Arthur Grimes

And once you've got those three, you're pretty happy.

But all three of them are important, not just one of them.

Yeah, look, I don't think many people would disagree with the aims or, you know, the utopian aims of it.

Obviously, we have to live within the planetary boundaries and especially in terms of climate change.

That's absolutely crucial because that's like a hard constraint eventually.

We see terrible living standards in certain countries, although almost every country has vastly increased their living standards over the last 20, 30, 40 years.

And inequality across the world has reduced a lot over that time as well.

largely because the poorest countries like China have become much wealthier.

So the poorest people in the world are now middle-income people.

They were the poorest and now they're middle-income.

So there's been a big move towards greater equality in the world, but I think most people would share the view that reduced inequality would be a good thing.

What it reminds me of, not that I was around at the time, but Keynes in the pre-World War II period predicted that his grandchildren would only work 15 hours a week.

And what was that, 750 hours a year, which is less than what they're suggesting here.

And he was completely wrong, of course.

uh i mean i see nothing in the report to suggest how it could happen that's that's the problem with it it's just sort of just dreamland really i thought it was a spoof when i first read it um yeah and i was wondering who put it out but it turns out maybe they're serious but um

There's just nothing there about how to achieve it, you know, and how would you go about doing it?

I'll give you an example.

We've often heard in New Zealand that, you know, we don't need to get any richer because, you know, we're pretty well off and we're happy, you know, pretty happy most of the time.

The problem is that we have this place called Australia next to us where anybody can go and work and people leave to go to Australia, not because it's a fantastic place to live, you know, if they've got...

spiders and snakes and it's too hot and all that sort of stuff.