Even at his most philosophical, columnist Matthew Hooton is a realist. That made his economic alignment of New Zealand with the likes of Kazakhstan just a little scary.
He is entitled to be philosophical (he has a doctorate in the discipline) but last week’s column in the New Zealand Herald was brutally material: If we continue our steady-as-she-goes, borrow-and-hope, growth-will-come economic prescription of the past 17 years our economic peers will be Bulgaria, Russia and Kazakhstan.
I liked his colourful analogy suggesting that we have been kidding ourselves: “There never was a rock-star economy, except in the sense of a once-successful arthritic band loading themselves up on cocaine and methamphetamine to get through the nostalgia tour.”
His bottom line was that our level of productivity sucks. Per-capita GDP growth has stagnated at less than 0.5 per cent since 2008.
Hooton’s focus was on the economy as a whole but his sobering commentary made me think about the long-term effect of gross domestic product growth on media sustainability.
His timing was a little unfortunate. It took the shine off some positive news from two of our media companies in the same week. Continue reading “NZ news media need higher productivity – from the rest of us”
