Sponsor's Message

I'm not talking about being able to afford a house in Remuera and two BMWs in the garage -- I'm talking about being a billionaire or better.

So how would you go about becoming so embarrassingly wealthy?

Well once upon a time the fast-track to becoming very well off was through things such as property investment or even the oil industry -- but not any longer.

According to this story (CNet) it's computer software and/or the internet that is the way to secure a good place on the world's list of the "most wealthy".

Now have your say Got something to say about today's column, or want to see what others think?  Visit The Forums While you're here, why not visit the Aardvark Hall of Shame and perhaps make your own nomination.

It would appear that the secret to having more money than you could spend in a thousand lifetimes is easy: just write some "must-have" software or build a killer search engine.

Now that you've been told the secret -- get going! :-)

From a more serious perspective, this report shows just how real the knowledge economy bas become and how very much we're missing the boat.

Where are all the billionaire producers of primary products?

There are none, of course and, the way things are going, the chances of NZ's nett export receipts rising is looking increasingly remote.

A huge percentage of everything we currently export involves the physical transportation of bulky, heavy, relatively low-value commodities from down here on the backside of the planet to the major markets half a world away.

This leaves us badly exposed to the effects of rising fuel prices and a number of other factors that can quickly cripple our competitiveness on world markets.

Likewise, our reliance on the mass-production of biological material (wood, milk, meat, fruit, etc) leaves us similarly exposed to the devastating effects of disease, global warming and other similarly uncontrollable factors.

Surely it's time we renewed the now dying push to hike our knowledge-based output so as to insure against all those risks which are rapidly looming on the horizon.

The recent oil price hikes alone have been responsible for a massive blow-out in our balance of trade payments and there's simply no way to address this with our current focus on physical exports.

But how do we instigate a shift in emphasis towards knowledge-based exports?

Well we could call on government to provide all sorts of incentives -- but due to the unacceptable levels of bureaucratic overhead involved in such things, I doubt this would be worth the effort.

Perhaps we ought to be looking at putting the emphasis on encouraging our students and young people to take an entrepreneurial role and teaching them the skills they need to really get involved in knowledge-based startups?

Instead of focusing on namby-pamby feel-good, politically correct, tree-hugging, "no such thing as failure" curriculums, maybe it's about time we set our sites on providing our young people with a good no-nonsense grounding in the basics and a "fire in the belly" attitude towards getting out there and taking on the world in hi-tech areas.

Sure, not that many kids will have the interest or the ability to start a hi-tech venture and make it a success -- but a single Bill Gates from the ranks of our up-and-coming would almost double NZs GDP so it would seem to be a damned fine investment to me.

But what do you think?

Are we headed on a slippery slope to second-world living standards if we don't read the writing on the world and adapt our exports to a changing world economy and climate?

Go have your say in The Aardvark Forums

If you feel that this is a good thing and/or you hold a "geniune affection" for yours truly -- then you are welcome to gift me some money using the buttons provided. In gifting this money you accept that no goods, service or other consideration is offered, provided, accepted or anticipated in return. Just click on the button to gift whatever you can afford. NOTE: PayPal bills in US dollars so don't accidentally gift more than what you were intending :-)

Contacting Aardvark
I'm always happy to hear from readers, whether they're delivering brickbats, bouquets or news tip-offs. If you'd like to contact me directly, please this form. If you're happy for me to republish your comments then please be sure and select For Publication.

Other media organisations seeking more information or republication rights are also invited to contact me.

Just add a couple of lines of JavaScript to your pages and you can get a free summary of Aardvark's daily commentary -- automatically updated each and every week-day.

Aardvark also makes a summary of this daily column available via XML using the RSS format. More details can be found here.

Contact me if you decide to use either of these feeds and have any problems.

Linking Policy
Want to link to this site? Check out Aardvark's Linking Policy.

Did you tell someone else about Aardvark today? If not then do it now!