A closing of the browser tabs:
- New Zealand's space industry keeps growing. Here's BusinessDesk on Dawn Aerospace. So neat.
- America's economists are very sceptical about the latest round of tariffs on imports from China.
- Ancient bugs hiding in NZ amber.
- Statistics New Zealand is shifting out of central Auckland because of increasing levels of 'intimidating behaviour' in the neighbourhood. Police victimisation stats had a surge in crime in Auckland Central West in 2023 that's since abated, but the number of victimisations there remains far higher than in the Lambton area around the SNZ Wellington office.
- Easy to find claims that public ownership is better than private because private operators are too short-term oriented. Meanwhile, half the board of Christchurch City holdings has resigned. Why? "...the decisions council has subsequently taken over 2024 to maximise short-term dividends at the expense of paying down group debts and investing in the future of its companies has caused us to lose confidence in council's ability to responsibly own core strategic infrastructure."
- Satya Marar at Mercatus on America's populist turn in antitrust policy.
- Modern desalination is pretty cheap. The energy required for desalinating a household's water is roughly on par with the power needed for its refrigerator.
- Whenever you're depressed by NZ problems like deteriorating council infrastructure, messes in government IT systems, and crises in public media funding, always worth checking over at Canada's seemingly worse problems in the same areas.
- Concrete is neat.
- There is no good version of a central bank digital currency.
- Eli Dourado wants floating cities.
- Worried about the de-banked - people who can't reasonably access normal banking serives? Fix AML.
- If I were still teaching Public Choice, this would be added to the syllabus. If you want the implicit models behind critiques of the left's shift into identity politics from folks like Chris Trotter, it's a good read.
- Cass Sunstein's 'Economic Constitution of the United States' would also hit the syllabus. I've viewed the Public Finance Act and Reserve Bank Act as being part of New Zealand's economic constitution. Sunstein here makes the case around the rules around regulation and regulatory impact assessment.
