Grossly deceptive product

January 8, 2008

Dear Sir,

So Bermuda has a GDP of $5.35 billion which equates to $83,935 per person, the highest in the world beating even tiny Luxembourg and the mighty USA.

A word of caution; GDP figures are notoriously inaccurate and this is particularly true when someone tries to calculate the amount of services produced within a given territory. It was tough enough to do this when an economy consisted largely of tons of steel, bushels of wheat, or millions of automobiles — things that could easily be counted — but now that economies are largely services it is an all but impossible task to collect the data and accurately to calculate the value of invisible things such as financial advice, insurance premiums, audit fees, and meals cooked not to mention music compositions, literature, computer programming, and medical research.

It is no wonder that GDP means not only Gross Domestic Product, but also Grossly Deceptive Product. There is much guesswork involved by statisticians and they are highly dependent on business providing accurate and timely information ¿ something that is not top of a CEO's in-tray. Don't bet the ranch on the accuracy of the numbers produced. Probably the best way to treat GDP figures is the same as any other government statement; never believe them until it has been officially denied. Fictional or not, the numbers are the best we have and there is no doubt that they are stellar, and tell a good story.

My scepticism, however, should not detract from the remarkable achievements of the Bermuda economy, surely one of the best that has ever existed as I tried to explain in my 2004 book "The Economy of Bermuda". For a remote island with no natural resources to be at the pinnacle of the world's successful economies is no mean achievement. We enjoy one the world's highest standard of living and we enjoy one of the highest qualities of life. However, we should maintain a sense of proportion that befits a people dependent on brains to make a buck.

For example, with 20.5 square miles and with 640 acres per square mile this means that each acre in Bermuda produces income of $407,774 per year. At a capital value of say 10 times earnings this means that each acre in Bermuda is worth more than $4 million. Is it any wonder we can no longer afford to have farms? Or produce affordable housing?

It would be boring in the extreme to give a dissertation on the many limitations of GDP calculations but one way of avoiding boredom is to list some bizarre and nonsensical recommendations in which Bermudians could increase our spectacular GDP even more. Here is a list of ten ways to increase our GDP even more:

1. Pay more in taxes as government expenditure is included in the GDP. As we all know government projects have massive cost overruns (think Berkeley Institute) and the money disappears into outer space ¿ or into the back pockets of contractors. Financial incompetence always adds to the GDP.

2. Get divorced; legal fees, two houses with furniture, and two cars are all important in the GDP. Divorces stimulate the economy.

3. Burn down your house and don't worry insurance will pay for it and rebuilding it will employ lots of people in the construction industry. If you don't want to burn it down break the china, the furniture, and your television sets. Replacing them creates lots of jobs in the retail business an important component of the GDP.

4. Eat junk food, do not exercise, smoke heavily and get your wife and children to do the same. Obesity is good for the economy. The more spent on medical care the higher the GDP. There is a bonus to all of this; unhealthy people die at an early age and this means that per capita income increases because it is not shared as widely.

5. Send your wife out to work, and hire a maid. If your wife takes care of the children and does the housework that is not counted in the GDP. When your wife works that counts toward the GDP, as does the cost of the maid.

6. Riot and burn your neighbourhood because rebuilding adds millions to the GDP.

7. Form a gang and shoot up your rivals, deal in drugs ¿ but more importantly get caught. Building and managing prisons is a growth area, and think of all the security guards that will be needed in gang warfare.

8. Pollute the sea ¿ an oil spill would be fantastic. Think of all the ships, chemical sprays and people needed to clean up the Great Sound. This creates lots of jobs and makes the GDP look good.

9. If you are really ambitious, start a riot. Think of all the equipment and police needed to restore order. Such expenses add big time to the GDP.

10. Go to church and pray for a hurricane, or even better an earthquake. Disasters are fantastic for the GDP because of all the rebuilding that has to take place. After Fabian, you may recall that many people said that hurricanes were good for business ¿ and they were if you were in the construction industry.

I could list another 50 ridiculous and outlandish things to do that would boost the level of our GDP, but in reality they would not make us better off but would give the illusion of monetary prosperity.

Of course, we could do the opposite and simply stop working and go to the beach, stay in bed, or play tennis. This would be much more pleasant, but our GDP would plummet and we would become some of the poorest people in the world even if we were happier as a result. Or we could give up our paid jobs and become charitable workers ¿ feeding the homeless, visiting the sick, helping old people, walking stray dogs, or committing to some other good and noble cause. This is not a good idea for such things are not included in the GDP calculation ¿ but then neither are bad things like drug dealing.

We should welcome our ever increasing prosperity, recognise that GDP is a useful indicator, but understand that it has too many limitations; it is a statistical creation of 70 years ago that helps us to understand the largely mistaken theories of Keynes, and is important in promoting interventionist government and the fostering of envy.

ROBERT STEWART

Smith's Parish

We have no Opposition

January 8, 2008

Dear Sir,

On January 2, 2008 I read in your paper and article concerning women in the Legislature with some interest. It is not the subject that aroused my need to write this letter, but the lack of protocol which has once again appeared in your paper.

In identifying Mrs. Patricia Gordon Pamplin, you referred to her as the "Interim Opposition Leader". Perhaps there are those in the community who wished at the end of the last Parliament that brought about the third decisive victory for the Progressive Labour Party never happened.

The fact of the matter is that December 18 did happen, and with that the need to appoint a New Opposition Leader. This particular Act, which is the responsibility of the Governor under section 72 under the Bermuda Constitution, has not happened, so why refer to Mrs. Pamplin as "Interim Opposition Leader"?

We do not have an Opposition Leader because the United Bermuda Party is unable or incapable of finding someone to lead them. Since there is no Leader there is no one for the Governor to identify to appoint. In light of this reality, the term "Interim" is misplaced. Be that as it may, if you wish to properly "title" Mrs. Pamplin is should be "Acting Leader of the United Bermuda Party." Until the appointment is made under Section 72 we have no Opposition Leader, no Opposition or a Shadow Cabinet for that matter!

LEROY RILEY

Hamilton Parish

Do not move the BSoA

January 10, 2008

Dear Sir,

Thank you for allowing me this space to give my thoughts on the current situation regarding the Bermuda Society of Arts and the termination of their rental agreement in the City Hall Arts Centre by the Corporation of Hamilton.

I was the director of the Bermuda Society of Arts for five and a half years prior to its current director Vicki Evans -Cracknell. I left the position in 2006 to pursue a Master's Degree in Fine Arts in New York and have been associated with, exhibited at, and volunteered for, all of the Islands arts organisations over the past ten years. Today I am writing as former Director but also as member and artist.

To begin with the BSoA supported my development as an artist in a way that exists in very few places in the world. They allowed me to enter some tentative photographs and paintings that at any other gallery in the world wouldn't have been accepted as I was very much a beginning amateur artist. Because of these works being shown I was able to get advice and mentorship from other Bermudian and non Bermudian artists. Their feedback gave me the confidence to keep making and developing my artwork.

In becoming involved with this diverse group I also gained an understanding of what art is and what it can do for a community. I had long talks with professional artists, artists returning from overseas with ideas and ways of making art I had never heard of, teachers working with artists far younger than myself, inmates of our correctional facilities and their families, visiting artists, art appreciators and everyone else in between. This is what is so vital about the BSoA; it is this ability to bring together Bermudians regardless of race, economics or nationality. If there is one thing that I have learned in my studies overseas is that art can indeed foster change and bring people together, and without it we are a ship without sails.

The Bermuda Society of Arts has been the only tenant of the space in which it currently exists, it is Bermuda's largest gallery and the only remaining gallery that has as its sole purpose the display and development of contemporary Bermudian art and artists.

Its location in the City Hall Arts Centre is also of key importance in this regard. Within the city there are no longer any commercial gallery spaces available for Bermudian artists to show in or sell their work from. The life of an artist is one that involves a great deal of hard work and very little real payoff financially. But any little bit helps and our artists are having a hard enough time as it is without the loss of the BSoA.

Geographically it is also a location that allows our young people easy access to the arts. Catch the bus to town, go to City Hall and I will meet you on the steps. This is something that many teachers over the past 40 odd years have said to their classes knowing that they can take their students to see something easily and safely that might just change the way they look at themselves, their country and possibly the rest of their lives.

I personally have met many people through my involvement with the BSoA but one in particular always stood out. It was a conversation I had with an inmate of one of our correctional facilities about how since being locked up they had begun to draw and paint and in doing so had begun to change they way they approached the world. This discovery profoundly impacted their lives and they felt that had they had the opportunity to explore this at a younger age they might have made different decisions. This was a sincere sentiment on the part of this particular person and it moved me then, and it moves me now.

If the Bermuda Society of Arts is evicted from the City Hall Arts Centre it will take away the opportunity for art to affect people in such a way and by extension our community. Bermudians are very supportive of each other and I hope that in reading this letter it might move people to appeal to the Corporation to reconsider their stance in this matter.

PETER LAPSLEY

Artist

Member, former gallery director of the BSoA

Misrepresentation

January 8, 2008

Dear Sir,

I am writing this letter regarding the name "Ladies Chambers", which was given to the new government park opened last year across from the West Pembroke Primary School on the North Shore in Pembroke West. I would like the public to know, the old and the young, that the history of the "Ladies Chambers" has always been at Spanish Point near the pontoons at Spanish Point Park and that this being a historical name, the sign was erected in the wrong place.

A CONCERNED SENIOR CITIZEN

Cabinet diversity

January 6, 2008

Dear Sir,

Ex-Minister Neletha Butterfield is bemoaning the fact of reduced female representation in Cabinet. Not only is there a reduced female presence but there is a lack of white representation in Cabinet too!

ANTONY SIESE

City of Hamilton

We are not stupid

January 6, 2008

Dear Sir,

When I was a little boy going to school in the back of town throughout the 1950s and 60s, I could never ever remember anyone from any field of the then so-called leadership of Bermuda other than the Governor and the Bishop of Bermuda who only came because protocol dictated it, coming to our schools and sharing with the children their experiences of what it would take to be successful in Bermuda, "never".

I only used to hear about the types of people who went into the whites' schools and made speeches of motivation, which no doubt inspired and helped to bring about a sense of belonging to Bermuda to those children, but it never happened at any of the schools of which I had attended. I could go on and on about the slackness of those who had been setting Bermuda's agenda for the past almost 400 years, and that's not withstanding that which happened to me personally over some of those same years.

It seems when some people start flapping their lips about this polarization of Bermuda, if you notice, they never put it in its proper context, lets see if I could help out here; the polarization of Bermuda truly began in 1616, when a black and an Indian was brought to Bermuda as indentured servants, then later made slaves. From then on, chattel slavery lasted in Bermuda for over 230 years. But it doesn't stop there; before the slaves were so-called emancipated in 1834, the crown put aside 20 million pounds to pay off the slave masters who had benefitted from all this free labour, while at the same time abandoning the ex-slave into the wilderness of empty freedom without just one penny in hand.

However, it doesn't stop there; the then Governor of Bermuda "R.S. Chapman" just prior to emancipation, began enacting laws that would restrict those same rights of the ex-slave that was granted to them in the crowns own emancipation order. However, it doesn't stop there; for over a hundred and forty plus years after that, the ex-slave had to put up with a segregated society and poor living conditions and it goes on, for some 30 years after that in the 1990s, Jerome Dill a minister in the then UBP government conceded to the public that there was glass-ceilings preventing black Bermudians from moving up in the job market and other areas.

In addition, you mean to say that the best thing that could be said after all of that, is to get over it; there is a saying if you slap me, I will slap you back, it is unreal for one to believe that another Human being is to just stand there and take someone else stupidness.

Let there be no elutions, not only are we not stupid when we go to vote at the polls, we are not stupid when it comes to understanding Bermuda's historical past and how it still effects the Bermuda of today, let it be known that we clearly understand, that those who set Bermudas political, social, and economic agenda and followed the states quo for the past 300 plus years, that's from 1616 up until now are truly the ones who have polarized Bermuda and no one else. Yes, we're not stupid.

E. M. STOVELL

Pembroke

Spanish Point