Lessons From A “Legendary Teacher” Prof. James R. Flynn 1934 – 2020

A Truly Wise Man: For Flynn, the contest between truth and falsehood was never about “bad people” peddling “bad ideas”: it was only ever about inadequately supported propositions. And, the best way to demonstrate their inadequacy was to challenge them on their own terms, in public, with the evidence.

“A LEGENDARY TEACHER”, was how University of Otago Vice-Chancellor, Harlene Hayne, described Professor James R. Flynn (1934-2020). The thousands of first-year politics students who attended his lectures down the years will certainly attest to the accuracy of Haynes’ description. The stories that grew up around the often slipper-shod professor were as colourful as the man who inspired them. Following his death last Friday, at the age of 86, “Jim” Flynn’s former students will be recalling those stories with that tearful mixture of sadness and pride that distinguishes the passing of all truly outstanding individuals.

Flynn was not just a teacher of university students, however, but of two whole generations of New Zealand leftists. Born in Washington DC, Flynn was that rarest and most admirable of things – an American socialist. There are very few democratic nations in the world where it is harder to ply the socialist trade than the United States, and those who make the attempt require the most extraordinary fortitude.

The man after whom Flynn’ son is named, Eugene Victor Debs, spent years in a federal prison for the “crime” of opposing military conscription during the First World War. Flynn himself, although a prodigiously talented scholar, was repeatedly fired from his university posts on account of his membership of Debs’ Socialist Party of America. It didn’t help his career prospects that Flynn was also an active participant in the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 60s. Not when the colleges that hired (and then fired) him were located south of the Mason-Dixon Line!

The American South’s loss proved to be New Zealand’s gain, however, when Flynn and his wife, Emily, sought refuge in what was still regarded, in the late-1960s, as one of the world’s most successful social-democratic nations.

The politics department which Flynn brought into being at the University of Otago, and which he would lead for the next 30 years, largely eschewed the sterile empiricism of “political science”, offering its students, instead, a strong grasp of the philosophical and historical origins of political ideas. To do well in Flynn’s “political studies” department, students not only had to be able to count, they also had to be able to read. (Nothing so alarmed Flynn in the latter part of his career than the dramatic fall-off in ‘voluntary’ reading among under-graduates.)

Although the contemporary university is legally obligated to be the “critic and conscience” of society, it is an obligation more honoured in the breach than in the observance. That could never be said of Flynn, however, who threw himself into the political life of his adopted country with gusto. He had hardly unpacked his belongings before he was quietly advising the Leader of the Labour Opposition, Norman Kirk, on New Zealand’s foreign policy options. In Dunedin, he soon became one of the leading-lights in the Committee on Vietnam. Whether it be leading an anti-war march down George Street, or debating socialism with his students in the Captain Cook Tavern, the lanky figure of the bearded professor soon became a fixture of the academic left in Otago.

In New Zealand, as in the rest of the world, the “Red Seventies” were roughly shouldered aside by the Neoliberal Eighties and Nineties. For Flynn, one of the most egregious effects of the “free-market” counter-revolution was the re-emergence of “Scientific Racism” – especially the notion that the IQ of Blacks was inherently inferior to that of Whites.

To counter this old and pernicious heresy, Flynn immersed himself in, and mastered, the intricacies of psychology, statistical science and higher mathematics. The result: an empirical demonstration of the social malleability of intelligence “scores”, now known, universally, as the “Flynn Effect”, undercut decisively the arguments of the new “racial scientists” – most particularly, Arthur Jensen and Charles Murray.

It was a genuinely “classical” demonstration of the way in which propositions one believes to be without foundation should be countered. Not for Flynn the contemporary preference for naming and shaming one’s opponent’s on social media; “de-platforming” them from all university venues; and presenting them with the choice of either offering-up a humiliating recantation and apology, or, losing their jobs. Flynn simply went in search of the evidence. If it wasn’t there, then the propositions of one’s opponents could be exposed as academically unsustainable.

For Flynn it was never about “bad people” peddling “bad ideas”: it was only ever about inadequately supported propositions. And, the best way to demonstrate their inadequacy was to challenge them on their own terms, in public, with the evidence.

It is, without doubt, one of the most important intellectual lessons of this “legendary teacher”: that truth is the product of free and open debate; and that any university unwilling to stand up for free and open debate is, ultimately, unworthy of the name.

Arguably, Flynn’s most important political lesson is the principle he did so much to enshrine in both the NewLabour Party, and in its successor, the Alliance. Significantly, it is based on the same intellectual rigour that gave birth to the Flynn Effect.

Essentially, Flynn’s political argument was a simple one. It is ethically insupportable and, ultimately, electorally self-defeating, for a left-wing political party to make promises to the electorate which it cannot show to be fiscally sustainable. Left-wing political leaders, said Flynn, have a moral obligation to demonstrate, by drawing up a mathematically coherent Alternative Budget, how all the good things they are promising will be paid for.

Does this approach have a political cost? Of course it does! Voters don’t like to hear that their taxes will need to be raised and/or new taxes imposed. But, Flynn’s argument was that until the electorate can be persuaded that paying higher taxes is a necessary condition for living in a just society, then any electoral victories on the part of the Left will only ever be temporary. The mission of the true democratic socialist, argued Flynn, was not, primarily, to win votes in the short term, but to effect a long-term change of voters’ hearts and minds – by telling them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

Idealistic? Quixotic? Naïve? Flynn was called all of those things in his time. At no point, however, did I hear anyone, from either the far- or the centre-left, demonstrate the fault in Flynn’s operating principles for a genuinely democratic socialism. As he proved in relation to race and intelligence, if the numbers do not stack-up, then neither does the argument.

Though a life-long atheist, Flynn was not above offering his classes and comrades the odd biblical quotation. One of his favourites was from the Book of Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun that – The race is not to the swift, Nor the battle to the strong, Nor bread to the wise, Nor riches to men of understanding, Nor favour to men of skill; But time and chance happen to them all.

I always thought of it as a curiously self-refuting quotation. For if time and chance determine all things, then the quest for truth and justice is vain and doomed to disappointment. But, perhaps, it is in that quote from Ecclesiastes that we find the true measure of James R. Flynn: philosopher, mathematician, socialist. That in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, the pursuit of truth and justice remains the only accurate test of our determination to become fully human.

This essay was originally posted on the Interest.co.nz website on Monday, 14 December 2020.

Paying For Your Party’s Promises.

Fully Informed? Labour’s 2017 promises raised expectations that were little short of revolutionary. Unfortunately, they were never adequately shaken through the fiscal sieve. The hard economic work was not done – and it shows. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s critics have long complained that her grasp of the way the New Zealand economy works is alarmingly weak.

“HOW ARE WE going to pay for it?” If you are in the business of “transformational” politics, that is the $64 billion question. It was a question aspiring transformers were always tasked with answering back in the days when the Alliance was a “thing”. A big thing, too. For a few intoxicating years in the early-1990s, the Alliance regularly outpolled the Labour Party.

It frightens me to think that there will be people voting in next year’s general election who weren’t actually born when the Alliance was going strong. Not for them the memories of a rampant Jim Anderton leading his rag-tag left-wing coalition to an 18 percent showing in the 1993 election. No memories at all of when the Greens were not a party in their own right, but a leading constituent party (alongside the socialist NewLabour Party) in Anderton’s merry throng.

It was one of the things that I most admired about Jim Anderton: his absolute commitment to showing the voters exactly how he planned to pay for his promises. Every year John Lepper and Petrus Simons, the two economists Anderton had retained to advise him, would get together with the young – and not so young – policy wonks that flocked to the Alliance’s colours and thrash out what Anderton called his “Alternative Budget”.

The Alliance never ran from the accusation that they were “tax and spend” socialists – they embraced it. Those Alternative Budgets were the proof. Anybody who cared to could calculate, with considerable precision, by how much their taxes would rise, and identify exactly on what the additional revenues would be spent.

Of course there were sceptics, both in and out of the Alliance, who questioned this approach. “Why would people vote for a party promising to raise their taxes?” – they demanded. The patient reply was perennially supplied by Professor James Flynn: “Because promising people progressive changes without first detailing how they are to be paid for is unethical.”

Flynn understood that real change could only come when the people offering it enjoyed the confidence of those who make change possible – the voters. If you hadn’t already convinced them that it should be done, then it wouldn’t be – couldn’t be – done.

The Alliance made a great many mistakes before it finally imploded in 2002, but its greatest mistake (or, more accurately, its leader’s greatest mistake) was to set aside Professor Flynn’s sage advice in the interests of consolidating a coalition agreement with Helen Clark’s Labour Party.

Labour, however, was promising too little to accomplish real change because it was unwilling to tax the voters too much. Even worse, it was point-blank refusing to roll back the “Rogernomics Revolution”. Given that rolling back Roger Douglas’s neoliberal revolution was the Alliance’s raison d’être, Anderton’s acceptance of Labour’s refusal to challenge the status quo amounted to political suicide.

But, surely, all this is the dead-and-buried politics of the unlamented twentieth century? What has the long-defunct Alliance got to do with today’s politics?

Two word answer: Jacinda Ardern. The Prime Minister’s performance at the lectern in the Beehive theatrette on Monday (12/8/19) was a sad and deeply frustrating vindication of both Jim Anderton and Jim Flynn. All those transformational chickens set loose by Jacinda in the election campaign of 2017 are now flocking home to roost.

Labour’s promises, raising little short of revolutionary expectations, were never adequately shaken through the fiscal sieve in the manner of the Alliance’s fully-coasted manifesto. The hard economic work was never done – and it shows. The Prime Minister’s grasp of the way the New Zealand economy works appears weaker than that of the humblest Alliance parliamentary candidate. The latter were thoroughly schooled in basic economics by Messrs Lepper and Simon. It was always the case with the Alliance that, from the very beginning, its leaders understood which questions they absolutely had to be able to answer.

It makes me wonder whether, in the gloom of all these gathering economic storm-clouds, Labour’s leaders ever wish that they had a Jim Flynn to remind them of the ethics of knowing how social and economic transformation will be paid for – before it is promised.

Probably not. Very little provokes the scorn of Labour MPs like a favourable reference to the Alliance. Hardly surprising, really, because the Alliance was always the party Labour could have been; should have been; but wasn’t.

This essay was originally published by The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 16 August 2019.

Budget Alternatives And Alternative Budgets

Walking The Talk: The NLP's 1991 Alternative Budget. NewLabour's leader Jim Anderton understood the political and ethical rewards accruing from his party's willingness to show the voters not only what they wanted to do - but how they intended to pay for it. Act's new leader, Jamie Whyte, has just picked up the idea. What's stopping Labour from putting some numbers alongside its promises?

 

IT WAS ONE OF THE THINGS I admired most about the NewLabour Party (and later the Alliance) – it’s Alternative Budget. From its inception, in 1989, until its absorption into the Alliance, the NLP Leader, Jim Anderton, made a point of pre-empting the Government’s official Budget Statement with one of his own.

 

Along with Anderton, himself, the alternative document was put together by the NLP’s economic consultants, John Lepper and Petrus Simons, with invaluable input from the University of Otago’s Professor James R. Flynn. The irrepressible Flynn was the party’s unofficial conscience when it came to fiscal policy, insisting that it was politically unethical and tactically foolish to offer voters all manner of benefits without, at the same time, demonstrating how the party intended to pay for them.

 

It was Flynn’s stated intention to make not only his party comrades, but also the wider electorate, understand that democratic socialist outcomes could not be guaranteed in the absence of democratic socialist taxes. He knew that the fastest and most effective way of turning a party of idealists into a party of realists and pragmatists was by showing them how high income taxes would have to rise in order for them to cover the costs of what Bill English describes sneeringly as “nice to haves”.

 

It was very instructive to observe how the policy maximalists would wince when they saw how high the income taxes of not just the obscenely wealthy but ordinary middle-class professionals and skilled wage workers would have to rise if the Party’s pet projects were to go ahead. The wily old Flynn knew that the prospect of having to levy politically suicidal income tax rates would spur the membership into moderating their demands and searching for alternative methods of revenue-gathering. The result was the NLP/Alliance’s adoption of the Financial Transactions Tax – a measure which, very neatly, solved the problem of how to pay for paradise.

 

The preparation of an alternative budget is a highly educational (not to say therapeutic) exercise for any political party, but it is especially useful for radical parties like the NLP/Alliance and ACT.

 

That the ACT Party’s new leader, Jamie Whyte, not only recognises this but has actually gone ahead and released an alternative budget bodes very well for the party’s electoral future. At the very least it has forced ACT’s members into thinking seriously about where they want the country to go and how they propose to take it there.

 

Getting In On The Act: Jamie Whyte recently released his party's own Alternative Budget.

 

As neoliberals, not democratic socialists, the task confronting ACT’s members would have been pretty much the opposite of the one facing the NLP/Alliance. Rather than starting with all the things they’d like to have and then calculating how much tax would be needed to pay for them, ACT’s members began by asking themselves how far taxes should be lowered and then worked out how many government services and transfer payments would have to be eliminated to make that figure possible.

 

The answer, of course, turned out to be: “A helluva lot!”

 

Whether the scale of expenditure cuts required to produce a top income tax rate of 17 percent made ACT’s members wince I do not know, but, after reading their alternative budget, I’d wager that very few of them were in any doubt about the radicalism of their party.

 

Why 17 percent?

 

Well, I have a theory about this seemingly random number. Originally, I suspect, the desired top tax rate was deemed to be 10 percent. But, when ACT’s economic advisors told them that to bring the top rate down to that level would require them taking a very large and a very blunt axe to health, education and welfare spending, they reluctantly decided that, 10 percent being electorally suicidal, a higher figure was required. Hence 17 percent.

 

Set at this level, Whyte is able to reassure (the Epsom?) voters that taxes can be lowered dramatically without slaughtering the New Zealand electorate’s sacred cows.

 

It is interesting to note that immediately following the release of its alternative budget the value of ACT’s “stocks” on iPredict rose to 3.8 cents. In other words the political speculators now expect ACT to win nearly 4 percent of the Party Vote.

 

Why, then, does Labour not produce an Alternative Budget? Wouldn’t such an exercise be of enormous assistance in putting some credible flesh on the bones of Opposition policy? Would it not ensure that when John Key, channelling Tom Cruise, began shouting: “Show me the money!” the Leader of the Opposition was well equipped to do exactly that?

 

Because, when you think about it, there’s really no excuse for an opposition party not being able to cover its policy bones with detailed flesh of. Opposition politicians would, after all, like us to believe that they have what it takes to form an alternative government. So, surely, within its ranks there ought to be sufficient wit and experience to pull together an alternative budget?

 

Oh yes, I know, the political “strategists” will have none of it. “Why show the Government your hand?” They will ask. “Why risk Treasury ripping all your numbers to shreds? The resources just aren’t there for the Opposition to even contemplate producing a document to challenge the government’s budget statement.”

 

But no one’s asking for that sort of detail. All Labour’s supporters want to hear is the two Davids – Cunliffe and Parker – making confident replies to Government and news media questions about numbers. The policies of the alternative government have got to add up. If working people are going to be better-off – or worse-off – as a result of Labour’s policies, then surely they have a right to know by how much? If Phil Twyford wants to be believed when he says the next Labour Government will build 10,000 affordable homes every year, then he must be able to quantify “affordable” in a way that makes sense to a young couple bringing in $70,000 per year.

 

The so-called “cheese-on-toast” budget that National will deliver on 15 May is unlikely to be spectacular – but it doesn’t have to be. The Government will simply point to their handling of the Global Financial Crisis; to steadily expanding economic activity; to rising business confidence and falling unemployment and say: “See? It’s steady as she goes. The economy’s in safe hands.” The advantages of incumbency are numerous and usually decisive.

 

Unless.

 

Unless they are systematically undermined by an Opposition with a clear and compelling story to tell. Using broad brush strokes to outline their alternative narrative, but also supplying sufficient detail for ordinary people to be able to imagine themselves into the story.

 

If there really is an alternative – for God’s sake, let’s hear it!

 

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Wednesday, 14 May 2014.