years to 1985 consumption more than doubled (64.3m), and by 2005 it had more than doubled again (136.4m). By 2010 the UK was consuming ten times as much cider as it was in 1965*. Cider is big business.

Source: Walter Minchington, 'Competition and cooperation: The British Cider Industry since 1880', in Hans Pohl (ed.), Competition and cooperation of enterprises on national and international markets, 1997; and Cider UK. 

In 2003 Bulmer's was sold to a brewing chain, and by 2008 the venture had been bought by mega-brewers Heineken. The Irish company that produces Magner's is owned by the Irish drinks company C&C Group; the Magner's cider brand was introduced in 1999 because C&C lacked the rights to the Bulmers cider name outside the Republic of Ireland. However, the two ciders are the same product. Confusing!

My introduction to cider drinking came when I first moved to London in 1997. Traditionally regarded as an unfashionable student drink, cider was perfect for me because I don't drink beer, but when others were drinking pints it was easier to be drinking something served at the same volume for 'pacing' purposes. And as an added plus, the red English ciders tend to look like beer in a dark pub interior. When I returned to New Zealand in 1999 cider had yet to take off, but in recent years the market has expanded and you can even obtain Bulmer's and Magner's here now.

I guess I'll just have to refrain from criticising the Bulmer's billboard in Tory Street for historical inaccuracy. Perhaps I'll just have to change tack and lambaste it for misleading cultural stereotypes - after all, the use of the word 'frightfully' suggests it's a drink for poshos, which is traditionally not the case at all - apart from George V, that is.

Hot summer's day in London + a Magner's by the Thames = nice

NZ roads: safest they've been since 1973

Online polls conducted by newspapers are, generally speaking, complete piffle. Ones with political topics are easy for party activists to skew with targeted voting campaigns, and the selection of the poll options for most topics usually seems to either reflect the narrow perspectives of the question-setter or a need to beat up a story, rather than a desire to accurately gauge and reflect actual public opinions. 


This came to mind when I skimmed over this morning's Herald poll, which poses the question 'To reduce New Zealand's appalling road toll we need to...'  Currently the poll results for the four options, after 10,400 responses, are:

Reduce speed limits	8%
Improve our roads	28%
Improve driver education	51%
Get more cops on the road	13%

These are all viable policy approaches to reducing the road toll, certainly. Under the artificial proviso that I'm only allowed to choose one option instead of a mix of several, I would probably go along with the majority of respondents and opt for improving driver education too. Clive Matthew-Wilson, editor of the Dog & Lemon motoring guide, agrees that driver education is a problem. In 2008 he said: 'The New Zealand system makes the assumption that public transport doesn't exist and that education is not that important and that it's ok to have third world roads. No wonder so many people get killed'. I think New Zealand drivers would benefit from compulsory defensive driving refresher courses every five to ten years, to shake people out of the bad habits they get into, particularly as our roads have become far more crowded in recent years; many New Zealanders passed relatively easy tests and learned to drive when the population was a lot smaller, and I believe this has an effect on their approach to driving. 

But before we flail for simplistic solutions to a very real problem, it's important to look at the initial premise, which simply isn't valid. Certainly, for the families and friends of people who die or who are seriously injured in road accidents, the effects of the road toll are calamitous, and every sympathy must go out to them. But the fact remains that while there is always room for improvement, New Zealand's road toll has been steadily declining since it peaked at 843 deaths in 1973. This is despite significant increases in both the national population (1973: 2.99m; 2008: 4.23m) and the number of motor vehicles on the roads since that time. (n.b. I can't track down the underlying historical road toll numbers on the MoT website, despite it saying that it has all the figures back to 1950).

While there is every reason to take strong measures to address the ongoing problem of New Zealand's road toll, it is daft to call it 'appalling' when it has demonstrably been in a steady decline for more than a generation, despite an increasing population and greater numbers of vehicles on the roads. Rather than throwing exaggerated rhetoric around, we should be congratulating ourselves that our policy approach appears to be working, and continue to refine our approach to road safety to keep the numbers of road deaths going in the right direction.    

Natural increase and migration

Recently I noted that the population estimate for New Zealand was currently registering a total of 4.4 million people, which is a far cry from the 'traditional' figure I remember from my youth, which held that New Zealand had a population of three million. You still hear people use that three million figure today, even though it's woefully out of date - it just seems to have stuck in the national psyche: one million during WW1, two million during WW2, and three million after that.

I decided to take a look at how the overall population growth figures are changing. Following a delve through the Stats website trying to hunt down historical data, I decided to limit my search for information to recent years. So here's a look at how the New Zealand population has been growing in the early years of the 21st century (March annual figures):

Source: Statistics NZ

The rate of population growth from natural increase (the difference between live births and deaths) has remained rather static, although the numbers have risen from around 30,000 at the turn of the century to around 35,000 in 2011. But net immigration has fluctuated much more widely, showing the fluidity of modern population movement, which often follows changing economic conditions in New Zealand or overseas.

For the first three years of the table above, New Zealand experienced a net population loss from migration. This was offset by natural increase, but ultimately meant that the national population grew slowly from 1999 to 2001. This was followed by a reversal and three big years of net migration to New Zealand, perhaps partly spurred by the 2001 terrorist attack in New York. In 2002 and 2004 migration contributed nearly half of New Zealand's total population growth, while in 2003 it contributed even more, at 60 percent.

Over the past seven years years net migration decreased to between five and ten thousand people per year, with the exception of a temporary leap to twenty thousand in 2010. This has meant that in recent years New Zealand's population growth has been largely driven by natural increase, with an average of 22.8 percent of population increase derived from migration, with the remaining 77.2 percent of the increase caused by natural increase.

While New Zealand still struggles to construct sufficient new dwellings to house its expanding population, at least the patterns of population growth in recent years have been more consistent than in the earlier part of the century, making planning a little easier.