Poets better prove – the sacred craft challenges autocracy

Great Russian writers such as Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky opposed Tsarist tyranny.  Their successors challenged the Bolshevik autocracy.

The Bolsheviks knew the power of literature.  Lenin never forgave Dostoyevsky’s devastating critique of revolutionary thinking in The Devils.  The Soviet regime sought to co-opt literature to its cause.  A Soviet ruling decreed that “any preaching of ideological emptiness, of an apolitical attitude, of ‘art for art’s sake,’ is foreign to Soviet literature, and harmful to the interests of the Soviet people and State.”

Stalin knew that Russian cultural achievement preceded and would survive him, that it defined people’s collective narrative, and that it could laud or demonise leaders.  He created a Soviet-era Pushkin cult, and co-opted Maxim Gorky to burnish his regime’s cultural legitimacy.  Gorky’s relationship with Stalin broke down in 1935, and he died in 1936 in mysterious circumstances.

The four greatest twentieth century Russian poets were Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), Marina Tsvetaeva (1892-1941), Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966) and Boris Pasternak (1890–1960).  Many Bolshevik leaders had a near superstitious reverence for poetry – and fear of it.  Russian poets were the abstract chronicles of the nation.  As Mandelstam wrote:

A people needs poems darkly familiar

to keep them awake forever…


Bukharin warned Stalin that “poets are never wrong”.  Pasternak’s prowess as a translator of Georgian poetry saved him from the NKVD, with Stalin instructing his secret police to “leave this cloud-dweller alone”.

However, poetry could also prove lethal.  Mandelstam remarked in the midst of Stalin’s terror:  “poetry is respected only in this country – it gets people killed.” He wrote his Stalin Epigram:

Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.

But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,

the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,

the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.

Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.

One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.

He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,

He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.


Mandelstam was arrested, and he died incarcerated in December 1938.

His widow Nadezhda Mandelstam chronicled the Soviet suppression of literature in   two memoirs: Hope against hope and Hope abandoned.  She wrote that: “…they always knew what they were doing: the aim was to destroy not only people, but the intellect itself”.

Stalin aimed to undermine people’s critical faculties and replace them with simplistic faith in himself, the Party, and the ideology and identity politics that supported them. He sought a new narrative for Russia based on class warfare, the “New Soviet Man”, and “Heroes of Labour”.  These were stylised, abstract figures lacking authentic human nature.

Nadezhda Mandelstam argued that “the usual line was to denounce history as such: it had always been the same, mankind had never known anything but violence and tyranny.”  The Stalinist regime “attacked all old concepts just because they were old. . . Everything was dismissed as fiction.  Freedom?  There’s no such thing and never was!…Terms such as ‘honor’ and ‘conscience’ went out of use at this time…”

The result was the degrading of Russian culture and the destruction of those who safeguarded it.  The heaviest toll among the intelligentsia during the 1930s purges was among writers.

Marina Tsvetaeva’s husband died in a labour camp, and she committed suicide in 1941.  As writers died or fell silent, Stalin turned to Eisenstein’s cinematography to reconstruct Ivan the Terrible’s image, to strengthen his own.  Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible Part 1 was an apologia for the Tsar, and tacitly for Stalin.  Ivan the Terrible Part 2 depicted the Tsar’s mental deterioration, and was banned till after Stalin’s death…

However during the Great Patriotic War, patriotic poetry revived.  Konstantin Simonov’s Remember Alyosha drew on Russian history and cultural continuity to hearten Russian soldiers.http://lingualeo.com/pt/jungle/konstantin-simonov-remember-alyosha-the-roads-of-smolenshchina-31640#/page/1

Persecution then revived after the war, and continued into the 1950s.  On 12 August 1952, 13 Soviet Jewish poets, intellectuals and professionals were executed in Lubkyanka prison in Moscow.  By 1954, only 50 writers remained alive of the 700 who had met at the First Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers twenty years earlier.

The only two great writers who survived Stalin’s terror were Akhmatova and Pasternak.

Akhmatova’s husband was executed, and her son imprisoned.  The Russian people, as Stalin saw them, had “a craving for an all-embracing idea which would explain everything in the world and bring about universal harmony at one go.”  Nazism and Stalinism sought racially or ideologically pure utopias controlled by rulers who did the thinking for the compliant masses.  Akhmatova did not believe in utopias:


Our sacred craft has existed

For a thousand years.

With it even a world without light would be bright.

But not one poet has ever yet said

That there is no wisdom and no old age,

And that possibly there is no death.


The greatest intellectual threat to Stalin was Shakespeare, who was enormously influential in Russia.  Catherine the Great loved Shakespeare. In the years following the 1825 Decembrist revolt, Shakespeare’s works helped to interpret to Russia the meaning of the times.  Pushkin drew on Shakespeare’s inspiration to help create a Russian national literature.

Belinsky argued that “reading Shakespeare’s drama shows that each person is a legitimate artistic subject, however low he stands in the social hierarchy and even in humanity as such”.  Lermontov wrote that Shakespeare is “a genius too broad to comprehend, penetrating into people’s hearts and fates”. Turgenev placed him among Titans and semi-gods.  Dostoyevsky regarded him as “the prophet sent us by God to announce the mystery of man, and of man’s soul”.

During the 1940 blitz, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany, Ahkmatova telegraphed through Shakespearean imagery which side Russia’s literati were on in To the Londoners.

The twenty-fourth drama of Shakespeare

Time is writing with its indifferent hand.

We, ourselves, the guests at this awful event,

Better would read Hamlet, Caesar, and Lear

Over the river, in heavy lead clad;

Better – to bear, with singing and torches,

Juliet, the dove, to her family’s graves,

Peep into windows of Macbeth’s castle

Tremble with the knife of the hired assassin

But not this one, this one, this one –

This one we don’t have the strength to read…


Shakespeare’s plays and poems attack vaulting ambition, and power achieved through murder.  They allude to the tyrant’s stroke, and to art tongue-tied by authority.  In Shakespeare, death levels paupers and kings: “imperious Caesar, dead and turned to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away”.

The sonnets are about one individual’s feelings for another.  They are concerned with love, mortality, the uniqueness and value of individuality, and with moments in time, not with group narratives or collective morality tales.  They see love triumphing over princes’ monuments and tyrants’ brass tombs.

Pasternak turned to translation to avoid persecution for contentious writings, and became famous for his Shakespeare translations.  Only after Stalin’s death was his greatest prose work, Dr Zhivago published.  It is concerned with individuals not collectives. It was sharply criticized in Israel for its assimilationist views on the Jewish people.  Pasternak’s response was: “I am above race”.

Pasternak survived Stalin’s time, avoiding where he could literary meetings subject to state scrutiny.  At one gathering Pasternak knew his loyalty to the state would be questioned if he stayed away, if he attended and remained silent, or if he said anything that could be used against him.  Urged to speak, he finally stood up and said “thirty-two”, and then sat down again.  He was referring to his translation of sonnet 32:

If thou survive my well-contented day,

When that churl death my bones with dust shall cover,

And shalt by fortune once more re-survey

These poor rude lines of thy deceasèd lover,

Compare them with the bettering of the time,

And though they be outstripped by every pen,

Reserve them for my love, not for their rhyme,

Exceeded by the height of happier men.

O then vouchsafe me but this loving thought:

“Had my friend’s muse grown with this growing age,

A dearer birth than this his love had brought

To march in ranks of better equipage.

But since he died and poets better prove,




In this sonnet, Shakespeare imagines his lover outliving him.  While future poets may outshine him, this will not take away from Shakespeare’s love while he lived.

Sonnet 112 sees a scandalised Shakespeare surviving only through the love one person has for him. http://sonnetprojectnyc.com/portfolio/play-sonnet-112/    Simonov’s Wait for me sees a Russian soldier in the Great Patriotic War attribute his survival only to his wife’s confidence he would return, when all others assumed him dead, and were drinking to his memory.  The soldier survived, only because his wife, and only her, waited for him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQ2gMcFx3No

These intimate, humanised feelings between people are possible only when there is unique individuality. They are impossible when people are conceived as abstract group caricatures.


Stalin particularly hated Hamlet, ostensibly because “Hamlet’s indecisiveness and depression were incompatible with the new Soviet spirit of optimism, fortitude, and clarity”.  Hamlet was banned from 1941 until Stalin’s death.

The great Soviet theatre director, Vsevolod Meyerhold was obsessed with Hamlet, and had plans to stage it.  He was murdered by Stalin’s secret police, and his wife stabbed to death.  Meyerhold had told his friends “Engrave on my tombstone ‘here lies an actor who never played and never staged Hamlet’.” 

Hamlet posed an existential threat to Stalin.  Like Claudius, Stalin had murdered for power.  Hamlet was just a sword stroke away from the head of state.  He was intellectually autonomous. Squares in tyrannous states are huge to make individuals feel small.  Hamlet could be bounded in a nutshell and count himself the king of infinite space.

Claudius might justify his actions because Denmark was subject to external threat, needed strong leadership, and could not afford internal strife.  Stalin used such arguments to justify his tyranny.  Shakespeare never believed that individuals should be sacrificed for power or “the good of the masses”.

Stalin lived a life of public “adulation” and private loneliness. His wife committed suicide.  Stalin executed almost all his closest Bolshevik colleagues, and was left without any close friendships.

Millions died in the gulags from 1929 to 1953.  In 1937 and 1938 Stalin signed lists condemning masses of people to execution.  When reviewing one such list, he muttered: “Who’s going to remember all this riff-raff in ten or twenty years’ time? No one.  Who remembers the names now of the Boyars that Ivan the Terrible got rid of?  No one.”

However, those who survived the gulags remembered those who had died.   The ghost in Hamlet wanted to be remembered, as much as to be avenged.  Did Stalin fear that survivors might seek revenge?  Or was his fear how he would be remembered in Russia’s cultural memory?

At Pasternak’s stage-managed funeral in 1960, party officials were horrified when mourners spontaneously recited a banned Pasternak poem comparing Hamlet to Soviet reality.

The sacred craft outlived autocracy.


Posted in Economics, Shakespeare | 1 Comment

How innovation can fulfil our future

By Peter Winsley, 15 February 2017

Malaise[i] in developed countries can be countered through productivity growth.  This creates wealth for those working productively, and for social transfers and expanded services.  However, people want meaningful work and empowered lives, not compensatory afterthoughts.  If there is no “we” in a shared journey on the same timetable, there is only “them and us”, and future fears.

Monetary and fiscal policy[ii] lacks traction, and productivity growth can only come from innovation that delivers wider spill-over benefits.  There are positive correlations between innovativeness and social mobility, driven by new entries more than incumbents[iii].  However, network returns, market power, intellectual property and tax regimes mean innovation often leads to “winner take all” effects.

Innovation “superstars” reinforce myths that a few private individuals working in isolation drive innovation.  In fact, most transformative technologies now depend on public funding[iv] and social learning, not individual “genius”.

None of us in the developed world deserve what we have.  Our wellbeing largely results from luck – when and where we were born, and history’s physical and intellectual gifts to us.  The technologies we use were developed by others, from different times, countries and cultures.

While business responds to today’s demands, government needs to address long-term societal challenges.  These include aging populations, health, and resource management.

A business can be like a hedgehog that knows just one or a few big things.  However, a government must be like a fox that knows and does lots of things.  It must play a large and multi-faceted role in innovation, including steering private investment in ways that support a wider social flourishing[v].

Government needs to invest in human capital, infrastructure such as roads and broad band, and systems to manage sustainable distributed energy generation[vi].

Corporate and incumbent welfare[vii] stifles innovation, while new business entries foster it.  Institutions and policy settings therefore need to foster competition and innovation.  For example, patent thickets, trolling, and excessive vagueness and duration of intellectual property rights impede innovation.  Government should shorten intellectual property protection, and let entrepreneurs exploit grey areas where rights are unclear.

The US FDA illustrates how excessive regulatory hurdles impose social costs[viii]. Its processes are ill-suited to some personalised medicine, combinational therapies and low risk devices.  New Zealand could do better[ix] through agile institutions and greater tolerance of high salient risk to deliver low visibility but high impact health advances[x].

New Zealand needs increased domestic savings rates[xi] to lift capital intensity and labour productivity, to reduce real interest and exchange rates, and to improve tradeable sector performance[xii].  Compulsory savings schemes and fine-tuning the tax system could encourage savings and investment that underpin the productive sector.

Shifting social policy transfers from consumption subsidies to capability development investment could build human and financial capital to drive innovation and productivity growth[xiii].

Risk capital is needed for innovation, and patient capital to retain benefits in New Zealand.  Private investors focus on privately-captured benefits, while the state should focus on long-term benefits for New Zealand[xiv].

Venture capitalists often support serial entrepreneurship where investments are realised and reinvested.  However, New Zealand struggles to retain long-run benefits from knowledge-intensive manufacturing and services (KIMS) businesses[xv].  State agencies could use investment stakes to anchor some core activities in New Zealand.  These could relate to head office, design, IT and R&D functions.  When a KIMS business reaches international scale, has core competencies embedded in New Zealand, and is financially self-sustaining state investors can exit and reinvest in new businesses[xvi].

New Zealand has exceptional opportunities for technology adoption and extension.    There is a rising productivity gap between global frontier and other businesses[xvii].  Innovators need to connect to businesses on the global technological production possibility frontier and learn from them.

New Zealand “innovation” is essentially extension of international advances.  It must start with documenting prior art and international understanding[xviii].  This both drives technology adoption and seeds new ideas for innovation.  A focus on long-term innovation therefore pays short-term technology adoption dividends.

Research clutter and duplication, “outcome switching”, unreproducible and trivial results and methodological weaknesses blight research internationally[xix].  Research can focus on what fits the methods recognised in peer review, not what needs to be understood or done[xx].  Publication counts and author attributions are inflated to lift “box ticking” ratings[xxi].

New Zealand is too small to capture benefits from its own science-push research.  It should specialise in the rapid adoption, extension and commercialisation of international basic science. This is not free-riding, since our international contribution is applied technology that delivers consumer surpluses and wider spill-over benefits[xxii].

Curiosity-driven research within time-frames that suit researchers will not lead in a linear way to innovation[xxiii].  Innovation requires external engagement, user focus, two-way learning, and a drive to create technology that improves people’s lives.  In longitudinal and in some biological and ecological studies long time-frames are inevitable.  However, as evidenced in the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Programme, technology can answer to deadlines.

Our publicly-funded research should deliver technological solutions, and the results should then be codified in publications that show how impacts were made[xxiv].  This is more holistically challenging than unfocused research as it requires more social engagement and interactive learning.  Technological achievements, not promises, should drive academic standing and institutional rankings.

New Zealand can succeed in innovation in differentiated as well as commodity-based industries[xxv].  Its businesses do well in “hard to research” industry good markets, and in customised short production runs.  Many leverage economies of scope rather than scale.  IT facilitates disintermediation and integration into global value chains.  It mitigates economic geography and engineering scale economy constraints.  It has transformative capacity in fields as diverse as “Internet of Things” enablers, precision agriculture, social media and digital finance.

Freeman Dyson in The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet[xxvi]envisages sustainable energy, biotechnology and the Internet ending rural intellectual isolation and economic stagnation.  These capabilities, together with small-scale 3D manufacturing and natural environment assets can create opportunities within provincial New Zealand.

The US is reducing emphasis on climate change mitigation and sustainable energy in favour of greater fossil fuel dependency.  Fossil fuels are capital-intensive resources that concentrate power and create few knowledge-intensive jobs or wider innovative and entrepreneurial opportunities.

New Zealand should do the opposite to the US.  It has among the world’s highest per capita natural resource endowments.  Climate change response and sustainability shifts create opportunities in agriculture, renewable energy, timber engineering and biomaterials innovation.  Much of this is differentiated[xxvii], capital-light and knowledge-intensive innovation that creates opportunities for many New Zealand businesses and regions.

In such a tale of two countries New Zealand would do better socioeconomically and environmentally, and benefit more from the longer-term sustainability upside.

Manufacturing sector productivity frees up resources to expand service sector employment.  This is often low paid, low status work.  However, labour market policy settings can change to value the deeply human skills that automation cannot replace.  Service sector jobs can evolve to build new working life identities and social standing[xxviii].

Social investment approaches and data analytics can lift service sector productivity directly, and through interventions that avoid future costs from crime and benefit dependency.

Health and education sector productivity is low, partly because it requires voluntary patient and student cooperation.  The challenge is to make working with people as efficient as manipulating physical objects, while fostering respectful relationships and the meaning and self-worth that come with them[xxix].

Innovation will only fulfil our future if we socially mandate it.  People need such survival traits as prudence, tact, and frugality.  They also need expansive traits of courage, truth-telling, and generosity that create opportunities for others.

We need to value our risk takers and innovators more than our sportspeople and celebrities.  Then our entrepreneurial spirits will flourish, and innovation will fulfil our future.



[i] Malaise as described in: https://winsleys.wordpress.com/2017/01/15/what-caused-the-mess-we-are-in-and-how-do-we-get-out-of-it/

[ii] Near zero interest rates seem to be having no effect in countering economic stagnation.  Keynesian expansion succeeded dramatically from the late 1930s due to recovery from the Great Depression, long waves of technological innovation dating from the 19th century, war stimulus followed by meeting pent-up consumer demand from deferred consumption, followed by a  baby boom.  These conditions are unusual and unlikely to be repeated.  The US economy had high employment and productive capacity utilisation in the lead up to the 2016 Presidential election.  Given this, growth from high Keynesian multipliers through fiscal expansion seems unlikely, even if through massive infrastructure investment.  See Glaesar, E. 2016: If you build it…Myths and realities about America’s infrastructure spending.  City Journal.

[iii] Aghion, et al 2015: Innovation and top income inequality  NBER Working Paper No. 21247

[iv] See Mazzucato, M. 2015: The Creative State.  RSA Journal Issue 2, pp. 12-17.

[v] See Phelps, E. 2013: Mass Flourishing.  Princeton University Press.

[vi] An example is ways to manage the integration of distributed and intermittent energy sources into a reliable national system.

[vii] For example, government bail-outs, grants or special deals for existing businesses, overly tight intellectual property protection, regulatory restrictions on new housing, and protection of professional rent-seeking.

[viii] These include the size and duration of clinical trials.

[ix] An example would be giving patients, under personalised clinical guidance, access to drugs that have passed safety trials but have yet to be approved.

[x] The FDA’s risk aversion avoids a visible death at the cost of “invisible graveyards” due to delays in therapeutic advances.  See Madden, B. 2010: Free to choose medicine.  National Center for Policy Analysis.

[xi] It matters where investment is sourced and where revenue is earned.  Dollars earned from exports are different to those borrowed offshore.  The former create wealth, net worth and capability, the latter a rising debt servicing burden.  Likewise, income from gainful employment is more valuable sociologically than benefit payments.

[xii] See OECD 2016: OECD structural mission to New Zealand 29 August – 2 September 2016.  OECD.

[xiii] One approach might be to give all children a capability development account to be used only for education and investment in assets that enhance productive capacity and build net worth.  Social policy transfers that subsidise adult consumption could instead be channelled into these accounts.

[xiv] For an interesting discussion of the state’s role in innovation see Mazzucato, M.; Perez, C. 2014: Innovation as growth policy: the challenge for Europe.  SPRU, Working Paper Series 2014-13.

[xv] KIMS businesses enrich product diversity and therefore product space opportunities.  See Hausmann, R. Hidalgo, C. et al, The Atlas of Economic Complexity: Mapping Paths to Prosperity. Published jointly Harvard Kennedy School and Center for Economic Development; and MIT Media Lab, 2011. http://atlas.media.mit.edu/book/ Also see Hidalgo, C. et al  2007: The product space conditions the development of nations.  Science 27 July 2007.

[xvi] Such state investments could turn “intellectual putty” into “clay” embedded into New Zealand’s productive base on a longer-term basis.

[xvii] Andrews et al, 2015: Frontier Firms, Technology Diffusion and Public Policy: Micro Evidence from OECD Countries.  OECD.

[xviii] Some New Zealand researchers and innovators put too little effort into this.

[xix] Sarewitz, 2016: Saving science.  The New Atlantis.  Spring-Summer 2016.

[xx] See Deaton, A.; Cartwright, N. 2016: Understanding and misunderstanding randomised controlled trials.  NBER Working Paper No. 22595.  See also Hausmann, R. 2016: The problem with evidence-based policies.  Project Syndicate 25 February.

[xxi] These behaviours reflect the bad incentives that are created for scientists, and should not be blamed on scientists themselves.

[xxii] Examples include Fisher and Paykel’s healthcare innovation, Graham Liggins’ development of steroid solutions to foetal lung maturation challenges, and Hayward Wright’s development of the international kiwifruit industry based on imported plant material.

[xxiii] Taylor (2016) argues that New Zealand appears “to be far more focused on scientific research than on technological innovation”. See Taylor, M. Z. 2016: The politics of innovation.  Why some countries are better than others at science and technology.  Oxford University Press.

[xxiv] Much basic science is a spin-off from applied research and technological development.  Pasteur’s research on applied health and agricultural problems helped create microbiology science.  Karl Jansky founded much of radio-astronomy while exploring practical telecommunications problems for Bell Labs.

[xxv] R&D in commodity-based industries can be of exceptionally high productivity as its costs are spread over large product volumes.  There can therefore be an inverse relationship between R&D productivity and R&D intensity as measured by R&D expenditure as a proportion of total business revenue.

[xxvi] Dyson, F. 1999:  The Sun, the Genome and the Internet.  Oxford Books.

[xxvii] Such differentiated businesses may be small, however this can be an advantage.  Smaller, knowledge-intensive businesses have a higher ratio of external surface area to mass and therefore greater potential for a higher proportion of staff to be interacting with and learning from external parties.

[xxviii] People value personal relationships in market transactions and in their wider lives.  This is influenced by national and cultural context.  German trades people have higher standing that their Anglophone counterparts.  French waiters demand more respect than US or New Zealand ones.  Recreational and community services are often driven by people’s desire for esteem based on a sense of indispensability or self-worth in a specialised field.

[xxix] A good start would be banning the instrumentalist term “human resources”.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

What caused the mess we are in, and how do we get out of it?

By Peter Winsley

16 January, 2017

Inequality, social malaise, and identity-based extremism result from productivity trends, technological change, globalisation, and business models.  These sit within tax, labour market, competition, trade, intellectual property and other policy settings that governments can change.  Policy makers must find ways to drive inclusive growth with widely-shared benefits that restore self-worth and open society.

Globally, wealth has never been more evenly spread (Heise, 2016).  However in some developed countries inequality has risen.  Since the early 1970s incomes in the US for the top 1% rose by around 300%, while incomes for those below the top 10% stagnated.  The real median income of US households was less in 2016 than in 1999 (Cowen, 2016).

In the US, rates of “absolute income mobility” – the fraction of children who earn more than their parents – have fallen from around 90% for children born in 1940 to 50% for children born in the 1980s (Chetty et al, 2016).  Some communities have seen rises in drug abuse and morbidity (Case & Deaton, 2015), and reduced life expectancy (NCHS, 2016).

Divergence has grown between the most profitable businesses and those in the mainstream.  This divergence reflects a mix of frontier firms with exceptional innovative capabilities, network effects, and mergers and acquisitions that create market power and monopolistic pricing (Barth et al, 2014; Furman & Orszag, 2015).  This has led to higher economic rents

Productivity and median incomes have diverged.  For example, in the US from 1948 to 1973 productivity grew by 96.7% and hourly compensation by 91.3%.  From 1973-2014 productivity grew by 72.2% and hourly compensation by only 9.2% (Bivens & Mishel, 2015).

Technological change in the manufacturing and IT industries has reduced material goods and IT costs.  It has also destroyed many jobs, with employment growth largely being in ill-paid service sectors.  Productivity gains have therefore not translated into well-rewarded jobs.  Identity as well as skill mismatches have occurred as self-worth and pride disappeared with the jobs that gave rise to them.

Globalisation is associated with manufacturing sector job losses.  However, Helpman (2016) concludes that while trade has played a role in increasing wage inequality, its cumulative effect has been modest, and globalization does not explain most of the rise in wage inequality within countries.

Malaise comes when businesses lose sight of external customers and focus on management and shareholder interests.  Examples include the finance sector model leading to the 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC), and the Maximising Shareholder Value (MSV) model.

In the lead up to the GFC, banks went from financing economies’ capital needs to financing themselves.  Even as local, community banks declined, finance expanded as a proportion of the economy.  The GFC lowered the path of GDP in advanced economies (Fatas & Summers, 2015).  It caused enduring negative impacts on future output (Ball, 2015).  Post-GFC attempts to reduce government debt have likely resulted in a higher debt to GDP ratio associated with negative output effects.

The GFC saw lower income people lose jobs and incomes, and then bail out finance companies “too big to fail”.  Gains were privatised and losses socialised.  This corporate welfare helped give rise to the Tea Party movement and subsequent American and European populism.

In the post-World War Two period in the developed world, a “retain and invest” business model drove innovation, productivity, social mobility and real income advances.  Shareholders were rewarded with dividends from patient capital and long-term productivity growth.  Stable employment helped workplace learning translate into sustained productivity and job security.

William Lazonik (2014; 2015, 2016) documents how, from around the 1980s, many corporations moved to an MSV model.  This created incentives for share price manipulation, insider trading, and share buy-back schemes.  These diverted finance away from innovation and other productive investment towards short-term management and shareholder interests (Kozul-Wright, 2016).

Over 2003 to 2012 the largest 500 US companies returned more than US$2.4 trillion to shareholders through share buy-back and other arrangements.  US public corporations now have record cash holdings, and total pay-outs to shareholders as a percentage of net income are at record levels (Kahle & Stulz, 2016).

Both the financial conduct associated with the GFC, and the MSV model diverted resources from innovation and productivity growth into short-term gains for the privileged few.

Policy levers are needed to address problems that policy makers have allowed to happen.  However, options are limited.  Monetary policy has little traction at low interest rates.  There is scepticism about how big the Keynesian multiplier is now in many economies.  Infrastructure spending may not be effective (Glaesar, 2016).  Many countries face environmental limits, debt burdens, unfunded entitlements and ageing populations.

Crony capitalism and corporate welfare in western countries do not deliver widely-shared benefits.  State capitalism degrades people’s rights and freedoms.  Populist movements are shallow, divisive and capricious.  Social welfare transfers cannot compensate for labour market income losses.  People want jobs for meaning, standing and social connections, not just money.  A dollar earned is worth more than a dollar paid as a benefit.

However there are opportunities, and cues on where to focus.  Middle class spending power is rising within growing and better connected world populations. Climate change and resource depletion creates demand for technological and investment responses.  Businesses are cash-rich and interest rates are low.

Never before have so many scientists and technologists been active in so many different fields and countries.  Physical communication has never been cheaper, nor idea exchanges greater, more diverse, faster, or more stimulating.

My next paper will argue for an inclusive innovation strategy to lift productivity and deliver broadly-shared benefits.


Ball, L. 2014: Long-term damage from the Great Recession in OECD countries.  NBER Working Paper 20185.

Barth, E. et al 2014: It’s where you work: Increases in earnings dispersion across establishments and individuals in the US.  IZA DP No. 8432.

Bivens, J.; Mishel, L. 2015: Understanding the historical divergence between productivity and a typical worker’s pay. Economic Policy Institute Briefing Paper No. 406.  2 September 2015.

Case, A.; Deaton, A. 2015: Rising morbidity and mortality in midlife among white non-Hispanic Americans in the 21st century.  Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America 112(49).

Chetty, R. et al 2016: The fading American dream: trends in absolute income mobility since 1940: NBER Working Paper No. 22910.

Cowen, T. 2016: Is Innovation Over? The Case Against Pessimism.  Foreign Affairs March/April 2016 Issue.

Fatas, A.; Summers, L. 2015: The permanent effects of fiscal consolidations.  CEPR Discussion Paper No. DP10902.

Furman, J.; Orszag, P. 2015: A firm-level perspective on the role of rents in the rise of inequality.  Presentation at ‘A Just Society’ Centennial Event in Honor of Joseph Stiglitz.  Columbia University.

Glaeser, E. 2016: If you build it…Myths and realities about America’s infrastructure spending.  City Journal, Summer 2016.

Heise, M 2016: The Complexity of Inequality.  Project Syndicate 9 December, 2016.

Helpman, E. 2016: Globalisation and wage inequality.  NBER Working Paper No. 22994.

Khale, K.; Stulz, R. 2016: Is the American Public Corporation in Trouble?  NBER Working Paper No. 22857.

Kozul-Wright, R. 2016: Returning to investment.  Project Syndicate 6 October 2016.

Lazonick, W. 2016: The Value-Extracting CEO: How executive stock-based pay undermines investment in productive capabilities.  Institute for New Economic Thinking.  Working Paper No. 54.

Lazonick, W. 2015: Stock buybacks: From retain and reinvest to downsize-and-distribute.  Centre for Effective Public Management at Brookings.

Lazonick, W. 2014: Profits without prosperity.  Harvard Business Review September 2014 Issue.

NCHS 2016: Mortality in the United States 2015.  NCHS Data Brief No. 267.



Posted in Economics, Uncategorized | Tagged , | 3 Comments

Letter to Donald Trump

23 December 2016

Dear Donald

What you bring to the Presidency is the ability to reach across the aisle, make workable deals, and drive them through Congress. 

You also need to carry Americans with you.  To do this, you must drive a wave of innovation that delivers mass benefits and a nationwide flourishing.  

You need the entrepreneurs and wealthy investors to make this happen.  However, well-rewarded blue collar jobs and middle class upwards mobility must be delivered. America must show leadership in the world.

America’s difficulties do not come from trade, or from Hispanic immigrants.  America has the right to ensure other countries respect its intellectual property rights, and that foreign bureaucrats do not impede its exports.  All countries have the right to control their borders.  However, you need to deal with the real causes of America’s malaise. 

The American tax and regulatory system has favoured the existing wealthy and powerful, and led to corporate welfare and economic stagnation.  It has destroyed the self-esteem of millions of Americans through eroding meaningful employment and the sense that people have control over their lives.

American businesses used to lead the world in innovation to deliver great new products to customers, and to create jobs that give people pride as well as better lives.  Such businesses were based on the “retain and invest” model. 

Since the 1970s, these businesses have been degraded by the “maximize shareholder value’ model.  This has led to share buy-backs and excessive CEO benefits, at the expense of long-term wealth creation.  Banks drifted away from their core lending functions to developing complex derivatives disconnected from the real world.  Inept regulation and tax policy allowed this to happen.

The American education system needs to be upgraded and made more equitable.  Vocational education linked to academic content needs to be expanded.  Social and ethnic background should not become social predestination.  Invest in young Americans!  Give every American child a Great America capability development account, to be used only for education, business and home ownership investment.  This should be favoured over tax cuts.

US decision-making has been gridlocked through politics, regulation, and litigation.  You have broken the political gridlock.  Regulation is needed to protect the environment, working conditions, health and safety.  However, too much corporate welfare, agricultural subsidies, occupational licensing, and FDA and other regulation burdens Americans and stifles their innovation.  Cut through it with well-targeted secateurs, not a chainsaw!

America’s litigious environment is more about coupon-clipping and deadweight loss than it is about justice.  Test some new ideas.  Look at New Zealand’s Accident Compensation scheme.

In healthcare, ask yourself why other western democracies have better health coverage, and why it is far cheaper.  Retain the best elements of “Obamacare”.  Look at a single-payer system.  Learn from what New Zealand has done with its Pharmac model.

Invest in a massive upgrading of America infrastructure.  Lead America’s transformation to a sustainable society that manages through climate change and bullet-proofs its future.  This means millions of job making electric cars, solar panels, wind turbines, smart grid technology and biomaterials.  This is far more job-rich and technology-intensive than fossil fuel production.  It would break the power of oil producers in countries hostile to democratic values.  You can pay for future tax cuts from the wealth streams the above strategy would generate in future.

Simplify the American tax code, and if you must cut taxes do so to benefit the working poor and middle classes.   A destination-based consumption tax and elimination of interest tax deductions could level the trade playing field, keep jobs in America, and discourage debt-fuelled real estate and financial sector growth.

Work constructively with China and Russian, since common interests are greater than differences.  Avoid future entanglements, and foster potential new friends such as Iran.  Deal with international issues in a constitutional way that respects international law.  The breakdown of trade and of arms limitation agreements would be catastrophic for everyone. 

You have your chance to make America Great.  History will not forgive failure, so let’s make sure it canonizes your success.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Peter Winsley

Wellington, New Zealand

Posted in Economics | 2 Comments

Why Shakespeare is important for young people

By Peter Winsley, December 2016

William Shakespeare is the world’s greatest playwright and poet.  He is also the greatest psychologist, because he reflected human nature as he observed it, not as it was later theorized to be.

Shakespeare wrote around forty plays, 154 sonnets, narrative and other poems.  A key theme in Shakespeare is never to waste time:  “I wasted time and time wasted me”.  “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late”.

He was a gifted poet, but as a friend observed, poets are made as well as born – he worked hard at his craft.

Some think of Shakespeare’s characters as fictional creations, some as real people, some as possible people.  Those of his plays with original plots were the exemplars of the imagination: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest.  The first celebrates language and word-play for its own sake:

This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease, And utters it again when God doth please: He is wit’s pedler, and retails his wares At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs… To show his teeth as white as whale’s bone…

O, never will I trust to speeches penn’d,            Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue…

The latter two plays assert the human mind’s unbounded capabilities, the joy of language, rhymed or unrhymed, staying with you even without the story:

Before the time I did Lysander see, seemed Athens as a paradise to me.


I am as ugly as a bear, beasts that see me run away for fear.

…Do thy best, to pluck this crawling serpent from my breast.

What a dream was here – Lysander look how I do quake with fear, methought a serpent ate my heart away, and you sat smiling at his cruel prey.

…those things do please me, that befall preposterously.


Lord, what fools these mortals be

She was a vixen when she went to school, though she be little she is fierce.

…be thou here again, before the leviathan can swim a league…

…I’ll put a girdle around the earth in earth in forty minutes.

You minimis of hindering knot-grass…you acorn.

Shakespeare believed in individual uniqueness, in human rights and dignity, and in the universality of human consciousness.  His works cannot be captured by any cultural, religious, political, ethnic, or other identity group that divides people.  He is the supreme poet and dramatist of humanism; humanism as a belief system, and as a guide to how to live.

Shakespeare’s works elevate humanity beyond what it thinks itself capable of: “we know what we are, but not what we might be”.  He tells us things can get better – then leaves it up to us.

Shakespeare’s language is still modern English, but some words and phrases are unfamiliar, or their meanings have changed.  The No Fear Shakespeare website[1] gives you all his works with parallel translations into today’s easy to understand English.  Take Shakespeare to heart by reading his words quietly to yourself, and then read them aloud so you listen to yourself in Shakespeare’s words.  Memorise lines and scenes you especially like.  Refer to No Fear Shakespeare only when you don’t understand the meaning, and then go back to his original words.

There is no powerful human experience, emotion or relationship that Shakespeare does not shed light on and help you to understand better.  Throughout your life, in good and bad times, lines you think you’ve forgotten will come back to you.  They will also become more meaningful as your life changes, and you understand more.  You will find that Shakespeare is teaching you more.

You should value Shakespeare for such reasons as:

Shakespeare’s contribution to the English language

Shakespeare observed social psychology (human nature in action), and saw it so much more clearly than others that he had to invent new language to describe what he saw.

Shakespeare coined something like 1,700 English words, and much of the English language’s most memorable and commonly-used sayings, phrases and metaphors.  Phrases such as stalking horse, hobby horse, green-eyed monster…

Many Shakespeare lines have evolved: “the cat will mew and dog will have his day” becomes “every dog will have his day”.  The expression “weasel words” comes from the lines:


Few English-speaking people go a day without quoting Shakespeare, typically without realising it.  Expressions and sayings from Shakespeare include:

I shall be loved when I am lacked.

All that glisters is not gold.

Brevity is the soul of wit.

They’ll take suggestion as a cat laps milk.

Out of the jaws of death.

The world’s mine oyster.

I will wear my heart upon my sleeve.

More sinned against than sinning.

The better part of valour is discretion.

In the end, truth will out.

The be all and end all

The mirror up to nature;

Nothing can come of nothing.

It is a custom more honoured in the breach than the observance.

A little more than kin, and less than kind. –

Neither rhyme nor reason.

Trippingly on the tongue


As mad as a March hare.

In my mind’s eye

There is no virtue like necessity

As dead as a door nail.


Who alone suffers, suffers most in the mind.

Neither a borrower nor a lender be.

Cleft my heart in twain.

The apparel oft proclaims the man,

I must be cruel only to be kind.

When sorrows come, they come not as single spies but as whole battalions.

That was laid on with a trowel.

Shakespeare’s support for human rights and dignity

Shakespeare judged people as individuals, not on their race, ethnicity, wealth, status, family affiliation or gender.  He understood that individuality is almost infinitely variable, even within the same family – two of King Lear’s daughters are evil; one is an angel, and “good wombs have borne bad sons”.

Everyone is ultimately what they are: “I am that I am”, and no-one can really see truly inside someone else:


Shakespeare tells us to stand up for our rights, even if we are outgunned:


The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on.

An excerpt of Sir Thomas More that Shakespeare wrote expresses sympathy for refugees, recognising their common humanity.

Shakespeare treats all with dignity.  He notices the servants, fools, shepherds and “rude mechanicals”.  He confers on them as well as on the great and mighty the power of his words.

Shakespeare saw how multi-faceted people can be.  We sympathise even with evil characters such as Claudius in Hamlet when we see them from different angles, or eavesdrop on them as they reflect on being trapped by circumstances or the consequences of past action.

Shakespeare notices the nondescript and invisible people ignored by the powerful. Shakespeare treated even his minor characters as worthy of his genius and his sympathy.  In The Tempest, although Caliban has sought to burn his books and kill him, Prospero says “this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”.  Caliban draws from the innate dignity Prospero has helped foster within him, and his last words are “to seek for grace”.

Shakespeare’s worse characters degrade good people to overcome their own feelings of inferiority.  Shakespeare understood the consequences of humiliating people.

Iago in Othello feels slighted by being passed over for promotion.  Iago knows that a brazen lie, spoken with confidence, will often be believed, and this leads to tragedy.  In King Lear, Edmund’s dignity is violated by his branding as an “illegitimate” son.  “Fine word, ‘legitimate’ …Now, gods stand up for bastards!’  Only as he lies dying and reflects on the deaths of Goneril and Regan, who both desired him, does Edmund discover his humanity: “Some good I mean to do, despite of mine own nature”.

Shakespeare never stereotypes, and is not callous to individuals in his pursuit of higher causes.  Shakespeare is with his characters, and has an understanding and moral feeling for them.

Human individuality is infinite and people should not demean themselves by surrendering their individuality to groups.  Shakespeare understood that individuality is selfish and destructive unless it relates to one’s wider social connectedness.  “To one’s own self be true” is actually quite shallow advice.  After all, Hitler and Stalin were “true to themselves”.

Shakespeare portrayed mental health issues with empathy.  He acknowledges the stigma and ill-treatment associated with mental illness in Twelfth Night, but also sees mental disorders as deeply human, affecting both the dove Ophelia and the preternaturally intelligent and noble Prince Hamlet.  Hamlet pretends to be mad, perhaps becomes mad, but recovers his composure:


King Lear’s madness in the storm is depicted with love and sympathy:

Why, he was met even now As mad as the vex’d sea, singing aloud, Crown’d with rank fumiter and furrow weeds, With harlocks, hemlock, nettles, cuckoo flow’rs, Darnel, and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn.

Shakespeare is in his element portraying feigned madness, as in the “ravings” of Edgar when pretending to be a Tom o’Bedlam mad beggar:


Pillicock sat on Pillicock’s Hill.

Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the todpole, the wall-newt and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow-dung for sallets, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool; who is whipp’d from tithing to tithing, and stock-punish’d and imprison’d; who hath had three suits to his back, six shirts to his body, horse to ride, and weapons to wear… But mice and rats, and such small deer,have been Tom’s food for many a long year
Child Rowland to the dark tower came; His word was still Fie, foh, and fum! I smell the blood of a British man…

Be thy mouth or black or white, Tooth that poisons if it bite; Mastiff, greyhound, mongrel grim, Hound or spaniel, brach or lym, Bobtail tyke or trundle-tail- Tom will make them weep and wail; For, with throwing thus my head, Dogs leap the hatch, and all are fled

Shakespeare lived at a time of rising awareness of the New World and its possibilities.  In The Tempest, Miranda has been stranded on an island since three year’s old.  She sees a “primitive” in Caliban, yet also sees her father’s art and books, and then visitors from his former old world.  She comes to see the old world as new: “O wonder, how many good creatures are there here!  How beauteous mankind is!  O brave new world, that has such people in it!”

People are shaped by social norms and what is around them.  Edmund commands the murder of Cordelia because “men are as the time is”.  He obeys the social norms of the time, and does not see beyond them, until his last act of redemption.  In Corialanus, uncritical adherence to custom is criticized: “What custom wills, in all things should we do it, the dust on antique time would like unswept and mountainous error be too highly heaped for truth to o’verpeer”.

People can be objects of circumstances as well as the creators of them.  Macbeth does not begin as evil, and is a reluctant and morally-torn murderer.  However, once he has committed his first murder his character changes, and it becomes easier to kill again.  He then becomes an irredeemable monster who grows weary of the sun and of life itself; “this tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”.

The nature of the mind, emotions and human creativity

Shakespeare saw the mind as related to the brain, and not for example to an imaginary spirit world.

A core theme in Shakespeare is that poetry, love and madness are related, and are part of unbounded human imagination.  He saw that they come from people not from spirits, devils and witchcraft or cold rationality. “The lunatic, the lover and the poet are of imagination all compact”.  He knew that imagination can misfire, people can see things that are not there: “…or in the night, imagining some fear, how easy is a bush supposed a bear”.

Shakespeare used devices such as staging scenes from a play within his plays, having characters disguise themselves, or pretend to be mad.  He makes his audience do much of the work by using their imaginations.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream some workers stage a play and make a mess of it.  One pretends to be a wall, another a lion, unconvincingly!  However the audience within “the play within a play” loves it, as they have used their imaginations to “create” for themselves a fine, entertaining play.  What they “see” is different to what is “the reality”, yet is just as real…  “The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name”.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream, magic potions see men and women fall in and out of love based on mistaken identities, including a lady falling in love with a man turned into an ass.  In As you like it, genders are muddled, men and women fall in love with illusions, with the deeper irony that in Shakespeare’s time boy actors played the female parts.

Life as acting and drama

Shakespeare’s life was poetry and above all drama on the stage.  He saw the stage as life itself:


People are actors, play different roles, and shift between different identities in life.  This is why we should not encourage people to confine themselves to one dominant role such as ethnic, religious identity.  Acting also requires an audience and others on the stage – life is inherently social.  Shakespeare almost certainly began professional life as an actor.  Hamlet says of visiting actors:


Hamlet then watches a play within a play:

O what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit … And all for nothing! For Hecuba! What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, … He would drown the stage with tears …The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King

The play that is life can also have its weepy moments:


Shakespeare’s last play[2] reflects on acting and its effects on the imagination:

These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits and Are melted into air, into thin air…We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.

And at the play’s end, Prospero’s farewell to the audience, and perhaps Shakespeare’s goodbye to the stage:


Shakespeare’s stimulation of others’ creativity

Shakespeare’s works inspired many other creative contributions, including art, music, poetry and novels.  Romeo and Juliet inspired West Side Story, and Taming of the Shrew, Kiss me Katie.  The Tempest alone inspired around 37 operas.  Countless novels from Dogs of War, Brave New World, Owls do Cry to Pale Fire take their titles from Shakespeare lines.

The rising power of the internet and multi-media mean that Shakespeare’s works, and the works he has inspired will continue to trigger more creative achievements, and these in turn will spawn others in an unbounded way.  This reflects and helps to drive ever-lasting creative achievement in literature, music and other arts.

His inspiration for you when things go wrong

Shakespeare’s mind roamed so freely that anyone immersed in his work can think of Shakespeare scenes or quotes that provide insight into all major events and emotions in their lives.  These insights can answer questions, or give you another way of thinking.  They may help you see you are not alone, that others have faced similar problems and got through them.  They also allow you to see yourself from outside, as if you are observing another person.

Shakespeare is inspiring when things go wrong.  When you are out of luck and a social outcast, read sonnet 29[3] and realise that Shakespeare too was once at the bottom, and rose from it to touch the stars.  When you look back, angry and bitter at bad things that have happened in the past that you can’t forget, turn to sonnet 30.  When annoyed by criticism or by shallow, insincere flattery, sonnet 112.  When disgusted by others’ bad behaviour, sonnet 66.  When you are depressed for no good reason, remember it’s not real and it’s all in your head: “there is nothing neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so”.

Shakespeare also makes clear that suicide is never acceptable:

O that this too too solid flesh would melt, Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!


… To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub! For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

…. For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, Th’ oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despis’d love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office… But that the dread of something after death- The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn No traveller returns- puzzles the will, And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of…
Shakespeare knew that sometimes we have to accept that bad things happen, even to the best people such as Cordelia:

We are not the first Who with best meaning have incurr’d the worst.

When you have to act quickly and only you can do so, know that “the time is out of joint, Oh cursed spite, that I was born to set it right.”


Shakespeare is the supreme poet of love, with its complexity, power, its focus on the bond between unique individuals that overrides all else, its ineffability, its immunity to other’s understanding, and its relationship with the mind’s imaginative powers.


Love can turn tragic, as in Romeo and Juliet from which we draw some famous lines:

A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life.

But soft what light through yonder window breaks, it is the East and Juliet is the sun…

O Romeo, Romeo, where art thou Romeo?


Death, that have sucked the honey of thy breath.


Shakespeare can also be pragmatic and not allow love or its loss to consume all: “no one ever died for love”.  Sonnet 30 sees Shakespeare brooding over the past, even over things that should be long forgotten, such as “love’s long since cancelled woe”, overcoming past sad times by thinking of someone he cares for:

Then a while when I think of thee, dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.

Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets are his most heart-felt personal statements and may not even have been intended for publication.  Most of them are love poems that capture how his feelings for the one he loves free him from despair, anger with things that have happened in the past, sadness, cynicism, fear of death or world-weariness.

For Shakespeare, “love is not love when it alters when it alteration finds’.  In sonnet 124, his love is immune from short-term political conniving, and he contrasts this with those who die repentant having spent their lives being sinful:

It fears not policy, that heretic, Which works on leases of short-number’d hours, But all alone stands hugely politic, That it nor grows with heat nor drowns with showers. To this I witness call the fools of time, Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime

His love and his expression of it in verse out-lives marble and gilded monuments of princes (sonnet 55) and tyrant’s crests and tombs of brass (sonnet 107).

For Shakespeare, “music was the food of love”, and love inspired music:

It was a lover and his lass https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPOz01Ckxvo

Shakespeare knew that love could be puzzling, that it sometimes passed with youth, but it should be embraced when it is there.

What is love? ’tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter; What’s to come is still unsure: In delay there lies no plenty; Then come kiss me, sweet and twenty, Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

He warned that love often brought all kinds of trouble with it:


Hermia: O cross! too high to be enthrall’d to low.

Lysander: Or else misgraffed in respect of years,—

Hermia: O spite! too old to be engaged to young.

Lysander: Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,—

Hermia: O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes.

Lysander. Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentany as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream; Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold!’ The jaws of darkness do devour it up: So quick bright things come to confusion

Polonius in Hamlet, intercepts a love letter from Hamlet to Ophelia:

Doubt thou the stars are fire; Doubt that the sun doth move; Doubt truth to be a liar; But never doubt I love. ‘O dear Ophelia, I am ill at these numbers; I have not art to reckon my groans; but that I love thee best, O most best, believe it. Adieu. ‘Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, HAMLET.’

Relationships between children and parents

Shakespeare understood the power of love between children and parents.  He captured the poignancy of the love between the elderly King Lear and the daughter he had banished and become reconciled with:

Cordelia: O my dear father, restoration hang Thy medicine on my lips, and let this kiss Repair those violent harms that my two sisters Have in thy reverence made!

Lear: You do me wrong to take me out o’ th’ grave. Thou art a soul in bliss; but I am bound Upon a wheel of fire, that mine own tears Do scald like molten lead…


Cordelia: And so I am! I am!

Lear: If you have poison for me, I will drink it. I know you do not love me; for your sisters Have, as I do remember, done me wrong. You have some cause, they have not.

Cordelia: No cause, no cause.

Shakespeare on friendship

Shakespeare’s plays are full of close friendships, and the role they play in good times, in advice and counsel, and in helping in times of need.  He understood the difference between friends you could rely on, and those you couldn’t:



Overcoming fear of mortality

Shakespeare lived in a time of high infant mortality within large families, and much lower life expectancy due to illnesses that in many cases can now be treated.  Many of his sonnets and plays are concerned with overcoming mortality, by having children, creating great immortal art, affecting other people positively, or through a life narrative or reputation that survives you.

The fact that you are reading this tells you that Shakespeare is immortal, and is still with us, that people affect each other and the future in all kinds of ways that live beyond us.

Who tried to censor Shakespeare?

Shakespeare has been pilloried, censored or banned for centuries, and for all kinds of reasons.  These include ignoring prevailing moral codes, atheistic tendencies, contempt for inherited privilege, internationalism, disparagement of identity politics, exposing the shallow nature of kingly power, promotion of market trade, usury, suspected grain-hoarding, lack of a class angle or socialist realism, unpatriotic sentiments, portraying black people and continentals in too favourable a light, and promotion of teenage sex, homoeroticism and cross-dressing.

The common grievances all censors, banners and book burners have with Shakespeare are his humanism, the unbounded nature of his intellect, his love of life, and belief in human potential.  There is also jealousy from minds inferior to Shakespeare’s.  Shakespeare in his plays often exposed tendencies by the mean-spirited to drag others down.

The common aim of those who censored or banned Shakespeare has been to limit human consciousness as revealed and expanded in Shakespeare, in order to promote narrow moral, religious, nationalistic, cultural or racial codes or world views, or simply for small-mindedness itself.

What Shakespeare admired and despised

Shakespeare valued honesty, integrity and loyalty. In sonnet 25, beauty is truly beautiful when it comes with honesty and integrity. Sonnet 105 encapsulates Shakespeare’s view of an ideal lover; someone who is “fair, kind and true”.  Cordelia is “so young my lord, and true”.  Rosalind and Celia, Orlando and Adam are loyal to each other, without instrumentality or likely reward.  Kent and the Fool are loyal to King Lear, at risk to their own lives.

Shakespeare did not elevate intelligence above human character, concern for others and honesty:

No legacy is so rich as honesty.

Iago and Edmund are intelligent, and evil.  They easily outwit more admirable characters such as Othello, Cassio and Edgar. The fool in King Lear has the emotional intelligence to realise things will end badly when Cordelia is banished from the kingdom.  He pines away when Cordelia has left, feeling early what others cannot see.

Corin in As you like it, the old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, and the servants in King Lear are of kindness and character.  Rosalind in As you like it needs composure, self-regulation, prudence and agility as well as her intellect to survive in the Forest of Arden.

Shakespeare saw love between individuals as something that survived time and shallowness.  In sonnet 18 it lasts “as long lives this and this gives life to thee”.

Shakespeare also knew that the mind can play tricks.  Psychology can misfire, and romantic love can distort judgement or stumble over the tedium of domestic life.

For Shakespeare, the worse sins are cruelty, deception and flattery. Shakespeare values compassion and despises its absence in Goneril, Regan and Iago.  It is often the humble people who are most horrified by cruelty, such as the servants who are disgusted by Cornwall and Goneril in King Lear.

Shakespeare despised superficiality, insincerity, and “dwellers on form and favour.”  Ophelia in her “madness” gives fennel, signifying flattery to Claudius.  Goneril and Regan flatter Lear, and Cordelia is banished for she lacks that “glib and oily art to speak and purpose not” and cannot heave her loving heart into her mouth.  She says:

Nor are those empty-hearted whose low sound reverbs no hollowness.

Lear bitterly reflects on his two oldest daughters:


Shakespeare despised fair weather friends:

That sir which serves and seeks for gain, And follows but for form, Will pack when it begins to rain and leave thee in a storm But I will tarry; the fool will stay, And let the wise man fly.

Power and governance

In Shakespeare, the cream does not always rise.  “Some rise by sin and some by virtue fall”.  It is often the power-hungry and sociopaths who seize power, and the humble people who hold them to account.

Shakespeare did not believe in mob rule.  He was a man of order, and a constitutionalist.  He was acutely aware of how disorder can bring out the worst in people.  In Julius Caesar and Corialanus he sees how crowds can be gullible, easily swayed, capricious, and subject to mass neuroses.

Shakespeare was nuanced enough to understand that pacifism can invite attack, and that some good people shed blood, including their own.  There are few pure angels or devils in his works.  People have reasons for what they do.

Some of the deepest humanism in Shakespeare comes from simple people who stand up against personal malignity, for no reward, and at risk to their lives.  It is a servant who comes to the defence of Gloucester when he is being maimed by Cornwall, dying as a result.  Another servant understands the corrupt effects of top leaders such as Cornwall being vicious psychopaths: “I’ll never care what wickedness I do if this man comes to good”. A servant says of Goneril: “If she live long, and in the end meet the old course of death, women will all turn monsters”.

Later on in King Lear, Regan realizes that good people are horrified by cruelty, and rues letting the blinded Gloucester “smell his way to Dover” for “where he arrives he moves all hearts against us”.

Shakespeare’s histories are often extended narratives on the creation of order, perhaps through successions of rulers, and often involving unethical behaviour.  Henry IV tells his son and future successor: “God knows, my son, by what by-paths and indirect crook’d way I met this Crown.”

Richard 111 is written for an audience within a power structure that wanted to brand the king as an evil tyrant.  Shakespeare plays to the gallery, but often parodies the narrative.  Richard 111 was born with teeth fully formed in his mouth!

Shakespeare recognises the importance of the “genuine authority” that Kent saw in King Lear.  Shakespeare attacked illegitimate and unconstitutional power achieved through murder in Macbeth, Richard 111 and Hamlet. In King John “there is no sure foundation set on blood, no certain life achieved by other’s death”.

Lear finds that his evil daughters and their followers do not respect him but only his kingly power, and when he gives this away he no longer has authority.  Order then breaks down, and is only restored at the end of the play by those who respect constitutionality and reestablish it over the dead bodies of those who have destroyed Lear, Cordelia, and the fool.

In King Lear, Goneril, Regan, Cornwall, Edmund and Oswald live in accord with savage law.  The good characters are fools, have blind spots, or refuse to flatter and connive.  However, they have the affiliations, affinities and truth that make people highly developed humans and make civilized life possible.  Albany himself is disgusted with his brother-in-law, Cornwall.  He says if there is no punishment for Cornwall “humanity must perforce prey on itself.”  He then sees the black heart of his own wife Goneril, and turns against her.

Shakespeare, his father, and no doubt others in his social circle were often victims of petty tyranny, hierarchal privilege, imperiousness or mendacious use of the law.  Hamlet reflects on the oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, the law’s delay and the insolence of office.  In Shakespeare’s late play, Cymbeline, death is seen as a liberation from the tyrant’s stroke:



Guiderius: Fear no more the lightning flash,

Arviragus: Nor the all-dreaded thunder-stone;

Guiderius: Fear not slander, censure rash;

Arviragus: Thou hast finish’d joy and moan:


Guiderius: No exorciser harm thee!

Arviragus: Nor no witchcraft charm thee!

Guiderius: Ghost unlaid forbear thee!

Arviragus: Nothing ill come near thee!

Guiderius: Quiet consummation have; And renowned be thy grave!

Economics and economic justice

William Shakespeare was good with money and property, believed in trade, a market economy and strong property rights.  He saw the relation of these things to liberties, human rights, self-determination and artistic freedom.  Shakespeare saw the relationship between property and power.

In Shakespeare’s time, a merchant class was emerging from feudalism.  It was supported by new forms of property right, including those over such abstractions as loans and creative works.  Shakespeare’s own father had been accused of usury (charging excessive interest), and this is a theme in Merchant of Venice.  The bard himself understood the time value of money and the need for a premium for risk.

You can imagine Shakespeare as a salesman:

Lawn as white as driven snow; Cyprus black as e’er was crow; Gloves as sweet as damask roses; Masks for faces and for noses; … Come buy of me, come; come buy, come buy; Buy lads, or else your lasses cry: Come buy.

In the mediaeval times that preceded Shakespeare, the major barriers to human advancement were lack of tradeable property rights, of open markets and of trade betterment.  In Shakespeare’s own time hierarchy unrelated to merit was the biggest barrier to betterment.

Shakespeare’s father was a glove maker and merchant and his mother a prosperous farmer’s daughter.  Shakespeare came from a rising but still insecure middle class which wanted to do better, and which was constrained and in some cases threatened by both privileged hierarchies and by poorer people jealous of success.

Shakespeare was fascinated by the cultural and economic achievements on the continent, especially in the Italian city-states which were settings for some of his plays.  The Renaissance had begun in Florence in the 14th century.  It was in Italy that the modern banking system emerged, and trade betterment gained the momentum that would over time drive economic growth and rising per capita incomes throughout the western world.   Shakespeare mandated commerce, trade, and a justice system that enforced contracts.

There are more trading states than castles in Shakespeare, and he saw that trade betterment through market exchange needed individual rights as well as prosperity.

Shakespeare saw money as a means to an end, not a higher human value or a substitute for the person herself.  “Fairest Cordelia, that art most rich, being poor…”

He understood how poverty often compromised behaviour.  In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo buys poison from a reluctant apothecary (pharmacist):

Romeo: I see that though art poor.  Hold, there is forty ducats….Art though so bare and full of wretchedness and fearest to die?  Famine is in thy cheeks, need and oppression starveth in thine eyes, contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.  The world is not thy friend, nor the world’s law; the world affords no law to make thee rich; then be not poor, but break it and take this.

Apothecary: My poverty but not my will consents.

Romeo: I pay thy poverty and not thy will…There is thy gold – worse poison for men’s souls, doing more murther in this loathsome world, than these poor compounds that thou mayst not sell.  I sell thee poison; thou has sold me none.  Farewell.  Buy food and get thyself in flesh.

Shakespeare sees how money can be used to gloss over bad character: “O what a world of vile, ill-favoured faults looks handsome on three hundred pounds a year”.  He sees how it can: “place thieves and give them title, knee and approbation, with senators on the bench”.

In Shakespeare’s time, scientific and rational ways of thinking were challenging religion.  This was supported by rising capabilities in measurement, of time and money and of people’s lives, and the quantification underlying trade and the betterment it created for people.  Forms and symbols of quantitative measurement abound in Shakespeare, typically with multiple meanings.  Coins are associated with men’s character and mettle, in King Lear love is divisible by thirds and Cordelia’s “price has fallen”.  In Macbeth, Shakespeare characterises time as linear, sequential, grammatical and physically moving:

Shakespeare did not confuse kindness and decency at the individual level with abstract political or religious causes.  He was no socialist.  Shakespeare in Corialanus satirizes the credulity of the public masses understanding of economics: “let’s kill him and we will have corn at our own price”.

Shakespeare spoofs the political logic, consistency and denial of agency of those who banished Corialanus: “….though we willingly consented to his banishment it was against our will…”

Public uprisings, overthrows of government and referenda can blow back and harm the very people who supported them.

Shakespeare moved to London to make his money by combining different words in new ways.  He retired to Stratford-on-Avon to invest in houses, farmland and other tangible properties.  He was successful because he was able to trade in markets that rewarded his talents.  His humanism and feeling for the poor was reflected in his will.  However, his mindfulness of poverty came through most strongly in works such as King Lear.

The banished aristocrat Edgar escapes with his life, disguising himself as a Bedlam beggar[4].

To take the basest and most poorest shape That ever penury, in contempt of man, Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth, Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots, And with presented nakedness outface The winds and persecutions of the sky. The country gives me proof and precedent Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices, Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary; And with this horrible object, from low farms, Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills, Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers, Enforce their charity. ‘Poor Turlygod! poor Tom!’ That’s something yet! Edgar I nothing am


As so often in the topsy-turvy world of King Lear, it is the fool’s commentary which is the wisest and least foolish:

Fathers that wear rags Do make their children blind; But fathers that bear bags Shall see their children kind. Fortune, that arrant whore, Ne’er turns the key to the poor

King Lear shows compassion to the poor only after his fall into poverty and dissolution.  Reduced to destitution he sees for the first time the wretched poverty of his former subjects, and feels compassion for them.  Approaching a hovel he tells his fool:

In, boy; go first.- You houseless poverty… Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are, That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides, Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp; Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel…
Lear understands others through affinity with the suffering of those in the “poor, pelting villages”.  Shakespeare understood that an economy must ultimately deliver acceptable outcomes for the poor if it is to support a good society.

Cordelia reflects on what he has been through when Lear is rescued from being an outcast in the storm:

Was this a face

To be opposed against the warring winds?

To stand against the deep dread-bolted thunder

In the most terrible and nimble stroke

Of quick cross lightning? … Mine enemy’s meanest dog,

Though he had bit me, should have stood that night

Against my fire. And wast thou fain, poor father,

To hovel thee with swine and rogues forlorn

In short and musty straw


Nature of justice

Shakespeare understood that life was not a morality tale, that good did not triumph in every instance, and that there was no inevitable justice.

Shakespeare understood that justice is a human creation.  As such it is flawed, but better even with its imperfections than no law, or the law of the jungle.   Shakespeare felt injustice at times in his life, and he also defended his legal rights in disputes with others.  King Lear in his “madness” sees the potential for hypocrisy within a justice system:


Gloucester:  Ay, sir.

Lear: And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office… Through tatter’d clothes small vices do appear; Robes and furr’d gowns hide all. Plate sin with gold, And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks; Arm it in rags, a pygmy’s straw does pierce it. … Get thee glass eyes And, like a scurvy politician, seem To see the things thou dost not.

Measure for Measure contrasts large-minded and small-minded justice, while Portia in the Merchant of Venice sees mercy as integral to it:


Witchcraft, astrology, predestination, luck and magical thinking

Shakespeare did not believe in ghosts or witchcraft but drew on it for its dramatic effects.  From Hamlet:


Angels and ministers of grace defend us!


‘Tis given out that, sleeping in my orchard, A serpent stung me. So the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process of my death Rankly abus’d. But know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father’s life Now wears his crown…

Fare thee well at once. The glowworm shows the matin to be near And gins to pale his uneffectual fire. Adieu, adieu, adieu! Remember me.

And from Macbeth:

First witch: When shall we three meet again In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

Second witch: When the hurlyburly’s done, When the battle’s lost and won.

A sailor’s wife had chestnuts in her lap, And munch’d, and munch’d, and munch’d:— ‘Give me,’ quoth I: ‘Aroint thee, witch!’ the rump-fed ronyon cries. Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ the Tiger: But in a sieve I’ll thither sail, And, like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, and I’ll do.

And the very ports they blow, All the quarters that they know … Though his bark cannot be lost, Yet it shall be tempest-tost…


Shakespeare challenged astrology, predetermination and magical thinking that denied people’s individual responsibility.  In sonnet 14 he writes: “not from the stars do I my judgement pluck”.  Helena says in All’s well that ends well: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven”.  Julius Caesar tells Brutus: “Men at some time are master of their fates: The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Edmund in King Lear listens to his father Gloucester attributing human discord to mysterious forces and higher powers.  He soliloquises:



Free thinking

Shakespeare understood the risks of speaking truth to people in power.  Kent stands up to the imperious King Lear, defends Cordelia, and is banished.  Kent is the model of a high integrity public servant.

Relationships based on gratitude cannot be relied on, any more than King Lear could buy loyalty by giving away his lands.   People, especially the vulnerable, must take care of themselves, and not depend on others for protection.

The strongest characters in Shakespeare are individuals who think for themselves, who refuse to adopt uncritically the views of others, who see things as they are and stand up for themselves.  They do what it takes to survive in a harsh world.

Humanism and human potential

William Shakespeare is the poet, dramatist, psychology and philosopher of the humanist world view.  He is above cultures and above race.  At the heart of his humanism is the dignity of individuals, their individuality and autonomy, human capacity to love, and the power of human imagination. “I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.”


Language, music, and high culture

Shakespeare understood that language, music and high culture are what distinguishes humanity from base nature.

Music is the soul of love, and is integral to such plays as As you like it and The Tempest.  Cordelia and a doctor use music to try and restore Lear to health.  Shakespeare distrusts action men who have no time for music and poetry and creations of the higher mind.  Julius Caesar mistrusts Cassius’s “lean and hungry look” (would he were fatter!), for thinking too much: “he reads much, looks through the deeds of men, loves no plays, hears no music… Such men as he be never at heart’s ease whiles they behold a greater than themselves and therefore are they very dangerous”.


Shakespeare’s love for music even permeates plays unrelated to it, such as Merchant of Venice[5].

While Shakespeare loved folk music, he also parodied its overly fantastic flourishes:



Shakespeare was influenced by Christian culture, yet his world view was secular and humanistic.  He was deeply sceptical of the integrity of priests and others who claimed to be God’s representatives on earth:

When priests are more in word than matter; When brewers mar their malt with water; When nobles are their tailors’ tutors, No heretics burn’d, but wenches’ suitors; When every case in law is right, No squire in debt nor no poor knight; When slanders do not live in tongues, Nor cutpurses come not to throngs; When usurers tell their gold i’ th’ field, And bawds and whores do churches build: Then shall the realm of Albion Come to great confusion… This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time

King Lear’s deep current of irreligious thought and scepticism is set in pre-Christian times, and Lear and the fool in a dream-like conversation ask whether something can come from nothing, distantly challenging the Genesis account of creation.

Shakespeare understood that religion can be used for evil purposes:

The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

There is a sense in Shakespeare that things can and will move on and will get better.  This theme is reflected in sonnet 32 where Shakespeare imagines his lover outliving him, that future poets will exceed Shakespeare’s heights, but that this will not take away from the love Shakespeare had while he lived.  His lover who outlives him can admire another living poet for his achievement, and Shakespeare for his love…

Tragedies such as King Lear are incompatible with a belief in God or in divine justice.  The gods are appealed to in King Lear; all of them are silent.

O you mighty gods,

This world I do renounce, and in your sights

Shake patiently my great affliction off.

If I could bear it longer and not fall

To quarrel with your great opposeless wills,

My snuff and loathèd part of nature should



Ophelia responds to Laertes’ cautions about her relationship with Hamlet:

But, good my brother,do not as some ungracious pastors do, show me the steep and thorny way to heaven, whiles, like a puff’d and reckless libertine, himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, and recks not his own rede.


Ophelia is victimised by hypocritical and life-denying religion even after her death. The priest minimises the rites for Ophelia’s funeral.  She is given a Christian burial against the priest’s objections that her death was a suspected suicide, and therefore should condemn her to lie in unsanctified ground.

However, Shakespeare acknowledged his Christian cultural heritage in his will.


Shakespeare was acutely conscious of the stages of life, how different ages face different challenges, and that we must enjoy life when we have it:

When that I was and a little tiny boy, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, A foolish thing was but a toy, For the rain it raineth every day. But when I came to man’s estate, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain, ‘Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate, For the rain it raineth every day But when I came, alas! to wive, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain By swaggering could I never thrive, For the rain, it raineth every day But when I came unto my beds, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain With toss-pots still had drunken heads, For the rain, it raineth every day A great while ago the world begun, With hey, ho, the wind and the rain But that’s all one, our play is done, And we’ll strive to please you every day.

He understood that teenage years were difficult ones:


King Lear is partly about despised old age.  Goneril, Regan, Cornwall and Edmund see old people’s existence as a burden on themselves, “the old must give way to the young”.  They hunger to inherit Lear and Gloucester’s property and power.  “The hedge-sparrow fed the cuckoo so long, that it had its head bit off by its young.”

King Lear himself satirises his two older daughters’ contempt for him:

Dear daughter, I confess that I am old.  Age is unnecessary.  On my knees I beg that you’ll vouchsafe me raiment, bed, and food.


“Ingratitude, that marble-hearted fiend.”  “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child”.  King Lear ends:

The weight of this sad time we must obey, Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say. The oldest have borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much, nor live so long.

Elderly people may give away their property to their children, only to find their children suddenly lose interest in them, or even secretly hope they pass away. This is a timeless issue.

Shakespeare brought out some of the best in humanity in those such as Cordelia, Edgar and Orlando (in As you like it) whose love and fidelity to elderly relatives or servants was ineffable but truer and less instrumentalist than those with the “oily arts” of the Gonerils and Regans.

Family tyrannies, both internal and between families

Shakespeare’s plays are full of authoritarian parents, especially fathers, tyrannising their children.  Desdemona in Othello, Hermia in Midsummer Night’s Dream, Juliet in Romeo and Juliet, and Cordelia in King Lear are all bullied or threatened with death or banishment if they marry someone they love, refuse to marry someone they don’t love, or fail to give all their love to an imperious parent, even at the expense of reserving at least some love for a future husband.  Desdemona is a victim of her father and husband. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHT7WM2nsFk

Romeo and Juliet is of course the supreme indictment of the tyranny of feuds between families and branding through a family name: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”.

Gender issues

Hamlet, driven up the wall by his mother Gertrude, says “frailty thy name is women.”  However, Shakespeare himself has extraordinary sympathy with female characters.  They are often the most powerful and intelligent people such as Rosalind and Viola, or those with the purest, deepest character such as Cordelia.

Rosalind is at Hamlet’s intellectual level, but has far more self-control.  She sustains her strong self and character while disguised as someone else, parlays a weak hand of cards into a winning one, and gets the last words in, in the epilogue where she looks the audience in the eye.  Interestingly, Celia in As you like it is the only character who maintains her autonomy from Rosalind, while also being her great friend and forest sister.  Celia is the one person Rosalind cannot command.

Rosalind is also very down to earth.  She is in love but will not die for love, she is in control of her own self, not maddened by the teeming brain of lovers.  She cures a youth of puppy love:

…full of tears, full of smiles…would now like him, now loathe him, then entertain him, then forswear him, now weep for him, then spit at him…to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic…


Even in the superficially patriarchal play Taming of the Shrew, Katie is really in control, while feigning subservience.

That Shakespeare was passionate about women is clear, and he fathered the first of his three children out of wedlock at age eighteen.  However some of his sonnets are addressed to one or more men, whether as patronage or authentic love.  He may have been bisexual, and arguably there is a homoerotic theme in the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio in Merchant of Venice.

Racism and cultural identity politics

Othello is a deeply anti-racist play.  https://winsleys.wordpress.com/2015/04/28/the-upstart-crow-and-why-i-feel-i-belong-here/

It was banned in Nazi Germany and in some southern US states, at least where Othello was played by a black actor.  In Merchant of Venice, Launcelot the servant is expected to make an honest woman out of the black girl he has gotten pregnant, and the black Morocco is a credible suitor for Portia.  In contrast the racist Gratiano is portrayed as venal and corrupt.

Shylock is portrayed with humanity and sympathy:


Nationalism and group identity politics

Shakespeare always put individuals and relationships between them as paramount in his works, and never put political theories, national, racial or cultural pride ahead of them.

Hamlet is a man alone facing a tyrannous rule and consumed by the need for a just revenge against one murderer.  He contrasts this with an invading army where thousands may die purely for a worthless symbol:

Witness this army of such mass and charge, Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit, with divine ambition puff’d, Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death, and danger dare, Even for an eggshell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw … to my shame I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men That for a fantasy and trick of fame Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain?

Plays such as King John, Richard 11 and Henry V include some fine rhetoric that seems admirably patriotic at first blush.  England in Richard 11 is “this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle…” In King John: “Nought shall make us rue, if England to itself do rest but true.”

Shakespeare’s historical plays such as Henry V are full of heroic speech.  “The youth of England are on fire…they sell that pasture now to buy the horse…”Tomorrow is Saint Crispian day … we few, we happy few” are portrayed as lucky because honour and glory are a fixed quantity and so the fewer there are the more honour and glory they get!

However, in King Lear, the French army are on the “good side” and the British on the “bad side”.  Shakespeare’s Henriad plays are subtle attacks on nationalism and its relationship to abuse of political power.  Henry V is an ironic attack on megalomaniacal state power. Henry V threatens a French town’s inhabitants with mass murder if they do not surrender.  French prisoners are massacred.  Shakespeare exposes the evil of war and deflates its “heroism”.

A key device in exposing nationalism’s dark underbelly is Falstaff, a larger than life, drinking and womanizing hedonist.  Falstaff teaches us not to moralise.  Lear laments his age while Falstaff transcends it.

In Henry IV part 1, Falstaff is told that he “owest God a death” and should die with honour.  Falstaff replies:




Shakespeare hates the “churlish knot of all-abhorred war…contumelieous, beastly, mad-brained war”.  Shakespeare’s military figures are typically deeply flawed and come to bad ends.  In Troilus and Cressida Greek classical heroes are shown in an unflattering, unheroic and unvirtuous light.  Heroes such as Edgar and Hamlet only take up arms reluctantly.

In Henry 1V Part two King Henry warns his son Hal he may have to pursue foreign quarrels to protect himself against civil strife. “…be it thy course to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels…”  At the end of the play Hal rejects Falstaff so he can become a serious-minded, war-mongering monarch.

Despite the bombast of “once more into the breach, dear friends, once more; or close the wall up with our English dead” Shakespeare does not gloss over the horror of war. At the end of Henry V the audience is reminded that “they lost France and made his England bleed”.

Aristocratic privilege, bloodline and inheritance

Shakespeare’s histories and tragedies show kings, nobles and other aristocrats in a human and often unflattering light.  While individuals can murder other individuals, only people in positions of great power can do harm on a mass scale.  There are kings and aristocrats who murder their way into power – Richard 111, Macbeth and Claudius.  Others can lose their power, lands, sanity and lives through imperiousness and vanity (Lear).

Above all, kings and aristocrats are shown in Shakespeare not as having divine rights but as flawed human beings who make mistakes, can be ineffectual, mad, outsmarted, misunderstand things, have fatal flaws or behave capriciously, irrationally or with bad intent.

The histories and tragedies eroded the distance between the human and royalty.   They removed the artifice and the divine justification for power and its aura of invincibility.  They paved the way for the English revolution.

False pride and spurious and shallow honour and show of appearances

Shakespeare attacked pride, spurious and shallow honour displays and shows of appearances: “Small things make base men proud”.


In sonnet 25 Shakespeare notes that those patronized by the aristocracy, and famous warriors with honour and privilege are all vulnerable to having these baubles stripped away.  In sonnet 91 Shakespeare shows how people can be proud of the wrong things – wealth, inherited social status, clothes, hawks, hounds and horses.  Sonnet 125 disparages those who favour appearances and covet powerful people’s favours.

In the history plays Hotspur is in love with honour, Falstaff with wine and womanizing.  Pistol, Nim and boy in Henry V comment cynically on honour, militarism and conflict.  They are characters who are happy to trade off the chance of fame for a mug of beer, and safety.

Insecurity of power and greatness

A powerful theme in Shakespeare is how everyone is human, and that death conquers and levels all, the beggars and kings.  In Hamlet, “Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, might stop a hole to keep the wind away”.

Richard 11 in a meditative moment reflects upon the underlying human frailty even of kings:

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground And tell sad stories of the death of kings; … I live with bread like you, feel want, Taste grief, need friends: subjected thus, How can you say to me, I am a king?

Henry V reflects that, “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown”.

Political tyrannies

Shakespeare as a humanist was deeply suspicious of power that comes from inheritance and ambition for power.

Shakespeare’s plays often contrast power-hunger and the destruction it unleashes with humble, sane people ordering their lives around their family, friends, their loves and there making a living.   Shakespeare celebrates those “who doth ambition shun and love to live in the sun”, and woodland fellows “that always loved a great fire.”

Such people, and sometimes nature itself constitute the real world rather than a political fantasy world.  The porter scene in Macbeth is the only humorous scene and the only one where sane, balanced humanity is represented in a world of vaulting ambition, murder, witchcraft and power struggles.

Shakespeare’s attacks on tyranny are enduring and everlasting and take new forms as new tyrannies emerge.  This is reflected in the fate of Shakespeare’s works in Stalin’s Soviet Union.  Russian writers were long the conscience and abstract chronicles of that long-suffering nation, embodied its soul, and were often in the forefront of challenges to tyranny.

During the 1940 blitz when the Soviet Union was an ally of Nazi Germany, Anna Ahkmatova telegraphed which side Russia’s literati were on in To the Londoners. https://creativeconflictwisdom.wordpress.com/2012/02/28/anna-ahkmatova-1889-1966-conflict-poem-to-the-londoners-1940/

As George Orwell revealed in his essay Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool[6], Tolstoy could never abide Shakespeare’s unbounded love of life and wideness of mind, refusal to agonise over his soul and over death, and his exposure of hypocrisy.  Above all, he never forgave Shakespeare for the lessons from King Lear: if you give away your money and power as a way of getting an indirect advantage for yourself, don’t be surprised if others play by different rules and you live to regret it.  Loyalty to family does not always exist, especially with “pelican daughters” such as Goneril and Regan.

Stalin hated Hamlet, ostensibly because “Hamlet’s indecisiveness and depression were incompatible with the new Soviet spirit of optimism, fortitude, and clarity”.  Stalin banned Hamlet from 1941 till his death.  The great Soviet theatre director, Meyerhold was obsessed with Hamlet and had plans to stage it.  He was murdered by Stalin’s secret police and his wife stabbed to death.

Hamlet was too close to the bone for Stalin. Like Claudius, Stalin had murdered for power.   He believed the ends justified the means.  Shakespeare never believed that individual dignity, rights and lives should be sacrificed for some collectivist mass project or delusion.  Hamlet was a highly intelligent, sceptical observer who was close to power, and just a sword stroke away from the head of state…

Hamlet retains his autonomy in the midst of a tyranny, and this is dangerous to an autocrat: “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer…The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune…Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them..”


In Shakespeare’s England, except in London and a few larger towns, people lived close to and as part of nature.  He loves the “cuckoo buds of yellow hue that paint the meadows with delight[7]”, the owls’ ‘tu-whit too whoo’, the icicles hanging by the wall, as Tom drags logs into the hall…

In places his works shows an awe of the stars and night sky, but his love for nature is mainly expressed through man living in and with nature, in farms, “poor pelting villages”, in the forest of Arden where there are books in brooks and words in streams and poems on trees… Shakespeare alludes to herbal remedies, and to the use of egg white and cobwebs for their antiseptic or healing properties.

Shakespeare delighted in nature, the colours, dynamism, plants and what they connoted, birds, their calls and animals.  So much of his love involved people interwoven in and interacting with nature, the “shepherds piping on oaten straws” and “merry larks are ploughmen’s clocks”:

Where the bee sucks. there suck I: In a cowslip’s bell I lie; There I couch when owls do cry. On the bat’s back I do fly After summer merrily.
He did not see nature as separate from people:


He was the supreme poet of man as part of nature, drawing meaning from what plants stood for and what birds’ songs meant, and how nature’s storms and cold felt for people.

In Midsummer Night’s Dream the fairy world transcends human brick and mortar existence and merges with a magical world where plants and insects live their own lives to be admired in themselves and as they relate to human needs for medicines, for wonder, for lighted candles, for peaceful children, and for sheer delight:

Your eyes are lode-stars; and your tongue’s sweet air More tuneable than lark to shepherd’s ear, When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.
The contending world of humans and spirits are intertwined:

Puck: How now, spirit! whither wander you?

Fairy: Over hill, over dale, Thorough bush, thorough brier, Over park, over pale, Thorough flood, thorough fire, I do wander everywhere, Swifter than the moon’s sphere; And I serve the fairy queen, To dew her orbs upon the green. The cowslips tall her pensioners be: In their gold coats spots you see; Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours: I must go seek some dewdrops here And hang a pearl in every cowslip’s ear. Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I’ll be gone: Our queen and all our elves come here anon.



Puck: Thou speak’st aright; I am that merry wanderer of the night. I jest to Oberon and make him smile When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile, Neighing in likeness of a filly foal: And sometime lurk I in a gossip’s bowl, In very likeness of a roasted crab, And when she drinks, against her lips I bob And on her wither’d dewlap pour the ale. The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale, Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And ‘tailor’ cries, and falls into a cough; And then the whole quire hold their hips and laugh, And waxen in their mirth and neeze and swear A merrier hour was never wasted there.

Oberon: Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania…

Titania’s rebuff to Oberon is eerily predictive of climate change:

Titania: These are the forgeries of jealousy: And never, since the middle summer’s spring, Met we on hill, in dale, forest or mead, By paved fountain or by rushy brook, Or in the beached margent of the sea, To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind, But with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport. Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain, As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea Contagious fogs; which falling in the land Have every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents: The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain, The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard; The fold stands empty in the drowned field, And crows are fatted with the murrion flock; The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud, And the quaint mazes in the wanton green For lack of tread are undistinguishable: The human mortals want their winter here; No night is now with hymn or carol blest: Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, Pale in her anger, washes all the air, That rheumatic diseases do abound: And thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose, And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer, The childing autumn, angry winter, change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world, By their increase, now knows not which is which: And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension; We are their parents and original

Shakespeare can turn giving someone directions into supreme naturalistic poetry:

Titania’s last act before wishing others goodnight is not something mundane, like putting the cat out, but:



And she is so imaginative in her kindness:

Be kind and courteous to this gentleman; Hop in his walks and gambol in his eyes; Feed him with apricocks and dewberries, With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries; The honey-bags steal from the humble-bees, And for night-tapers crop their waxen thighs And light them at the fiery glow-worm’s eyes, To have my love to bed and to arise; And pluck the wings from painted butterflies To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes..

In Romeo and Juliet, the headstrong and mercurial Mercutio has a flight of imaginative fantasy where he communes with an imaginary fairy world:

Mercutio: O, then, I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men’s noses as they lie asleep; Her wagon-spokes made of long spiders’ legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, The traces of the smallest spider’s web, The collars of the moonshine’s watery beams, … Her chariot is an empty hazel-nut Made by the joiner squirrel or old grub, Time out o’ mind the fairies’ coachmakers. And in this state she gallops night by night Through lovers’ brains, and then they dream of love; O’er courtiers’ knees, that dream on court’sies straight, O’er lawyers’ fingers, who straight dream on fees,
In As you like it , Orlando, Rosalind, Celia and others are banished to the Forest of Arden, where “there is no clock in the forest”.  Orlando loves Rosalind, and nature becomes the paper on which love poems are written:

O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books, And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character…, Run, run, Orlando; carve on every tree, The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she. If a hart do lack a hind, Let him seek out Rosalind. If the cat will after kind, So be sure will Rosalind…

Those who live in harmony with nature can enjoy a simple and contended life:



he that doth the ravens feed, yet providentially caters for the sparrow be comfort to my age

Even the worse weather causes less pain than bad things that happen between people:

Blow, blow thou winter wind, though art not so unkind as man’s ingratitude…thou sting is not so sharp as friend remembered not.

Life must be lived, and love of life

The Middle Ages asserted a supremely powerful and all-creating God who lay in judgement on our immortal souls, and who divinely mandated the earthly powers of royalty and aristocracy.  In contrast, humanism was more concerned with living life as it was, and the nature of human relationships, rather than treating life as a transitional preparation for an after-life.

Shakespeare’s loved life for itself and within its bounds. He accepted the conditions of life, and that it is there to be lived.  Shakespeare had no obvious belief in an undiscovered country from which a traveller may return.  You have to enjoy live now, enjoy all things around you, and knowing that some things survive: poetry, children, others’ memories of you, and your enduring achievements.

Shakespeare plays with the image of time moving in one direction only, “if as a crab I could go backwards.”  He uses distance in time and sequencing of events and lifetimes to protect himself from accusations of heresy, apostasy or political subversion.  “These prophecies Merlin shall make, but I live before his time.”  

There is no evidence he believed in an immortal soul in a strictly literal and religious sense.  In his poems and in the last lines of Hamlet and Othello his tragic heroes want to be remembered after their deaths, for the right reasons.

There is no greater lover of life in Shakespeare than Falstaff in the two parts of Henry IV and in the Merry Wives of Windsor.  He is an intelligent and quite learned man.  He debunks honour, glory, and nationalistic cant.  He is allegedly a coward but defends himself, pointing out that discretion is the better part of valour.  Rather than a “victory of death” rhetoric on the battlefield, his cry is “give me life”. He praises drinking and has a bottle of Spanish wine rather than a pistol on the battle field.

Falstaff appears in three plays, and Mrs Quickly has known him for over 29 years, has seen all sides of him, and still loves him.  In her account of his death she told of how Falstaff:

…babbled of green fields…and all was as cold as stone.

While Lear and Ophelia are garnered with weeds or drowned with them, Falstaff engaged with flowers and symbols of life to the end: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PedB0DWay0

However, Shakespeare knew the danger of excessive drinking, warning “O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains”.  He alludes to “falser than vows made in wine”.  The porter lines from Macbeth are famous:


Vaulting ambition

Shakespeare’s bad characters are often motivated by “vaulting” or “blown” ambition, motivated by power for its own sake, not for what the exercise of justice, fair dealing or human advancement.  “Lowliness is young ambition’s ladder whereto the climber upward turns his face”.  Macbeth reflects that, “I have no spur to prick the sides of my intent, but only vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself, and falls on the other.” In contrast, Cordelia says, “No blown ambition doth our arms incite, but love, dear love and our ag’d father’s right.”

The love of language and poetry for its aesthetic powers

Shakespeare loved words, language and poetry for the aesthetic beauty, how they sound.  The poetry was in his head and he had to write his plays and poems to express them, even when the plots and themes do not require them.

If you read and relish Shakespeare, understand him and take him to your heart he will always be with you.  The following includes some lines memorable for their poetry, and some for meaning that may only come later in life, so you can read them and reflect on them as you live life to the full:


Hence, away! now all is well, one aloof stand sentinel.

There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Your bait of falsehood takes this carp of truth.

A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!

The moon’s an arrant thief, whose pale fire she snatches from the sun.

I am constant as the Northern Star.

Light seeking light doth light of light beguile.

Winter of our discontent

Put out the light and then put out the light.

Deeper than did ever plummet sound I’ll drown my book

Rising and cawing at the gun’s report.

I have set my life upon a cast and will stand the hazard of the die.


Give me that man that is not passion’s slave.

Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead.


Is’t possible a young maid’s wits should be as mortal as an old man’s life?

Let the stricken deer go weep, the hart ungalled play; for some must watch while some must sleep: so runs the world away.


To my sick soul (as sin’s true nature is)


It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.


Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none.


Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind; the thief doth fear every bush an officer.


The night is long that never finds the day.


I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

O God! that one might read the book of fate

And what makes robbers bold, but too much lenity.


When majesty stoops to folly.

Thus Kent, o princes, bids you all adieu, he’ll shape his old course in a country new.

He hath ever but slenderly known himself.

If our father would sleep till I waked him.

To be a comrade with the wolf and owl.

Nero is an angler in the lake of darkness.

I do not like the fashion of your garments, you will tell them they are Persian but let them be changed.

And I’ll go to bed at noon.

You have been sunshine and rain at once.

I know you what you are.

Love, and be silent.

Come not between the dragon and his wrath.


To be acknowledg’d, madam, is o’erpaid


I cannot draw a cart, nor eat dried oats; If it be man’s work, I’ll do’t.

The lady protests too much.

This is the very coinage of your brain.

More matter, with less art.

Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low- an excellent thing in woman.


I have a journey, sir, shortly to go. My master calls me; I must not say no.

On a day–alack the day!– Love, whose month is ever May, Spied a blossom passing fair Playing in the wanton air: Through the velvet leaves the wind, All unseen, can passage find; That the lover, sick to death, Wish himself the heaven’s breath.

All my pretty ones…

Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it.

Out, damned spot!

But what’s his offence?  Groping for trout in a peculiar river.

How far that little candle throws his beams – so shines a good deed in a naughty world.

And the country proverb known, that every man should take his own, in your waking shall be shown, Jack shall have Jill, naught shall go ill..and all will be well.

The robbed that smiles steals something from the thief.

It’s not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church-door; but it’s enough,’twill serve: …

A plague on both your houses!.


I have drunk, and seen the spider.

This is fairy gold, boy.

If ever you have looked on better days…and know what tis to pity and be pitied.


There is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.

This quarry cries on havoc.

I shall not look upon his like again.

There’s daggers in men’s smiles.

Fortune, turn thy wheel.

It is as easy as lying.

When a father gives to his son, both laugh.  When a son gives to a father, both cry.

Better a witty fool than a foolish wit.

Love thrives not in the heart that shadows dreadeth.

Read and immerse yourself in Shakespeare for a lifetime and he will always be ahead of you!

[1] https://www.google.co.nz/?gws_rd=ssl#q=no+fear+shakespeare+sparknotes

[2] That is, the last play he wrote entirely himself; in semi-retirement he collaborated with some other writers on other plays.

[3] There are wonderful dramatized, and often set to music versions of Shakespeare sonnets at http://sonnetprojectnyc.com/


[4] Bedlam beggars were often mentally people left to roam the countryside begging for survival.  They were the subject of one of the most famous anonymous poems in the English language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_o%27_Bedlam

[5] These lines are set to music by Vaughan Williams. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFBj-qWLrsw


[6] http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/lear/english/e_ltf

[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSLodFqYlPQ


Posted in Shakespeare | 1 Comment

Overcoming child poverty, with the future in mind

Overcoming child poverty, with the future in mind

By Peter Winsley, December 2016


Child poverty in New Zealand can be defined as an economic and sociological state that impedes children reaching their full potential.

Poverty in New Zealand is relative not absolute.  Compared to other developed countries, New Zealand has good material consumption levels and inequality is not extreme (Grimes & Hyland, 2015a, 2015b; Perry, 2016).

In dynamic economies inequality is associated with high social mobility.  It should reflect meritocracy, not impermeable class barriers.  It should see people connected to the same country and its journey through history, rather than divide people.

High inequality is not a problem if the social mobility traffic stream is moving forward.  Problems arise when the traffic becomes grid-locked.  Inequality then becomes entrenched and frustrates expectations people have that life will get better.  Child deprivation results from entrenched inequality, and perpetuates it into future generations.

This in turn can lead to socio-economic class segmentation and conflict.  Norman Kirk once said people “don’t ask for much: someone to love, somewhere to live, somewhere to work, and something to hope for”.  Without social mobility as “something to hope for”, people become alienated as they see fair society narratives ringing hollow, implicit contracts dishonoured, and trust in institutions decaying.

“Social class” is a self-defeating term in meritocratic societies with high social mobility.  It is a descriptive term where economic stagnation, corporate and capital owner welfare and poor childhood environments impede mobility.

Class barriers can erode New Zealand’s fair society narrative and implicit social contract.  This narrative and contract assume people can reach their full potential if they behave in certain ways, and there is a supportive environment.  They delineate the rights and responsibilities of individuals, society and government.  From these are derived laws and social norms.

Child deprivation damages health, learning, and leads to benefit dependency and crime.  When people fail to reach their potential, New Zealand forgoes productivity gains, cultural achievements and community.  Deprivation hurts us today, and its longer-term effects harm future generations.  Addressing it effectively at the right lifecycle stages delivers exceptional returns.  Why then is New Zealand as a society making so little progress on reducing child poverty?

Why are we making so little progress in reducing child poverty?

Reducing child poverty is impeded by:

Denial of key issues

 Key issues are denied through opaque or vapid language, or silence.  Since language is the medium of thought, this corrupts our ability to see issues clearly, and to think them through.

Examples include denial of the importance of family structure, that cognitive ability is partly heritable, that poverty degrades parental competencies, and that some cultural behaviours cause deprivation.  There is a tacit ban on the term “social class”.

We deny the realities that some people will not learn from mistakes, that some are incapable of parenting, and that most child deprivation would disappear in a generation if people decide only to have children they will love, nurture, and can afford.

 Failure to distinguish between situational and cultural deprivation

Child deprivation in developed countries can be considered as either situational or cultural, though there are inter-relationships between the two.  Situational deprivation is effort-independent.  It arises from events beyond individual control.  These include downturns leading to job loss, changes in unavoidable costs such as housing, food or energy, or unexpected health problems.  People are prepared to help others overcome situational deprivation.

Cultural deprivation is closely-related to individual effort, or lack of it. It results from bad parenting, poor values, weak self-control, and denial of personal responsibility.  People are reluctant to help others manage this deprivation.

People innately sympathise with the situationally-deprived.  Support for social welfare systems depends on whether people are perceived to be trying or not, and whether outcomes are effort-independent or not (Petersen et al, 2012).

There is an innate lack of sympathy for those whose plight is self-authored.  The mind has modules for cheater detection and punishment.  We innately resent free-riding and paying for the costs of other’s negligence, laziness, or weak self-control.  It may also be rational to oppose resource transfers to those who will make poor use of them.

Insufficient distinction between today’s deprivation and avoiding it in future

To tolerate or reward poor parenting allows the behaviour to continue, get worse, and persist inter-generationally.  However, it is morally bereft not to address today’s child deprivation, since children are dependent on adult care.

The public policy challenge is ensuring children have the best opportunities in life, without reinforcing poor parenting.  For example, sanctions such as conditional obligations may be tough on parents, but they must not harm children.

Today’s child poverty must be addressed differently to how future deprivation is avoided.  This means intervention must address today’s challenges, while creating incentives that shape a better future.

Deviation from socially productive resource allocation

Market workings can be subverted by those in powerful positions influencing policy and regulatory frameworks.  This leads for example to policies that are pro-business rather than pro-market.  It is associated with private capture of rents, and socialisation of losses.

The regulatory machinery, tax and property rights regimes can disconnect economic rewards from people’s real, socially valuable productivity contributions.  For example, teachers are as skilled as Wall Street bankers and are more socially valuable, but are paid much less.  Teachers do not cause macroeconomic crises, and when they fail they are dismissed, not bailed out.

Globalisation and technological change are welfare-enhancing so long as economic growth and returns on human capital are broadly dispersed and exceed returns on concentrated physical and financial capital.  However, “trickle-down” policies and regulatory capture allow privileged people to turn income streams into concentrated physical and financial capital that amplifies their advantage and creates barriers to social mobility.

Corporate welfare, business environmental free-riding, weak regulation of financial markets, of building quality and of workplace safety, regulatory barriers to new business entries, and restrictions on new housing developments have typically favoured capital owners, at others’ expense.  Largely middle class students have captured the benefits of interest-free student loans, depriving the school system of resources and impeding higher education access for many from poor backgrounds.

High-performing economies require human, financial and other resources being directed to socially useful effort that benefits people, and at the right life stages.  This applies to government services, as well as to businesses delivering value to customers.

Value destruction results from ignoring this principle.  The 2008 financial crisis partly resulted from banking system “innovation” that involved profit not service maximisation.  It was exacerbated by government-mandated lending policies, and a failure to track property right transactions in a publicly visible way.

Product market companies such as Apple and Big Pharma businesses engaged in tax arbitrage, financialised their businesses through share buy-back and other activities, and ignored their product lines and customers (see Lazonick, 2014, 2015).  This reduced innovation and productivity growth investment and led to massive output loss.  Housing purchases focused on speculative gains, rather than on expanding housing supply.

Addressing child poverty means being supportive of well-regulated markets that allocate resources effectively, and for socially beneficial purposes.

Proposed ways forward

 Ways forward for public policy depend on guiding principles.

These are that children’s interests are paramount, and in a fair society all can reach their potential.  An individual child’s interests must prevail over ethnic, religious, cultural, kin or political identities and ideologies.  This may mean overriding group ideologies relating, for example, to female education, blood transfusion, or child custody transfers between kin and non-kin groups.

Children should not suffer for societal or parental failings.  Government should reinforce good parenting through services it provides and incentives it creates.  Parents have primary responsibility for children’s well-being, and they have obligations as well as rights.  Lifting children out of deprivation should not reinforce parenting harmful for children.

Addressing child poverty requires a multi-partisan strategy.  This must be developed within a social cost-benefit rather than accounting frame.  It must form part of an economic growth strategy with widely-shared benefits.  The focus must be elevating the bottom and middle through productivity growth and new opportunities, rather than redistribution within a static zero sum game.

Investing in children can be delivered in ways that lift savings and capital formation rates.  It can reduce crime and other social costs.  It is associated with intergenerational transmission of education.  It can counter the economic effects of an ageing population, address secular stagnation, lift future productivity and increase labour market participation.  In short, our children are our future and are the best of all possible investments.

Specifically, two distinct but complementary strategies are proposed.  One addresses today’s deprived children, whether victims of situational, effort-independent variance, or cultural, effort-dependent variance.  It ameliorates deprivation through services best delivered by government, rather than by families themselves, while avoiding crowding out individual responsibility.

This strategy should invest in beneficiaries’ children on similar terms as those of working parent’s.  Welfare to work strategies are good policy, and mechanisms such as in-work tax credits can have positive health as well as economic benefits (see Muennig et al, 2016).  However, children’s interests are paramount and so links between work, tax advantages and other incentives should not be punitive.  Therefore, resources delivered to non-working beneficiaries’ children should directly benefit children, and not reward parental disengagement from work.

This strategy needs to be reinforced by asymmetrical paternalism.  This can benefit those suffering from bounded rationality and weak self-control, without imposing costs on others.  Examples include contract “cooling off” periods, and framing of business promotions in ways facilitating informed consumer choices.

The second strategy focuses on avoiding future deprivation.  This includes changing the calculus of parenting decisions in ways that avoid children being born into cultural deprivation in future.  It includes a capability development approach to grow individuals’ future wealth-creating capabilities, rather than social welfare transfers to subsidise consumption.  This aims to lift productivity through expanded human and other wealth-creating capital formation.

Interventions for today’s deprived children

 Poverty degrades parental capabilities, leaving child development deficits that public interventions can address efficiently.  Children are resilient to some deprivations, such as poor clothing and few holidays and entertainments.  They are highly vulnerable to other deprivations, such as epigenetic risks and respiratory illnesses.

Interventions must be precisely targeted to where they can make the biggest difference.  Key interventions include:

 Investing early and at the right points in children’s cognitive and social development

Poverty causes stress, and can have biochemical effects on child development (see Gluckman, 2009; Gunnar & Quevedo, 2007).  Children from stressful backgrounds can suffer from under-development of the prefrontal executive system and the brain’s language system (Noble et al, 2007; Farah et al, 2006).  This harms working memory, task planning and impulse control, with low executive function especially harmful for self-regulation.

Early development of executive function shapes language abilities and predicts later academic achievement (Blair & Diamond, 2008).  Language ability is critical, and high vocabulary correlates with real work ability (Hirsch, 2013).  Low socio-economic status is associated with around 30% of variance in language ability (Noble et al, 2007).

Child cognitive and non-cognitive skills diverge at early stages between families of different permanent income (Heckman & Mosso, 2014).  At least 50% of the variability of lifetime earnings is due to attributes determined by age 18 (Heckman & Mosso, 2014).  Cross-fostering studies suggest that around 50% of IQ disparity in children is experiential (Capron & Duyme, 1989).

Cognitive skills are largely formed by around eight to ten years old, and the ability to change human neural circuitry is highest early in life and decreases with time (Knudsen et al, 2006).  Investing early in children avoids poverty damaging cognitive and non-cognitive development.  Cognitive ability and soft skill development can be improved through early intervention at key life-stages (Heckman & Mosso, 2014; Heckman & Kautz, 2012).

There are excellent returns from high quality early childhood education (Doyle et al, 2009).  Advances in neuroscience, psychology and sociology, and growing data analytical capabilities, can allow interventions to be targeted effectively.

There is no equity-efficiency trade-off in investing in the capabilities of young children from low socio-economic backgrounds.  However, adult education programmes to remediate earlier educational neglect produce poor results for most individuals (Knudsen et al, 2006).

Deal with failures in information, construal and response

Information failings underlie child poverty.  These relate to complex epigenetic, pre-natal, child development, education and socialisation knowledge, through to nutritional understanding and financial literacy.

Government has a key role in some specialised knowledge-intensive services.  Examples include diagnosing and treating health issues and learning disorders, helping people navigate educational processes, and delivering financial literacy programmes.

Government can regulate framing and choice architecture to make information construable and likely to be acted on (see Kahneman & Tversky (eds), 2000).  Low cost psychological interventions can enhance aspiration for those from low income families (Yeager & Walton, 2011).  The evidence suggests that cognitive performance is not a fixed resource, and it can be expanded if people believe it can be.

 Focus on female education

Better educated parents and especially mothers have healthier children.  A mother’s education is a key determinant of children’s later achievement and life prospects (Currie & Moretti, 2003).

Policy settings mean that for young, poorly educated females having children gives income and a social status.  A transition from school to motherhood can appear attractive compared to unemployment or minimum wage, casual work.

Engaging young females in education builds their capabilities, flowing through to higher aspirations.  It also delays fertility to an age when people have higher self-awareness and self-control.  This is when better decisions are made on whether to have children, how many, and what obligations this entails.

Uplifting female education has transformative multi-generational impacts, thereby bridging today’s needs and tomorrow’s opportunities.

 Focus on children’s health

 This means free and accessible children’s health care, with a strong early stage and preventive orientation.  It includes timely intervention to address such “third world” illnesses as rheumatic fever.  It means that no smoking or drug abuse become fundamental lifestyle tenets.

Healthy diet must become a habit rather than an exception.  Good diet is a parental, not a state responsibility.  Breakfast programmes run by businesses or social agencies reinforce parental irresponsibility and the deprivation it gives rise to.

Government’s role is to ensure people have good nutritional understanding, and to nudge them to act on it.  This is an informational role, and may require regulatory intervention, for example through sugar drink taxes.  Government might also support cost-recovery school lunch programmes where parents are time-scarce and have poor nutritional understanding.

Children’s health also means healthy, quality, affordable housing.


Piketty (2014) hypothesised rising economic returns accruing to capital compared to labour.  However, much of the evidence reflects housing ownership and higher imputed rents to home owners, rather than entrepreneurship, venture capital or new wealth-creating endeavours (La Cava, 2016).  Wilkinson & Jeram (2016) also highlighted the impact housing prices have had on inequality and deprivation.

Housing must be seen more as a foundation for life, family and bringing up children in a good environment, rather than as a store of wealth or a speculative investment.

Reducing regulatory restrictions on housing supply would expand affordable housing stock and reduce deprivation.  It would make it easier for people to move from low to higher productivity regions, delivering a productivity and incomes dividend.

Social housing development should replicate the housing conditions of well-functioning families, including household stability.  There is room for social housing innovation for middle class New Zealanders, as well as for the lower income.

 A social housing model could be developed based on permanent leases with rents set on a fixed ratio to the cost of rates.  This could promote secure tenure for families within a predictable rental band, without requiring home ownership.  It could foster similar household stability to that which home owners enjoy.  It would give tenants an incentive to participate in local government elections to ensure value for money for rates-funded services.

Unlike home ownership, a permanent tenure social housing model would not act as a store of wealth that could be liquidated.  However, tenants/leaseholders would have similar tenure stability as home owners.  Such a model would allow individuals to invest more in the productive sector, such as through entrepreneurial and equity investments, rather than invest in inflating the price of a fixed housing stock.

 Removing temptations and stresses from the financially and time-poor

George Orwell in Road to Wigan Pier, and economists such as Mullainathan & Shafir (2013) noted how poverty degrades self-control and rational behaviour.

Energy, time and computational ability are scarce resources that can be depleted. Rich and poor people have the same basic psychology.  However, poorer people’s self-control is more depleted because of the greater stresses they face, rather than because of moralistic failings.

Poorer people have fewer margins for error, and face worse consequences when self-control fails.  More automatic behaviours demand less self-control than active choices (Baumeister et al, 1998).  Under stress, people can “downshift” and rely on automatic responses rather than rational decision-making.  Poorer people may face unexpected repair, health or other unbudgeted expenses that wealthy people can easily handle, but which can push deprived households further into difficulty.

Interventions can reduce the space within which poorer people make bad decisions.  They can remove temptations that erode self-control.  The approach is to “tie Odysseus to the mast”.  Fresh food-free zones can be replaced with junk food-free zones around schools.  Pokie machines, fringe lenders and food trucks can be banned from vulnerable neighbourhoods.  This means they will disappear, as they cannot survive in self-determining places.

Avoiding deprivation in future generations

Key interventions include:

 Fostering responsible decisions on parenting and family structures

Large families were associated historically with high infant mortality, old age insecurity, patriarchal control, religious and traditional strictures and poor education.

Family size has declined as a result of better education, lower child mortality rates, enhanced women’s rights, and changing cultural and religious beliefs.

We now have universal sex education and access to birth control.  High quality health care, housing and nutrition have dramatically reduced infant mortality.  Superannuation, ACC and other safety nets reduce adult dependence on children’s support.

Fewer children mean more can be invested in their education and capability development, removing deprivation risk.  Having children is a choice.  Having a large family reflects recurring choice, with the consequences becoming increasingly obvious.  It is a fundamental obligation for parents to have only those children they can nurture to their full potential.

High fertility in low income families now largely reflects poor decision-making capabilities, and vertical transmission of behaviours through deprived families, not rational choices and responses to horizontal learning from wider sources (see Zakharenko, 2016).

Some people are incapable of good parenting, yet they still have children without being held accountable for the resulting deprivation.  Where past behaviour predicts likely future bad outcomes then there is no longer a moral right to have children.  Some potentially capable parents fail because of weak obligations on them to treat parenting as their most fundamental human responsibility.  Their behaviour can change in response to high societal obligations, and to conditionality in government services and resource transfers.

Society must encourage the right parental understanding and decision making on fertility and parental obligations.  These go beyond legal obligations.  They mean active, concerted parenting, not just meeting basic needs and then leaving children to their own devices.

Currently, disengaged parenting and child neglect are “sins of omission”, while child abuse is a “sin of commission”.  Child neglect through passive and disengaged parenting should be progressively reframed as a sin of commission.  We will know we have succeeded when we no longer see children and young people hanging around unaccompanied, lacking parental guidance or other mentorship.

Society can augment parental capabilities and enrich children’s lives through expanding green and public space and cultural services.  These influence positively the environment in which children develop.  Their non-rivalry and openness to all encourages wide public support for their provision.

Family structure is a key determinant in child well-being.  Many children are born without a formal family structure being in place.  Mitchell (2016) noted that the proportion of children born to married couples fell from 95% to 53% between 1961 and 2015.  Between 1968 and 2015 the proportion of Maori children born to married parents fell from 72% to 21%.  Around 51% of children in poverty live in single parent households.

Fundamental in psychology is the importance of symbolic and substantive commitment devices that force parties to think about their obligations and which pose a psychic cost to reneging on them.  Moral commitment is needed to engaged parenting and to family structures that support good childhoods.

A marriage is a commitment with legal standing, symbolic power and moral heft.  Marriage breakups, single parent and blended households may not be damaging to children when parents are educated, responsible, and in good financial shape.  They can lead to child deprivation when parents have weaker capabilities.  While many marriages will fail, commitment to a socially and legally mandated family structure will reduce child deprivation.

Reductions in corporate and special interest group welfare

Rent-seeking behaviours, special interest groups and the regulatory barriers that entrench them create private but not social value.

Business and capital owner welfare must be challenged.  Wilkinson & Jeram (2016) cite the one billion dollar bail-out of South Canterbury Finance.  Rose (2014) also sought to quantify corporate welfare.  Some income support can subsidise employers and keep downwards pressure on wages.  There is significant non-compliance with minimum employment conditions in some sectors.

New Zealand is rightly an open society with a permissive immigration system that welcomes diversity.  However a factor in low skill migration is business owners wanting cheap labour, and home owners and landlords wanting housing price inflation and higher rents.  Immigration could focus on the highly skilled and innovative, and for humanitarian reasons on refugees whose motivation to do better compensates for any language or skill deficits.

Rising house prices and rental costs have exacerbated effort-independent child deprivation.  Removing barriers to new housing developments would make a huge dent in child deprivation.  Funding for accommodation supplements should be used to expand housing supply, not to subsidise landlords and indirectly inflate property prices.

These issues require changed policy settings that avoid corporate and capital owner welfare, and improve resource allocation.

Shifting from social welfare transfers to capability development

Social welfare transfers that maintain consumption rather than expand capabilities effectively keep people in poverty.

Addressing cultural (as opposed to situational) deprivation with income transfers erodes personal responsibility and makes people passive.  Dependency-based welfare can make life devoid of meaning, leading to higher morbidity, suicide rates and other social ills than in less developed countries.

Subsidies for consumption without reciprocal obligations guarantee child deprivation.  They should be replaced progressively by an education, capability development and asset creation approach to children’s development.  The aim is to avoid deprived childhoods turning into deprived adulthoods.

The best way to reduce child deprivation is to lift economy-wide productivity.  Investing in children must be a part of economic growth strategy.  It needs to benefit the wider society as well as individual children.  In the same way, compulsory savings can help to both lift individual net worth and create investment capital to drive economy-wide growth.

Children could have vested in them at birth an account to be used only for their capability development.  Eligible expenditures might include early child through to tertiary education costs, health expenditures, home ownership, investment assets, and net worth enhancement.

Child poverty discourse largely excludes net worth, though recent work (Chapple et al, 2015) is starting to address this.  Net worth creates financial leverage and supports self-determining mind-sets.  Holding assets is associated with better socio-economic outcomes (Brynner & Paxton, 2001) and with children’s educational attainment (Zhan & Sherraden, 2003).

Child capability development accounts could serve wider purposes such as macroeconomic stability, smoothing out lifecycle incomes, and fostering retirement saving.  These accounts could be universal, with government and other contributions being weighted to the poor.

Capability development accounts would expand human and investment capital.  By lifting future earnings capacity and net worth they would be a form of pre-distribution rather than re-distribution.  They could therefore be core to a strategy to reduce inequality.

A capability development strategy can attract multi-partisan support, since education and capital asset formation contribute to higher productivity and therefore wider societal benefits.  Crucially, it means investment in children’s capabilities, not subsidies for parental consumption.

We will see optimum investment in deprived children when it is seen to benefit all, and when it reinforces the right parental behaviours.  Failing these, child deprivation will persist, get worse, and degrade opportunity and our fair society narrative even further.

 Bibliography and references

Arnold, D; Doctoroff, G. 2003: The early education of socioeconomically disadvantaged children.  Annual Review of Psychology 54: 517-45.

Banerjee, A. Mullainathan, S: Limited Attention and Income Distribution.  AEA Session “Psychology and Development: Theory and Experimental Evidence”.

Baumeister, R. et al 2005: Social exclusion impairs self-regulation.  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Vol 88 (4) 589-604.

Baumeister, R.; Bratslavsky, M.; Muraven, M. Tice, D. 1998: Ego depletion: Is the active self a limited resource? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (5): 1252-65.

Bertrand, M.; Mullainathan, S.; Shafir, E. 2004: A Behavioral Economics View of Poverty. American Economic Review 94 (2): 419-23.

Black, S.; Devereux, P. 2011: Recent developments in intergenerational mobility.  In D. Card and O. Ashenfelter (eds.)  Handbook of Labor Economics., Vol 4, Part B, Chapter 16, pp. 1487-1541.  Amsterdam and New York: Elsevier.

Black, S.; Devereux, P.; Salvanes, K. 2003: Why the apple doesn’t fall far: understanding intergenerational transmission of human capital.  NBER Working Paper 10066.

Blair, C.; Diamond, A. 2008: Biological processes in prevention and intervention: the promotion of self-regulation as a means of preventing school failure.  Development and Psychopathology 20, 899-911.

Boston, J.; Chapple, S. 2015: The Child Poverty Debate: Myths, misconceptions and misunderstandings.  Wellington, Bridget Williams Books.

Boston, J.; Chapple, S. 2014: Child Poverty in New Zealand.  Wellington, Bridget Williams Books.

Boston, J. 2013: Improving educational performance: Why tackling child poverty must be part of the solution.  Institute for Governance and Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.

Bynner, J. Paxton, W. 2001: The Asset Effect.  London, Institute for Public Policy Research.

Capron, C.; Duyme, M. 1989: Assessment of effects of socio-economic status on IQ in a full cross-fostering study.  Nature, 340, 552-554.

Caspi, A., Wright, B.R., Moffitt, T.E., Silva, P.A. 1998: Early failure in the labor market: Childhood and adolescent predictors of unemployment in the transition to adulthood. American Sociological Review, 1998, 63(63), 424-451.

Chapple, S.; Hogan, S.; Milne, B.; Poulton, R.; Ramrakha, S. 2015: Wealth inequality among New Zealand’s Generation X.  Policy Quarterly, Vol. 11, Issue 1. pp 73-78.

Clarke, J., Kim, B., Poulton, R., Milne, B.J. 2006: The role of low expectations in health and education investment and hazardous consumption. Canadian Journal of Economics, 2006, 39(39), 1151-1172.

Cunha, F.; Heckman, J. 2009: The economics and psychology of inequality and human development. Journal of the European Economic Association. 7 (2-3): 320-364.

Cunha, F.; Heckman, J. 2008: Formulating, identifying and estimating the technology of cognitive and non-cognitive skill formation.  J. Human Res. 43 (4) , 738-782.

Currie, J.; Moretti, E. 2003:  Mothers’ education and the intergenerational transmission of human capital: Evidence from college openings.  Quarterly Journal of Economics (2003) 118 (4): 1495-1532.

Cutler, D. et al 2008: Socio-economic status and health: Dimensions and mechanisms.  NBER working Paper 14333.

Dale, M. C.; O’Brien, M.; St John, S. (eds) 2014: Our children, our choice: priorities for policy.  Auckland, Child Poverty Action Group.

Deci, E. Ryan, R. 1985: Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior.  New York, Penguin.

Doyle, O.; Harmon, C.; Heckman, J.; Tremblay, R. 2009: Investing in early human development: Timing and economic efficiency.  Economics and Human Biology 7: 1-6.

Duckworth, A. et.al. 2005: Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents.  Psychological Science Vol. 16 Issue 12, pp. 939-944.

Farah, M. et al 2006: Childhood poverty: specific associations with neurocognitive development.  Brain Research 1110:166-174.

Fergusson, D. et al 2008: The transmission of social inequality: Examination of the linkages between family socio-economic status in childhood and educational achievement in young adulthood.  Research in Social Stratification Mobility.  Vol 26, Issue 3: 277-295.

Fernald, A.; Marchman, V.A.; Weisler, A. 2013: SES differences in language processing skill and vocabulary are evident at 18 months.  Developmental Science 16 (2): 234-248.

Friedman, B. 2006: The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.  Society January/February pp: 15-22.

Fuller, R.W. 2006: All rise.  Somebodies, nobodies and the politics of dignity.  San Francisco, Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Gintler, D. Pollak, R 2004: Family structure and childrens’ educational outcomes: Blended families, stylised facts and descriptive regressions.  Demography 41 (4). 671- 696.

Gluckman, P. 2009: Growing old before you are born. Dialogue, Newsletter of the Liggins Institute.

Gluckman, P.; Hanson, M. 2006: Mismatch.  Oxford University Press.

Grimes, A.; Hyland, S. 2015a: The material wellbeing of New Zealand households. Motu Note #21.  Wellington, Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.

Grimes, A.; Hyland, S. 2015b: A New Cross-Country Measure of Material Wellbeing and Inequality: Methodology, Construction and Results.  Motu Working Paper 15-09.  Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.

Gunnar, M.; Quevedo, K. 2007: The neurobiology of stress and development.  In S Fiske (Ed.) Annual Review of Psychology, 58: 145-174.

Hancox, R. J., Milne, B.J., Poulton, R. 2005: Association of television viewing during childhood with poor educational achievement. Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, 2005, 159(159), 614-618.

Heckman, J.; Kautz, T. 2012: Hard evidence on soft skills. Lab. Econ. 19:4, pp. 451-464.

Heckman, J.; Mosso, S. 2014:  The economics of human development and social mobility.  Working Paper 19925, NBER.

Hirsch, E. 2013.  A Wealth of Words.  City Journal Winter 2013.

Kahneman, D. 2011: Thinking fast and slow.  New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Kahneman, D.; Knetsch, J.; Thaler, R.  1991: The endowment effect, loss aversion, and status quo bias.  Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol 5, No 1, Winter 1991: pp. 193-206.

Kahneman D, Tversky, A (ed) 2000: Choices, values and frames.  Cambridge University Press, Russell Sage Foundation.

Knudsen, E. Heckman, J.; Cameron, J.; Shonkoff, J. 2006: Economic, neurological, and behavioural perspectives on building America’s future workforce.  PNAS July  2006:  10155-10162.

La Cava, Gianni 2016: Housing prices, mortgage interest rates and the rising share of capital income in the United States.  Reserve Bank of Australia Research Discussion Paper – RDP 2016-04.


Lazonick, W. 2014: Profits without prosperity.  Harvard Business Review. September 2014 Issue.

Lareau, A 2011: Unequal childhoods: Class, Race and Family Life.  (2nd ed). University of California Press.

Lareau, A., Cox, A. Social class and the transition to adulthood: Differences in parents’ interactions with institutions.  pp 134-164 In M. J. Carlson and P. England (eds): Social class and changing families in an unequal America.  .  Stanford University Press.

Marmot, M. 2004: The status syndrome.  How social status affects our health and longevity.  New York, Times Books.

McAuley, I. 2008: You can see a lot by just looking.  Centre for Policy Development.  Occasional Paper – Number 5.

Melchior, M.; Moffitt, T. E. , Milne, B.J., Poulton, R., Caspi, A. 2007: Why do children from socioeconomically disadvantaged families suffer from poor health when they reach adulthood? A lifecourse study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 2007, 166: 966-974.

Ministerial Committee on Poverty 2016: Government actions to reduce poverty in New Zealand: Report to Ministerial Committee on Poverty March 2016.

Mitchell, L. 2016: Child poverty and family structure: What is the evidence telling us? Family First.

Moffitt, T.E., Arseneault, L. , Belsky, D.W., Dickson, N., Hancox, R. J. , Harrington, H. L., Houts, R., Poulton, R. , Roberts, B.W., Ross, S., Sears, M.R., Thomson, W. M. Caspi, A. 2011: A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA), 2011, 108: 2693-2698.

Muennig, P. et al 2016: Cost effectiveness of the earned income tax credit as a health policy investment. American Journal of Preventive Medicine. pp 1-8.

Mullainathan, S.; Shafir, E. 2013: Scarcity: Why having too little means so much.  New York, Times Books.

New Zealand Government 2016: Government actions to reduce poverty in New Zealand: Report to Ministerial Committee on Poverty.

Noble, K.; McCandliss, B.; Farah, M.  2007: Socioeconomic gradients predict individual differences in neurocognitive abilities.  Developmental Science 10: 4, pp 464-480.

Offer, Avner 2006: The challenge of affluence.  Self-control and well-being in the United States and Britain since 1950.  Oxford University Press.

Office of the Children’s Commissioner 2014: Choose kids: Why investing in children benefits all New Zealanders. Wellington, Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

Office of the Children’s Commissioner 2012: Expert Advisory Group on Solutions to Child Poverty. Solutions to Child Poverty in New Zealand: Evidence for Action.

Office of the Prime Minister’s Science Advisory Committee (OPMSAC) 2011: Improving the transition.  Reducing social and psychological morbidity during adolescence.

Perry, B. 2016: The Material Wellbeing of NZ Households: Overview and Key Findings from the 2016 Household Incomes Report and the Companion Report Using Non-Income Measures.  Wellington, Ministry of Social Development.

Petersen, M.; Sznycer, D.; Cosmides, L.; Tooby, J. 2012: Who deserves help?  Evolutionary Psychology, Social Emotions, and Public Opinion about Welfare.  Political Psychology Vol 33, No. 3: 1467-9221.

Piketty, T. 2014: Capital in the Twenty First Century. Cambridge, MA, Belknap Press.

Price, M.; Cosmides, L.; Tooby, J. 2002: Punitive sentiment as an anti-free rider psychological device.  Evolution and Human Behavior 23.  203-231.


Rose, J. 2014: The cost of corporate welfare since 2008.  Taxpayers’ Union.

Rossin-Slater, M.; Wust, M. 2016: What is the added value of pre-school?  Long-term impacts and interactions with a health intervention.  NBER Working Paper No. 22700.

Ryan, R.; Deci, E. 2000: Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development and well-being.  American Psychologist.  Vol 55, No 1, 68-78.

Smiley, P.; Dweck, C. 1994: Individual differences in achievement goals among young children.  Child Development 65: 1723-43.

Stain, M (ed) 2016: The US labor market.  Questions and challenges for public policy.  American Enterprise Institute.

Sunstein, C.; Thaler, R. 2008: Nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness.  New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Sunstein C & Thaler R 2003: Libertarian Paternalism is Not an Oxymoron.  University of Chicago.  John M Olin Law & Economics Working Paper No 185.

Tooby, J.; Cosmides, L. 2008: The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables.  In: Lewis, M.et al (Eds)  Handbook of Emotions, 3rd Ed. pp 114-137.

Wilkinson, B.; Jeram, J. 2016: The Inequality Paradox: Why inequality matters even though it has barely changed.  Wellington, The New Zealand Initiative.

Wilkinson, R. Pickett, K. 2009: Spirit Level.  Why more equal societies almost always do better.  London, Allen Lane.

Wills, R. 2016: Are we there yet? Five years on the road to addressing child poverty.  Wellington, Office of the Children’s Commissioner.

Yeager, D.; Walton, G. 2011: Social-psychological interventions in education: they’re not magic.  Review of Educational Research Vol 81, No 2: 267-301.

Zakharenko, R. 2016: Nothing else matters: Evolution of preference for social prestige.  Mathematical Social Sciences 2016 No. 80, 58-64.


Zhan, M.; Sherraden, M. 1996: Effects of assets on attitudes and behaviors: Advance test of a social policy proposal.  Social Work Research 20 (1), 3-11.



Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Maori, identity and socio-economic development

Maori, identity and socio-economic development

By Peter Winsley, July 2016


Maori[i] always wanted to do better economically.  Their ancestors migrated to Aoteoroa for a better life.  Their culture rapidly adapted to new technological and institutional opportunities and circumstances.  From earliest European contact Maori sought trade, technology and new institutions to deliver higher incomes, net worth and economic self-determination at the individual and whanau level.

Maori have failed to reach their full potential, partly due to their initial technological and institutional starting point, and the Crown’s failure, largely in the nineteenth century, to fully implement the Waitangi Treaty.  More recently, Maori suffered from labour market change, from policy settings that created passivity and short-termism, from negative stereotypical attitudes, and from flawed narratives and mind-sets relating to education, incomes and net worth.

For Maori to achieve their full socio-economic potential we need to drive off core time-honoured culture and kaupapa which have historically been instrumental in Maori survival.  We need to reject out-dated and self-defeating cultural behaviours, mind-sets and narratives, and foster those relevant to the modern world.  Policy and institutional settings need to support capability-based approaches to socio-economic development at the individual and whanau level.

Maori have made extraordinary socio-economic gains from early European encounters till now.  However these gains have been in absolute terms, and the relative gaps between Maori and other New Zealanders have not been closed.

Because people compare their status with others, rank status inequality has negative health[ii] and other effects, even within communities with high absolute prosperity.  Inequality and people falling short of their potential also erodes social cohesion and reduces net economic welfare.

It is in New Zealand’s wider interests to ensure Maori achieve their full potential and at as high a socio-economic level as their compatriots.

Why are Maori still disadvantaged?

The starting point for Maori was their socio-economic capabilities and institutions in pre-European times, and the culture and mind-sets that grew up around them.

Human societies evolved largely from hunter-gatherer origins through kinship-based tribalism, shaped by limited resources, technologies, and the property rights and institutions governing them.  Ideas, domesticated animals and plants and technologies moved through trade and exchange.  This was especially between east and west along the Eurasian continent, and through other trade routes[iii].  More isolated parts of the world such as the Antipodes had less access to the resources and ideas underlying higher technological levels.

Romantic images of pre-European Maori life would be ridiculed by those that had to live it.  In pre-European times Maori life was hard and short.  Maori infant mortality was around one third to one fifth, and life expectancy from childhood was around thirty.  Many died from degenerative or malnutrition-related illnesses, and from violence.

Through accidents of geography and history Maori had a stone age, oral culture lacking metallurgy, pottery, and the key domesticated crop and animal species available in more technologically-privileged societies.  Bracken fern-root, which is essentially unpalatable became a staple food for survival.  One can only marvel at Maori ingenuity in surviving with so few plant and animal resources and at low technological levels.  Maori endured, and created oral culture and artefacts that testified to their resilience, sustained them culturally, and passed on heritage to the modern world.

Maori development in the nineteenth century was impeded by the Crown failing to implement the Waitangi Treaty in a fair and timely way.  The Treaty is New Zealand’s founding document as a British colony[iv].  It has been a connecting thread within a wider Maori narrative.  This focused on economic self-determination (tino rangitiratanga) at the individual, whanau and collective level.  This involved defending property rights, while also acquiring European technology and institutions.  This concern for economic outcomes was common to all major nineteenth century Maori spiritual, cultural and political leaders.

The Treaty constitutes a Preamble and three Articles.  The Preamble expresses a need for strong government[v] and rule of law, acknowledges immigration and contemplates more.

Article One transfers sovereignty or kawanatanga[vi] (governance) to the British Crown.  Crown sovereignty is exhaustive and indivisible.

Article Two protects Maori property rights at the individual as well as collective level, effectively extending Magna Carta and English common law rights to Maori.  It limits chiefly power by referring to individuals and families, not just chiefs[vii].

Article Three extends to Maori the citizenship rights and obligations of Crown subjects.  It establishes a non-discrimination principle that implies Maori will not be subject to laws that do not apply to non-Maori, and the inverse.  This principle was often not honoured by the Crown.

The Treaty of Waitangi created an equal partnership between Maori and other New Zealanders, not an equal partnership between Maori and the Crown.  All New Zealanders were made subjects of the Crown, with equal rights and privileges.  The Treaty is therefore an open rather than a closed institution, and colour-blind in its universality.

Nineteenth century Treaty breaches largely involved the Crown not being strong enough in preventing conflict between different Maori groups[viii] and Maori not being treated the same as other British subjects.  The Crown also failed to fully enforce Article Two Magna Carta and common law rights, and it engaged in or facilitated unfair or fraudulent land confiscations and sales.

Early conflict between Maori and Pakeha reflected largely cultural and institutional differences and misunderstanding.  Racism damaged Maori from earliest times.  However, it was diluted by high inter-marriage rates, Enlightenment philosophy, education, open Christian institutions, and the gradual emergence of a shared national identity.

Nevertheless, generations of Maori had to put up with subtle or direct insults, stereotypical attitudes, neglect or suppression of culture and language, and patronising and sometimes blatantly racist attitudes.  This does not however explain enduring socio-economic under-performance.  Asian and other minorities have been subject to worse racism than Maori and yet often do better than both Maori and Pakeha.  This suggests a critical role for cultural and family mind-sets as they relate to education and to individual and family advancement.

Maori were affected negatively by some technological and labour market changes.  In the boom times from the end of World War Two to the late 1960s regulation and labour market dynamics compressed wage and salary differentials.  This was egalitarian, however it weakened incentives for higher education[ix] and reduced New Zealand’s microeconomic flexibility and therefore its productivity.

High Maori birth cohorts from the 1950s and 60s[x] meant young people entered the labour market in the 1970s and 80s as conditions were becoming unfavourable to blue collar workers in fields such as manufacturing, meat processing and transportation.  The labour market began to favour the services sector and more highly educated workers.  This made it difficult for young Maori to secure well-paid jobs, start families, and to become home owners.

The lack of male breadwinners who earned enough to support a family led to solo mothers leading households.  Social welfare created passive welfare dependency and made it financially more attractive for poorly educated females to have children supported by the state than to enter the workforce.

Maori socio-economic disadvantage reflected largely problems of social class rather than race or ethnicity.  Research[xi] suggests the mind has modules that recognise cues of possible coalitional relationships, however there are no innate mental modules for race as a discrete coalitional marker.  Race is highly visible but substantively minimal in determining meaningful differences[xii] between people or groups.  Likewise, human psychological universals overwhelm cultural differences.

However, group identity is shaped by how others react to what is visible (even if it is superficial), and how this influences self-identity.  The high salience of Maori identity and the lower salience of class disadvantage led to some diagnosing of race and ethnicity, or the stereotypical attitudes that it triggered, as being causative of poverty.  Some saw cultural revival[xiii] as a solution, some as an entrepreneurial opportunity.

From the 1980s much effort was put into cultural solutions to socio-economic problems.  This involved Maori-centred educational initiatives, devolution of services to Maori providers, Te Reo[xiv] and advocacy of biculturalism.  Such initiatives created new businesses and public service careers based on cultural service, boosted Maori pride[xv], made New Zealand more responsive to Maori, and fostered Maori institutions with deep community linkages.

However, these initiatives sat uneasily with an increasingly multi-cultural and internationalised New Zealand, and diverted resources away from employment, higher education and net worth objectives and the mind-sets needed to fulfil them.

What should we do from now on?

New Zealand has much of the conditions in place for Maori and other New Zealanders to reach their full socio-economic potential.  These include strong and inclusive government and rule of law, and a market and trade betterment-based economy.  New Zealand has effective property rights, civil and political rights, macroeconomic stability and microeconomic flexibility.  It has well-developed civil society.

Given the above, we need to:

Recognise that core Maori culture supports high socio-economic outcomes

Modern cultural-related initiatives have had mixed effects on Maori and may have kept alive tikanga and mindsets that are irrelevant[xvi] and in some cases harmful[xvii].   However, core aspects of time-honoured Maori cultural identity are consistent with the highest socio-economic outcomes and need to be affirmed.  These include:

A willingness to move to where the opportunities are

People’s destinies are shaped, though not always determined by accidents of birth. Maori ancestral migrations came through Asia and the Pacific to New Zealand, probably to escape over-population, resource scarcity and conflict.  This migration is at the heart of Maori history and identity.  Maori moved throughout New Zealand, and later on rapidly seized opportunities arising from modern technology, institutions and urbanisation.

This culture of moving to where the opportunities are predates and will outlive narrow place-based indigenous[xviii] identity, turangawaewae, mana whenua and tangata whenua concepts.  Post World War Two urbanisation dramatically improved Maori well-being through better education, housing, employment and healthcare.  In parallel there were high rates of inter-marriage.  Inter-marriage transferred new ideas, mind-sets and human capital to Maori through horizontal transmission of knowledge, and this led to dramatically improved education and economic outcomes.

Rising education and socio-economic levels came at some cost to Maori cultural identity and language.  Socio-economic advances from the 1920s on to the 1980s were strongly correlated with the decline of the Maori language and traditional culture.

People need to move to where the opportunities are rather than be confined to arbitrary place-based identities.  However, strong kinship ties can weaken social and geographic mobility.  Many Maori still live in rural and provincial areas that lack rich labour markets and higher educational institutions.  They lack visible role models who can demonstrate what is possible in life.

Narrow, place-based interventions often fail and it is better to facilitate people moving to where the educational and career opportunities are[xix].  This is mandated by Maori history, practice and narrative, and is not in conflict with it.

Cultural adaptiveness

Culture is a product of available resources, knowledge, property rights, and stages of social organisation.  It evolves to achieve practical purposes, such as resource allocation, sustainability, food safety, conflict resolution, and to maintain social harmony.  As circumstances change, culture needs to adapt.

Customs often emerge in response to observed past behaviours that are stable over time.  In tribal societies technological change is slow or non-existent, and customary practice and dependence on elders’ views is critical.  Elders may be repositories of traditional knowledge.  Deference to their memories of past food-gathering or ecological events is valuable in stable technological environments.  In a rapidly changing environment it can become maladaptive.

In pre-European times, high effort-independent variance and lack of banking and other institutions meant Maori struggled to accumulate savings.  This encouraged a culture of living for today and sharing of surpluses to create future return for remembered favours[xx].  Koha is a form of saving in that it psychologically stores claims for future reciprocity.  Kin-based sharing and reciprocal altruism leads to short-term consumption[xxi] rather than individualised and whanau-level education and investment in the future.

However, Maori adapted their culture and customs flexibly in response to the impacts of European engagement.  Maori used rahui and tapu to protect resources and restrict trade.  Cultural behaviours were therefore valued for their practical functionality, and adapted as circumstances changed.  Maori culture is therefore dynamic and adaptive not static.  It must be allowed to evolve as circumstances change.

Hunger for learning, trade, new ideas, technology and institutions

Learning and the institutions that support it can be conceived simplistically as open and horizontal, or as closed and vertical in nature.  Open institutions learn from others and are open to all.  A closed institution has exclusive membership based on discrete characteristics such as race, ethnicity or gender.

Horizontal learning is open to new ideas, pluralistic, contested, and from internationalised and non-kin sources.  Vertical learning is more closed within cultural or kin-based groups and may be narrowly transmitted through families.[xxii]

For socio-economic advancement, institutions should be open and ideas horizontal and international.  This also means intellectual and cultural heritage will be validated, passed on and enlivened, and that which is invalidated will be forgotten.

At the time of the first European encounters, Maori were behind European technological and institutional levels, which had origins in Middle Eastern, Greek, Roman and Asian knowledge communicated through trade routes across cultures and through time periods.

However Maori were thirsty for knowledge and technology and were fast learners.  Early European observers such as Marsden spoke highly of Maori intellect.  Thousands of Maori were literate as early as the 1850s, at a time when many Pakeha were illiterate.  European engagement meant that horizontal learning from international outsiders and strangers supplanted much traditional learning passed down vertically through kin.

Maori engaged with Christianity because of its openness[xxiii] to them and its association with missionary school education.  They actively competed to attract missionary stations to access European knowledge, literacy and technology.  Churches and schools became tapu and were protected even during conflicts.

Maori rapidly picked up market opportunities created by European technologies and trade contacts.  Rawiri Taiwhanga, of Nga Puhi was believed to be New Zealand’s first dairy farmer in the 1830s.  Maori adopted new ship-building techniques.  In 1848 Tamati Waka Nene ordered flour-milling machinery from Sydney – leading edge technology for the time.  Competing missionaries plying the Wanganui river were played off against each other with promises of “souls for flourmills”.

A core driver of learning was inter-marriage.  Inter-marriage created a richer set of ideas, opportunities and social mores from which Maori and part-Maori could choose[xxiv].  Learning from other cultures was the key kaupapa of top Maori leaders from early engagement.

Over time, Maori had to adapt their cultural belief systems to the European world, and decide what to retain and discard.  The Young Maori Party was established by ex-students of Te Aute college from around 1902, evolving from the Te Aute Students’ Association established in 1897.  It was made up of elite Maori who had European-style education to New Zealand’s highest standards of the time.  It included Apirana Ngata, James Carroll, Maui Pomare, Paraire Tomoana and Te Rangi Hiroa (Peter Buck).

The Young Maori Party promoted Maori health, education and advancement.  This they saw coming mainly from western-style education and practices.  Party members supported Maori Parliamentarians such as James Carroll (Timi Kara) and Wi Pere in pushing through the Tohunga Suppression Act 1907.  However Ngata, Tomoana and others also emphasised cultural revival and Maori pride, while getting the best out of the wider world.

Strong concern with property rights

Maori always had a strong concern with private as well as collective property rights.  In pre-European times Maori property was individual (personal tools and effects), communal (a capital-intensive meeting house or large canoe) or tribal (tribal boundaries).   Property was inherited, with ohaki being a public statement of someone about to die, disposing of property.  There were associations between the ownership of things and who provided the labour input into them.

In 1847, George Grey wrote of Maori that there were no people in the world “more sensitive upon the subject of money matters, or the disposal of their property”.  Tellingly, most Treaty of Waitangi claims have been property rights disputes.

In common with other tribal societies, Maori land ownership was communal in nature.  Communal property rights develop for land where there is low value of output per unit, highly variable resources, low returns from intensive investment, and large economies of scale in use and in infrastructure.  These conditions often coincide with low technological levels, lack of accumulation and specialisation, and with tribal social organisation.

Communal rights can be economically efficient where there are resources that are difficult to individualise because of their diffuse spatial distribution, mobility, seasonality or sustainability constraints.  However, economically effective property rights require clarity of title, excludability, tradability, ability to be represented in an abstract form, and integration into a transaction cost efficient information system.

This typically means that individualised private property rights are more economically productive than communal ones.  Some Maori communal assets are now dead assets partly because they are weakly titled and so cannot be leveraged.

However, Maori historical focus on avoiding communal land alienation partly reflected the instinct that inalienable land can convey net worth, not just income, that it survives individual transience and is associated with intergenerational group identity.  Nevertheless, for Maori to fulfil their potential in today’s economic environment their property rights focus must be on individual and whanau-level net worth rather than communal property.

What is also critical for Maori is that net worth[xxv] should be transferred vertically to individuals and families and to future generations[xxvi].


In pre-European times rangitira (at the hapu and whanau level) and ariki (at the iwi level) had responsibility for governance, keeping the peace, protecting hapu or iwi property and resources, and providing social welfare functions.  Excessive accumulation was punished by muru, or pillage – a form of forced redistribution.  Chiefly power was contingent on their meeting their obligations.  Maori culture did not mandate chiefs capturing hapu or iwi assets for their own use.

Maori society was therefore deeply equalitarian, and Maori were (and still are) highly sensitive to even slight differences in rank status between individuals[xxvii].  Pakeha settlers were escaping from Britain’s class system and had a strong egalitarian ethos.  These forces have helped shape New Zealand’s deep egalitarian culture.

Egalitarianism implies minimising socio-economic differences between groups and individuals, consistent with rewards for effort that create good incentives.  It assumes that relative as well as absolute incomes and net worth matter.

Policy neutrality between Maori and other New Zealanders, or assuming that we are all just “one New Zealanders” will not close the socio-economic gaps.  Analysis of inequality in developed countries shows that when the return on capital exceeds the rate of economic growth, inequality rises[xxviii].  The low net worth of Maori individuals and households is therefore a severe disadvantage that could well be compounded in a time of declining housing affordability.

Maori relative disadvantage has been associated with, and can often be subsumed within wider sociological factors.  However, even when other variables are accounted for, Maori identity is an independent variable associated with negative outcomes such as high crime and incarceration rates.  Therefore, broad-based policies addressing socio-economic disadvantage affecting all ethnic groups will not close the gaps between Maori and their compatriots.

Closing the socio-economic gaps between Maori and others will require disproportionately large investments in capability development for Maori.  This investment would not be for Treaty of Waitangi or cultural reasons but for New Zealand’s socio-economic development and for the self-interest of New Zealanders as a whole. Given the relative youth of the Maori population, investment in education will lead to correspondingly higher returns[xxix] over the lifecycle, while enhancing egalitarianism.

Multi-generational collective identity

People seek to connect to cultural narratives involving a past, shared values, behaviours and mind-sets.  These collectively allow individuals to transcend their ephemeral existence and see themselves as part of something wider and more enduring than themselves[xxx].  Multi-generational narratives also pass on valuable heritage to future generations, for example taonga such as artworks, music and literature.

Collective narratives can be positive or negative.  They can be as toxic as Nazism or ISIS, or as rich in universal humanism and intellectual achievement as those of ancient Greece or of modern European and American Judaism.  Lack of positive cultural narratives creates vacuums that can be filled by inertia, by drugs that suppress consciousness, or by negative, identity-based in-groups hostile to out-groups.

Moreover, positive narratives can foster what people want to live for, as well as how they make a living.  Maori have a sense of belonging to something wider than the individual.  This includes recognition of inter-generational property, cultural heritage,  whakapapa, war history, patriotism, faith in the Waitangi Treaty, cultural and linguistic revival and connections with the natural environment.

Intergenerational communitarian identity can be consistent with high individualised achievement.  Minority groups such as some Jewish, Sikh, Lebanese, Chinese and Gujaratis communities have harmonised distinctive cultural identity with high intellectual, economic and business achievement valued and rewarded in open and internationalised rather than in-group environments.

Maori are increasingly achieving across more intellectual and international business fields, and weaving these new strands of achievement into their multi-generational collective narrative.

Foster a whakapapa of the mind

Without written language, oral history prevailed in traditional Maori society.  Whakapapa reflected kinship relationships and also provided a memorisation structure to transmit environmental, property rights and other knowledge.

However, there are conceptual problems with defining any group of people in bloodline whakapapa terms.  Everyone has two parents, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on into deep evolutionary history.  This means every individual has over a billion ancestors, with some being ancestors several times over.  This leads to rapid dilution over the generations in the importance of any one ancestor to an individual’s genetic inheritance and identity.

Furthermore, Maori culture was never rigidly bloodline-based.  It sometimes supported meritocracy unrelated to bloodline[xxxi], reflecting at least some recognition of achieved rather than ascribed status.  In Maori culture, incapable ariki “would be set aside in practical affairs, and only called upon to perform certain religious rites”[xxxii].

In the same way that consanguinity can lead to health problems in isolated populations, inward-looking kin-based cultures can cut themselves off from new learning from others.  Kinship-based tribal identities are closed.  In their most inward-looking manifestations parents and extended family pass on narrow mind-sets to their children, rather than casting a wide intellectual net and learning internationally, from other cultures, and from universal human intellectual and cultural heritage.

The most powerful and efficient means of transmitting knowledge and culture is through the horizontal interchange of ideas and learning.  This requires connections to people who know something you don’t.  The more people you interact with and the more pluralism, ideas and perspectives, the better the outcomes[xxxiii].

Maori identity has been progressively reframed by inter-marriage and higher educational levels, and redefined for legal and statistical purposes.  Now any amount of Maori blood entitles people to “feel Maori.”  In every generation, inter-marriage enriches whakapapa links to a more open society and humanistic world.  Almost all New Zealand-born people will have some Maori blood within a few generations, as well as links to other cultures and to open society more generally.

Maori are now embracing a more internationalised rather than parochial whakapapa of the mind.  This is driven by information technology, movement of people and inter-marriage.  Maori socio-economic development now requires that a whakapapa of the mind must prevail over a bloodline whakapapa.

Foster multiple identities and matching identity to the right content

People have multiple identities[xxxiv] and different identities will prevail in different contexts.  The right identity has to be matched to the right context (a surgeon who is also a rugby player, juggler, lay preacher and jazz musician must only be a surgeon in the operating theatre).  The mix of identities an individual embodies will shape their ability to see themselves in others.  President Obama governed for all Americans, not one ethnic group.  However, his black American identity gave him affinity with minority groups, while still acting for all.

Everyone is at the centre of a unique web of valuations that does not exactly duplicate anyone else’s.  For this reason, Maori or any other specific identity can be seen as just one of many identities that overlap with others’ multiple identities.

Maori identity may be of different significance to Maori of similar bloodline ancestry, depending on relative economic and psychological incentives.  It may appear of different salience and relevance, depending on varying professional, sporting, recreational, avocational, family, religious, political and other contexts.

Understanding which of one’s multiple identities is most critical in a particular context leads to positive socio-economic and wider life outcomes[xxxv].  Some advocate a Maori-centred and closed view of identity leading to a “Maori achieving as Maori”[xxxvi] kaupapa[xxxvii].  This can build pride and be a partial defence against stereotypical threat and cultural stigmatisation.  It is consistent with multiple identities if Maori identity is matched to the right and relevant context.  However, if any one dominant group identity overrides the ability to match the right identity to the right context it can lead to bad outcomes[xxxviii].

Promote cultural narratives that support top socio-economic outcomes

Cultural identity and narrative can foster mind-sets and behaviours consistent with positive socio-economic outcomes.  Positive identity is typically not narrowly ethnic or race-based and can involve any group identity that gives people values and life directions, consistent with better socio-economic outcomes.

Some research[xxxix] suggests that, compared to non-Maori, Maori are more likely to have beliefs inconsistent with economic prosperity.  These include belief that a better life is due more to luck than hard work, that Government is doing too little, that business should not be run solely by the owners and stakeholder models are preferable, and that the environment should be given more priority over the economy.  These beliefs, together with collectivism and kinship ties are argued by some to have constrained Maori economically.

Some Maori may well have a greater propensity for non-market goods such as cultural and recreational activities.  However, this may result from social class rather than ethnicity.  An ethic of short-term sharing among kin and fatalism about the future impede Maori economic development.  However, businesses run along stakeholder lines can succeed, and sustainable development approaches can harmonise environmental and economic objectives[xl].

A positive cultural narrative must be placed within an internationalised and humanistic frame, however it can encompass the Treaty of Waitangi, nation-state identity and multi-culturalism.[xli] Patriotism does not need to be the last refuge of scoundrels.  It can reflect mutual liking between people who interact a lot, who inter-marry and share a common destiny.

A shared New Zealand national life requires more than tolerance.  It requires admiration, whether for Maori film, folksong and language, for kapa haka, the emotional power of tangi, open marae, or simply for individuals.  Maori television is widely enjoyed by non-Maori, including for its commitment to long-term cultural and historical heritages which are not supported by mainstream media.  Educated Pakeha increasingly use Maori expressions such as ‘arohanui’ and ‘kia kaha’ to express profound emotions ineffable in English.

Maori pride in artistic, musical, film-making and sporting achievement can become pride in New Zealand’s wider achievements.

Challenge damaging cultural behaviours and mind-sets

Some past cultural behaviours may now be damaging.  In early times children were adopted out to relatives (whangai) to overcome straitened whanau resources.  In modern times such extended whanau and caregiver relationships[xlii] can confuse parental accountability and make children vulnerable.  This is not a trivial matter to be glossed over to be “culturally sensitive”[xliii].  Placing vulnerable Maori children in the care of whanau or other kin can lead to higher abuse rates than those released into the care of non-kin.

The exacerbation of cultural distinctiveness can amplify the differences and mask much more significant commonalities.  It leads to issues being addressed as ethnic rather than socio-economic and humanist in nature.  This leads to cultural content as a solution to problems which are socio-economic in nature.  This however compounds closed rather than open mind-sets and institutions, reduces exposure to new ideas and learning, and exacerbates socio-economic inequality.

Different cultural groups achieve different socio-economic outcomes even when faced with the same external circumstances.  This is associated with mind-sets rather than ethnicity as such.  Low socio-economic well-being can, for example, be influenced by identity-based “cultural storylines” that poor outcomes are the result of others’ actions, not of the individuals themselves

Maori were rightly aggrieved with Treaty breaches, and the government has responded to them.  Settlement of historical Treaty claims is largely about justice, and to some extent about re-distribution.  Settlements also reduce grievances and encourage people to focus on the future.  Substantial Treaty settlements are being invested in productive enterprises and education.  They are also fostering the growth of Maori institutions that can be leveraged off.

However, some parties have an interest in perpetuating grievances and constructing new ones[xliv].  There are risks in a psychology where people feel that “others” or “history” are limiting what they can achieve.  This reduces the incentives for the education, labour market performance, asset creation and business entrepreneurship that can create new wealth, and instead focuses people on lobbying or litigation.

Cultural attitudes are changing positively.  More and more Maori want to be judged by their professional or other performance in their field, not typecast as narrowly and stereotypically “Maori”[xlv].  Many are uneasy with the faith they are asked to have in cultural identity-based solutions.  Criticism of canons of this faith can trigger hyperbolic over-reactions.  These might be triggered by concern that such criticisms can mask prejudiced attitudes.  They might also suggest there is little substance in the canon or the alleged “cultural offence” against it, and people must be discouraged from scrutinising it too closely.

Work with Maori institutions to support better outcomes

Every developed country has unique institutions that reflect historical contingencies and path dependencies rather than textbook economic models.  Maori institutions such as iwi collectives have connections with and can influence people it is hard for government to reach.  Some ban alcohol, drugs, smoking and gangs from their recreational and cultural events, and this supports positive behavioural change.

Maori collectives manage some large scale and long term investment funds.  This is important in an economy with thin capital markets and short-term investment horizons.  Some collectives promote individualised savings schemes, such as Ngai Tahu’s Whai Rawa scheme.

Other initiatives could be explored to permit individual investment aligned to collective structures.  Examples include A share and B share structures and initiatives akin to Fonterra’s Shareholder Fund.   Maori institutions can therefore be leveraged off for social and economic development, including at the individual and whanau level.

Promote Maori capability development

Tribal social organisation worked in the past, but not in modern times.  Adam Smith’s insight was that self-interest (rather than selfishness) within complex and impersonal markets leads to labour specialisation and economic growth benefiting society as a whole.  However if people’s psychology is still influenced by tribalism their self-interest may be constrained by cultural, kinship or relational loyalties.  This causes disadvantage in modern economies with different rules.

The focus for Maori development must start with the individual.  Individuals are the ultimate unit of moral concern.  They exist in a social and cultural context, but intervention must be evaluated in terms of effects on individuals.  The social group, such as the hapu and whanau cannot be the ultimate unit to engage with as it masks inequalities within these groups, for example in relation to the status of women.

Mind-sets must now turn to capability development and socio-economic outcomes at the individual and whanau level.  This must be the driving kaupapa of the Maori and the wider New Zealand narrative, however it requires supportive social and economic policy settings.

Social welfare that subsidises consumption keeps people in poverty, while investment in capability development gives them the educational and other tools to rise out of it.  Passive dependency conflicts with traditional Maori culture.  Maori proverbs and sayings valued hard workers and despised the lazy.  There was strong social stigma against infidelity, and against people not supporting their families. 

New Zealand’s existing social policy settings contrast, for example, with those of Singapore.  Singapore made individuals responsible for their own and their children’s well-being, while the state invested in capability development and net worth creation.  It invested heavily in educational, home ownership and savings-based financial asset capabilities and avoided consumption-based “welfare”.  It thereby stopped a passive underclass developing.

Singapore’s policies are paternalistic in recognizing that people’s self-regulation needs external support and “ties that bind”, such as compulsory savings.  They are supported by a culture of high savings, strong families, individual aspiration, self-regulation and respect for authority.  Such policies could take root in New Zealand if they were recast in our own cultural terms, which might include a healthy scepticism for excessively hierarchal authority.

In New Zealand today, the disadvantaged are not Maori as a whole but a subset with poor education, within certain age groups, living in certain places and with particular mind-sets.  Better data, and Maori institutions with deep community connections will increasingly enable resources to be targeted more effectively.

The key investment target must be Maori capability development through high level education focusing on career achievement, individualised incomes, ability to adapt to change, and high net worth.

Maori failure to achieve must not be misdiagnosed as a cultural malaise and be “treated” with cultural activities or sport.  We must not be confused between making people feel culturally comfortable in education (and using culture as “hooks” into education), and culture being the content of what is taught[xlvi].

What is required is not inward-looking cultural content but maths, science, advanced IT, English, and major international languages taught by open society educationalists[xlvii].

Strong affirmative investment is also needed, for example through scholarships and additional student support.  This is especially important in highly-rewarded professions, and where there is tight regulation, limited entry, and often challenges in navigating educational and professional pathways.

Such investment in education, and in wider capability development with a strong net worth focus are the only ways to achieve fairness and allow people to reach their full potential.  Maori must not be passive, and must self-author their lives in an active and self-determining way.  This will see tino rangitiratanga made manifest at the individual and household level.  It will benefit all New Zealanders over the longer term socio-economically, and through a more integrated, cohesive and open society collective narrative, with more and more authors sharing the pen.


[i] ‘Maori’ in this paper refers to those who self-identify as Maori, and to their pre-European ancestors.  ‘Maori’ historically meant ‘ordinary’ and only took on its modern meaning from the early 19th century in counterpoint to non-Maori ethnicities.  Different protocols influence who is categorised as Maori for statistical purposes.  Maori identity is also fluid and responds to economic and psychological incentives.  See Chapple, 2000.

[ii] See Wilkinson & Pickett, 2009.

[iii] See Diamond, J. 1997.

[iv] The New Zealand Constitution Act 1986 marks the point at which the Crown, after a long and incremental evolution, was finally stripped of all but a symbolic or procedural role. The Constitution Act is therefore New Zealand’s founding document as an independent parliamentary democracy.

[v] The absence of strong government underlies current turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa, triggering refugee crises that are challenging immigration policy frameworks in Europe and elsewhere.  The benefits of strong government are often taken for granted, until it is absent.

[vi] Kawantanga was translated as “governorship” in early Bible translations available to Maori in the late 1830s.  By 1840 hundreds of Maori had visited New South Wales and would have observed how powerful Crown governors were.  Some had also visited Britain and observed Crown power.

[vii] Rangitira were heads of households or hapu rather than powerful ariki or chiefs leading iwi.  Over 500 of them signed the Waitangi Treaty.   Tino rangitiratanga in the Treaty is about self-determination at the individual, household and hapu more than the iwi level.  Article Two protects individuals from chiefly or tribal dominance as well as from rapacious settler land buyers.  It was influenced by memories of the social devastation Scottish “chiefs” caused during the Highland enclosures.

[viii] This was a factor in the emergence of the Kingitanga movement.

[ix] Tertiary education expanded dramatically in the post-World War Two period, however most Maori at this time lacked tertiary-educated whanau and peer group role models.  Their family structures were also being disrupted by move to the cities, labour market and social change.

[x] Maori gangs emerged in the 1960s, a time of full employment and prosperity.  Their emergence suggests not poverty but absence of a positive social narrative for young Maori living in urban areas in which they felt isolated.

[xi] Kurzban et al, 2001.

[xii] It is important to acknowledge that racial classification can be important in health and medical diagnosis.  Morphology and skin colour have implications for health, and the genetics underlying some diseases and allergenic risks are disproportionately present in some racial groups.

[xiii] Many countries, ethnic and religious groups have promoted cultural revival in response to socio-economic challenges.  These range from the benevolence of the European Renaissance and the nineteenth century Danish folk high school movement to the malevolence of 1930s Germany.  The lesson may be that cultural revival is positive when it is open and humanistic and negative when it is closed and xenophobic.

[xiv] Kohanga Reo began in 1982 and Kura Kaupapa schools from 1985.

[xv] Benefits included Te Reo revival, vast historical scholarship, the revitalisation of interest in Maori poetry and song from Rihi Puhiwahine Te Rangihirawea through to modern popular music, and film-making achievement of international renown.

[xvi] Peter Drucker argued that business processes should be regularly put on “trial for their lives” to see if they are still needed.  Such an approach could well be taken with customs that no longer appear logical and relevant.

[xvii] Examples include restrictions on women speaking on some marae, and bans on women tradespeople working at night on some “culturally sensitive” buildings.

[xviii] Indigenous means “of or belonging to a place”.  There are Pakeha and Asian New Zealanders who have had multi-generational connections with, and are indigenous to specific places in New Zealand.  Conversely, there are Maori born in Australia who have never visited New Zealand.

[xix] As Gorky wrote, “people are not trees; we are not supposed to lead all our lives on the one spot”.

[xx] In contrast, small business owners in communities dominated by tribal or indigenous populations are often of minority ethnicities such as Asian.  They are free from local community demands for insecure credit, gift-giving, reciprocal altruism and other social claims inconsistent with longer term accumulation and well-being.

[xxi] Coleman et al (2005) reported nineteenth century accounts of a low thrift and savings culture among Maori.  However, this might have reflected the Crown’s depredations and the distrust it created in banks and other savings-related institutions as well as, or rather than cultural factors.  A Maori saying in the 1850s was “out of debt is out of trouble”.

[xxii] See Zakharenko, 2016.

[xxiii] Christianity began as a Jewish sect which, unlike its Jewish spiritual competitors, was open to Gentiles, women and other outsiders.  Later in its development, Augustine’s culture of openness won out over Donatist and other competing factions that were exclusive.  Christianity created a moral foundation of openness to other cultural and ethnic groups.  Europeans then promoted Christianity through exploration and colonisation.  Christianity also co-opted from other cultures, for example secular karakia became a basis for Christian prayers, reflecting two way cultural learning.

[xxiv] This suggests a hypothesis that Maori who intermarry with non-Pakeha ethnic minorities may do even better since they access and can draw the best from three different cultures: Pakeha, Maori and a third ethnicity that comes with its own knowledge base, insights and mind-sets.

[xxv] The transfers of net worth in the form of, for example, home ownership and business equity stakes to children and grandchildren is critical to breaking out of inter-generational poverty.  This has to be at the individual and whanau rather than communal level.  This is because individual rights in communal resources are diluted in every generation, and communal property rights are not geared to individual and whanau development.

[xxvi] These arguments resonate with Keynes’ view that ideas should be international and capital should be local.

[xxvii] It is possible this leads to over-stratification, and over-reaction to micro-cues of perceived status differences that are not in fact very material.

[xxviii] See Piketty, 2014.

[xxix] These returns would include higher labour market participation, economy-wide productivity gains and avoided costs through lower crime and reduced benefit dependency.

[xxx] This is associated with “terror management theory” in sociology.

[xxxi] For example, Te Rauparaha was not of the highest bloodline rank but rose to Ngati Toa leadership on his merits.

[xxxii] See Grimes et al, 2015.

[xxxiii] The Controller and Auditor-General (2016) noted that Maori school achievement was lower in schools with higher proportions of Maori students, and that smaller schools do worse for Maori.

[xxxiv] See Sen, 2006.

[xxxv] It is fine to be incompetent in juggling and excellent in the surgical theatre, but not the other way round.

[xxxvi] Top New Zealand business leaders such as Rod Drury and Rob McLeod have Maori ancestry, however they do not noticeably promote “Maori succeeding as Maori” as integral to their commercial achievements.

[xxxvii] The Controller and Auditor-General (2016) notes that achieving as Maori means different things to different people.  This does not suggest a credible kaupapa, if taken in isolation from an open society, multiple identities framework.

[xxxviii] Some cultural markers can impede the ability to match identities to different contexts.  For example, indelible and visible tattoos can be commitment devices that imply one identity dominates over others.  They can materially harm job prospects in some parts of the world.

[xxxix] Grimes et al, 2015.

[xl] See MAF, 2007.

[xli] For example, Singapore’s economy has been established largely through Chinese, Indian and Malay immigrants working within what began as a British colonial institutional framework, and with a common economic vision that has co-existed with multi-culturalism and multi-lingualism.

[xlii] It is important to acknowledge, with admiration and humility, the great love and care present in many Maori extended whanau that have taken responsibility for grandchildren, adopted children, or picked up vulnerable people who would otherwise be poorly cared for.

[xliii] Silence on some matters may be a sign not of “cultural sensitivity” but of weak character.

[xliv] Treaty processes can blame the Crown for bad outcomes that really result from factors such as poor attitudes to education.  They can also create the fiscal illusion that there is remote entity (“the Crown”) that can deliver settlements that do not impose costs on New Zealanders, such as on low income taxpayers.

[xlv] An example is Maori succeeding in highly individualistic sports, academic and professional fields, breaking down stereotypes that Maori are better at team sports and group learning.

[xlvi] Lourie & Rata, 2014 argue that the “cultural solution” is in fact a cause of Maori educational under-achievement.

[xlvii] Many of whom will have Maori among their identities.




Chapple, S. 2000: Maori socio-economic disparity. Paper for the Ministry of Social Policy. Labour Market Policy Group, Department of Labour.

Coleman, A et al 2005: Maori economic development – Glimpses from statistical sources. Motu Working Paper 05-13.  Motu Economic and Public Policy Research.

Controller and Auditor-General 2016: Education for Maori: Using information to improve Maori educational success.  Wellington, Controller and Auditor-General.

Diamond, J.1997: Guns, Germs and Steel: The fates of human societies.  Norton & Co, New York.

Grimes, A.; MacCulloch, R.; McKay, F. 2015: Indigenous Belief in a Just World: New Zealand Maori and other Ethnicities Compared. Motu Working paper 15-14. Motu Economic and Public Policy Research,

Kurzban, R.; Tooby, J.; Cosmides, L. 2001: Can race be erased?  Coalitional computation and social categorization. PNAS Vol. 98, No. 26.5387-15392.

Lourie, M.; Rata, E. 2014: A critique of the role of culture in Maori education.  British Journal of Sociology of Education.  Vol. 35, No. 1, 19-36.

MAF, 2007: Sustainable Development Framework for New Zealand Agriculture and Forestry.  Agriculture and Forestry Perspectives 1.  Wellington, MAF.


Sen A. 2006: Identity and violence.  New York, W W Norton Books.


Zakharenko, R. 2016: Mathematical Social Sciences 2016 No. 80, 58-64.



Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments