16 June 2007

New Zealand Unleashed: the country, its future, and the people who will get it there

by Steven Carden with Campbell Murray

Random House New Zealand, 318 pp, $39.99
Reviewed by Roger Kerr

Someone at Random House had a bad hair day over this book.

The problems start with the very first line, which reads, “Steven Carden is an Engagement Manager at the manag-ement ( sic ) consulting firm, McKinsey and Co., in New Zealand.”

Worse than numerous other misspelt words are numerous garbled sentences: “Understanding and applying the rules that complex adaptive systems, then, should be a part of New Zealand's thinking about the future”; “Even after the Britons eventually could afford to use bricks again, centuries later, they had to import them bricks from Flanders bricks had not been produced in Britain since Roman times.”

More importantly, a tougher editor would have encouraged the author to go beyond a lot of familiar material and conventional wisdom and get more substance, originality and takeaway ideas into the narrative.

For the book is commendably well-intentioned: the author and his colleague are young, highly educated New Zealanders, with an impressive command of science, history, psychology and other disciplines, who want the country to be an economic success story.

And it has a tone of engaging humility: its stated aim is not to be “an exercise in policy formulation” and it neither wallows in national self-flagellation nor minimises future challenges.

The material is organised in four parts dealing respectively with the uncertain and fast-paced nature of the world today; change and complexity; enterprise and adaptability in New Zealand's past; and some ideas on fostering creativity and a willingness to change in future.

Much of this, in the genre of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock , is interesting if not exactly new (technological trends, globalisation, the entrepreneurial history of Maori and so forth). Some is a little overblown for my taste: societies in the past have often been confronted with staggering new developments and massive upheavals like the First World War and the Great Depression. Are current technological developments more society-changing than electricity, the telephone, air travel, the contraceptive pill or the supermarket? Are we so much more knowledgeable and sophisticated today – for example, has any modern writer surpassed Shakespeare's understanding of the human condition? The best answer to anyone describing their paralysis in choosing a mechanically complex motor car is: have you ever tried to buy a horse?

It is hard to disagree with the book's conclusion that a prosperous New Zealand must be creative, adaptable, dynamic and willing to embrace continuous change, though it is rather banal. And are New Zealanders as change-averse as the book sometimes suggests? The 1984-87 Labour government introduced changes that were radical by past standards (though not by the standards of policies elsewhere), yet it was re-elected in 1987 with an increased majority.

It is when it comes to economics that the book is at its weakest. Too often people with a management consulting background look at the economy as a collective entity (like a firm) and talk the language of strategy and visions. I tend to share the sentiments of a Russian politician at the end of the 20th century, “Spare us any more national visions!” There is too much use of the ‘we word' (‘we as a nation' must do this or that) and too little recognition that the role of government in a free (and prosperous) society is not to plan strategies but to create an environment for individual human flourishing.

Thus the book gets it wrong when it sees the economy as a mechanistic equilibrium system and when it describes Friedrich Hayek as a “conservative economist”. One of Hayek's celebrated essays was ‘Why I am not a Conservative' and like Schumpeter (whose work is also mentioned) he emphasised spontaneous, decentralised entrepreneurship and ‘creative destruction'.

Likewise New Zealand hasn't “grown relatively poorer over the past three decades”; it has held its own over the past 15 years as the benefits of the reforms came through (although it may now be sliding again). Myths about New Zealanders being “the worst savers in the OECD” are recycled uncritically.

Unleashing New Zealand comes closest to a takeaway idea when it says, “Adaptable societies must have cultures and institutions that facilitate freedoms, especially freedom to experiment on a small (or large) scale.”

It's just a pity that the editor did not push the author harder to explore these themes, to make more of the insights of books like Virginia Postrel's The Future and its Enemies and Richard Epstein's Simple Rules for a Complex World , and to reflect on the implications of today's freedom-reducing and interventionist policy trends for New Zealand's future prosperity.

Roger Kerr is the executive director of the New Zealand Business Roundtable.

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