Author: tworuru

The way New Zealand’s Taxpayers’ Union works should be obvious by now. This fake union — which is actually a neoliberal, ultra-capitalist lobby group acting in concert with a dense network of international right-wing think tanks called the Atlas Network — advances its agenda by carefully picking divisive issues and laundering them through the news media. Every story they land in a mainstream publication is a victory for them, and thanks to the news media’s addiction to conflict and its diminishment by market forces, the fake union and its think-tank bedfellows are having an easier ride than ever.

It probably shouldn’t be this easy, though. Witness this glorified press release masquerading as a story in Stuff, published on Christmas Eve, in the heart of the silly season:

The story itself is… boring. The first bit is based squarely on (via what looks some heroic paraphrasing to avoid outright copying) a Taxpayers’ Union press release. The fact that some council staff earn over $100,000 is framed as shocking, when in fact it’s wildly unsurprising; the people who run cities and towns are doing a demanding job and they’re (sometimes) paid well for it. And that’s what the article itself says, a third of the way through, citing Infometrics (an economic consultancy based in Wellington.)

Infometrics chief forecaster Gareth Kiernan said he would expect roles in larger councils to be paid more than equivalent roles in smaller councils, particularly at the higher levels.

Near the end comes a missive from Connor Molloy, Campaign Manager for the Taxpayers’ Union (who are not identified in the story as anything other than “the Taxpayers’ Union,” with no explanation for readers that the “union” is a right-wing lobby group.) Molloy, of course, seems to think that the best Christmas present for council staff is for them to lose their jobs:

Connor Molloy, campaigns manager for the Taxpayers’ Union, said reducing the number of highly-paid “backroom” staff was the right thing to do if councils were threatening big rate hikes.

“Rather than going straight for core services like rubbish collection and libraries, councils ought to look inwards at their own bloated bureaucracies first when looking to make savings.

From a quick scan, this story seems like merely another example of the TPU successfully “placing” a piece of its neoliberal propaganda in the media, which happens — to the media’s vast detriment — all the time. But on a closer look, things get even bleaker.

Reading the story, a little blue hyperlink in the opening paragraph caught my eye, as it’s designed to do.

Curious! I wanted, as many readers might, to see the raw data informing the story. I was mystified as to why Stuff weren’t just hosting it themselves, or embedding the data on their page, as is standard practice for news organisations, which just made me curiouser.

I clicked through.

The page I landed on looks like this.

Hmm. Looks like I just need to put my email address in this handy form and I’ll get to see the report! You can even choose to be one of the three types of person: an “Elected official,” “Ratepayer,” or “Journalist (or reseracher.)1”

I’ll just pop my details in and click “VIEW REPORT” and…huh? It’s just a normal webpage! No need for an email address at all!

Look at that URL. That’s not a hidden or gated page: if the website was designed to be user-friendly, you could navigate straight to it. You don’t need to put in an email address to access the data, but the page is designed explicitly to make it seem like you do.

Do you at least get emailed the report? Like hell. Nothing shows up in your inbox until a few days later, when a horrifically-formatted email arrives and it’s made clear you’ve been added to a Taxpayers’ Union mailing list.

Take another look at that first form up there. There’s nothing whatsoever to indicate that you’re signing up to a mailing list. Not even a pre-checked “yes, send me Taxpayers’ Union emails,” checkbox. It’s either very poorly designed or deliberately misleading: either way, it could easily be illegal, under New Zealand’s Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act (2007).

So this is where we’re at. Stuff isn’t just parroting Taxpayers’ Union propaganda and enthusiastically leaning in to their “government = waste = fire them all” framing; they’re encouraging their readers to visit a website that harvests their emails and, unasked, signs them up for the full TPU package.

If you’re thinking “this seems bad!” well, I have more: want to know where this overtly propagandistic Ratepayers’ Report that shills for a right-wing lobby group originally comes from?

It was born as a collaboration between Stuff and the Taxpayers’ Union.

Don’t take my word for it: here’s the TPU press release.

The New Zealand Taxpayers’ Union, in collaboration with Fairfax Media has today launched “Ratepayers’ Report” hosted by Stuff.co.nz (…) “For the first time, New Zealanders now have an interactive online tool to compare their local council to those of the rest of the country,” says Jordan Williams, Executive Director of the Taxpayers’ Union. “Ratepayers can visit ratepayersreport.co.nz to compare their local council including average rates, debt per ratepayer and even CEO salaries.”

That was back in 2014. But at least the 2014 Ratepayers Report was hosted on Stuff’s own site, and didn’t speciously sign its users up to spam. It looked like this:

Nearly a decade later, the Ratepayers’ Report, together with a payload of TPU propaganda, is embedded in news cycles. The Taxpayers’ Union puts it out regularly, and media publish obligingly. A Google search of the Stuff site for “Ratepayers’ Report” shows you how entrenched it is.

This is how the Atlas Network right-wing sausage factory works: their junk “think tanks” propagate their neoliberal message and exploit the decline of media by doing journalists’ work for them. They’ve been doing it for years, and it’s been wildly successful, to the point that they’ve just released a book skiting about how manipulative they are. But this — a reputable news site sending its readers to sign up directly, and probably unknowingly, for TPU propaganda — seemed beyond the pale. What was going on? I wanted to know, so I put the following questions to Stuff.

• Why is Stuff linking to a Taxpayers’ Union email harvesting site?
• Was Stuff aware that the function of the Ratepayer’s Report was at least partially to harvest emails for the Taxpayers’ Union?
• What is Stuff’s policy on linking to external sites, especially those that may act maliciously or harvest user details?
• In your view, was the nature of the Ratepayer’s Report website (and its email-harvesting capability) sufficiently disclosed to readers?
• What is the present nature of the relationship between Stuff and the Taxpayers’ Union?
• Referring to the press release above, what is the past nature of the relationship between Stuff and the Taxpayers’ Union?
• Was this a commercial relationship, i.e. did either TPU or Stuff pay each other for participation in the Ratepayer’s Report? Was there contra, or an exchange of services?
• Does the relationship between Stuff and the TPU that established the Ratepayer’s Report persist today?
• If not, when did it end, and why did it end?
• Does Stuff have guidelines for journalists (or editors) who utilise the work of lobby groups in their stories, perhaps along the lines of the BBC? I refer to this page, which states:

Contributors’ Affiliations

4.3.12 We should not automatically assume that contributors from other organisations (such as academics, journalists, researchers and representatives of charities and think-tanks) are unbiased. Appropriate information about their affiliations, funding and particular viewpoints should be made available to the audience, when relevant to the context.

If so, can you please provide me or point me to a copy of these guidelines?

Further to the above question, why does the story not identify for readers who the Taxpayers’ Union is, and what their work entails? I refer to these Newsroom stories that make it clear that the TPU is a neoliberal, right-wing lobby group, with links to fossil fuel and tobacco concerns, as well as being part of the international Atlas Network of neoliberal, right-wing think-tanks.

I note also that this Stuff story (correctly) identifies the Taxpayers’ Union as a “right-wing pressure group,” so clearly it’s possible to be upfront about the group and their motivations when writing a story about the TPU’s work and the concerns they raise. Given this, why isn’t this clear identification the norm across Stuff?

A day later, Stuff replied, with a comment they asked to be attributed to Keith Lynch, Editor-in-Chief of Stuff Digital:

Stuff has no formal relationship with the Taxpayer’s Union. A report from the Taxpayers Union was transparently quoted in the story alongside information from other named sources. In this case, the link to the source was included so audiences could access the information referenced in the story, should they wish.

On reflection, we have now updated the story to remove the link.

There you go, Stuff readers: four sentences and one middle finger. Wondering why Stuff saw fit to partner with the TPU? When the partnership ended? Why it ended? What their guidelines are when handling the journalistic equivalent of radioactive waste — the propaganda created by think tanks to shape society in their image? Screw you. You don’t get to know. The hyperlink to the Taxpayers’ Union site that misleadingly harvests readers’ emails is gone (without so much as an edit notice or correction on the page) because it should never have been there in the first place — but as for the merest whisper of explanation as to why the TPU so often gets such an easy ride in media?

Nothing.

I replied, asking Stuff if they’d be giving my other questions actual answers. I didn’t hear back. It’s amazing, really: journalists hound politicians endlessly to just Answer The Question (as they should!), but when it’s them on the hook they provide weasel words that’d do any politician proud, and then evaporate into the ether.

Going back to the Stuff story one last time, I saw this little banner above the body copy.

You care about our money? I bet you do. Here’s a thought, Stuff: how about showing that you care about your audience? Stop feeding them repurposed think-tank propaganda, own your mistakes, and act with integrity. Perhaps, instead of taking the Taxpayers’ Union at their obviously-compromised word, you could talk about how the TPU used racist insinuations about “co-governance” to fight Three Waters, a government program designed to fix horrifically neglected water infrastructure while freeing councils from paying for it — the repeal of which is now being cited by councils as a key reason for massive rate hikes.

Maybe then people would be more inclined to pay you, instead of mistrusting you.

In a world where misinformation is so easily spread, the mainstream press should be fighting it, not amplifying it. It’s too bad that Stuff seems incapable of assuring its readers that it will treat think-tank content with the caution it warrants.

An incredibly important documentary went live today, and I don’t want you to miss it.

“Trick or Treaty? Indigenous rights, referendums and the Treaty of Waitangi” is a deep dive on how right-wing influence networks in Australia joined forces to destroy Australia’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament — and how the same forces are at work in New Zealand. I’ve taken an interest in New Zealand’s gaggle of lobby groups for a long time now, so I was very pleased to do research for the doco and work with award-winning producers and top-tier journos Mihingarangi Forbes and Annabelle Lee-Mather. I also appear on camera, which is less my thing, but as an Aussie-born Kiwi the subject is very close to my heart, and I didn’t want to miss the chance to tell what I think is a vital story.

Much of what’s in the doco is far from secret, particularly to those in the media-politics confluence; but (crucially) it is not well known by the general public. The short version is that there are a bunch of well-funded, right-wing, neoliberal influence and lobbying groups in New Zealand, who share links with similar groups overseas. They are ostensibly independent groups, but they coordinate their activities, share resources, trade personnel, and — when you zoom out slightly — essentially work as one large body. In fact, several of the groups officially operate under the auspices of one giant neoliberal anthill organisation, called the Atlas Network. In New Zealand, these groups — and the individuals who work in them — tend to cluster around parties like ACT, NZ First, and National. Their modus operandi is to write stultifyingly dull papers, create model legislation, get pet MPs and parties elected, and incessantly insert their messaging into the public consciousness via the media. That messaging varies from group to group, but the (almost invariable) common denominator is this:

They consistently oppose both climate action and recognition of indigenous rights.1

Having seen extraordinary success in Australia with the triumph of the “No” vote on the Voice, these same forces look to be coming for Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Since it gained limited judicial and legislative recognition, Te Tiriti has been a bugbear for neoliberals. It represents everything they hate: an example of collective recognition and responsibility, and an admission that indigenous people do in fact have continuing inalienable rights that pre-date colonisation. Perhaps most importantly, Te Tiriti acts as a potential handbrake on the kind of unfettered property rights required for mining and fossil fuel companies to prosper.

So it’s no surprise that the ACT Party and lobbyist enablers like Hobson’s Pledge want nothing more than to get rid of it.

Wherefore referendum

In the doco, I’m asked if I think there will be a referendum on Te Tiriti. My answer is yes: in my opinion, it only really remains to be seen what form the referendum will take. There are two options: a government-initiated referendum or a citizens-initiated referendum. For the first option: the coalition agreement between National and ACT specifically calls for ACT’s Treaty Principles Bill to be advanced to select committee: National have pointedly not committed to a referendum but to ACT Party leader David Seymour, it’s clearly still on the cards.

The other option is a citizen’s initiated referendum or CIR: anti-Tiriti group Hobson’s Pledge, co-founded by former ACT Party leader Don Brash, is already lobbying for one. Anyone can get a CIR before Parliament; all that’s required is the signatures of ten percent of registered voters. For an issue like Te Tiriti, long a lightning rod for cranks, racists, and the terminally uninformed, 370,000-ish signatures should be a snap.

In my opinion, either option stands a very real risk of ripping the country apart, on a scale not seen since the Springbok tour protests or perhaps even the Land Wars. And I also think that ACT’s proposed Treaty principles — on top of the other anti-Tiriti measures being undertaken by the ACT/NZ First/National government — would be the most profound assault on indigenous rights in Aotearoa since the racist Justice James Prendergast declared the Treaty a “simple nullity.”

Maps of Meaning

In the doco, there are a few shots of me using a program that looks like a digital spiderweb. I like that it’s been included, because it’s becoming a big part of my writing process. Obsidian is a note-taking program that allows users to write in Markdown, and easily link notes to each other. I’d recommend it to journalists everywhere — it’s encrypted, open-source, and great for brain-dumping and research. One of its nifty features is its mind map or “graph view,” functionality, which showcases all your notes and how they link to each other.

That, I’m very aware, is essentially a computer version of this:

Mind maps have a bad name, thanks to conspiracy theorists and very funny sketches based on conspiracist antics, but they’re a really useful visual tool for research. What’s obvious on viewing the mind map I’ve made — which, to be clear, is comprised primarily of publicly-available information listed on the websites of the organisations I’m researching — is just how entwined everybody is. New Zealand is a small country, to be sure, but after a few hours it becomes very clear that the favourite hobby of these lobby organisations is giving each other jobs. The boards are stacked with fixtures of the “business community” — the very elites that these same organisations so often rail against — and a scan of member’s employment histories often reveals them bouncing around related orgs like pinballs. New NZ First MP Casey Costello, to pick one name more or less at random, has previously worked for (or with) the Taxpayer’s Union, Hobson’s Pledge, and ACT. Each organisation is so entwined with the others that they start to look, accurately, like the same body.

The media is the message

One of the best things about this documentary is that it gives New Zealanders something Australians missed out on: a primer on who these interconnected neoliberal groups are and how they operate. While they have many channels to their audience, like newsletters and social media, the most important medium is still the mainstream media. One of the things I said during shooting that didn’t make the final cut is that the New Zealand media is “infected with lobbyists” — and it is. Lobbyists and their ilk advance their agenda in the media through the following methods:

1. Giving journalists their phone numbers and never failing, as I mention in the doco, to pick up when it rings, to deliver some variation on “the world’s richest and most sociopathic people are right, actually.”
2. Combining a never-ending deluge of press releases with juicy scoops and leaks of the “ya didn’t hear it from me but boy have I gotta story for YOU. You’ll never guess how much funding this poet got!” variety, usually supplied to pet journalists and right-wing media orgs who can be relied upon to advance the lobbyist’s agenda. See also: Newstalk ZB.
3. Providing enticingly conflict-loaded “insider” opinions for free or very cheap to cash-strapped editors and producers, with the tangible result that a huge proportion of New Zealand’s opinion columnists, podcasters, and other varieties of talking head are paid lobbyists of some kind, which brings me to:
4. Getting actual media jobs, which has everything to do with a laissez-faire media culture that pretends not to notice the constantly revolving door at the axis of business, politics, and journalism. Numerous examples include New Zealand Institute asset Luke Malpass waltzing into the job of political editor at Stuff, a position he wields with all the impartiality of a used car salesman; ex-National leader Simon Bridges failing into a podcast at Stuff; New Zealand Institute sleep aid Eric Crampton’s spot at Newsroom; Muriel Newman (the founder of unhinged climate-denying lobby group NZCPR) being slung a new gig at Newstalk ZB; long-time right-wing lobbyist Matthew Hooton getting a seemingly eternal opinionist gig at NZME; and his (current? former? I don’t know, and neither do you, because the media outlets he appears on often don’t deign to tell us) consigliere Ben Thomas, who rejoices in the lifetime appointment of Chief Migraine Officer on the Spinoff’s exhausting political podcast, Gone By Lunchtime.

Given the noble Fourth Estate functions essentially as a base of operations for influence operators, what can be done? Lots, in my opinion:

1. Short of proper lobbying finance and influence disclosure law, which are all but impossible under the present Government but might be an option when they disintegrate, the media can start by voluntarily and transparently showcasing the bona fides of its talking heads. Every time a lobbyist shows up to generously peddle influence and build their own profile, their appearance can be marked with a disclaimer showing exactly who they have a.) previously worked for and b.) are working for now. That’s really the least that should be done: audiences desperately need to know which talking heads are on the take2.

2. News media can also choose to identify when stories have been shopped to them by members of astroturf influence organisations like the Taxpayer’s Union, or (more ideally) refuse to run their hit pieces.

3. Media should identify and label influence groups accurately: for example, identifying a spokesperson as being from the benign-sounding “New Zealand Institute” tells an audience nothing: labelling the New Zealand Institute (accurately) as a “neoliberal lobby group for ultra-free-market economics with representation from some of the biggest corporates in New Zealand on its board” tells audiences what they need to know.

4. Media should also proactively highlight when their employees are intimately linked to lobby groups or politicians, which is (especially in the Press Gallery) much more common than non-media people might think. Such is the case with Newshub’s Political Editor Jenna Lynch, who is married to ACT Party Chief of Staff Andrew Ketels. It doesn’t matter if she’s the world’s most scrupulous reporter who somehow manages never to discuss politics with her husband: it’s a very obvious potential conflict of interest, and audiences deserve to know about it — and any other such conflicts.

5. As a final suggestion, the media should also stop giving prime opinion and airwave real estate to the world’s most boring politicians because of the more-common-than-you think reasoning of “oh, they were such a hoot when we got on the piss that one time.” Their audiences will fervently thank them.

Thanks for checking out the documentary. Please share it far and wide: I think there’s a lot in there that New Zealanders both deserve and need to know.

A short lunchtime post today. Let’s begin with a (gift) link to an Atlantic story revealing Substack’s Nazi problem. How bad is is it here? This bad:

At least 16 of the newsletters that I reviewed have overt Nazi symbols, including the swastika and the sonnenrad, in their logos or in prominent graphics. Andkon’s Reich Press, for example, calls itself “a National Socialist newsletter”; its logo shows Nazi banners on Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, and one recent post features a racist caricature of a Chinese person. A Substack called White-Papers, bearing the tagline “Your pro-White policy destination,” is one of several that openly promote the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that inspired deadly mass shootings at a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, synagogue; two Christchurch, New Zealand, mosques; an El Paso, Texas, Walmart; and a Buffalo, New York, supermarket. Other newsletters make prominent references to the “Jewish Question.” Several are run by nationally prominent white nationalists; at least four are run by organizers of the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia—including the rally’s most notorious organizer, Richard Spencer.

The rest of the article is just as damning. I am only annoyed that I didn’t write about it myself; Nazi content on this website isn’t hard to find, and I could have reported on it much earlier. That said, I am glad that a mainstream publication is addressing the issue.

It’s been known about for a long time, and Substack, to its enormous discredit, has done nothing about it. Instead, they’ve worked to explicitly elevate “alt-right” types like Richard Hanania, with this simpering puff piece and accompanying podcast by Substack cofounder Hamish McKenzie. When Huffington Post writer Christopher Mathias revealed Haniana’s past as an overt white supremacist writing under the pseudonym “Richard Hoste,” Substack’s silence was deafening. They did not retract or otherwise repudiate their article, or even really address the controversy. As the Atlantic article makes clear, Substack already has terms of use that ban “hate,” but they’re not enforcing them. Instead they’re striving to be edgy, sucking up to weirdo Silicon Valley accelerationists, and making cringeworthy ads:

Please note this isn’t about encouraging “free speech,” a position I have a lot of sympathy for, because Substack aren’t genuine free speech maximalists. If they were, they’d allow all non-criminal speech, including explicitly protected and legal forms of free speech like pornography and other kinds of sex work. They don’t, and this makes them free speech hypocrites.

With Substack’s Nazi problem now very much out in the open, the platform now has a choice: enforce their terms of use and evict the vile people who make a living (and make money for Substack) by peddling overt hate to huge audiences, or maintain their current course and become a Nazi bar. I suspect they’ll pick option B, which sucks. I have good friends who make their entire living from writing on Substack and the platform’s hypocritical, ideologically inconsistent free-speech-for-Nazis-but-not-for-boobies policy is putting writers in a terrible position. If they stay, it looks like they’re okay with being on a platform that doesn’t just permit but promotes hate. If they leave, they risk losing their livelihood.

Clearly, organised opposition is what’s needed. If this site’s writers banded together and threatened to leave Substack en masse, the resulting revenue hit might make continued Nazi-coddling untenable. Writers are already organising:

In my opinion, the choice is stark: if you’re a non-Nazi writer who objects to Substack making money from white supremacists (not to mention this site’s vast swathe of TERF writers and culture-war contrarians) you should make this extremely clear to the site founders, ideally in an organised, public way that doesn’t allow for individualised, targeted pushback. You could look to leave altogether, taking your subscribers and their revenue elsewhere: there are other subscription email providers that either have ideologically consistent free speech policies — allowing all legal speech, not carving out convenient exceptions for Nazis — or that don’t go out of their way to promote Nazis at all. Revolutionary stuff! Here are some alternatives:

Buttondown

Buttondown is not “free” in the way Substack is (Substack takes a big cut of your subscriptions) but they’re an inexpensive option for independent publishers. Also they seem like good sorts on social, without any pretence of “creating a new economic engine for culture.”1

Here’s Buttondown’s Substack migration guide, including moving your paid subs.

Ghost

Ghost Pro is a very Substack-like experience for your newsletter and subscribers, with the option to self-host if you’re a tinkerer.

Here’s Ghost’s Substack migration guide, including moving your paid subs.

WordPress

WordPress.com’s Newsletter product now offers a paid email subscription option, including the ability to connect your existing Stripe account for paid subs.

There are other options out there too. For my part — as all my posts here and at The Cynic’s Guide To Self Improvement are free anyway — I will definitely be moving my newsletters to another platform if Substack doesn’t come up with a satisfactory response to their Nazi problem. It’s long overdue.

Hi! I hope you enjoyed the sunshine in the Brighter Future. Unfortunately, today’s newsletter is a return to the Dark Present, with a timely reminder that everything is danged1 and it’s all economics’ fault.

Well, that’s not 100 percent correct: it’s lots of people’s fault, especially the governments who’ve refused to reign in the mad paper-clip machine of capitalism and have set civilisation on a course straight for the heart of the Sun, but neoliberal, orthodox economists deserve an outsize share of the blame for chaining the rest of us to the mast so all we can do is watch. And William Nordhaus is one of the crew — standing on the shoulders of giants like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek — who’s done the most incalculable damage. When our kids ask us “Who killed the world?” we’ll be able to confidently answer “This guy.” The Intercept has the horrible details. Briefly paraphrased, the scoop is that Nordhaus’ theories that calculate the economic impacts of climate change are bollocks.

Nordhaus’s models tell us that at a temperature rise somewhere between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius, the global economy reaches “optimal” adaptation. What’s optimal in this scenario is that fossil fuels can continue to be burned late into the 21st century, powering economic growth, jobs, and innovation. Humanity, asserts Nordhaus, can adapt to such warming with modest infrastructure investments, gradual social change, and, in wealthy developed countries, little sacrifice. All the while, the world economy expands with the spewing of more carbon.

His models, it turns out, are fatally flawed, and a growing number of Nordhaus’s colleagues are repudiating his work.

Yes, it turns out that Nordhaus’ work is pure copium, so attractive and addictive that it’s been mainlined by everyone from corporates to governments to the IPCC.

Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and a leading researcher on climate tipping points and “safe boundaries” for humanity, projects that in a 4 C warmer world, “it’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that.” Global population today stands at 7.6 billion, with 80 million people added every year.

By contrast, when Nordhaus looked at the effects of 6 C warming, he did not forecast horror. Instead, we should expect “damages” of between 8.5 percent and 12.5 percent of world GDP over the course of the 21st century.

He’d have gotten away with it too, if it wasn’t for those darn meddling laws of thermodynamics.

Start with your typical textbook for the dismal science — say, the definitive one by Paul Samuelson, co-written with Nordhaus, titled “Economics.” The book is considered “the standard-bearer” of “modern economics principles.” You’ll find in its pages a (…) simple, imperturbable closed system that’s also ludicrous, fantastical, a fairy tale. In the circular flow diagram of standard economics, nothing enters from the outside to keep it flowing, and nothing exits as a result of the flow. There are no resource inputs from the environment: no oil, coal, or natural gas, no minerals and metals, no water, soil, or food. There are no outputs into the ecosphere: no garbage, no pollution, no greenhouse gasses. That’s because in the circular flow diagram, there is no ecosphere, no environment. The economy is seen as a self-renewing, perpetual-motion merry-go-round set in a vacuum.

So how does it all work? Nordhaus’ theories are, of course, predicated on the fairy-tale of endless economic growth. Pry the lid off the voodoo equations of orthodox economics and you’ll find the same basic fallacy over and over again: line goes up.

In DICE, the effect of a warmed climate is measured solely as a percentage loss (or gain) in GDP. Growth of GDP is assumed to be “exogenously determined,” in the language of economics theory, meaning it will persist at a set rate over time regardless of climate shocks.

Like other orthodox economic fallacies such as the Phillips Curve — an illustration of the idea that having too much employment causes inflation, so having unemployment must necessarily un-cause it — Nordhaus’ DICE model is based on a fundamental misuse of mathematics:

The second of Nordhaus’s errors is the use of reductionist mathematical formulas. He employs something called a quadratic to calculate the relationship between rising temperatures and economic outcomes.

Economists are always doing this. They love nothing more than finding a concept that’s hideously complex and intrinsically non-linear and drawing crayon-like curves all over it. But wait, it gets much, much stupider.

The third of Nordhaus’s errors is related to similarly simplistic formulas. Nordhaus calculates GDP of a particular location as fundamentally related to the temperature of that place.

What — and I really must stress this — the dang. How does economics manage to elevate such abject, obvious idiocy to the pinnacle of the profession? The assertion is self-evidently untrue. GDP is not a function of your danging latitude. Nor is it a function of Nordhous’ next colossal mind-fart:

The fourth fatal error Nordhaus makes is the most farcical. In a 1991 paper that became a touchstone for all his later work, he assumed that, because 87 percent of GDP occurs in what he called “carefully controlled environments” — otherwise known as “indoors” — it will not be affected by climate.

It really has to be said again and again: dang economics.

Lest we forget, it’s also orthodox, neoliberal economics that has gifted us the currently-in-vogue method of dealing with climate change: carbon trading and emissions offsets. Let’s be clear: setting a price on carbon pollution is a good thing. But economists have, of course, poisoned the well of carbon pricing with carbon offsets: the idea that we can make up for burning carbon here by not burning carbon there, and that we can turn not-burning into licences to burn carbon. Factor in the idea of the world ploughing its valuable energy resources into mostly hypothetical technology to suck carbon out of the air and turn it into worthless dry ice and boom, you’ve got a plan to save civilisation — one that, typically for economics, makes no danging sense. Cory Doctorow has the goods:

[Carbon offsets allow] companies to make money by promising not to emit carbon that they would otherwise emit. The idea here is that creating a new asset class will unleash the incredible creativity of markets by harnessing the greed of elite sociopaths to the project of decarbonization, rather than to the prudence of democratically accountable lawmakers.

Carbon offsets have not worked: they have been plagued by absolutely foreseeable problems that have not lessened, despite repeated attempts to mitigate them.

For a break from all this, let’s look at journalist David Williams’ deep dive into what NZ’s local enemies of climate action have been up to lately. Ah, of course. They’ve been working to elect climate change deniers, minimisers, and delayers, in the form of the Act and National parties:

In the Taxpayers’ Union’s first press statement, in 2013, its founders described it as “a politically independent grassroots campaign to lower the tax burden on New Zealanders and reduce wasteful government spending”.

The independence claim has been repeatedly knocked.

In Dirty Politics, Hager wrote the Taxpayers’ Union “operates, in effect, as an arm’s-length ally of the National Party” and called it a “political tool”.

The following year, political scientist Bryce Edwards described the Taxpayers’ Union to the NZ Herald as “the Act Party in drag”.

A huge share of the blame for the Taxpayer’s Union’s success can be laid at the feet of news media, who essentially let political actors like the TPU and the Act party do their jobs for them. These groups function as press-release factories, churning out readymade news for conflict-hungry media, who are only too happy to both-sides climate-denying hysteria-bait about (for example) cycleways if it leads to them getting a few more clicks. They also make themselves permanently available, always ready to feed a juicy, conflict-loaded, nuance-free soundbite to the media maw. Witness the Spinoff’s live updates editor telling on himself as he complains that David Seymour won’t pick up the phone anymore:

During the Judith Collins years, he twisted this level of availability into becoming a de facto opposition leader, commonly leading coverage where the National Party leader would traditionally be found. If you couldn’t get a comment out of National, you’d get on the blower to Seymour and he’d give two or three well-communicated soundbites on just about anything.

Most journalists would ring him directly, or text him and expect a return phone call within minutes. On one occasion, he called me via a bluetooth bike helmet and I did the interview while he was cycling around his local electorate.

“Well-communicated soundbites!” I’m so sick of this stuff from journos. When will they learn that their job is not to hand out praise to politicians based on well they spin the issue du jour? That it’s not to give space to people — especially not powerful people — just because they’ll pick up the danging phone? Of course David Seymour’s not answering your calls: he’s in negotiations for his real job — attacking indigenous rights and sabotaging climate change action. What’s left of the (broadly) reputable Fourth Estate needs to figure out where it stands on climate change, ideally yesterday, and to stop platforming climate change deniers, delayers and minimisers like David Seymour and the Taxpayers Union without conspicuous disclaimers about what their policies and actions are and mean.

While I’m on the subject of lazy media, here’s another ghastly habit that can get in the bin and die: the uncritical repetition of political and economic myths. From yesterday’s Spinoff Bulletin newsletter, we get this:

By now, we all know the orthodox drumbeats: when employment levels are high, wages rise faster. People have more money to spend, so prices go up and so does inflation. When unemployment is high, the lack of money to spend means that inflation goes down. It is our old mate, the Phillips curve, conceived by New Zealander Bill Phillips. A consensus of bank economists ( paywalled, and is that the collective noun or just an accidentally clever allusion to it by Liam Dann?) is picking that the unemployment rate will have risen. Most are pinning that prediction on high levels of migration.

It’s nice that we seem to be gradually approaching the point where people might finally start saying the quiet part loud: unemployment is largely a political and fiscal choice, designed to keep wages (and inflation) suitably low; but what’s not being said is that simplistic economic concepts like the Phillips Curve are at best contested and at worst bunk. Even orthodox economists have had enough of the Phillips Curve: witness the ultra-neoliberal Cato Institute call it a “broken theory” and “a poor tool for policymaking.” So here’s another reminder, because you can never have enough: the broken idea behind raising interest rates is to make people lose their jobs and/or houses so inflation might come down.

The fact that inflation might happen not just because people have jobs, and could just as easily be attributed to supply constraints and massive corporate profiteering doesn’t seem to matter, least of all to media who are happy to keep repeating economic myths and making space for climate change creators.

On that note, and in good news for no-one but economists, there are signs that the Reserve Bank might finally be succeeding in engineering its longed-for recession:

The below, earlier issue of Hickey’s newsletter is well worth reading, not least because he shares some gobsmacking tidbits that should be being screamed from the rooftops by the rest of the media — like the fact that at current rates of growth (which successive Governments have both encouraged and done nothing to prepare for) NZ’s population will exceed 20 million by 2100.

Wednesday’s Chorus: An impossible trinity

Listen now (31 mins) | TL;DR: The key news in Aotearoa’s political economy today includes: National appears set to push councils to move their water assets off their balance sheets in a very similar way to Labour’s Three Waters plan, just without the co-governance and as much compulsion, but still with the flawed idea that somehow off-balance-sheet borrowing is actually better for taxpayers and ratepayers in the long run than facing up to the fact that higher taxes, charges and public debt are needed to fund fast population growth;

The Kākā by Bernard Hickey

And then there’s this humdinger.

A Treasury analysis of the potential costs of the Crown having to buy emissions credits to meet its Paris agreement commitments was released in September and shows the cost to taxpayers could blow out to $25.948 billion by 2030, if as expected with current policies, there is a shortfall.

This is not included in the Crown Accounts as a contingent liability. If it was, a Government would be obliged to try to reduce it, or have to explain to taxpayers why they’re spending more on emissions credits overseas than it spends on health in a year.

The other option would be to renege on the Paris agreement, which ACT has advocated, and then see New Zealand’s FTA with Europe cancelled arbitrarily.

That’s where our “but David Seymour has perfectly-crafted soundbites and always picks up the phone!” attitude gets us: the neoliberal party looks to cost us billions of dollars in worthless “offsets” that we will be forced to buy for breaching our Paris commitments by not following the ETS, a climate policy advocated for and invented by neoliberals. Of course, none of that includes the staggering costs of not sufficiently adapting to or mitigating climate change, which are going to be much, much, much more. I’d say that we should just burn it all down, but that’s happening anyway. Happy days.