This is a bad policy that is short-sighted and textbook-based (as against real-world based), and will produce more problems than it tries to solve.

The theory (and that is a part of my problem – it’s formulated largely by people who sit in offices, write academic papers after studying statistics, and have little if any real classroom experience) is that class sizes have less effect on educational outcomes than quality of teachers.

That may be supported by some ways of analysing broad-brush data, but it doesn’t mean that there is a shred of validity in concluding that class sizes can get bigger if we just pay some teachers more. I’m 95% certain (sorry, hedging again!) that this equation does not work in policy setting or in practice, because it fails to take into account the human spirit as it reacts to classroom challenges and career options.

For the first five years of my working life, I was a secondary school teacher. I had a three-year degree and a one-year Diploma of Education. I chose that vocation during my senior high school days principally because I wanted to teach, wanted to play a part in making life good for the following generation. Sure, the money was good enough, but that was a secondary consideration, and looking back I would have done it even if paid a bit less.

I lasted five years (well, three fulfilling ones to be exact – I struggled in the final two). Gradually the job turned into being a classroom manager-cum-policeman. This affected my health and dulled my enthusiasm for the job.

I think I was quite a good teacher. The kids on average seemed to like me and I got pretty reasonable results from my senior classes. I took part in lots of extra-curricular activities, and at least until weariness began to take over, I put a lot of effort into preparing what I hoped would be interesting classes.

After a few years of huge and dedicated effort, I gave up because it was just too hard, with the large classes, to do good teaching while managing the kids who didn’t want to be there. And here’s the thing: if I had been paid another 20% in salary to stay on, I would have let it pass. It just wasn’t worth the stress and the effect it was having on the rest of my life. I had skills learned in my degree and had no trouble finding a new career that paid a similar amount but was far less wearying.

Another observation. The teachers at that first school were a mixed bunch. Some were career teachers who may have found difficulty doing some other jobs so they just stayed on doing their best but holding back enough for them to not be affected by the stress and workload. They had a way of teaching that got by, had pretty fixed classroom plans, and remained somewhat emotionally aloof. For them, the remuneration they got was probably as good as they would get anywhere because they were not top-notch in the creativity and passion stakes, so wouldn’t need to be diverted from looking for other jobs.

And there were other teachers who (as I had intended to do) immersed themselves into doing the best possible job for their students. The dedicated ones, who possibly unlike me had the energy and inner creativity to be excellent, interesting teachers who could stay the course. Had they been paid more due to their excellence, I’m sure they would have taken it gladly. But I doubt that any of them would have tried any harder as a result, because they were already doing great work. For them, pay was an important but secondary driver.

Now, according the our Education Minister and her department policy analysts, making a better education system is simply a matter of luring better teachers by offering more pay, but forgetting to explain the full offer: “We’ll offer you 15% more pay, but you’ll have to teach larger classes and spend even more time being the classroom policeman and doing paperwork.”

Some existing or prospective teachers may not mind larger classes, but most I suspect (based on my experiences) would not find that a particularly attractive proposition.

The sort of creative, passionate and energetic teachers we want are motivated generally by their love of what they are doing, not by being paid more (though a fair wage is important). And their main de-motivator is likely to be having to do more classroom policing as their class sizes increase. These people are the ones most likely to leave rather that sign up, because they have key personal skills that are suitable for other less stressful and more creative careers.

Conversely, the type of teacher who will do a better job just because they’re paid more may not be the type of teacher you actually need. Their passion may be more money-oriented than child-oriented. They may find it hard to get jobs elsewhere, so will do what they can to hang on as teachers. Hardly inspiring!

My firm conclusion is that if you want to attract quality teachers, don’t try paying them heaps more; just give them smaller classes to work with so they can spend more time educating and less time disciplining.

In Greece, Spain, the UK and now France the question is being asked in deadly earnest. Although the debt crisis may not be as great in New Zealand, we still have large and potentially crippling deficits to deal with and the question is being asked here too.

Should a nation and its citizenry tighten their belts to the point of real pain? Or should money be thrown at the debt problem in the hope that everyone spending more will produce more jobs and create an upward spiral in confidence that makes the money keep going around and eventually even out?

For most people it’s something of a left-vs-right issue, almost a good old class battle.

The people advocating austerity tend to be those with plenty enough already and who hold the levers of power with inside knowledge of money and debt markets and the like. They can still live comfortably with reduced services and less disposable income, and understand how to manoeuvre their assets to remain safe and even work the system and even the crisis to their advantage.

Meanwhile the people arguing for stimulus and growth tend to be those who don’t really understand how macro economies work, live to short-term goals and are envious of those with plenty.

I know that these are pretty simplistic stereotypes, but I think they’re close enough for a large number of people. But I also know there are a good number who do understand how economies work, who don’t live in relative wealth or poverty, and who have opposite opinions largely depending on their personal view of life (such as poorer people who religiously avoid debt).

I think there are essentially three approaches – two on the extremes (hard right and hard left) and one in the middle. As usual, as is apparently my character, I have a strong position near the middle. I believe that both austerity and stimulus can be achieved, and would work, if a particular combination of them is chosen. And in particular if our leaders (and we as their electors) are capable of looking to a distant enough horizon.

1. The hard right view is a country-wide version of the option applicable to a severely indebted individual – just stop spending and work harder. Pay back your debt (or reduce it to a manageable level) as quickly as is possible and stop paying all that wasted, dead-money interest.

I’m pretty certain that, while this is good advice in for most individuals and particularly for strict Presbyterians, this cannot work for countries, for several reasons.

First, any attempt to take a nation into emergency footing must include taking the citizens with you. This is no easier an ask than it ever was throughout history. Done badly, the result is almost inevitably and eventually expensive and destructive civil unrest and possibly revolution. Civil unrest is already a big problem in Greece and, apparently, in Spain, with France and UK now familiar with scary events of disorder and confrontation over lifestyle and immigration issues. Add to that the uprisings in Middle Eastern and Northern African countries and you can see what can happen if you anger your citizens without convincing them, intellectually and emotionally, of the benefits of your policies. Britain managed austerity measures during World War 2 because the citizens understood the reasons: I doubt very much this is the case now.

The second main reason why austerity can be counter-productive is that it can easily produce a downward spiral, for individuals and the country as a whole. The less money people have (having lost their jobs or seen cuts in their benefit entitlements) the less they spend and so the less local businesses make. This leads not only to more people unemployed and therefore with less money to spend, but also a fall in government income in taxes, meaning fewer services and lower benefits it can offer.

As the New Zealand government is now showing, the way out of this is to sell more assets to foreign “investors”, providing some immediate relief with new money in, but in the long run further reducing income streams from dividends, more of which go offshore. Put simply, this is not a sustainable situation but a slow, downward spiral that we will regret in decades to come.

2. The hard left view is to borrow money and distribute it as cash, tax cuts, and benefit payments. You give everyone more money in the hope that (a) they won’t put it all into the bank, and (b) they buy products made and sold locally, putting more money into local businesses who can then spend more themselves within the economy.

This works if two conditions are satisfied. First, if the resultant increased tax take (GST on sales, business income) by the government pays for at least the interest on the money borrowed to make it happen and preferably pay off some of the principal. Secondly, if the bulk of the money is in fact spent or invested locally.

But if the spending on imported stuff (or overseas trips) is more than the income our exporters can bring back into the country, then we’re going backwards into an ever worse position, with the only response being either a switch to austerity or even more (borrowed) cash stimulus to put off the day of reckoning.

Sadly, Kiwis being as they are, the debate is largely along these black-and-white lines – austerity or borrowing. Everyone is looking after number one and demanding of their political leaders whatever solution suits them best. If those struggling to keep up come into extra money, many tend to spend it on imported flash goods and trips to Oz, trying to retain their accustomed lifestyle. And if they are already well protected they resent money going to the undeserving, lazy strugglers and demand their government get tough.

3. My view is in between. As a country we should be careful with our money (a touch of austerity or at least a measure of caution), but make sure that as much as possible of the money the government borrows to keep us going is spent within the economy on projects that produce tangible and sustainable assets.

I’m okay with certain levels of debt. I know how important debt was for me to end up owning a house. And when things get hard, I’m okay with borrowing a bit more, but under certain conditions.

Certainly not as a stimulus for spending! The “free market” ideology of giving consumers the cash and letting them choose how to spend it is folly. By nature, too many of us see it as a windfall and spend it on treats or stuff we don’t need, often imported and not necessarily good for us. It’s unwise for New Zealand’s recovery to be dependent on retail activity – that’s the model of the rat keeping the treadmill going but getting nowhere.

Extra “stimulus” money (borrowed from overseas) should be spent on things which have long-term benefits for the country. To name a few, I can suggest: power projects (preferably using renewables), communications technology, encouragement for tech-based niche export industries, transport infrastructure, cleaner and better primary produce, ways of making the country more attractive to tourists, better education and health of younger people, and reducing the causes of costly expenditure associated with low socio-economic status.

If we borrowed more money but invested it in some or all of these areas, we would (a) keep the money in an economy that is actually making advances rather than just spinning the wheel, (b) employ people who would then spend it, (c) dampen down feelings of disenchantment or even revolt among ordinary Kiwis.

The National government and other advocates of sales of the Crafar farms (yesterday) and other chunks of prime land to overseas interests continually frame the debate as being about the pros and cons of “foreign investment”.

It’s as if we should be saying, “Wow, these overseas people love us so much and think so highly of our future that they want to give us something, invest in us”. Like a parent paying for a child’s university education, ultruistically investing in his or her future.

A foreign company buying a New Zealand farm or asset is not investing in NZ – it is buying a piece of it for their own benefit. We Kiwis may see it as benefitting us by giving us cash and perhaps easing access to a foreign market. But the buyer is doing it purely for their own benefit, be it long-term strategic and/or medium-term financial benefit.

If I buy your house, I’m not investing in you. I’m paying you some money and although the property stays where it is, you no longer have any control over it. I’m doing it because I expect to gain something of value to me, not because I want to help you or recognise your personal value and worth.

I’m sure the European settlers in the 19^th Century didn’t buy (and in some cases steal) land from Maori because they wanted to invest in Maori and show how much they valued Maori assets. They did it because they as future owners would benefit financially at the expense of the sellers.

So, whenever you see or hear the term “foreign investment” used in the media by advocates of off-shore sales, simply replace it with “asset sales to foreigners” and see if the argument sounds so convincing.

Goals like reducing the number of assaults on children, reducing criminal reoffending and increasing participation in early childhood education are what we all want, surely. And the government is stating publicly that it will be judged on these goals (although the five-year horizon takes it three years beyond the next election so there is a hunk of wriggle room).

So why does hearing and reading this news make me feel dejected and patronised? Because of the rider John Key added at the end of the announcement of the targets – that ministers and chief executives of the public service departments would be held accountable for achieving the targets.

All this in a series of moves that see funding cuts to government departments and laying off of public servants – the people you need to actually achieve the ambitious targets.

I doubt very much that if a target isn’t met, a minister will cop the blame. It will be passed down to the senior civil servants who will be blamed for not controlling or motivating their staff. CEOs will be sacked and further restructuring will take place, neither of which will actually achieve anything except make the prime minister and his government look like they’re doing something.

Achieving most if not all of the targets will need concrete plans and extra, well-aimed funding. How do you reduce the amount of crime, or the number of assaults on children? By putting in resources such as one-on-one social worker intervention within at-risk families. And resources like these need money.

Of course, what John Key and Steven Joyce and their friends are actually doing is framing the discussion on the size of the public service as an issue of how well they could be doing if they worked more efficiently, when in fact the real goal is a financial one – to cut funding and jobs in the public sector and thereby save money. That reality is negative and provocative, so they frame it in words that are more appealing – “we’re not trying to cut jobs and save money, we’re trying to see the public service operate more efficiently to achieve these targets”.

The Government can proclaim targets until the cows come home; without specific plans and the funded resources required to achieve them, they are merely a sideshow intended as a smokescreen to mislead an uncritical voting population.

Recently I made a submission to the Green Paper on Vulnerable Children. It was nice for the Government to ask us for our ideas and opinions on ways to reduce damage to children, but their invitation to submit came with an explicit, depressing condition – there will be no extra social welfare funds, so anything you suggest means funds coming from elsewhere. Again, great intentions, but no extra resources.

Or take the “reduce offending” target. How on earth can you do that without setting up rehabilitation and halfway-house programmes, which generally require lots of specialist staff and expensive resources?

So here’s the scenario we should expect. Take the target of “increasing the proportion of 18-year-olds with NCEA level 2 or its equivalent from 68% to 85%”.

1. Specific goals will be laid out by the education mullahs in Wellington to get better teachers, increase ‘efficiency’ by reducing the number of courses taught, or other Great Ideas.

2. Education practitioners and schools will point out that this can only be done without making huge class sizes if there is more funding and more and better trained teachers. The populace, encouraged by right-wing commentators, will say this is just the teachers’ unions exerting their power. The Ministry, which due to job cuts now has fewer people working on developing more professional development for teachers, says there is no money for teachers so just Do It.

3. In three or five years, statistics will suggest that the target has not been met. The politicians will work on massaging the stats hoping to make them look better, saying they don’t give the full picture or were based on faulty data or using changed baselines, and argue that it was the previous government’s fault anyway.

4. When this doesn’t quite work, they’ll say that the Department needs restructuring (“get rid of more back-office staff”) to achieve the results and plea for another term in office to prove they were on the right track. And sack a few CEOs – that always looks like strong government in the media.

I may be wrong, but I believe Hone is learning that he can express strong sentiments and forceful arguments publicly without the use of four-letter words. The result, as I observe it, is that we can now see that the man does indeed have depth and clarity in his thinking and simple eloquence in its expression.

I venture to say that if he can keep this up through the current parliamentary term, he will indeed be able to claim mana among those he represents as well as the respect of the broad population, in the same way that Pita Sharples has in recent years.

The Labour Party should now be reversing its silly policy of the last election campaign, when it said it would never work with Hone (while still being happy to work with a man of far less integrity in Winston Peters).

This morning I heard Hone speak on the radio about the social welfare changes, and I was impressed with his clarity of message. No fudging around, just calling a spade a spade. And no sounding like an angry victim. To me he represented and laid out in simple terms the counter-argument in the debate – that the “reforms” in reality are not about getting more people into jobs, but dog-whistling to the National party’s electorate that beneficiaries will be dealt to. And that if there is no actual training programmes for people looking for jobs, and no actual jobs being created, then there is no point.

In contrast, National’s minister for Social Welfare, Paula Bennett, sounded full of platitudes about unspecified training and hoped-for new jobs but offered no actual plans, just estimates by officials with no reasons for the numbers quoted.

I was similarly most impressed by Harawira’s response a few weeks ago to Paul Holmes’s sad, nasty Waitangi Day column in the Herald. There was Hone – usually despised by the mainly pakeha majority for his poor choice of words – this time being the voice of reason, not taking Holmes’s poisonous bait but rather just setting out the real facts, firmly but without vitriol, no punches pulled but all above the belt.

I was also surprised and Impressed to see how well Hone stood up and put forward a respectful, well reasoned position during the televised minor-leaders debate during the last election. His contributions were worthy of a major opposition party, not just the ramblings of a marginal party.

At the risk of sounding sycophantic, I could also express pleasure at seeing the grace, style and humour that Hone showed at the events at Waitangi. Given the prominent – and roundly criticised – role that his family has taken at the Waitangi Day celebrations/protests over the past decade or so, it was a pleasure to see a more measured and laid-back approach from their highest profile representative. I’m sure that he still feels strongly about the treaty issues that he has fought over, but he is learning to couch his convictions in a good humoured way that is mindful of other opinions.

I think that Hone Harawira is coming of age and, with the Maori Party leadership aging and struggling to keep their identity while being a government coalition partner, he (and his party) is well poised to become the main voice for Maori political aspirations through this decade.

I’ve blogged before about some politicians who have impressed me with their direct, honest approach to New Zealanders. Pita Sharples had, and maybe still has, mana but his position within government is making it ever harder to provide an independent Maori perspective. Steven Joyce I once saw as a refreshingly direct interviewee but now I can see that under pressure he is simply driven by the need to spin facts in order to avoid inconvenient counter-arguments. And John Key – again I was mildly impressed in his early prime ministerial days with his directness, but that has long worn off and now I see little to admire in his bland dismissal of anything that doesn’t interest or please him.

No, I may be wrong but …. Hone Harawira is now the person I could soon find myself respecting most among our political leaders.

Who could forget the gloating way our beloved leader goaded the unprepared leader of the opposition, Phil Goff, at the Christchurch debate, demanding that Goff present precise figures of how the economy would pan out under Labour’s proposals.

The assumption – largely unchallenged by the media who preferred to highlight and glory in the PM’s throwaway gloat – was that National could show the money.

Until yesterday, it was assumed by most Kiwis that Key and his finance minister Bill English knew how the dollars panned out. We were assured that privatisation of assets would bring in so much, and that we were well protected against the downside of the mess in Greece and the Eurozone.

And now we learn, straight and unambiguously from English’s mouth on radio, that the figures National was relying on for proceeds from asset sales were not just a “best guess” but in fact a complete guess.

Not only that, but the savings from not paying for borrowings will not compensate for loss of profits from retaining ownership. It is clear (if it wasn’t before) that privatisation of state assets is going to proceed come hell or high water, for ideological reasons alone.

My best guess is that a large number of New Zealanders who not still in thrall of our prime minister will be rather annoyed and disillusioned to realise that we were all sold a dog at the last election. The promise was based on just a guess of how the figures may pan out.

Treasury has advised the NZ government that the public education system needs to save money and to achieve this it should increase class sizes, using some of the money saved to pay the best teachers more. It justifies this policy via some convenient research that, we’re told, shows class sizes are not a factor in determining educational outcomes, whereas outstanding teachers are.

Decisions on how big classes are and how much you pay teachers lie along a wide spectrum. At the extremes are (1) having one teacher for every student, and (2) having classes of perhaps 500 under the tutelage of one fantastically qualified, motivated and remunerated teacher. Both are ridiculous.

All teachers and, I suspect, most parents believe that a key aim of educational policy should be to reduce rather than increase class sizes. Most of us can relate to experiences of some teachers and children hopelessly trying to work effectively within classes of 30 or 40.

I suspect the research being quoted is actually saying: If you have some extra money to spend in education, you should look at paying teachers more (in order to motivate them to do a better job or retain the best ones) rather than reducing class sizes. That may well be true, and at least it’s arguable. But it’s not the same as saying that if you want to save money you should therefore increase class sizes first.

The real question now is: in order to save money, should we edge the numbers up to larger classes, in the hope that the fewer teachers required will do a better job just because they’re paid an extra $10,000 pa (or whatever)?

I doubt there are many teachers who would take on the extra stress and workload of larger classes just for the sake of some extra pay. Apart, that is, for those teachers who are only in it for the money. (Free-market people always assume that everyone is in everything just for the money.) The teachers I know, while being happy to be better remunerated, would rather have less classroom stress and administrative workload than more money. This new policy will not encourage them to stay on if it is the workload that is currently causing them to leave the profession.

In any case, I hope the government can resist the temptation to tinker with the public education system for money-saving purposes. Good education will always be one of the most critical elements of a sustainable, intelligent society.

So if class size increase is truly on the agenda, under the highly doubtful argument that class sizes don’t matter, then just think how big you could make classes before things fall apart. Forty? Fifty? One hundred? According to Treasury’s argument, there is no upper limit at which the theory no longer applies, which is of course ridiculous. So every effort should be made to nudge sizes lower whenever possible and certainly not allow a creep upward.

Drawing the line likewise is presenting problems on the issue of the sale of New Zealand land to non-Kiwis. While once upon a time this could have been a black-and-white issue – ie, before the first parcels of land were sold to offshore owners – it is now a grey matter of how much is too much.

We are told that only 1% of New Zealand’s land mass is now in foreign hands, but also that the proportion of productive land held by non-Kiwis is 7%. That latter figure does raise alarm bells.

I’ve put my opinion on farm and land sales as clearly as I can in this posting: “How New Zealand could be bought out … again”, and in this earlier one: “Dairy farm buy-up will lead to NZ’s second great colonisation”. I can also see and follow the arguments for welcoming overseas investment, although my sentiment remains on the side of ‘no more sales’.

So it’s a question of where do you draw the line. The two extremes are (1) sell absolutely no land to foreigners (sorry, too late), and (2) open up all sales to the top bidders, wherever in the world they live (still possible, if we allow it).

This line is constantly moving, but in one direction only – upward. As long as NZ remains a desirable place to live and retire to (a flattering thought), make money from or secure your future food supply from, buyers from wealthier countries will continue to take part in (and usually win) land purchases.

And every parcel of land that goes to an overseas owner raises that percentage of our country that we no longer own, up from 7%. At what point does this reach alarm point, when our attitude will have to change or we must accept we are in the same position that Maori have found themselves – tenants and labourers in a country we no longer own? Ten percent? Twenty? Fifty?

This argument needs more long-term vision rather than mainly a way to maintain sovereign and private cashflow.

Since that post I’ve thought further about the practice of global trading currencies, securities, futures and financial instruments and have found that my attitude would better be described as abhorrence. Financial trading is actually a betting game with huge financial stakes for the players, which has huge but mostly hidden impacts on the lives of the rest of us – the 99.9% who don’t play these markets.

I was talking with a friend who in recent months has been making a comfortable living out of a scientific and business pursuit of online sports betting. I found myself reflecting on whether his income process was useful or damaging to society. My answer was “neither”.

I cannot for the life of me find anything in his new career that makes the world better. At least in Lotto a percentage of the stakes goes to community developments. Personal private-sector betting merely moves money around between winning and losing players, with the bookmaker taking a cut. At the same time, though, my friend is not actually damaging society. He’s not a problem gambler, and has systems built in that prohibit his activities from harming his family financially.

When I think of the money traders (commonly called “Wall Street”), I do not feel the same level of tolerance. Or any tolerance whatsoever. I may be wrong, but … I think they’re a blight on society, and that their departure would make every economy in every country more productive.

As with sports gambling, any damage they do among themselves is none of my concern really. These traders choose to play their game and accept that they will win some and lose some as they spend their day speculating on what will go up and what will come down in price. Some traders are bound to get into personal difficulties and probably affect the lives of their families, but apart from that, there’s no wider damage.

But unlike sports gambling, global financial traders DO have an impact on the way economies operate. With their betting they can influence the value of currencies: if they have enough funds the richest of them can outbid reserve banks and force exchange rates to move against the wishes of sovereign states. Although I don’t properly understand how it works, short selling of stocks or financial instruments can and often does artificially destroy the value of those assets. In other words, the activities of these gamblers actually affects the outcomes of what they are gambling on.

America being what it is (the land of the brave), there will always be a group of people there who are self-motivated to use whatever means they have to make easy money at the expense of others, without doing anything productive or useful at all. And the free enterprise-driven regulatory framework within which they play will always protect them. So I cannot see these trading leeches ever being eliminated unless capitalism collapses totally.

But my abhorrence of the money-market men is one reason why I support a global Financial Transaction Tax, a tiny percentage tax which would be placed on every financial transaction in the world. It may add a few dollars to my own personal banking each year, but just imagine how much money it would reap for the whole of society – and how much it could moderate the amount of betting going on among Wall Street traders – if every multi-million dollar transaction they do every day was subject to this tax!

Perhaps that would mean that these trading leeches would, however unwillingly, actually be contributing something to society for a change.

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we forget how grim it looked and sounded back then, when American banks such as Lehmans and other ginormous corporations went under or were bought and/or propped up by the US government, and it looked like the next Great Depression would happen?

It was just over three years ago now, but in the meantime various bailouts and much money-printing helped keep the wheels of commerce and consumerism spinning – at least for a while longer. And while they keep turning, we are led to believe that the problem is over. We may have a mild recession, we’re told, but the system will right itself in time and we’ll be able to get back to economic growth and raising our so-called standard of living.

I read this book aiming to understand a little better how it happened, and hoping to gain a view on how the capitalist system that the US has bestowed (or inflicted) upon the western world must be changed to turn things around to a sustainable system rather than business as usual which is merely delaying the inevitable.

You see – and I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging – I was one of those who sort of saw it coming, back before the experts were saying that “in hindsight the GFC was bound to happen but no-one could have predicted it beforehand”. It was in fact predictable, and this book shows how the storm gathered. Greed, irrational optimism and adherence to a credo that “values (particularly of real estate) always rise” combined to make most of us blind to what the dark clouds were telling us.

The author of The End of Wall Street is not an expert business reporter but simply a thorough researcher with a good reporter’s way of simplifying complex facts and parallel developments into a consistent, readable narrative. Not that I understood it all – but then not many people back then seemed to fully understand what the Wall Street traders in stocks, equities, securities, bonds, mortgage swaps, CDOs etc were actually doing. But I think I’ve got the gist of it now, thanks to Roger Lowenstein.

What the traders and banks were in fact doing was speculating on the value of anything they could get their hands on or could imagine mathematically (particularly future values), and more often than not with no inkling of the value or riskiness of those things. The name of the game was not owning anything but rather moving money, IOUs, stocks, bonds, mortgages, sliced mortgage securities, and other intangibles around between themselves, collecting a percentage along the way with each transaction along with any capital gain.

They made the hamster’s treadmill spin faster and faster (going nowhere in particular, of course) until, one day, it seized up. Perhaps a bearing broke or a spoke snagged. The Wall Street traders and banks were left with nothing tangible, nothing of intrinsic value, and no way of borrowing money to pay for the stuff they had in their hands or the debts they owed when the treadmill snagged.

Now we’re seeing something similar in effect, though different in substance, in the Euro crisis. All bailout plans are merely attempts to keep the hamster’s treadmill moving, short-term ways of keeping cash moving around by borrowing from anywhere and using the period of time before repayment is due to work out some way of doing it again to keep the lenders happy.

Anyone who publicly says what is pretty obvious – that this cannot be sustained even in the medium term – is considered an unwanted pessimist or doom-merchant. The goal of the wheel-greasing process is to maintain enough confidence among consumers and money dealers to see the system through another day, week or month. The horizon appears to be little further than this.

My view remains as I wrote in August in this post, that it’s the change of tide we should be reacting to, not the waves. The tide is coming in and we’re the children on the beach trying to build defences and diversion channels to stop the individual waves from destroying our sandcastles. In the end, the tide will win.

As Roger Lowenstein concludes, the lessons are there for the learning, and if we don’t learn them and make the changes necessary to our capitalist system, we will continue to get it wrong.

The curious thing for me is that I don’t seem to be able to muster much feeling about it, one way or the other. Why would that be?

Hopefully it’s not that I’ve passed a certain age when the discomfort of unpopular protesting is unattractive; when the people seen on the TV in their occupation tents look scruffy, insincere or thoughtless; when I think I have better things to do with my limited time. Pity help me if I’m letting that level of superficiality affect my judgment!

My first problem (and that of so many other people who are not up with spontaneous social media networking and the like) is that the target of the Occupy movement – especially in New Zealand – is not clearly defined. On the Vietnam war and the Springbok tour, we all knew precisely what the issue was and what we protesters (and our opposition) wanted. With Occupy, the target appears to be the ultra-rich 1% of the capitalist world. Or is it the capitalist system as a whole? Or is it the establishment? I guess the ambiguity reflects the difference between a “campaign” and a “movement”.

And if the target of the occupiers is one or all of these, exactly what is it that they would rather do and how would they start to achieve it. Unlike Vietnam or “the tour”, there is no single action or policy change that will stop excessive greed/wealth/capitalism.

So I find it difficult to rouse a feeling of solidarity with the occupiers as they camp out on public land in Auckland, Wellington and several other centres. Also, compared with the size of the occupying “forces” and the policing responses in America and the UK, the Kiwi groups are pretty ineffectual, apart from causing some short-term damage to grass cover, some health issues and general annoyance to a minority of opponents.

It’s actually a problem for protesters if no-one is inconvenienced or angered by them, so it is to be expected that the occupiers will persist and try new tactics even when many think they’ve had their fair time. But in the end their gains will be small, if any.

On the other side of the coin, the right to protest is in my opinion absolutely vital to any healthy society. Near the top of my list of life’s guiding principles will always be the knowledge that all it takes for a dictatorship to be established is for good people to say and do nothing. To not stand up against bad policies is to pay no respect to the people over the centuries who fought for democracy and individual freedom.

So the occupiers are right to keep before our faces one of the biggest societal problems the world is now facing – the growing gap between the ultra-wealthy 1% and the so-called 99% who must show restraint in their life choices or are simply too poor to have any economic options at all. The issue should be something we are all aware of and prepared to think about.

Is the wealth gap one of our biggest problems? Like an increasing number of commentators in recent months, I believe it is. Particularly the notion that the gap between the top few percent and the rest is actually widening. It’s a huge problem – and a potential time bomb – because the consequences affect every part of every society – even, eventually, the top 1%. But that’s too big an issue for me to tackle in this article, so I’ll give it some further thought in a separate post soon.