Snus heroes

I love these guys. They're celebrating World SmokeFree Day by launching a new business selling Swedish snus in New Zealand.

Jenesa went through the literature on snus in her report earlier this year. It's far safer than smoking, and it's ridiculous that it's been considered illegal, and that the Ministry continues to view it as banned.

The world has far too few people who are willing to give it a go despite the Ministry*.

It was always odd to interpret the SmokeFree Environments Act as banning snus, but you can kinda see how they took it that way if you ignore that the purpose of the Act is to reduce harm. The Act banned the sale of "any tobacco product labelled or otherwise described as suitable for chewing, or for any other oral use." The Court in March, in MoH v Philip Morris, reminded us about the importance of the harm reduction purposes of the act in s3A1(a), and said that the "other oral uses" part had to mean an activity like chewing.

Snus isn't chewed, but that seems a more minor point. The major point is that it's massively less harmful than smoking. People flipping from smoking to using snus reduce harm for themselves and, if you worry about second-hand smoke effects on others, there's none of that.

We still need changes to the rules. Snus shouldn't be banned for retail sale in New Zealand. We've known this for at least a decade. The NZ Smokeless Tobacco Company providing snus is remitting excise on the product, but the excise rates are well out of proportion to any risk - the product probably shouldn't draw any excise at all. And it is absurd that they're having to sell it under plain packaging with graphic warnings about the health risks of smoking - that may bring an interesting conflict-of-laws case where they're mandated to put on labels that are misleading, and misleading labeling can be illegal.

But at least they're giving it a go. Instead of taking the Ministry's interpretation, they'll be requiring the Ministry to prove their interpretation in Court. And if it winds up in front of the same judge who handled the heets case, it'll be interesting to see the result. Snus isn't like chewing, it isn't harmful, and banning the sale of it seems contrary to any harm reduction purpose in the Act.

Makes me wish, again, that iPredict were still going and had a market on whatever court case might come of this one.

* The Ministry of Health here is actually awesome on most dimensions of tobacco harm reduction. On vaping and heat-not-burn, they've got things dead right. I just don't get the hamfistedness around snus. [update: with caveat of course that the plain packaging rules are a nonsense for this stuff, but they're there I think pretty constrained by the legislation as written]

Minimum wages and fringe benefits

I'd suggested a couple of weeks ago that minimum wage hikes can be at the expense of other non-monetary benefits provided to workers.

Tyler Cowen points to some empirics on it from Jeffrey Clemens, Lisa B Kahn and Jonathan Meer ($):

This paper explores the relationship between the minimum wage, the structure of employee compensation, and worker welfare. We advance a conceptual framework that describes the conditions under which a minimum wage increase will alter the provision of fringe benefits, alter employment outcomes, and either increase or decrease worker welfare. Using American Community Survey data from 2011-2016, we find robust evidence that state-level minimum wage changes decreased the likelihood that individuals report having employer-sponsored health insurance. Effects are largest among workers in very low-paying occupations, for whom coverage declines offset 9 percent of the wage gains associated with minimum wage hikes. We find evidence that both insurance coverage and wage effects exhibit spillovers into occupations moderately higher up the wage distribution. For these groups, reductions in coverage offset a more substantial share of the wage gains we estimate.

Sponsoring Sponsorship

Amnesty International is testing community support for the continuation of the government's trial refugee sponsorship regime.

The pilot programme won't be completed until December 2018. Whether the programme continues will depend on experience in that trial programme, and presumably on the government's expectation that there might be sufficient community support to warrant it.

Those interested can pledge their support at Amnesty's site.

I'm not sure what will be expected of sponsors here in the final form of the programme, but the point of the programme is to let the government admit more refugees by taking costs off of the government. That implies a financial and non-financial obligation for sponsors.

Here's the Canadian model:

2.6 What are the responsibilities of the sponsoring group?Sponsoring groups agree to provide the refugees with care, lodging, settlement assistance and support for the duration of the sponsorship period. Normally, this is 12 months starting from the refugee's arrival in Canada or until the refugee becomes self-sufficient, whichever comes first. In exceptional circumstances, the visa officer may determine that the refugee requires more time to become established in Canada and will ask the sponsoring group to extend the sponsorship period to a maximum of 36 months. The sponsoring group has the option of refusing the request for an extension of the sponsorship period. However, the sponsoring group risks having the case refused as a result.

Private sponsors normally support the sponsored refugees by:

• providing the cost of food, rent and household utilities and other day-to-day living expenses;

• providing clothing, furniture and other household goods;

• locating interpreters;

• selecting a family physician and dentist;

• assisting with applying for provincial health-care coverage;

• enrolling children in school and adults in language training;

• introducing newcomers to people with similar personal interests;

• providing orientation with regard to banking services, transportation, etc.; and

• helping in the search for employment.

Sponsoring groups must reside or have representatives in the community of settlement (i.e. in the community where the sponsored refugees will live). The intent is to have a group of persons helping refugees to get established in the community and not one person acting alone.

It is not possible to sponsor only one member of a family unit. The sponsorship undertaking should name all immediate and dependent family members listed on the Application for Permanent Residence, whether they are accompanying the principal applicant to Canada or may follow later under the provisions of the One Year Window (OYW) program as described in section 2.10. The sponsoring group is obliged to provide support to all family members listed on the undertaking, regardless of the timing of their arrival in Canada. The sponsor is responsible for supporting the non-accompanying family members under the same terms as in the original settlement plan, unless the principal refugee applicant is now self-sufficient and able to provide adequately for his or her family members. De facto dependants should also be included in the sponsorship but should be named on a separate undertaking as described in section 2.11.

Previously:

• Let them help
• Learning from Canada: Refugee edition
• And now for a word for the sponsors

It's hard not to do good

Tyler Cowen points to a great question from a reader:

There was an idiotic movie in the 80’s (“Brewster’s Millions”) where Richard Pryor had to burn through $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit $300 million.  There were some conditions:  “. . . after 30 days, he may not own any assets that are not already his, and he must get value for the services of anyone he hires. He may donate only 5% to charity and lose 5% by gambling, and he may not waste the money by purchasing and destroying valuable items. Finally, he is not allowed to tell anyone. . . .” [Wikipedia].

Anyhow, I was thinking of a similar movie one could make.  Awful, but perhaps instructive to students of economics.

Similar premise, similar challenge.  But my twist is that the stipulation now is that he can do whatever he wants with the $30 million, on the condition that he NOT HELP ANYBODY with the money.

I don’t believe this is possible.  Consider:

If he were to simply keep in in the bank and not touch it, the supply of loanable funds would shift to the right, lowering the cost of borrowing money, thereby helping others to improve their lives in various ways.

If he were to spend the money, he would create gains from trade, a positive-sum game.  People would consider themselves better off for having sold him a good or service . . . or they wouldn’t have.  Plus multipliers.

If he gave the money away, the recipient would doubtless consider himself better off, at least initially.

If he burned the money, he would be, albeit in a small way, helping the nation’s economy as a whole, since that $30 million represents a claim on the nation’s goods and services that now will never be called in.

I guess what I’m getting at here is that I don’t believe there’s any way a rich person can avoid helping others with his money.

First up, Brewster's Millions was brilliant. I loved how he decided to waste his money with a run for office.

But the substantive question's a tough one. It's easy to come up with examples that have negative externalities and so impose some harm on others. And it's not impossible to come up with ones where the negative externalities might result in net harms. But ones where nobody is made better off?

And it's related to an older problem in preference-revelation mechanisms.

Recall that in the old Tideman-Tullock demand-revealing process, in which a Clarke tax could induce truthful preference revelation, you could only be sure that you had truthful revelation so long as the participants were neutral about the use of the collected taxes. If you gave the money to charity, people might overreveal their preferences since the collected funds would go to a cause they supported anyway. But if other people hated that particular charity, they might underreveal their preferences. Given the very flat payoff curve, these kinds of considerations might matter.

Tideman and Tullock's solution was that the collected taxes had to be spent on real resources produced in perfectly competitive markets so that no rents were conferred by having bought the resources, and then the resources had to be destroyed. That still doesn't work, though, because a lot of people have strong preferences against waste per se.

But it does hint at a solution to the question: if you want to spend money while helping nobody, buy something that is produced in a perfectly competitive industry that uses only inputs that come from perfectly competitive industries too.

I love this thought experiment. It is hard to come up with examples where trade does not benefit the people you're trading with. And yet political rhetoric often comes from the opposite starting point.

The more plausible examples in the comments over at MR have to resort to illegal activities to make them work: buy hand grenades and use them to blow up the manufacturer/vendor of the hand grenades.

Northland DHB missed the memo

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Health clarified that sale of nicotine-containing e-liquids is legal. The Smoke-Free Environment Act's prohibition on the sale of tobacco products for oral use does not apply to heat-not-burn products, or to vaping products.

Northland DHB seems to have missed the memo. We'll come back to that. Because it looks like the memo has changed.

The Internet Archive does not have a record of the Ministry of Health's original version of the page. But I definitely remember that it said nothing about snus. The lack of clarification around snus has been a matter of some interest and discussion.

But the website now has this, which I'll screenshot:

The relevant bit: 

“In Philip Morris v Ministry of Health [2018] NZDC 4478 (the decision), the District Court found that all tobacco products (except types that are absorbed through the oral mucosa eg. snus and chewing tobacco) may be lawfully imported, sold and distributed under the Smoke-free Environments Act 1990 (SFEA).”

But that isn't what the District Court said. The District Court, at Paragraph 30, said this:

The Ejusdem Generis Rule[30] This rule provides that where particular words describing a genus of things are followed by general words, the general words will be confined to things of the same class as the particular words. Thus, where the words “any tobacco product labelled or otherwise described as suitable for chewing” are followed by “or for any other oral use”, the other oral use means a tobacco product used for chewing or an activity similar to chewing.

If the Ministry is now defining absorption through the oral mucosa as being an activity similar to chewing, that's up to them - and potentially contestable in court. But it isn't the Court's definition. The Court didn't even use the term mucosa anywhere in the decision. 

The Court also noted that the ban on sale of less harmful products like heat-not-burn was inconsistent with the purposes of the Act. Snus is far less harmful than smoked tobacco. Jenesa Jeram's report on tobacco harm reduction covers snus in section 4.1.

I wonder about a few things:

1. When the change to the Ministry's webpage was made;
2. Why the editing was not noted;
3. Whether the Ministry has taken any recent advice on the risks associated with snus use;
4. What that advice might have been;
5. Whether the Ministry views a ban on snus as being consistent with the aims of the Act, and the evidential basis for that view;
6. The basis on which the Ministry decided that "an activity similar to chewing" implied a ban on anything involving absorption through oral mucosa. 

But back to where we started. The sale of e-cigarettes is totally not banned. The Ministry's clarification does very clearly say that the sale of vaping kit is fine. And yet we see this today from @WellingtonVaper

With all the efforts now encouraged around utilising #vaping by @minhealthnz to necessitate THR, there appears to be a DHB that doesn't support this message?? are you aware of this @hapaitehauora? smokers want to move forward in transitioning from their addiction not backwards. pic.twitter.com/3TXW2kSrc1

— WellingtonVapers (@WellingtonVaper) May 28, 2018

I guess Northland DHB didn't get the memo. Some of the memo seems to have changed, but not that part. The restrictions on display and advertising would apply, though, if the DHB could show that the nicotine in the products were derived from tobacco rather than synthesised. That's silly and still in need of fixing in the rules, but it's my understanding of the rules as they now are.

Previously [and as update]: Regulatory Catch-22

Household division of labour and sealed-bid tenders

In this week's Insights newsletter, I have a bit of fun with some econoparenting. 

I know that people who aren’t economists manage to raise kids and that it all seems to work out in the end, but I’m not entirely sure how.

I have learned that standard practice in the Crampton household diverges a bit from practice elsewhere. So gaze in awe, or horror, at our system for managing the more irksome household chores.

Some chores, the kids are happy to do just as part of being happy members of the family – and to get their dollar-a-day allowance instead of an amount discounted by the cost they imposed on their parents that day.

Other chores are less fun. Those go up for competitive sealed-bid tendering.

At the start of every quarter, we list the jobs that need to get done around the house.

We make a point of listing those chores that are more efficiently done by the source of the chore in the first place, and ones that we parents find particularly unappealing. So the kids can bid to do their joint laundry, fold it, and deliver it to their respective rooms. Vacuuming and washing the floors is another outsourced chore. And so is keeping the cat boxes in order.

The children submit sealed bids tendering for each of the chores – the weekly price they would charge for undertaking the chore satisfactorily. It is very important to define the tasks precisely, like the areas covered by a mop-and-vacuum requirement, or the frequency of cat box cleaning.

We tell the children that we need not necessarily accept the lowest or any bid. I look over the bids and award the chores for the quarter.

It has been transformational. Before we adopted the system, the kids would whine about doing chores. Now, we can threaten to shift to the other supplier. They each want to win as many chores as possible.

Aligning incentives can work wonders: instead of throwing mostly clean clothes in the laundry so that he doesn’t have to deal with re-folding them for another wearing, our ten-year-old makes sensible decisions and polices his sister as well.

And they haven’t yet started colluding against us, so that’s great too.

When I told folks around the office about our contracting arrangement, Oliver thought it was funny and told me to write it up for Insights. But I think it far more best-practice exemplar than satire.

Consider it for your upcoming third-quarter household planning.

The kids getting a bit taller will help. Right now there's only really one potential contractor on the laundry because the dryer is too high up for the other contractor. It's notionally contestable, but the current contractor will have to figure out that it'd be more expensive for us to use the other contractor on that one. And when they're tall enough to use the ironing board.....

Hydras. How do they work?

From Hansard, where Michael Wood teaches us about the classics:

Before I get to those, I just do need to reflect a little bit on some of the comments that have been made in the debate this evening. The first one I want to reflect back on, and it came through a number of National Party speeches—it had obviously been produced from the research unit, and different National Party MPs were trying to use it in a slightly different way—came out in the form of an accusation that this Government was some kind of three-headed monster, or, as Sarah Dowie put it, a three-headed hydra. Well, what I just want to explain briefly, for those members of the House who didn't study classical studies while they were at school is that the thing about hydras is that they're immortal and every time you attack them they just come back stronger. That is going to be the case with this Government. [emphasis added]

Now I haven't studied classics, but I've been listening to the Greek Myths. A lot. Over and over in the car - when we're not listening to Sherlock Holmes stories.

Here's StoryNory (strongly strongly recommended if you do any kind of long car ride with kids):

Heracles’ next task was to fight another terrible creature. This one lurked in the swamps of Lerna, and it was known as the Lernaean Hydra. It was giant snake with multiple heads. If you cut off one of its heads, two more would grow in its place. It was indeed a fierce opponent. Even Heracles did not think he could fight this monster on his own. He enlisted the help of his nephew, Iolaus. Heracles fought the Hydra with his sword, and each time he lopped off one of its heads, Iolaus jumped in with a torch and burned the stump before it sprout a couple of new heads. Hera looked down on this struggle to the death, and thought, “Two humans against one monster! That’s hardly fair!” and she sent a giant crab to join in the fight. Heracles and Iolaus stood back to back and fought off both these supernatural beasts. After defeating them in battle, Heracles collected some of the Hydra’s blood to use as poison on his arrows.

He returned to Eurystheus with news of his victory, but the king was not satisfied. “You did not fight the Hydra on your own,” he said, “And so the labour does not count.” Heracles shook his giant fist at the king, but Eurystheus, who was feeling safe at the top of his tower, shouted down: “It’s no use arguing. You’ve still got nine more labours to do, Heracles. Your next task is to bring me the sacred dear of Artemis – you’ll find it roaming the hills of Ceryneia. You will know it when you see it. It has little horns, made of gold.”

So. Should I be telling the kids that StoryNory had it all wrong and that the hydra is really immortal? Are there more complete versions of the story where Iolaus's trick only delayed the creature's regeneration?

HT: Chloe Swarbrick

“The opposition has been talking a lot about the three headed hydra. I don’t know if they studied classics, because the thing about hydras is they’re immortal.” - @michaelwoodnz delivering a characteristically poetic estimates speech #nzpol

— Chlöe Swarbrick (@_chloeswarbrick) May 23, 2018

Regulatory Catch-22?

Last month's court decision, and subsequent MoH position statement, mean that heat-not-burn tobacco products are legal to sell in New Zealand. 

But the MoH position statement said that other tobacco control regulations will apply to reduced-risk tobacco and tobacco-derived products, barring the ban on indoor use in workplaces.

Therefore, the same SFEA regulatory controls apply to smoked tobacco, heated tobacco and vaping products that are manufactured from tobacco. This includes the ban on sales to minors and restrictions on advertising.

The ban on smoking in indoor workplaces, early childhood centres and schools only applies to smoking. It does not apply to vaping or products that are not smoked, such as heated tobacco products. Individual employers and business owners decide whether or not to include vaping in their smokefree policies.

This could be reasonably read as meaning that MoH intends also that the plain packaging regulations intended for cigarettes would also apply to a pile of reduced-harm products. It might apply to vaping products sold by companies that are upfront that the nicotine is derived from tobacco, and also heat-not-burn products that heat tobacco sticks.

The plain packaging regulations require display of graphic warnings about the dangers of smoking. Pictures of diseased lungs, gangrenous limbs and the like. They all say things like "Smoking causes lung cancer".

But standard commercial packaging regulations prohibits misleading claims on packages.

So it could be the case that providers of tobacco-derived reduced harm products would be simultaneously required to put on graphic warnings that might lead consumers to believe that the warnings apply to the product within the package, and banned from putting those warnings on the packages because the warnings would be misleading when applied to reduced-harm products.

It would be nice if MoH could provide a bit more clarity around this stuff. Would a company get in more trouble for complying with the plain packaging rules when selling tobacco-derived vaping product, or for not complying with the plain packaging rules? Ideally, plain packaging shouldn't apply where there isn't combustion.

Zero percent blues

There's always an opportunity cost.

Tertiary education is heavily subsidised in New Zealand. While students pay tuition, their tuition fees cover a bit less than 20% of the cost.

And subsidies provided through the zero-percent student loan scheme are substantial - every year, the government writes down the value of the loans provided to students to reflect the combination of students who'll never pay the thing off because they don't hit the income thresholds for repayment, the students who'll just default or run overseas, and the value of the interest-rate subsidy. That's running around $650 million per year.

We'd argued that the government should reinstate interest to make the loans-scheme self-financing and use the savings to improve tertiary access in two ways: improvements in schools that need help in getting kids ready for tertiary in the first place, and means-tested funding to support tertiary students in greater need.

One consequence of the 0% loans scheme is that the government has to restrict access to loans to prevent people from borrowing infinity dollars and making an arbitrage play. And so there's a maximum number of EFTS that you can take before you can't borrow anymore. It's binding for medical students. Some of those students might have hoped the new government would ease that back; they would have been disappointed.

Labour's instead followed through with their promise to abolish tuition fees for the first year of university study.

Here's Stats New Zealand on the effects of the tuition-free policy:

The introduction of the Government’s new ‘first year free’ policy for tertiary education had a dampening effect on inflation for all households. The highest-spending households received the greatest benefit because they spend proportionally more on tertiary education.

Hooray! The cost of that? A funding freeze for the universities, or something close to it. Here's Times Higher Ed:

New Zealand universities’ worst fears appear to have been realised, with the staged elimination of tuition fees costing them any hope of a funding increase.

The Labour-led government’s first budget, handed down on 17 May, included almost no additional money for higher education. Representative body Universities NZ said that this would leave institutions about 3 per cent worse off in real terms over the next 12 months.

“This is the first time, in as long as our records go back, where there hasn’t even been a nominal cost-of-living increase,” said UNZ executive director Chris Whelan. He said that, while inflation in New Zealand was running at about 1.1 per cent, the costs of universities’ principal expenses – salaries, construction and licensing – were rising at between 4 per cent and 5 per cent.

Fun times for the universities. We can hope this means the disestablishment of some of the various administrative Associate Vice Chancellors for Virtuous but Non-Academic Things that have cropped up, and their related offices and staffs,* but the better betting odds would be on cuts or freezes on the academic side.

* I'd expect Tim Hazeldine would be the one most likely to be running a tally of these things.

Otago no-fun

Otago University once had a bit of a reputation as a party school, despite its public health department. 

Times change. The Spinoff reprints a piece by Chelle Fitzgerald from Otago student magazine Critic going through the bars they've lost:

The Gardies was the crown jewel of Castle Street. It hosted International Nude Day, the beloved holiday instituted by former All Black, Highlander and Sports Café presenter Marc Ellis. Ellis also judged the regular Beerable Arts competition there, usually streaking during the competition. Students would flock there specifically to see him nude. The 2010 closure of the Gardies, now a sleek university study centre, heralded a turning point in Otago scarfie culture.

I caught up with Marc Ellis to chat about how things have changed in Dunedin. He was at the Satay Noodle House, “a happy place” for him, tucking into a seafood deluxe. Famously, he once tried to purchase his former happy place, the Gardies. However the university swooped in and snatched it, he claims. “The pub had an evaluation at $1.1 million, and when the university heard we were trying to buy it, [with] the breweries’ backing, they paid $1.6 million for it – and that’s in the middle of a global financial crisis.”

Interestingly, the university found this stack of money at a time when they apparently could not even muster the funds to keep various departments fully staffed.

Critic uncovered emails using the Official Information Act which showed the university purchased Gardies with no plan of how they were going to use the property (while some believe this was simply to stop Ellis getting his hands on it, official evidence to support this has never surfaced).

Ellis had hoped to keep the Gardies as a pub owned by students, for students. “We were going to sell shares for $1000 to students. So if it cost $1.2 million, you’d get 1200 shareholders – we don’t own it anymore by that stage, it’s owned by the students. So you’ve got 1200 people who have a vested interest in ensuring it goes well, so they come down and have a beer, it’s actually a really simple strategy. But the university runs Dunedin, so the council would be on your back, and then you’ve got the legislators making it difficult, they can red tape you and make your life an absolute misery.

“It’s sad, isn’t it, university now is so different because you’ve got a board of grey-headed old white men making decisions which are just totally off pace with the evolving world. And they get it wrong – they’ve just ripped the heart and soul out of the university.”

Ellis has a point. With the elimination or reimagining of student pubs like the Gardies, the Bowler and the Cook, our neighbourhood has really changed. North Dunedin used to be a special place to blow off steam during uni. “It was a really beautiful melting pot and focal point for people from different courses, and different lifestyles and backgrounds, to meet, and to bond,” Ellis says. “And to remove that, and force them to try and hope to meet like-minded souls in the Octagon, with everyone else, and the general punters wanting a beer after work, it just doesn’t work.”

I love this bit from Ellis too:

“What’s the logic of the university, seriously? Trying to get rid of the pubs so there are a thousand people at ten flat parties, which is harder to control than a thousand people at one pub.”

“There are a lot of things conspiring against the survival of the student pub. You could bring it back, but you’d be fighting battles with all these bloody puritans and board members. Congratulations to the grey-headed old fuckwits who’ve sanitised university. Well done!” 

If only Otago constrained themselves to their own campus rather than having more imperialistic ambitions....

Update: the Proctor's confiscated all the issues of the student magazine's special issue on menstruation. How long until they're basically New Zealand's bible college, except secular?

Reader mailbag: Caveats on policy costings

This morning's inbox came with excellent comment from an informed reader about the difficulties in getting reasonable independent policy costings. The email reads (and is shared with permission):

• Do not underestimate how effective agencies can be at blocking information they do not want others to know. One reason the costings will be poor is because all kinds of information will not be unavailable because the agency, not the minister, do not want to be challenged. You will find "privacy" and "computer systems" becomes big issues...

• The main advantage of a single separate agency is consistency in the assumptions. At the moment they change depending on the whim of the needs of a budget bid. If agencies have to write down and be long term accountable for the assumptions, that will be a big step forward in like for like comparison. Even if the costings themselves are no more accurate, they comparison between policy costs (bigger, smaller, etc) will be more robust

• My experience of independent agencies is not good: stats NZ, Office of the Auditor General, Ministry for Women, SuPERU, etc They are all small agencies with some kind of "advocacy" role that they use to justify pursuing their own agenda. Ministerial accountability has its limits, but it is at least real accountability.

I agree with most of this. Privacy seems to be the default "Computer says no" reason for not doing things. Also agree that on the advantages of having a single consistent, if biased, ruler over having multiple different rules with different biases. 

My prior piece had looked at the ways a party might avoid having rigourous costings applied. Accountability for the costing agency would be a fun one - perhaps reinstate betting markets on whether policies wind up costing what they're advertised to cost? Ex-post assessments?

Costing policy

As the Greens' proposal for a policy costing unit looks like it'll be going ahead, here are some of the fun bits they'll have to deal with in setting it up. 

From my piece on it over in the NBR a couple years ago, when the Greens first pitched the idea:

The Greens’ proposal that election campaign promises be costed has drawn the praise it is due: it is an excellent proposal.

But it is a harder job than it might seem.

Even during the normal course of events outside of election periods, adequate costings or cost-benefit assessment of policy seems more the exception than the rule.

If the government is to build civil service capacity to cost all political party promises during the election period, why not use that opportunity to build an agency able to review policy over the course of the government’s term?

Let’s start with the difficult part on election policy costings.

Parties wanting costings on their policies can get them through the Treasury – although that potential is far more notional than real.

The State Services Commission’s Guidance for the 2014 election included guidelines for costing party political policies; the Treasury also provides a high-level guidance document.

Going through minister

But requests for costings must go through the minister of finance. This is no fault of current or previous governments – the Treasury is responsible to that minister.

A party outside of government requesting a policy costing could well worry the minister might request sensitive details. So it seems unlikely opposition parties would seek such costings under the existing guidelines.

Were an independent agency of Parliament to undertake the costings, what the agency might lose in expertise would be made up for in credibility: asking an agency responsible to a minister to undertake work that would be kept confidential from that minister does not work well. The Greens’ proposal consequently could be better housed elsewhere.

Suppose that agency provided costings on a voluntary basis. If everything were working properly, parties wanting policy costings from that kind of independent agency would request them early in the election period.

Time to do the research

The agency, and the ministries with which it might need to coordinate, would then have sufficient time to undertake the work. The parties could still time their policy releases throughout the election campaign but they would have had to have developed them early enough to have them costed.

Policies that parties would prefer not be costed would not be costed, while those that are costed have the cooperation of the party requesting it. Policies would be costed when parties expect they would fare well under evaluation.

That changes when an agency is charged with costing all policies.

Imagine you were a political consultant who came up with some policy that you, and your party, reckoned would be great politics, even if it were terrible economics.

Currently, you would never seek a sound costing on that policy – and you would hope the Taxpayers’ Union would not hire someone to run an eye over it.

Were all election promises costed by an independent agency, you would be well advised to delay submitting your policy for costing so that only a cursory take on it could be provided.

You would also be tempted to wrap the policy in enough complexity that any costing provided in a hurry would have to make simplifying assumptions. Or, conversely, you could avoid providing any of the details necessary for a costing, saying the finer points would be worked out while in office.

You could then attack any assumptions the costing unit might be forced to make as being Treasury ideological “burps” – as former Finance Minister Michael Cullen once dismissed sound Treasury advice.

An agency doing this job would need to have a fair bit of in-house expertise in costing. It would also need to have a strong reputation for down-the-line analysis. And, for it to do any good, there would have to be underlying voter demand for sound policy costings.

That last requirement is a bit of a worry. You might think that, if voter demand for policy costings were strong, parties would already be seeking independent and credible costings of their main policy planks.

Switching the default might make a difference. Currently, policies are only costed where parties want them costed. In the alternative, policies would only fail to be costed if the party had something to hide, or if the party came up with its policy proposals late in the game.

Voters who came to expect costed policies might draw the proper inference from ones that were not able to be costed.

And so while I really rather like the idea of all policies’ being costed, it will not be a small job where parties might want to throw sand into the works – for some policies.

But the attention to the costs of policy is strongly welcome.

The cost of existing policies, unfortunately, draw rather less attention. Even in the absence of independent costings, political parties have reasonably strong incentive to draw attention to the costs of their opponents’ platforms.

New policies proposed after the election at least draw cursory assessment as part of standard regulatory impact analysis – even if Sapere’s analysis last year found that 20% of regulatory impact statements completely failed to meet quality assurance guidelines and only 30% fully met them. Strengthening independent evaluation there might not go amiss.

Usual spending untested

But the bulk of the government’s spending – the big line items that do not change much from budget to budget – receive rather less attention.

Take the government’s student loan programme. Labour’s zero-percent student loan policy drew attention during the 2005 election campaign and again in 2008. But we do not often hear discussion of the $5 billion gap between the nominal value of the loan and their carrying value.

The vast majority of government spending simply carries on, from year to year, without much notice.

Perhaps an agency established to cost new political party proposals could, between elections, spend its time running rolling reviews of existing spending programmes, ensuring they continue to deliver value for money.

Bryce's report with Khyaati goes through these kinds of fiscal councils, and some of the other tasks that they might usefully undertake. 

Legalise it already

Marijuana legalisation started in America over twenty years ago with medical marijuana in California. It's expanded considerably since then. It is hard to look at the overall experience and conclude that New Zealand should not follow suit.

Remember that we are not talking about inventing marijuana for the first time or something. Marijuana exists and is consumed regardless of whether it is legal. Arguments about how bad marijuana is are a bit stupid. However bad you think marijuana is, you should be more worried about whether those harms are better mitigated by current prohibitionism, or by legalisation.

I had a chat with Bryan Crump over on Nights at Radio NZ about it a couple weeks ago, then wrote up my notes a bit more fully for a column over at Interest. A snippet:

Next up, the children. Won’t somebody think about the children? It has never seemed plausible that prohibition particularly discourages youths from using marijuana. A dealer of illegal drugs will not care about his clients’ ages unless there are sufficiently higher penalties for selling to children than for selling to adults though licensed retailers care about keeping their licenses. But, again, it is an empirical question. Legalisation could normalise or de-stigmatise marijuana use and could consequently increase youth uptake. Did it happen?

No. Anderson, Hansen and Rees showed that medicinal marijuana laws, if anything, led to a slight decrease in youth uptake of marijuana. Sarvet et al’s later metastudy looked across eleven different studies of adolescent marijuana use and found no support for the idea that legal medicinal marijuana encourages youth uptake.

How about marijuana as a gateway drug – or as substitute for other drugs? Victoria University of Wellington’s Luke Chu showed that medical marijuana laws did increase overall marijuana consumption, but also resulted in a 20% drop in medical admissions for heroin-related treatment, with no effect on cocaine. By that measure, marijuana access reduced use of harder drugs.

And Powell et al’s recent study showed that medical marijuana laws reduced opioid mortality rates. Opioids have become a scourge in much of rural America, with abuse of Oxycontin being rampant. But access to medicinal marijuana dispensaries cut opioid overdose rates by about a quarter. And, in the earlier period when regulation around dispensaries was less tight, the reduction in opioid mortality rates was even higher.

If a couple decades of American experience plus a Labour/Green coalition here can't get us toward legalisation, I wonder what can.

Budget 2018

Yesterday, I attended my first budget lock-up.

It was less interesting than it sounds.

But egads the Treasury staffers there are good.

For three and a half hours, you can look at the budget and ask any of dozens of Treasury people floating around the room about how different numbers were established. If they don't know, they know the person in the room who does know. And if nobody in the room knows, they'll phone the person back at the office who does know and will get back to you within minutes.

It is simply amazing. If I do it again, I'm going to have to come into the room with a big long list of all the things I always wanted to know but didn't know who to ask. Because they'll sort every one of them.

The one I was particularly curious about was the tobacco excise forecast. The government earns a lot of money from tobacco excise. And the government has now legalised vaping. The prior path of tobacco excise hikes would have had total tobacco tax revenues increasing a bit further despite volume declines. But with the availability of new and safer substitutes, the prior relationship between prices and consumption wouldn't be reliable.

So I asked! The tobacco excise forecast is based on an assumption of a two percent reduction in volume per year, based on historic trends. If those trends continue, and if excise freezes after the currently scheduled round of hikes, then excise reaches $1.86 billion by 2021 and starts falling a bit thereafter. I doubt that 2% per year volumetric drop is the right forecast as vaping becomes more mainstream and legal-legal instead of just pretty legal, but I'm not sure what the right forecast is. If consumption drops by 10% per year instead of 2% per year, though, you pretty quickly wind up with half a billion less in excise revenue than you might have been banking on. What has been pretty inelastic demand can turn pretty elastic once substitutes become widely available.

I'd provided budget takes for the Dom Post, the Spinoff, and this week's edition of our Insights newsletter. I tried to hit on bits other than the usual "This is who gets what" stuff ably handled elsewhere.

I also had a bit of a chat with Andrew Dickens at Newstalk ZB, but technical meltdowns at their end meant things ended at the commercial break rather than continuing afterwards. Alas.

Minimum wages and the margin

Michael Reddell makes a lot of sensible points about the government's intended hikes in the minimum wage. He reminds us that:

• Improving measured average productivity by disemploying the least productive is a false economy;
• Improving capital investment by forcing a substitution towards capital by making lower skilled labour too expensive is not the kind of productivity boost that improves overall economic performance.  

I'd add another bit. 

If a minimum wage becomes binding, firms have a few ways of responding. They can disemploy workers, change hours and rosters, and substitute towards labour-saving capital. But they can also chisel on other margins of the employment deal so that their effective labour costs go down. Every job is a bundle of tasks of varying desirability and a bundle of rewards of varying value to the worker and cost to the employer. 

Suppose that the total compensation bundle provided to an employee costs $20/hour, including money wages and on-the-job amenities like whether the air-conditioning and heating is set to comfortable temperatures, the comfort of the chairs or workstations, the ease of slotting shifts into your preferred schedule rather than the employer's preferred schedule, the degree of monitoring of on-the-job activities and breaks, and a host of other things that are part of the deal. 

If the minimum wage goes up, one of the margins on which employers can and will respond is in reducing costs on those other margins. Most of those margins are invisible to employment law, but do make work less pleasant. Among those workers who continue to be employed after a minimum wage hike, we should expect that at least some of the benefit of the higher wages is chiseled away in worse conditions. And we should expect that many workers will not prefer the resulting overall bundle - otherwise they could have contracted for fewer on-the-job amenities and higher wages in the first place. 

One margin that is visible to employment law is off-the-books hours: morning meetings before the official clock starts; clean-up after the clock stops; working lunches and the like. There's been a fair bit of press around that part lately. Off-the-clock hours make minimum wages less binding. 

As minimum wages ramp up toward 72% or 73% of the median wage under Labour's schedule, expect more of this kind of thing. If it comes with greater policing around easily monitored stuff, like unpaid hours, expect more chiseling on unmonitored things, or greater disemployment. 

Sweet slopes

Slippery slope arguments are only a logical fallacy if you don't have a mechanism. 

In health and lifestyle regulation, there are a couple of plausible ones. A rather plausible one is that establishing control regimes over consumption behaviours in one domain reduces the marginal cost of implementing similar control regimes over other consumption behaviours. Eugene Volokh covered rather a few mechanisms over a decade ago.

Here's Grant Schofield, the Ministry of Education's special health advisor and public health professor at AUT:

“[This Government] might not do a tax right away, but they can certainly start….with any of the points in our paper that we’ve suggested.”

Anti-tobacco laws over the years are used by Schofield and his co-authors to show the importance of Government intervention in making sugary foods less available and affordable in shops. Changes at the supermarket, ensuring sugary food and drink are not “loss-leading” and easy, end-of-aisle temptations, are among the recommendations.

Organisations providing dietary advice should also be banned from accepting money or endorsing products that market processed food, Schofield says. If they do accept or promote companies that have processed food, that should be publicly declared to show a conflict of interest. 

...

[Schofield] also points out that anti-sugar policies could be tacked on to current “infrastructure” restricting sale and advertising of alcohol and tobacco.

“We’ve got quite strict controls [over alcohol and tobacco sale]. I know people enjoy them, but they cause harm. It’s exactly the same with sugar and junk food.

“We already have all the infrastructure to do that with alcohol and tobacco, so let’s just chuck sugar in there as well.

Schofield also uses tobacco to rebut “industry arguments” regarding potential loss of business.

“At every point [when changes were made], there was interference. When smoking was stopped in bars and pubs, the industry… said it was going to be the end of everything and there would be people out of business. Actually the exact opposite happened. The country was just a better place.”

Overall, the public health problems stemming from excess sugar consumption are not too different from those associated with tobacco.

“You can say there is no safe level of tobacco, but there is a safe level of sugar,” Schofield admits.

“But there’s no nutritional value for sugar. I’m not saying we’ll ban it, it will still be in society, but we’ve got to change its availability - it’s pretty obvious.”

I care less about plain packaging on cigarettes per se than about the slope it puts us on. Remember what Jack Banzhaf told us about tobacco in the 90s?

"They use the 'slippery slope' argument. 'My God, if they can do this to smokers today they can do this to people who eat Haagen-Dazs ice cream or whatever.'"

Yup. They did. And they were right. Adjust your priors accordingly.

Bit depressing though. Wasn't it only a couple of months ago that NZIER and the Ministry of Health both advised that sugar taxes were a pretty bad idea?

Regressive excise

Statistics New Zealand confirms the regressive effect of the continued tobacco tax hikes. 

The latest inflation figures sort inflation by household expenditure quintiles. Poorer households are more likely to include smokers. The government continues its annual excise hikes on tobacco. Meanwhile, the government has made the first year of tertiary study free. Richer kids are more likely to take up tertiary study.

And so living costs for poorer households have gone up more than for richer households.

“Like the March 2017 quarter, prices for cigarettes and tobacco have seen large rises due to the annual tobacco tax increase,” consumer prices manager Geraldine Duoba said. “The tax increase was implemented at the beginning of the year, bringing the average price for a packet of 25 cigarettes up to $35.14.”

Of the different household groups measured, Māori households saw the highest inflation in the March 2018 quarter (up 1.3 percent), compared with 0.8 percent for all households. This increase for Māori households was driven by higher prices for cigarettes and tobacco, and interest payments.

The lowest-spending households experienced more inflation than the highest-spending households in the March quarter, partly because cigarettes and tobacco are a greater proportion of their living costs. Cigarettes and tobacco make up approximately 3 percent of total household living costs for the lowest-spending households, compared to 1 percent for the highest-spending households. Price increases for rent (up 0.7 percent) and petrol (up 2.5 percent) made the next-biggest contributions to price rises for the lowest-spending households.

The introduction of the Government’s new ‘first year free’ policy for tertiary education had a dampening effect on inflation for all households. The highest-spending households received the greatest benefit because they spend proportionally more on tertiary education. These households also experienced the greatest effect from the seasonal price drop in international air transport.

We warned about these distributional effects around education in our report on zero-percent loans a couple of years ago.

I'd run the numbers on the effects of National's tobacco excise hikes back in 2016. They'd then locked in 10% excise hikes every year through 2020. I'd focused on effects on Maori households, using the Otago public health peoples' numbers on quit rates.

So for every 1000 Maori, we have:

• 773 who would not have smoked regardless,

• 13 who quit because of the tax and enjoy health benefits, save some money, and may or may not be happier from having quit – we’ll assume happier,

• 214 who keep smoking about 90% as much as they had been smoking. Each and every one pays about $1020 more in excise per year than they otherwise would have paid.

For every Maori smoker who quits, 16.46 Maori smokers will pay a bit over a thousand dollars more in excise per year – assuming they start with a half-pack-a-day habit. Some will pay more, some less. The 2014/2015 NZ Health Survey says that Maori daily smokers smoke on average 10.3 cigarettes per day, so that’s about right. On the other side, the same survey says that current prevalence of daily smoking is 35.5% among Maori. If Wilson’s figures underestimate baseline smoking in 2020, then the tax hike would have a few more current smokers quitting than here estimated, and a lot more current smokers paying that extra thousand bucks per year.

The NZ Health Survey notes that daily smoking rates are 25.4% overall in the most deprived neighbourhood quintile (as compared to 8.3% in the least deprived quintile). MoH estimates there are 178,000 daily smokers in the most deprived quintile. If each of them is pays an extra $1000 in tax, the government is pulling $178 million more dollars out of our poorest communities.

When the Otago Public Health people talk about the package of policies that they support, and that I'm evil for not supporting, they mean the continued excise hikes. That's what "implementation of cutting-edge methods to reduce the affordability" means. It's more tax hikes on the poorest people in New Zealand.

My package of reforms? Freeze the excise hikes. Reduced harm products are now legal in New Zealand. Allow them to be advertised - they should not have the same advertising restrictions as smoked tobacco. Make sure that nobody tries applying plain packaging to them. Weigh seriously the trade-offs with an R18 status - if you keep it R18, then monitor to see whether that's winding up making youth smoking rates higher than they need be. Heck, distribute leaflets about reduced-harm products in the dairies and shops that sell cigarettes and let the dairy owners know about distributors who can supply them with reduced-harm products.

Over the next few years, there'll be a lot of switching to reduced-harm products. Eventually, you'll be left with a small number of continuing smokers for whom reduced-harm products simply don't work. Punishing that group with high levels of excise - I don't know what the point of it is. Schedule a reversal of the excise hikes, recognising that excise is less needed where there are better substitutes for smoking available. You just don't need as high an excise rate to discourage use when acceptable substitutes are more readily available. That's just maths and how elasticity works. Goods with more substitutes are more elastic in demand. Any excise hike does more to curb consumption for relatively elastic goods than for relatively inelastic goods. So you don't need as high of excise to induce any given demand reduction if you've been able to make more substitutes available. It's bizarre that parts of the public health community have worked so hard to make sure that acceptable substitutes don't become available.

It really annoys me when people say stuff like "The taxes are regressive but the health benefits are progressive!" Why? The person paying the tax isn't getting much health benefit from the tax. Quitters get the biggest health benefit, but there aren't that many of them.* Current smokers cut smoking rates a bit, but they'll also draw harder on each cigarette to compensate. And it's a bit funny to laud excise for the health benefits of a 10% reduction in the number of cigarettes smoked while damning vaping because some vapers will have the occasional cigarette as well.

Bottom line: the continued hikes in excise should not be part of any reasonable harm reduction package. The harms that excise imposes on those who continue to smoke are substantial. The now-legal status of reduced-harm devices means that you don't need to beat people up with excise.

And if you like excise because it beats up on tobacco companies, think again. Cigarette supply is basically infinitely elastic at the world price. Demand is highly inelastic, in no small part because there have not been good available legal substitutes. Basic tax incidence means the burden of tobacco excise falls predominantly on the relatively inelastic side of the market. That's the demand side.


* And there's still the more difficult question of whether they then see themselves as better off. Many will, some won't.

Why CANZUK?

Mike Reddell wonders why I support CANZUK, the movement wishing to expand the Australia-NZ free mobility area to include Canada and the UK.

I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the CANZUK cause. I read a lot of imperial/Commonwealth history, and ideas like this sort of free movement area among the old ‘white Dominions’ are strikingly reminiscent of calls for an imperial federation or, much later, for imperial trade preferences (which became a big thing as the UK moved away from free trade itself).  I could be a little provocative and suggest that is wasn’t entirely dissimilar to the sort of immigration policies New Zealand and Australia ran until a few decades ago, that could be  –  not entirely inaccurately –  characterised as “white Australia” or “white New Zealand” policies.  In that sense, I’ve always been a bit puzzled by Eric Crampton’s enthusiasm for this particular formulation, when he is so ready to characterise sceptics or opponents of New Zealand’s current immigration policy as “xenophobes”.   The logic of his position looks as though it should favour open borders more generally, not just among these four advanced, fairly culturally similar, countries.  And yet, for example, even as an example of Commonwealth sentiment, not even South Africa –  let alone Zimbabwe, Kenya or Namibia – appears in the CANZUK proposal.

I favour global free trade. My first-best preference would be that every tariff and trade barrier would be abolished tomorrow. Where that isn't possible, I prefer unilateral tariff reductions and membership in as many free-trade areas as possible. I supported the free trade deal with China, but that was hardly in opposition to supporting free trade with other places too.

I understand that there is a lot more opposition to immigration than there is to trade. But most of the usual criticisms of free migration don't apply to a free migration area between Canada, the UK, Australia and NZ. People flocking here from any of those to get free health care? Nah. People flocking here from any of those to collect welfare? Not plausible. They'll destroy our culture somehow? Depends on your thoughts on British cuisine I guess.

I don't buy those arguments against more liberal immigration policy with other countries either, but I expect I'm there in a minority.

It would be an odd free-trader who'd object to a free-trade deal with China when one's on the table just because it isn't a global free-trade deal.

It would be a puzzle if I supported a Fortress version of CANZUK that would close the borders to immigration from outside the region. I don't support that. CANZUK, plus continue letting people from other places become Canadians, Kiwis, Australians and Brits.

Misleading labelling

This is what the public health people want to put on your next bottle of beer or wine:

As always, it's all-source mortality that will matter most where alcohol protects against some stuff and increases the harm of other stuff. And the best estimate on that is still a small reduction in all-source mortality among those drinking about a standard drink per day.

The health warning labels are then highly misleading. It's true that most people will get little or no health benefit from low levels of drinking. But it's also true that most people will not get cancer from drinking, even at high levels of drinking. Small changes in things that are low overall risk are like that.

Even that study that just came out that everyone was trumpeting as showing that there is no benefit from light drinking showed that there is in fact a benefit from light drinking. The researchers were a titch misleading about it in the press release and in the headline charts, but they did put the real result in an online appendix. Where they'd made the J-curve disappear by truncating the x-axis, it comes back if you show all the data.

It's illegal to advertise things on products that aren't true. If you put a label on saying that something is New Zealand made, you'll get in trouble if the thing wasn't actually New Zealand made. But what about things that are highly misleading? That set of labels together provides a pretty misleading overall perception about the health risk of drinking.

If we wanted truth in labeling, we'd mandate this chart on every bottle instead. Compared to not drinking, there is a reduction in overall mortality risk with light drinking. Drinking about 3 drinks per day is as risky as not drinking. And drinking more than about 3 drinks per day is riskier than not drinking. And if you were really keen, you could flatten the curve a bit for whatever lifestyle confounding you think is still in there, making the base of the J a bit closer to the zero-line, but also flattening out the other end of the J-curve too.

Otago and disagreement

Every time I think that the University of Otago's Public Health people can't get any worse, they go and surprise me.

Today, the Initiative launched Jenesa Jeram's excellent report on vaping and reduced-harm alternatives to smoking. It walks through the evidence on the risks of vaping, heat-not-burn products, and snus, and makes some recommendations around liberalising access so that smokers might be able to choose ways of getting nicotine that don't involve breathing in smoke.

The report has drawn some reasonable support. Here's Action on Smoking and Health:

The report is well informed and accurate.
ASH has followed and will continue to follow the evidence in relation to all those alternatives.
Great article @JenesaJeram and @nzinitiative

— ASH New Zealand (@ASHNZ2025) May 11, 2018

And here's Massey University's Prof of Public Health, Marewa Glover:

Good update & overview on #vaping in NZ @JenesaJeram @nzinitiative Jenesa is right: if we honestly want to reduce smoking harm we should support use of Swedish #Snus also https://t.co/0E83Aj3Ufw

— Prof Marewa Glover (@MarewaGlover) May 11, 2018

The Science Media Centre ran a bit of an expert round-up. They asked Massey Health Sciences Senior Lecturer Dr Penelope Truman, who had a lot of sensible things to say:

“I welcome this policy input from the New Zealand Initiative.

“New Zealand has been at the forefront of tobacco control initiatives, with strong and largely successful policies in such matters as tobacco tax increases, restrictions on the places where people can smoke, restricting point of sale displays and, recently, introducing plain packaging.

“However, decreases in smoking rates in New Zealand have slowed, particularly for some groups (including Māori). Further, tax increases have reached the stage of encouraging illegal activity, such as the much-publicised dairy robberies. Smoking addiction is bearing especially heavily on those households with a low disposable income, and onlookers are increasingly questioning the ethics and efficacy of taking our ‘force them to quit’ approach to smoking cessation much further.

...

“The major worry, of course, is that vaping may become attractive to children and teenagers, become a gateway to nicotine addiction and, from there, encourage smoking. While it is obvious that youth are experimenting with vaping, I have never yet found anyone who can explain to me why, if e-cigarettes are a gateway to smoking, youth smoking is declining markedly everywhere that vaping is available.

“My reading of the data is that young people may experiment and may even take up vaping for a while (with or without nicotine) but that vaping diverts a significant proportion of those who might otherwise have taken up smoking from ever doing so. This may well be because nicotine by itself, in any form, is just not as addictive as smoking is.

“In the meantime, we have over 600,000 New Zealand smokers, who have not yet stopped smoking in spite of all the pressure to do so. The indications currently are that many might stop or reduce smoking if vaping were to become more readily available as a substitute, while very few non-smokers will take up vaping, beyond short-term experimentation.”

Lots of agreement on the importance of reduced-harm alternatives.

But Science Media Centre also asked Janet Hoek and Richard Edwards. Otago University. Here's their take on Jenesa's report.

“The dismissal of effective public health measures is perhaps unsurprising for a group funded in part by the three largest tobacco companies operating in New Zealand (British American Tobacco, Imperial Tobacco and Philip Morris). These are the companies already making or developing the ‘Heat not Burn’ products that the report promotes.

“We recommend that readers refer to an action plan developed following broad consultation with the New Zealand tobacco control sector. This sets out a multi-faceted strategy comprising an intensification of current approaches, including enhanced support for smokers wishing to quit; implementation of cutting-edge methods to reduce the affordability, availability, appeal and addictiveness of smoked tobacco products, and making nicotine-containing e-cigarettes and e-liquids widely available to smokers who wish to use them to help quit or as substitutes for smoking if they cannot or do not wish to quit.

“This comprehensive and evidence-based plan is far more likely to succeed than a limited approach that seems inspired more by the corporate interests of its backers than any real desire to achieve the Smokefree 2025 goal. It is difficult to view Ms Jerram’s report as anything other than ‘prugging’ – PR under the guise of research.”

So Action on Smoking and Health, Dr Truman and Prof Glover welcomed the report. Edwards and Hoek didn't like it - and that's fine. People can disagree. But what isn't fine is Edwards and Hoek's assertions around why our report isn't what they'd have written. They think our report reaches different conclusions than they've reached because the Initiative is a member-funded organisation and we have tobacco company members.

And yet ASH, and others in public health, agreed with the report - or at least found it well-informed and accurate. Are they somehow bought out by industry? I could understand people starting to question our intentions if there had been a bunch of errors or strange interpretations in it that all skewed one way, but it's Otago that's the outlier here - not us.

Our report recommends a regulatory framework that would keep the playing field open to new products and new producers. That hardly favours big players. A recommendation for very costly pre-market testing for every new product and every new flavouring would effectively lock the whole thing up such that only the largest companies could participate - and discourage people from switching away from traditional smoked tobacco. That is not what we recommended.

This is basic regulatory economics. Big companies are able to front the fixed costs of dealing with costly regulatory systems, and little guys aren't. That's why big companies sometimes welcome regulatory frameworks that sound like they'd be harmful to them - it hurts their competitors more. One of my favorite stories on that one was American washing machine manufacturers welcoming costly energy efficiency standards because, while it hurt them, it devastated the cheap imports then available. It hurt the competitors more. A lot of regulation is like that.

Otago simply seems unable to conceive of that people can disagree with them honestly - even though a good chunk of the New Zealand tobacco harm reduction academic community seems to disagree with them. Could it be possible that we disagree with Otago for reasons like those listed by Dr Truman?

And they couldn't even spell Jenesa's name correctly. It's Jenesa Jeram. Not Jerram.

I'm damned proud of Jenesa's report. And Otago's Public Health department is a disgrace to academia.

Afternoon roundup

Today's closing of the browser tabs brings a greater share of stupid New Zealand policy than I'd like.

• The SuperGold Card scheme was always stupid. Why? It's badly targeted. If you want to alleviate poverty, give money to poor people. Giving free transport to old people doesn't make a lot of sense. And as Duncan Greive over at the Spinoff points out, there's a big subsidy to rich retired (or just old and still working) people who live up on Waiheke Island - and who can get a free 23km ferry ride any time after 9am. Greive shows that this is just under $2m of the $28m government travel subsidy provided to old people. One upshot from Andrew Leigh's visit to New Zealand earlier this month: where Australia's government tries to give money mostly to poor people, New Zealand's government tries to give money mostly to old people. 
• Biddy Fraser-Davies is a hero. It takes a hero to fight MPI, year after year, to be able to make cheese despite MPI's regulatory efforts. It shouldn't take a hero to do this, and yet here we are. .
• The Public Health People are trying to ban schools from getting special alcohol licenses for school events. It's not like anybody's giving booze to kids. Sometimes there'll be parent events and fundraisers at which they want to be able to serve wine. It's harmless. But the nannies just can't help themselves. At least they've not been as successful as they'd like.

And one bit of news from outside of New Zealand: dictators lie about their GDP figures. And we can tell by the night sky. 

I study the manipulation of GDP statistics in weak and non-democracies. I show that the elasticity of official GDP figures to nighttime lights is systematically larger in more authoritarian regimes. This autocracy gradient in the night-lights elasticity of GDP cannot be explained by differences in a wide range of factors that may affect the mapping of night lights to GDP, such as economic structure, statistical capacity, rates of urbanization or electrification. The gradient is larger when there is a stronger incentive to exaggerate economic performance (years of low growth, before elections or after becoming ineligible for foreign aid) and is only present for GDP sub-components that rely on government information and have low third-party verification. The results indicate that yearly GDP growth rates are inflated by a factor of between 1.15 and 1.3 in the most authoritarian regimes. Correcting for manipulation substantially changes our understanding of comparative economic performance at the turn of the XXI century.

I do like this bit from the conclusion. Is GDP too 'hard' a measure as proxy for how well things are going? Looks like things go the other way:

These results provide additional justification for the use of innovative and ‘harder’ measures of economic performance, such as nighttime lights, in the study of economic development.

Is Vaping Legal? The Ministry's position: yes it is.

I've been wondering about the effects of Philip Morris v Ministry of Health. The Ministry has now put out a statement.

The Ministry will not be appealing the decision which said that PMI's IQOS, a heat-not-burn device, was not covered by the section of the SmokeFree Environments Act which banned chewed tobacco. The Court ruled that IQOS was not like chewing, and that the "or other oral use" clause had to be read as things that were like chewing.

So the sale of tobacco products previously banned under that provision is now legal. I would be exceptionally surprised if this did not include Swedish snus, which is not chewed.

The Ministry believes that most of the rest of the SmokeFree Environments Act's controls will apply to these reduced harm products. MoH writes:

Therefore, the same SFEA regulatory controls apply to smoked tobacco, heated tobacco and vaping products that are manufactured from tobacco. This includes the ban on sales to minors and restrictions on advertising.

The ban on smoking in indoor workplaces, early childhood centres and schools only applies to smoking. It does not apply to vaping or products that are not smoked, such as heated tobacco products. Individual employers and business owners decide whether or not to include vaping in their smokefree policies.

The Ministry of Health is considering how best to apply risk-proportionate regulation across all tobacco products including smoked tobacco, smokeless tobacco and vaping products.

Until the SFEA is amended, retailers should continue to trade responsibly and, in particular, not to advertise or sell vaping products to children and young people under 18 years of age.

Consumers of vaping products should not notice any difference as nicotine vaping liquid has been available for purchase in retail shops for some time.

Heated tobacco products might also become available for sale in New Zealand.

First up, it is excellent that MoH is not wanting to extend the ban on indoor use of cigarettes to other reduced harm products. They wish to leave it up to individual employers and business owners, and that is 100% correct. Awesome.

Second, it looks like the former 'grey market' status of vaping e-liquids has been upgraded to legal-to-sell. But, the Ministry considers that all the regulatory controls on advertising in SFEA apply to reduced-harm devices. The Court decision didn't say anything on this front, but it did have much broader language from the judge saying that application of cigarette controls on reduced harm products was contrary to the purposes of the Act.

I expect that means that if someone wanted to sell vaping kit, heat-not-burn devices, or snus, and advertised their products in ways that would be illegal if the product were a regular cigarette, the Ministry might pursue action against them. If the case wound up in front of the same judge, it would be interesting to see whether the judge would deem those restrictions also to be inconsistent with the purposes of the Act. Reduced harm products can do a lot less good if you're not really allowed to tell current smokers about them because of the advertising restrictions. Dhaval Dave et al found that restricting television advertising of e-cigarettes prevents people from flipping from cigarettes to vaping.

But it might wind up being moot depending on how far along the Ministry is in getting a new regulatory framework ready for reduced harm products. If it's a long way off, somebody might be tempted to test the law.

I'm also not sure on what the excise position would be for products like snus or the heets sticks for IQOS would wind up being. They're far less harmful than smoked tobacco. I do not know whether Customs would reckon them to be the same thing as tobacco for smoking, for excise purposes. Vaping e-liquids wouldn't count as tobacco for excise though.

Interesting times.

In related news, my colleague Jenesa Jeram releases her report on tobacco harm reduction tomorrow morning. Stay tuned!

Crowding out

You should always worry at least a bit about whether a government programme crowds out some other private sector initiative. A state-provided daycare centre could crowd out existing private providers. A welfare programme could crowd out existing charitable programmes. And government house-building schemes could crowd out private development.

The mechanism for crowding out is simple if you spend a few minutes thinking about it, but often isn't obvious to people unless it is pointed out. If there are only so many construction workers currently available in New Zealand and if they're all already employed, the government's Kiwibuild programme will have to crowd out some existing private construction simply by bidding construction workers away from other house-building activities.

But I never expected it to be this transparent!

The Government wants to buy private housing developers' existing plans to add homes to the KiwiBuild tally.

Housing Minister Phil Twyford announced the 'buying off the plans' initiative on Tuesday.

The initiative would see the Government use its $2 billion KiwiBuild fund to purchase developers' land to build KiwiBuild homes on, or purchase existing dwellings to be resold as KiwiBuild homes.

So they'll be taking existing properties that either would have been developed anyway, or that are already either built or in process, and on-selling them as KiwiBuild properties.

Property Council New Zealand chief executive Connal Townsend said the initiative worked in favour of the Government and residential developers who struggled to lend money from "nervous" banks, he said.

It reduced risk for the residential construction industry that faced hurdles from labour and building material shortages, he said.

"It's not a silver bullet, but a very helpful initiative. [It] speeds up the process hugely. Time is money to a developer."

The government is set to make access to finance way worse, at least for apartment projects, by banning foreigners' involvement.

Other than that, well, I guess there are some upsides in the government getting more first-hand experience with the consequences of its building materials supply regime, its immigration restrictions on foreign labour, and the occasional forays into anti-dumping tariffs. If the government thinks that, in a housing crisis and in a country where building materials are really expensive, it's a good idea to throw anti-dumping tariffs on Malaysian wire-nails, I kinda like that the government gets to experience more of that cost of that nonsense a bit more obviously and directly.

If the Property Council's right that there are risk and time costs being offloaded to the government, I'd hope that the prices reflect that appropriately.

But it's an odd way overall to run a government house-building initiative.

I have a few other ideas, like how we could have KiwiCar where the government buys a bunch of Hondas and puts a fern sticker on them before selling them here. It'll be great to have a domestic car industry again. Or KiwiShirt, where the government buys a lot of t-shirts from Malaysia or something, and puts New Zealand labels on them. It'll be great. Maybe the labels could be printed in New Zealand.

More problems with the stupid foreign buyer ban

I had missed the ADLS submission on the foreign buyer ban. It's another one of those "This is obvious when it's pointed out" things.

This bill is just so ridiculously bad.

Here's the ADLS's section 6.7.

A further serious consequence of the Bill would involve inheritance laws and the drafting of wills. Existing owners, whether they are New Zealand citizens, or considered as an overseas owner as per the definition in the Bill, if they bequeath part of their estate which includes residential or lifestyle land to a spouse, child or other person who would be considered an overseas person would need to take into consideration the hurdles that the Bill will put in their way. This may include overseas beneficiaries of a New Zealand family trust. We suggest that beneficiaries of a trust who are overseas persons must make a commitment to rent the property out or to divest themselves of the property within a given time frame. A couple may name their three children as executors of their will however one may be an overseas person. Would OIO consent be needed to transfer estate property to executors in this instance?

This gets messy for migrants living here with their kids, but where the rest of the family is back in the old country.

And here's 6.6

There could be unintended consequences of narrowing this wording, and even of including residential land as sensitive land in the Bill. Under section 10(1) of the current Act, a transaction requires consent for a transaction which will result in an overseas investment in sensitive land. Under section 12, an overseas investment in sensitive land is one where an overseas person or an associate of an overseas person acquires an interest in any land that is included in the Part 1 Schedule 1 list of sensitive land. This raises questions about the position of a married couple where one spouse is either a New Zealand citizen (and therefore is not captured by the Bill) or holds a permanent resident visa, and the other spouse holds a resident class visa but does not yet have a permanent resident visa. The second spouse would be captured by the Bill and would need to go through the onerous hoops of gaining consent before the couple could purchase a home. This could have serious consequences for property ownership within a relationship, the structuring of relationship property agreements, and divorce proceedings.

It will be interesting to see how much of this mess gets fixed in committee, and how much of it was intentional. Things that don't get fixed we might reasonably view as intentional. And a lot of what's in there, if it was intentional, is evil.

Learning nothing in education

What a waste. New Zealand set up a great little policy experiment in the partnership schools. And now that model's ending without really having been evaluated.

From my column in last week's NBR:

A government with access to the world’s best microdata, and with a strong stated commitment to evaluation, simply failed to commission or undertake any real assessment of its experiment with partnership schools.

Whether or not the schools actually improved outcomes for the students they taught, an experiment without measurement and evaluation is a failure.

Not rocket science

It is not as though this kind of evaluation work is either rocket science or unprecedented. America’s thousands of charter schools spawned a small academic industry of rigorous assessment. By my rough count, there are about 80 published academic studies of charter schools for every 100 American charter schools – and that counts only those studies published in economics books and journals.

...

Evaluation should have been built into the initiative from day one.

Admission to charter schools should have incorporated a lottery element so that outcomes could have been more fairly compared.

But even absent lotteries, New Zealand’s rich administrative data provides ample opportunities for better evaluation. For every student who switched to a partnership school, an analyst might have found a statistically similar student who stayed with the initial public school – or who switched to a different public school. Outcomes like performance on externally invigilated NCEA standards could have been compared across the groups.

Or, even more simply, outcomes could have been compared for partnership school students and public school students after adjusting for all of the family background characteristics we know matter in educational performance.

But none of that was in the evaluation’s terms of reference. So you might not be surprised that there were no meetings of the ministry’s senior leadership team at which the report was discussed. There was nothing really to learn from the report.

David Seymour was the MP responsible for partnership schools under the previous government. When I asked why there had been no rigorous evaluation of the partnership schools, he was livid. He told me he had desperately wanted proper evaluation, and cited some good evaluation models, but said those efforts had been blocked. He had been told it was not necessary because a better evaluation framework was coming for all schools and so no partnership-specific evaluation was needed. But that framework never came.

The government conducted an educational experiment without learning. We do not know whether students at the different partnership schools did better, worse, or about the same as comparable students in traditional schools.

That is even worse than running an experiment and finding out that all of the schools failed. If they failed, and we knew that, we would at least know that. We might start teasing out what parts succeeded, and which ideas really did not pan out. But we do not even know that. Neither can we celebrate any successes among the schools that did improve outcomes for their students.

Some of that work can still be done. Data still sits with Statistics New Zealand that could help us tell which schools did well under a model that will have ended by the time any analyst looks at it.

On the plus side, I suppose, National has become great cheerleaders for the schools - after having set up a model that guaranteed they would be killed by an incoming Labour government.

A government that loved the model and didn't care about evidence would have just started with a huge broad roll-out, so that any future government killing it would face a lot more angry parents.

A government that was properly interested in the evidence would have set the model early in its administration and would have run evaluation with it all along the way, watching things like school drop-out rates, NCEA subjects chosen and achievement in them, and what happened to students after school - comparing like with like.

And a government that just kinda hated them but was forced into doing something by ACT would do basically what National did - set them up without any proper evaluation so it would be easy for the next government to roll them back.

We've an ungated version of the NBR piece here now.