Afternoon Roundup

The afternoon's closing of the browser tabs brings:

• Tony Burton at The Spinoff on unemployment figures. Far fewer of those aged 15-19 are in work now than was the case prior to 2008. The jump, to my eye, coincides with Labour's abolition of the differential lower youth minimum wage. There's been of course expansion in tertiary education over the period, but the timing is consistent with the change in the youth minimum wage combined with the GFC, then levelling out to a higher steady-state youth unemployment rate. 
• The government isn't just mulling over porn filters. They're also looking at blocking access to online gambling. Another Tracey Martin initiative. 
• This older piece at the New York Times uses the Mercatus Center's tallying of regulations to look at the quantum of regulation facing apple growers in the US. It would be pretty interesting to replicate that Mercatus project in New Zealand. 
• Andrew Leigh on Australia's second convict age. Incarceration rates have been rising in Oz since the mid-1980s, with rates now again where they were around 1900 (though nowhere near incarceration rates in the US, and still below New Zealand's rates). He cites Kleiman approvingly on the importance of the swiftness and certainty of penalty over the duration of sentence.