Written By: advantage - Date published: 9:34 am, December 20th, 2020 - 22 comments
New Zealand like most countries across the world in the last year, has gone deeper and deeper into public debt.
It’s pretty clear that the New Zealand government’s response to economic crisis from lockdowns and global trade crashes by spending tonnes of debt money has been extremely effective.
Yet for some, it’s simple: debts must always be paid back.
We can still remember how Greece was treated by Germany during the GFC: pay the public debt you owe to us, and suffer.
Surely our huge new debt means taxes have to get raised in the future?
Population has always been a critical driver of events and prior to the Industrial Revolution we lived in a zero sum world, with energy and resources effectively limited to that which could be harvested from photosynthesis, one person’s gain was at the limit, always someone else’s loss. Very low density hunter gather populations could thrive (often quite nicely) because they rarely approached their local resource limits, but the invention of agriculture changed this dramatically. The next 10,000 odd years of recorded history is a long story of
local competition for fundamentally constrained opportunities.
There were only three ways to survive and dominate, use what you had more efficiently, take what someone else already had, or move to somewhere not yet occupied. One drove warfare, conquest and empire, the other drove innovation and intensification … yet the diffuse and intermittent nature of sunshine and climate imposed a strict zero sum game on both of these strategies, a