The pitfalls of buying NZ Made

It’s patriotic to support local producers but the reasoning doesn’t stack up on closer inspection.

Thursday was ‘‘Buy NZ Made’’ day, so I made a point of wearing my favourite American boots and brewing a pot of Colombian coffee before flipping open my laptop – the components of which were manufactured and designed in at least six countries.

According to a survey by the software company Xero, more than half of New Zealanders would prefer to buy local goods.

We’re even willing to pay a premium of 5 per cent to avoid the stuff made by Johnny Foreigner. Is it worth it?

The most obvious argument for buying locally is patriotism: Make New Zealand Great Again!

After all, we have to look after our own. There’s a huge difference between Kiwis and foreigners: their mothers gave birth to them over there, on the other side of a squiggly line on the map. If they don’t like it, perhaps they should have been born here instead.

Patriotism implies New Zealanders are in some way more deserving than, say, Somalians. How much more? Ten times? Or is that too gauche? If anyone knows the exchange rate between Canadians and Bangladeshis, let me know.

If we accept this argument, we also have to be OK with noone else buying our products. We can’t have it both ways: it’s only fair that all our trading partners promote their own ‘‘buy local’’ campaigns, and do their best to strangle our lucrative export industry.

That way, the world can segregate into isolated, selfcontained nations. We can abandon the magic of comparative advantage, in which both parties to a trade get richer, and start making our own over-priced, inferior TVs and cars again. We’ll be dirt poor. But at least it’ll be NZ Made dirt!

And think of the environmental impact. Much better to buy stuff here, rather than shipping it halfway across the world. Right?

Well, no. If we all bought our produce from the local farmers’ market, the world would be on fire right now. Transport accounts for only about 10 per cent of the emissions from food production. It is vastly more important to grow food efficiently, which means leaving it to producers with the most suitable climates and economies of scale.

The concept of ‘‘food miles’’ is dumb. If you care about the environment, the best thing you can do is let price be your guide, and fill your basket with cheap imported tomatoes.

Of course, maybe those tomatoes were picked by underpaid workers. This a strong argument in favour of buying from countries with decent labour laws (like New Zealand).

But even this isn’t as straightforward as it seems: outside of literal slavery or trafficking, people flock to work in factories and sweatshops because it’s better than the alternative (typically, brutal subsistence farming).

Low-end manufacturing jobs have been disappearing from New Zealand for decades, as developing countries undercut us. When the one factory that employs half the town shuts down, it causes real damage. Trying to hold back the tides is not the answer.

Instead, we have to move toward more innovative, valueadded products, high-skilled jobs, and services.

Xero, the company that ran the survey mentioned earlier, is the perfect example. It’s an amazing Kiwi success story, used by small businesses in more than 180 countries.

Xero is conquering the world not because it’s ‘‘NZ Made’’, but because it’s extremely good at making cloud accounting software.

‘‘NZ Made’’ is a brand, in the same way that Nike is a brand. That’s OK. Paying a premium for a brand is a useful way of signalling something about your personality: in this case, ‘‘economically illiterate’’.

The takeaway is to buy the highest-quality product for the price you’re willing to pay, regardless of country of origin.

In some cases, that product might just so happen to be made in New Zealand.

I’m typing this sentence on a foreign computer, drinking foreign coffee. But I’m also wearing merino undies, wrapping my junk in a constant patriotic embrace: woolly, a little snug, but breathable.

‘If we accept this argument, we also have to be OK with no-one else buying our products.’