Afternoon roundup

A long-delayed closing of the browser tabs:

• A compilation of the Official Information Act requests that Health New Zealand ignored or delayed. I doubt anything gets fixed without penalties for OIA non-compliance.


• CarbonNews ($) reports more investments into Ruminant BioTech, which has a slow-release bolus that massively reduces cattle methane production. 70%. If this thing winds up being able to be delivered at a reasonable price-point, that's agricultural methane emissions solved. Nitrates will still be a problem. But 70% reduction is well beyond any of the targets for long-lived gas reduction. 


• Who is Dril?


• Learning from Houston's townhouse reforms.


• If you take away combustion's harms, there's no particularly good reason to worry about people enjoying nicotine. Do you complain about their caffeine? The excellent Clive Bates. 


• And on the same topic, note too the speech by UK Minister Neil O'Brien on avoiding NZ-style prohibitionist approaches.

  Now of course some would go further - to stop people to start smoking in the first place. The Khan Review last year advocated the New Zealand approach - a full phase out of smoking, with the age of sale increasing over time to cover all adults.
  This would be a major departure from the policy pursued over recent decades which has emphasised personal responsibility and help for people to quit. And it is the help for current smokers to quit that we want to focus on. 

• An older piece by Pete Boettke that I'd missed on the genius of Armen Alchian. Certainly one of the Pantheon of the Econ Gods. Really important points on markets as a filtering tech. It doesn't matter if people are stupid, obnoxious, or daft. You can still model them as rational and the model tracks because that's what survives. Read!

And in honour of the Boettke piece...

Presenting...

GMU Balenciaga -- Economics with attitude 😎 pic.twitter.com/wzWiOnnd73

— Samuel Hammond 🌐🏛 (@hamandcheese) April 9, 2023

Afternoon roundup

The notables from the lunchtime closing of the browser tabs:

• Nancy Maclean thinks there's some kind of Koch - George Mason conspiracy to subvert democracy. To make her case, she misquotes Tyler Cowen and James Buchanan in ways that reverse the meaning of what they'd written. And here's more on Buchanan and racism. John Small takes issue with my liking James Buchanan; I don't trust a single thing in MacLean's book to be accurate, so I see no reason to go through the book and debunk it. 
• Seattle's $15 minimum wage reduced earnings among low-wage workers by cutting their hours. Here's the NBER paper.
• Dave Lane has an interesting suggestion: get tech students in high schools to provide the tech support. 
• Ontario has a messed up alcohol system. The Liquor Control Board runs all retail sales of hard liquor, and they're up against the Ontario Public Service Employees Union. One union's fight with one government monopoly retailer almost shut down Ontario's access to the good stuff. One might expect that unions have inordinate bargaining power in that kind of scenario. 
• Tim Harford has a great roundup on intellectual property issues. 
• The usual suspects are mad that there isn't a ban on having cartoon characters on cereal boxes. I don't know how you explain rising obesity with a fixed effect: cartoon characters have been on cereal boxes at least since the 1970s. Mum generally refused to buy the ones with the cartoon characters, taking it as a signal that they weren't as good for us. I can still hum the tune from the ads for Count Chocula and Frankenberry though. 
• Does inequality hurt economic growth? Maybe in less developed countries, otherwise not. Note too that where the route to riches is rent-seeking, you expect more inequality and less growth. 
• America moves a step closer to enabling supersonic passenger transport. Letting supersonics conform to the noise restrictions on older subsonic planes rather than the requirements on new planes would reduce fuel burn by allowing more aerodynamic engines. New Zealand should do the same if it wants to be ready when the new generation of supersonic passengers planes is ready. 
• Decentralisation doesn't work as well without fiscal equalisation. I liked this piece in National Affairs. I'll likely use it in the coming semester's Public Finance course I'm teaching at Victoria University.