Evening roundup

The accumulated worthies:

• Dave Heatley on the publicly-provided goods that should, and should not, draw user charges - and how to tell the difference. Public transport should be charged. I'd add that, when congestion charging is finally in place, the case for subsidising public transit really goes away. Or at least the economic case for it. 
• If you think that NZ hosting FIFA matches is worth at least $11 per capita in fun and festivities, then that's fine. But there might be better uses of the money. And if you think the spending buys us anything other than a festival, you're deluding yourself. A few bits from me in this piece. 
• New Zealand's holiday pay rules are so complicated that the Ministry of Health has spent $50 million on consultants trying to deal with it. They now estimate that they owe backpay of $1.8 billion due to incorrect holiday pay calculations. 
• Otago's public health people prefer prohibitionist approaches to vaping, with restrictions ramping up as smoking rates decline. 
• Westpac argues for vertical separation of the supermarkets to encourage competition. Their report ignores regulatory restrictions against new large-scale entry, other than nodding at removal of covenants. Bizarre from a sector that's likely to be hitting its own market study soon, and ought to prefer that interventions have sound logic. 
• New Zealand has a new policy in the event that boatloads of refugees arrive: detention. UNHCR has some reasonable concerns. 
• Concentration in graduate economics education.
• Scott Sumner on Noah Smith's pessimistic vision.
• Water flows downhill and restrictions on housing supply drive housing price growth. Nathaniel Baum-Snow in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. 
• Want affordable housing? Make sure there's ample excess zoned capacity. 
• Council-owned wastewater treatment plans are often a mess. Regional councils seem to feel constrained against properly enforcing their regulatory duties. 
• An oldie but a goodie: Alex Tabarrok on The Happy Meal Fallacy
• Some cautions about the "Gas stoves cause asthma" hypothesis. A lot of the underlying research isn't that sound. 
• Remember how SCTV came up with Bob & Doug McKenzie in response to a demand for 2 minutes more Canadian-content per episode? Think about that when considering CanCon rules for pornography in Canada....
• The Spinoff has a pre-budget roundup. Six months ago I'd have put very high odds on some form of a carbon dividend showing up. Now, with some problems in the last auction, it's harder to say. Still some odds of it though. A few bits from me in this piece. 
• Peter Griffin on Rocket Lab's successes. This really was one where NZ's regulators stepped up to quickly set an enabling regulatory framework.