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January 4, 2005

The Gloomocracy

One thing that always rankles me about New Zealand is the way New Zealanders emphasise the negative side of everything. Sometimes it's because complaining will push someone's selfish agenda. Most of the time I think it's just a national habit of whining, and reporting on whining. It's intensely annoying. It's also actually harmful to the country and its people.

I just saw a particularly good example. The Heritage Foundation and the Wall Street Journal did their 11th annual ranking of countries' "economic freedom". Roughly they're measuring how much government intervention there is in the economy. (It's a conservative think tank, so more is necessarily bad.) New Zealand was ranked fifth most economically free in the world, behind only Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg and Estonia, and hence ahead of countries such as the United States, Australia, Japan, etc etc. So what was the TV headline for this impressive performance?

NZ SLIPS IN ECONOMIC FREEDOM

Because last year we were third in the world. Sigh.

Posted by roc at January 4, 2005 11:36 PM

Comments

I don't think you should let the media get you down Roca. No matter where you are they'll put a negative spin on things just to make it sound more 'tragic' or 'devastating'.
Bad news sells more papers!

Posted by: Adam Demeter at January 5, 2005 12:21 PM

Roc,
I urge you to come to Germany for some time. Then you'll see that Germany probably far outranks New Zealand in terms of your so-called "Gloomocracy".

Posted by: Simon at January 5, 2005 12:28 PM

Did you know that pessimistic people are actually the more realistic ones?
Apparently the New Zealanders are extremely realistic. ;-)

Posted by: Martijn at January 5, 2005 7:25 PM

I remember hearing a Swede complain that life is really tough over there because their estate tax is so high...

Posted by: Paddy at January 7, 2005 3:45 PM