Social media slippery slopes

Yesterday, I went through what I see as a trilemma for age-gating social media access. 

A system putting obligations and liability on social media providers to keep kids off the platform will have at least one of the following three problems:

1. Easily worked around by those under the age limit;
2. Cumbersome for those over the age limit;
3. Ends internet pseudonymity. 

I think the proponents of the proposed Member's Bill that National has endorsed envision the system being light-touch and consequently leaning on the first part of the trilemma. It's about 'sending a message' as much as it is about developing a workable regime. 

The Bill is broad enough to encompass all kinds of ways of running it. It depends what you think counts as "reasonable steps". 

Consider the lightest-touch version. 

The Minister designates only Snapchat, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter - leaving everything else alone. And the Minister signals that they don't want the platforms going overboard on what's 'reasonable'. 

The platforms then require users to confirm that they are over the required age. They use various AI tools to watch for accounts that might be under-aged. Some of them, like Instagram, already do this - they try to push teenaged users onto a teen-version of the platform. 

If they suspect a user is under-aged, the platform will issue a challenge. "We think you're actually under the age limit. If you can't prove otherwise, we'll suspend your account or punt you into the kids' version (if that kid version is still legal)." 

For users falsely identified by the automated tools as being under the age limit, the trilemma applies. Either the challenge is easily worked around, or it is cumbersome for those over the age limit, or it's the end of pseudonymity. Being a light-touch regime, it leans on the former.

This does not seem like a political equilibrium. 

People will forget about the tradeoffs when it is obvious that kids are still on the networks. The Minister will put the platforms "On Notice!" that they have to do more to close loopholes. 

That pushes the designated platforms to tighten up. More users will face cumbersome checks confirming that they are over the age limits. It will be harder to maintain pseudonymity if those accounts need to be verified with a real ID. 

The more the regime is successful in keeping kids off of the regulated platforms (at cost to adult users), the more that kids will be pushed onto platforms that have not yet been designated. Those platforms will then be designated. Discord. WhatsApp. Various videogames that have chatrooms or that enable chat. 

Compliance burdens continue to rise, except on platforms outside the reach of New Zealand regulators, like 4Chan. 

The stable equilibrium at the end of that? Substantial hassles for users over the age limit and/or the end of pseudonymity, some kids deterred from using platforms, others out on forums that are far worse than where they are now. 

Recall that John Key's ban on pseudoephedrine-based cold medicines remained in place for more than a decade after it was very obvious that it had done nothing to stop meth while inconveniencing everyone with a cold. 

Campus speech

Victoria University's panel on free speech at universities seemed designed to be tedious, providing the smallest target for criticisms of the university. 

Rather than any discussion among panelists, we heard a series of statements in response to less-than-useful questions from Corin Dann. 

Because of Dann's framing, a pile of discussion was around who should be allowed to speak on campus.

Dann could not be expected to know that there has been a standard solution to this. Or at least there was for the period I was on campus at Canterbury. It worked well. Michael Johnston briefly alluded to that standard solution, but that didn't stop the 'but who should be allowed to speak on campus' bit. Or "Should someone be allowed on campus to debate cutting off Corin Dann's head" - as one of the panelists put it. 

Someone can speak on campus if they have been invited to do so by a member of the academic community. 

An academic can invite guest speakers to present to their class. 

Departments invite guest speakers to present working papers in regular workshops. Ours were on Friday afternoons, followed by excellent beer at the Staff Club. 

If an academic wants to host a guest speaker for a more public event, they need to get a room booking. At one point that was done through the Department because we controlled a couple of our own lecture theatres; later, that required centralised room booking. But the academic's name was on the booking; the academic had thought the speaker worth hearing out.

If a student group wanted to host a guest speaker, they could do it at the student union, or they could ask a member of faculty to book one of the lecture theatres. I think the student union restricted that to recognised student groups - but there was a broad set of recognised student groups, from ACT On Campus to Maoists. 

In any case, the guest was there because a member of the academic community thought they were worth hearing. 

For plenary speakers where there might be resourcing issues, or if it were part of a University named lecture series, that would need sign-off from whoever ran that series. Not getting signoff didn't mean the person couldn't speak on campus. It just meant they wouldn't speak in that slot. If other ways of financing a visit could be worked out, the academic could just book a room. 

The test shouldn't be some big public discourse about who is or isn't worth hearing, or who is or isn't presenting misinformation. 

There was useless, tedious discussion of whether Julian Bachelor (an activist favouring one reading of the implications of the Treaty of Waitangi) should be allowed to talk on campus. 

The only test should be whether a member of the academic community thinks he is worth hearing. Not whether his views are respected in, say, the Faculty of Law. I expect they think he's nuts, and they could well be right. It isn't my field. 

But I know that the Accounting Department regularly hosted speakers that folks in econ/finance thought were barking mad. And one fine Accounting colleague would often send all-college emails about how all of economics is wrong, as proven by their guest speaker who didn't have a clue about the content of intermediate micro, just that it was 'neoliberal'. 

The test wasn't whether we thought the speaker was an idiot, or wrong, or providing misinformation. Some of the Accounting guests were all three - at least in the view of the econ tea room. 

The test was whether the people in Accounting thought that the speaker was worth hearing. 

An equilibrium where we would have gotten to veto speakers that we thought were idiots and they got to veto speakers that they thought were idiots would have been terrible. 

So there's a simple answer on the Bachelor, or anyone else, question. They should be allowed to speak on campus if a member of the academic community has asked them to do so. 

That raises a separate question: would faculty still feel safe in inviting speakers that they think are very much worth hearing, but that might draw complaint?

Update:

After the session, I walked back toward the train station with a couple of Vic academics that I ran into outside the event. 

They noted that they’d been approached by a journo for their views.

They said they’d politely declined.

They also said that they hadn’t told the journo the reason for declining. Namely, that Vic is not a safe place for freely airing one’s views on such matters. They did not expect the Uni to have their backs if there were pushback, and they were surprised how many of their colleagues in the audience appeared supportive of restricting speech on campus. 

The alcohol levy review - an ongoing OIA saga

I keep a bit of a watching brief on the old BERL social cost of alcohol figure. It turns up in weird places. 

As aide memoire, BERL produced the number as commissioned work in the late 2000s that was meant to follow the method set by Collins & Lapsley in Australia. 

The Collins and Lapsley method has a few problems. But BERL compounded those problems with choices that seemed designed to generate a larger number for the tallied social costs. 

For example, Collins & Lapsley had aetiological tables that tried to attribute the fraction of different disorders that might be attributed to alcohol use. Their tables had a few disorders where the aetiological fraction was negative because drinking reduces the incidence of that disorder. BERL decided that, because they were only looking at harmful drinking, it was ok to just set all those cells in the table to zero rather than maintain a number showing benefits (and consequent reductions in net harm). 

Matt Burgess and I went through the BERL report, seeing what the number would look like if more standard method were followed. For example, BERL counted as social cost to the country every dollar spent on alcohol, including every dollar spent on excise, by those drinking more than about 2 pints of beer a day. Drinkers' spending on beer is a social cost only in the sense that private costs are part of social costs. And since benefits enjoyed by drinkers would need to be netted for any sensible net cost figure, the whole thing was a bit suspect. 

BERL responded to the critique by updating the figure to no longer count as a social cost drinkers' spending on alcohol excise, but let the rest stand. 

Brad Taylor joined Matt and me for an update to the review in 2011, when we went through the underlying Collins & Lapsley work. We adjusted upward the revised BERL figure, but the majority of the BERL-tallied costs were either double-counting or costs far better considered private than external and social. 

BERL provided an updated figure in 2018, but it turned out just to be the old figure multiplied by GDP growth over the period. Which could be fine if the initial number were sound (it wasn't) or if alcohol social costs scaled with GDP (they don't necessarily, and especially where alcohol consumption was declining over the relevant period). 

And the whole thing is a bit silly where the measured social cost really doesn't matter. The policy question is always whether any intervention, whether excise or otherwise, provides net benefits. Interventions can fail to do so despite very high measured social cost; they can also provide benefits even if social costs are low. The only reason for generating large social cost numbers is to motivate "something must be done" responses. 

Anyway. 

The number turned up again in last year's "Independent Review of the Alcohol Levy Stage 1: Rapid Review". The work for the Public Health Agency was undertaken by NZIER and Allen + Clarke. 

The work included this section:

90. The cost of alcohol-related harm to New Zealand society is significant. This section provides a summary of existing estimates of the cost of alcohol-related harm in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

91. The most recent study to quantify the social cost of alcohol in Aotearoa New Zealand was conducted by BERL in 2009. Commissioned by ACC and the Ministry of Heath, the report aimed to quantify the social cost of alcohol and drug related harm looking at the personal, economic, and social impacts. While the estimate of the social cost of alcohol-related harm in Aotearoa New Zealand published by BERL in 2009 and updated in 2018, or rather the methods used to generate it, have been criticised by some commentators, it has been widely cited in the alcohol-harm research and policy space in New Zealand over the last 14 years (BERL, 2009; Nana, 2018). The Law Commission’s 2010 report on the review of the regulatory framework for the sale and supply of liquor also cited the BERL 2009 report. 

92. In 2018, the updated estimate of the social cost of alcohol, based on the BERL methodology, was calculated to be $7.85 billion per year (Nana, 2018). This estimate included costs resulting from justice, health, ACC, social services, unemployment, and lost productivity. Intangible costs such as years of life lost from premature death, lost quality of life, child abuse, sexual abuse, and impacts on victims of alcohol-caused crime are also relevant to assessing the overall impact of alcohol-related harm on society. The 2018 update did not include intangible costs. A recent Australian Study found that in Australia $48.6 billion AUD of intangible costs could be attributable to alcohol (National Drug Research Institute, Curtin University, 2021). 

This section seemed particularly poorly undertaken. Citing the 2018 figure seemed particularly odd where the thing was just the old number multiplied by cumulative GDP growth. 

It's also incorrect to say that the 2018 update didn't include intangible costs. Intangible costs of lost life and lost quality of life were included in the 2009 figure, and the 2018 figure just inflated the old number by GDP growth.  

Paragraph 91 alludes to that 'some commentators' have criticised it, but said nothing about the nature of those critiques or who made them. Were the concerns trivial or notable?

Meanwhile, the bibliography included these two relevant references that weren't included in Para 91:

Crampton, E. (2018). The alcohol cost ‘zombie’ has returned. 

Crampton, E., & Burgess, M. (2009). The Price of Everything, The Value of Nothing: A (Truly) External Review Of BERL’s Study Of Harmful Alcohol and Drug Use (Working Paper No. 10/2009).

The 2009 piece was my original critique of the BERL figure with Matt; I'd have preferred the updated critique from 2011. The 2018 column had my initial guess that the updated BERL figure was just an inflation and population growth adjustment; my 2019 column had Ganesh Nana's confirmation that the new figure was the old figure inflated by cumulative GDP growth. So I'd have pointed to the 2019 column instead. 

But the authors clearly knew about my critiques. That they were in the bibliography suggested that there might have been more fulsome discussion of those critiques in earlier drafts. 

On 6 September 2023, I sent an OIA request to the Ministry of Health asking for all early and working drafts produced by NZIER [Paragraph 14 of the report said that NZIER undertook the analysis of existing data and evidence]; for correspondence between and notes from conversations between MoH, HPA, Allen + Clarke and NZIER regarding NZIER's analysis; and, for any peer review of the report. 

On 15 September, MoH replied saying that the correspondence would be extensive and that I needed to refine the request if I wanted to get anywhere. 

I replied immediately asking them to prioritise delivery of early and working drafts, and any peer review. I also suggested prioritising correspondence and relevant notes from meetings between and among MoH, HPA, and Allen + Clarke regarding the NZIER report. 

On 6 October, I reminded MoH that the refinement of my request only asked that they prioritise two parts of the request, and should not have triggered a clock reset; the requested information was due.

On 17 October, I had a reply from the Public Health Agency's Ross Bell. He noted that they'd considered the refinement as having triggered a time extension. But more substantively, they refused early and working drafts, as well as peer reviews, under 9(2)(g)(i) to protect free and frank expression of opinions. 

I proceeded immediately with the Ombudsman. 

On 16 November, the Ombudsman's Office commenced investigation. 

On 13 December, the Ombudsman's Office advised that the Ministry was prepared to reconsider its decision with respect to final drafts and asked whether that would be sufficient. I wouldn't know until I'd seen any released documents - if the released drafts let me see what had happened in the relevant section, that would be fine. If they didn't, I'd need to see more. I'd have to wait. 

On 2 February, a Senior Investigator at the Office of the Ombudsman noted that the Ministry had advised it would be providing a partial release, and asked whether I wished that they review the withholding of the earlier drafts; I noted that I couldn't know until I'd seen what they would release.

On 4 March, the Office reported that they were still chasing the Ministry about the later drafts. 

On 11 March, the Ombudsman advised that he had sent a letter to the Ministry recommending that the documents be released immediately and apologise for the delay.

At close of business on 14 March, the Ministry of Health released the later drafts. Ross Bell, Group Manager, Public Health Strategy & Engagement at the Public Health Agency, apologised for the delay and any related inconvenience.  

While those drafts did include some annotations from "KT" and Te Whatu Ora, they did not provide much light on what had happened with the section on alcohol social cost. The earliest draft was substantially similar to the final. 

So I still cannot really tell what happened. 

The bibliography references to the critiques suggest that, at minimum, those references were included as a citation in an earlier draft of Para 92. It's possible that an earlier version included more substantive discussion of those critiques, but it's hard to say.

I've asked the Ombudsman to form a determination around those earlier drafts' discussions of the costs of alcohol-related harm.

I suspected that the first draft from NZIER included substantive discussion of the relevant arguments. NZIER aren't idiots; they know this stuff. It's in the bibliography, so it was there at some point. 

If there had been more substantive discussion, was it excised at request of Allen + Clarke, or at request of the Public Health Agency?

In either case, the effect is a document sent to the Minister, advising on the alcohol health levy, that provides a fairly one-sided view on alcohol social costs. 

I yesterday received an additional bit from the Ministry, which might speak to the Public Health Agency's views on things:

Kia ora Eric,

Further to the below email sent to you containing the reconsidered documents of your OIA (ref. H2023031477), the Ministry has identified a paragraph pertaining to yourself in one of the early draft documents. While the Ministry is maintaining its position on withholding the early draft documents under 9(2)(g)(i) of the Act, the following excerpt is being released to you under section 16(1)(e) of the Act: 

So it seems that early drafts did include substantive discussion of my critique of the BERL figure, and that someone caused it to be erased.

I'd also note that I was discussant at the NZAE meetings on the BERL paper in 2009. It was standing room only, because my critique of the BERL paper had already been released. The Ministry could consider asking any economist in the room whether my critique was just a me-thing, or whether the profession broadly shared my concerns.

I did that work as an academic in the Department of Economics at Canterbury, five years before I joined the Initiative, and two years before doing any industry-funded work. The funded 2011 work [funded by NABIC] discovered an error in the earlier unfunded work that had us revise upward the earlier estimate of alcohol social cost. 

I note that Ross Bell, now relevant Group Manager at the Public Health Agency, was Executive Director of the Drug Foundation when the BERL figure was originally being critiqued. 

Here is the issue of the Drug Foundation's "Matters of Substance" newsletter that included discussion of the controversy around BERL's number. It would be surprising if Bell were not aware of the difficulties with BERL's figure. He had the masthead editorial on the issue of their newsletter in which my critique of the BERL figure was discussed. 

I'll look forward to seeing whether I can get any further with this via the Ombudsman. 

In the meantime, it looks pretty obvious that the Public Health Agency was very happy to put a biased document up to the Minister as advice - whether they requested that outcome directly, or had Allen + Clarke do it.

A provisional health warning on advice from the Public Health Agency may be in order. At least until we can figure out what the heck is going on over there. 

And a reminder that government-commissioned reports face censorship regimes. If the Ministry doesn't like what it says, well, the offending bit gets disappeared. As an offending bit here seems to have been disappeared. 

Afternoon roundup

The tabs!

• Universities continue to be very quick to cancel events. 
• NZ Pharmacists warn that if the $5 co-pay on prescriptions returns, customers might start using Chemist Warehouse again rather than community pharmacies. 
• David Harvey argues for a licensing regime instead of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. I don't think it'll work either. If the fee is high enough to save the media, the platforms would probably block news links altogether. Just let the Bill die at committee.
• Reasonable Covid wave coming through; your reminder of what to do.
• Which cuisine will reign supreme? All of them, thanks to globalisation. 
• Consumer NZ wants to turn audiology into a government-enforced cartel. That outfit's becoming increasingly reliable as a "do the opposite of whatever they're on about" signal. 

Morning roundup

A closing of the browser tabs:

• The Economist's write-up of Barcelona's new Museum of Prohibited Art. The museum's website is here. 
• Europe considering pricing agricultural emissions.
• Bill Gates on some of the climate tech in the pipeline.
• Cass Sunstein on goods that people buy but wish did not exist. Fun as a logical exercise - this class of goods could exist in this way. But banning them would just push status-seeking onto other margins. Other margins can be worse. And what if there's an additional class of goods: ones that people loudly claim they wish didn't exist, but secretly enjoy? In that case, could you ever tell which ought to be banned?
• Stephen Jennings's Conversation with Tyler. Great stuff on building new cities in Africa, and a gloomy bit about New Zealand. 
• What happens when central government tries to centrally plan daycare. Maybe Stephen Jennings is right to be pessimistic about the place. 

Morning roundup

The closing of the tabs....

• Free speech used to be a US left-wing value. On American campuses, only conservative students would support allowing a controversial speaker they disagreed with to speak on campus. This is very bad. 
• There's some support for free-speech on the NZ left, mostly Chris Trotter and Josie Pagani and Bryce Edwards. The rest pretends that free speech is some American neoliberal imposition and that we need nuanced approaches in which enlightened Wellingtoneans (themselves) would get to tell everyone else what speech is allowed. I wish we had better data on broader preferences.  
• The growth of the public sector over the past six years.
• The US National Institute of Justice rated the South Dakota 24/7 sobriety project as promising. Their whole database is likely useful for those keen on approaches that have some evaluation. 
• A $1 increase in US minimum wages is associated with a 0.92 percentage point reduction in percentage of employers offering health insurance and a 1.93 p.p. increase in prevalence of plans with deductibles. Always remember that total compensation bundles are more than just wages, and that squeezing one element of that bundle may affect the others. 
• The Paul Ramsay Foundation thinks Evidence Institutes, which trawl the lit [like the US National Institute of Justice, above] are a good idea. 
• Oh, I'm going to have to come back to this one as a dedicated post or column. Luming Chen's job market paper at UW-Madison. Policy uncertainty around wind energy destroys $5.9 billion in value in the US. 

Afternoon roundup

Eight browser windows each full of tabs. Something's gotta give.

• Excellent quips from our Treasury Secretary in response to RBNZ pleading for even more money.
• All the BS speech restrictions that apply on election day. 
• I don't get how Brian Albrecht doesn't yet have a syndicated national column in the US. Gold!
• Bits from me and a few others on whether National or Labour is 'better for business'
• My column at Newsroom this week expanded on last week's post on the NIMBY problem. 
• British Columbia's Supreme Court backs the Squamish Nation's push to build a pile of needed apartment towers on Squamish land in Vancouver, batting back NIMBYs. 
• A Commerce Commission that were on its game would be checking into just how the existing cartels have managed to block a new nurses' training school from training new nurses. 
• Excellent piece by Bill Watson on competition policy versus actual competition.
• Interesting ideas from Andrew Body and Simon Jensen on improving prudential bank regulation in NZ. But there's still the bigger question of whether we ought to split monetary from prudential.
• Noah Smith thinks a three-state solution is needed. I can't see how that works while Hamas runs Gaza, but maybe somebody will figure it out.
• "The region's pipes are ageing at a faster rate than they can be fixed." Wellington is such a mess. But I simply don't buy the claim that "Our councils are pushing their ratepayers to the limit in order to fund [Wellington Water]." Our council is set to spend $350m earthquake strengthening a building that could be bulldozed and just built a convention centre and is spending $100m more than necessary on a central library.  
• Queenstown has the country's worst housing shortage. The Infrastructure Commission points out that Queenstown's new plan will enable about 31-149 houses over ten years. Neither National nor Labour are really serious about housing.
• The final chapter in BusinessDesk's excellent series on the state of the NZ public service and the legacy of Peter Hughes. I still think an incoming government should fire Hughes pretty much on day 1 rather than let him see things through to February. 
• Years back we'd been arguing for a variant on city deals. They're in fashion now, with some risk of monkey-paw problems. 

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies:

• If you want to know why rail in NZ is all messed up, look at how the thing's structured. Egads. 


• New York going back to phonics, after noticing that whole-language ideology caused a lot of illiteracy.


• Matt Nolan on inflation and the Australian budget.


• A National Party candidate out on the campaign trail, handing out flyers for a Law and Order public meeting, walks in on a dairy robbery. Wonder what'll happen when a Labour candidate walks in on one. Seems higher odds than it ought to be. 


• The Motor Trade Association wants vehicle emission checks as part of the Warrant of Fitness. Not crazy for vehicles generally used in places with air quality problems. 


• Alberta's NDP are picking up a policy that was tried and failed at the Federal level: a tax credit for kids' sport. The thing mainly subsidised families who already had kids in sport. 


• Another council leaves Local Government New Zealand. 


• I'm not the only one expecting at least some inflation-adjustment of the tax thresholds. I'd hope that they'd be announced in the budget next week. 


• Worries about government deciding to censor whatever it considers to be disinformation aren't just fever-swamp ravings. Look at what Canada's Liberal Party is putting up for consideration.
  

  The story, it is now admitted, was true. Mr. Chong’s family was being targeted. The Globe’s sources were right, and The Globe was right to report what they had to say – even if they remained unnamed. Had it not, the matter would never have come to light, Mr. Chong would never have been told, and no Chinese diplomat would be going home.
  
  And yet even as the Liberal government was tacitly endorsing The Globe’s use of unnamed sources, the Liberal Party was busy demanding the practice be outlawed. Resolution 472 at the party’s national convention, passed without debate, calls on the government to “explore options to hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.” How very tidy.
  
  Understand: the government has no more business “holding” anyone “accountable” for the “veracity” of anything. But the second part, urging the government to ban all material whose sources cannot be “traced” – material like, say, The Globe’s reports – is frankly chilling. Any crank can present a motion of course. But it was the party at large, the party in power, that passed it.

  It really feels like appetite is being whetted about pressing need for crackdowns on whatever a government can consider to be disinformation, and that it will end very badly if it's allowed to happen.
  

Afternoon roundup

Oh the tabs. 

• Chris Quin is CE of Foodstuffs North Island. His chat with Morning Report on what they've been doing to get groceries through to Hawke's Bay, including helicopters....
• The nastiness is intrinsic to Dahl's work. Erasing it is a mistake. I still think that when rights-holders abandon the original works by making them unavailable, those works should enter the public domain. Especially if the author is already dead. 
• Looks like business-as-usual continues on at least one front. Government is set to impose a pile of compliance regulations on incorporated societies and there just isn't time to let them look at the regulations before they take effect. Government, despite the change at the top, is still trying to do too many things at the same time and risks making serious messes. 
• Dileepa Fonseca also points to government capacity constraints. "...Wellington's workforce is already overwhelmed coping with the central government's demands at the moment..."
• Yeah, it'd be great if it were easier to import and use plasterboard in rebuilding from a cyclone. 
• Headline says it all about building anything: "New Far North council dog pound balloons from $200,000 to $2.4m and can house fewer dogs."
• Look, if they were really serious about it, they'd have made it some kind of Commandment.
• University of Canterbury's Covid response was risible. 
• Effective Altruism in the classroom!
• Genetically modified trees that are sterile and so no wilding problem. But GE regs mean they can't be planted. 
• Bryce Wilkinson on some of the problems in the RMA replacement bills
• The perils of trying to curtail hazily defined 'disinformation'
• The Future of Long COVID
• We don't need laws against scapling. And if a platform like Viagogo can't reliably make sure it isn't selling fake tickets, people won't use it. 

Afternoon roundup

Easing back into the office after a summer break and already the tabs have multiplied.

Today's worthies:

• Alex Penk on the value of free speech
• Zoning Reform in Gotham. One option sounds a lot like NZ's National Policy Statement on Urban Development. 
• Bryce Edwards expects a big politician pay increase after the election. I'd forgotten about the MP pay freeze. I like that a nominal pay freeze for the politicians responsible for the dilution of the Reserve Bank's mandate and erosion of accountability for meeting its inflation target means substantial real pay cuts for them. 
• Bryan Caplan is working on a book on zoning reform. Will look forward to it!
• Regime uncertainty around investment in thermal generation is a problem:

  “Mitigating the winter 2023 operational coordination issue with further information is insufficient by itself, particularly considering the limited timeframe to resolve the issue,” the system operator says. The key issues are the influx of unreliable wind generation, the paucity of fast-start thermal generation, and the weakening market incentives for slow-start thermal generation. And Transpower says the EA’s proposed measures won’t address these underlying problems.

  The article notes some more complex multi-hour generation contracts as a potential solution. 

• Getting more energy generation seems like a good idea and people get unreasonably upset about landfills. And so a waste-to-energy plant gets knocked back for want of an adequate cultural impact assessment. 
• But, on the plus side, there is more generation coming through - including 168MW of geothermal
• Medicaid expansions in the US did not reduce mortality. In line with the results of the now-old RAND experiment. 
• Some details are up on the new smokefree regs. New Zealand's Planning Board has mapped out where cigarette stores will be allowed to be. Oamaru and Queenstown will each be allowed to have two stores. Balclutha can only have one. Auckland will be allowed 13. These are all clearly the scientifically-determined correct number of stores. If you disagree, you have a couple of months to make your submission. 

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the tabs:

• Environmental review laws have long been used for NIMBY purposes. This is a new one. The best that could come of this is a recognition that environmental review needs to be fixed.
• If Australia starts enabling nuclear power, NZ should consider a trans-Tasman approach that would let us piggyback on some of their regulatory efforts. There are economies of scale in this kind of reg. And Australia should be sure to kick NZ out of the arrangement if we start behaving like dicks. 
• The simplest explanation for Labour's approach to labour-market regulation is that they base their expectations of employer behaviour on how government behaves when it is a monopsonistic employer. 
• The simplest explanation for occupational regulation for medical workers is that it's a cartel arrangement that proved sticky when conditions changed.
• They've stopped pretending to be playing at anything other than extortion. “By doing things with news organisations, Facebook was attempting to reduce the risk of government hitting them with a big invoice,” one publisher said. “By pulling out, they’ve made it more likely that they will be whacked with regulation.”
• Could make for a fun test around Peltzman effects, if they gathered numbers on it.
• More reasons to be sceptical of the value of peer review, in some disciplines. The most obvious explanation for the problem (department demographics will reflect international demographics in the field, with some home-country bias, rather than home-country demographics full-stop) is ignored. But the paper's problems are bigger than that. Almost reads as a Sokal hoax. But it seems sincere. At U Manitoba, where I went for undergrad, there were more profs who were US Vietnam draft dodgers than there were in the Winnipeg population overall. An overrepresentation of them necessarily means an underrepresentation of the Canadian-born. Which is totally fine. Canadians will be overrepresented on US university faculties too. 
• David Harvey on problems in proposed changes to hate speech regs.

Afternoon roundup

Minor notes on the closing of the browser tabs:

• Andre Brett asks good questions about Auckland rail. Don't agree with some of the conclusions, but they're good questions. 
• The Onion's Amicus Brief in favour of parody is excellent.
• The tertiary education union is going on strike, seeking an 8% cost of living increase. Perhaps a bit difficult for the universities to avoid declining real wages for staff when tuition fee increases were capped at 1.7% for the year and international students might still be trying to figure out how to get visas. 
• There are way fewer nuclear warheads now than there were in the late 1980s. Dropped from over 60,000 to about 10,000. It's still a lot, and Russia has about half of them. 
• Charlie Gates interviews perennial Christchurch local government candidate, and eccentric, Tubby Hansen. 
• Stefanie Stantcheva explains how to run surveys, if you want to create identifying variation. 
• Oooh, yeah. That'll matter. Productivity measures can be upward-biased if some of the labour cost has shifted onto customers: pumping own fuel, supermarket self check-outs. It has to be more efficient than having paid staff do it, or else it wouldn't be done, but the full labour cost of producing the output includes the customer's time. 
• Dileepa Fonseca wishes we had more ghost houses. It would mean there is a surplus of houses, rather than a desperate shortage. He is absolutely correct. It's on the back of a report finally showing that there really aren't that many of them.
• John Cochrane reminds central banks that there are risks out there other than climate change. 
• British power companies are pelletising wood from old-growth forests for use in power generation. I don't know whether the economics would stack up for shipping pine pellets from NZ, but we might wind up seeing more of that kind of power generation here. 
• "What made JASON possible was the convergence of two factors: a competent research community willing to strictly act as advisors, and political officials who wanted that advice to be truthful rather than convenient." When elite physicists advised Washington.
• Inflate grades or get fired at NYU. 
• Oliver Hartwich reminds us that, unlike Truss, Thatcher started by balancing the budget. 
• Jonathan Milne on problems at Ports of Auckland. 
• Between ownership and rangatiratanga: Thomas Cranmer on the Three Waters reforms

Evening roundup

I was out on leave last week, touring around Lake Taupo with the family, hoping desperately for snow that didn't come. 

We had fun anyway. 

But the browser tabs... a week's worth of emails, and stuff saved up... egads. 

Some worthies as I try to clear six different Chrome instances...

• Wikipedians don't like research on IQ. They're even slowly memory-holing the Flynn Effect.


• Time to end the Canadian Dairy Cartel


• Neat evil DMCA hack: create a fake-dated earlier version of content you don't like, then claim the original is a copy. 


• DevPolicyBlog on reducing remittance costs in the Pacific. I hadn't known that getting money from Oz/NZ to the Islands has some of the highest remittance costs in the world. But it makes sense: NZ is overly enthusiastic about AML, and that's a fixed cost in a small place. 


• John McDermott on the case for another Saturday Night Special. When credibility is lost, getting inflation back under control is costly. The RBNZ forgot its job, and we will all bear a cost. 


• Jem Traylen tries to figure out why the government won't fast-track residence for migrant nurses. There are no good answers. 


• The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration has approved Moderna's Covid vax for under-5s. Unclear that Medsafe has even started looking at it. 


• The McGuinness Institute maintains an archive of Government Department Strategies. There are 221 operational GDS and 327 archived ones. I did not know there were so many. 


• Frank Newman on a few problems in the government's Three Waters financial modelling. Oh - and the IT systems alone could cost half a billion. 


• I wonder how much income protection insurance premiums are going to go up because of Long Covid risks. Would be fun if cautious mask-wearers could get a discount...


• Survey evidence of misperceptions could just be miseducated guesses. But wouldn't that predict unbiased means?


• The flu-normal sucks.


• New Zealand's defamation law is even worse than I'd thought. Its reach extends to America.


• Prof Beaglehole on Smokefree 2025.


• Three cheers for the three Christchurch councilors who voted against the stadium.


• Infometrics warns inflation expectations look unanchored. 


• Cameron Bagrie warns of a lack of expertise on the RBNZ Board. I remember Suzanne Sniveley telling us at the NZAE meetings that all is fine. 


• This is just lovely. How the world's worst golfer kept getting to play at big golf tournaments. Great fun story. 


• Pandemic-related losses in education. New Zealand did manage to get through the early period with some of the shortest periods of school closure in the developed world. But we're still showing shocking results on literacy and numeracy - though tough to tell whether it's worse than pre-Covid. 


• Russ Roberts' chat with Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan was great while we were on our drive back from Taupo. Just such an enormous amount of core data work in that project on immigration and outcomes. Here's Noah Smith with Boustan.

Afternoon roundup

I've got tabs, they're multiplying. And I'm losing all control - why can't Chrome be as good as it was a decade ago?

So time to clear them. The worthies:

• The ag sector's plan for dealing with ag emission pricing was released yesterday. I'm still thinking through this one. It is definitely not a first-best. Trying to figure out whether it's a second-best or a fifth-best. Executive Summary here, full report here. Stuff covers it here and here, and here with very minor comment from me. And here's BusinessDesk.
• Prohibitionists get mad that Emerson's Brewery donated to a breast cancer research fund. I'm pleasantly surprised that there's a cancer charity that cares more about cancer than about anti-alcohol activism. 
• Labour's proposals around supermarkets are populist nonsense. I worry that they're a foreshadowing of what's coming down the track for more sectors. Labour's falling in the polls, the next year will bring some horrible combination of high inflation and higher unemployment, and an election's due for 2023. Populist stuff like this will be tempting. 
• If water takes were under a cap-and-trade regime, this sort of thing would be better policed.
• A Grand Inquisitor has been appointed who seems likely to be very diligent. 
• America's welfare system has some worse EMTR cliffs than New Zealand's.
• The Ministry of Health continues to be a dangerous clown-show. 
• Winnipeg has a new slogan: 'It's made from what's real.' Bartley Kives ahs a thread of alternatives...
• Set density restrictions on bars and outlets, create rents for incumbents. Tullock's Trap. 
• The Commerce Commission has published submissions on regulatory barriers to entry in key building supplies. The Affordable Building Coalition's submission is very good.
• Maybe it would be a good idea to make it easier for foreign-trained GPs to practice in New Zealand? Maybe?
• There's maybe one degree of separation between everyone in New Zealand but come on.

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the browser tabs:

• The Niskanen Center goes through the problems with intellectual property. They remind that independent re-discovery needs to be allowed; I take it as meta-point that they mention Landes & Posner nowhere in the piece, which re-derives much of the Landes & Posner framework in different terms.
• Things have gotten really bad in US academia. (ungated link)
• The latest John Lott mess
• The case for an Australian carbon tax and dividend
• I don't know if Google's new language model can think, but it can run logical inference.
• Larry Summers chats with Ezra Klein on inflation
• The Infrastructure Commission's report on the housing crisis is excellent. I'd threaded the key figures here.

From TEU to FSU

Jack Heinemann's take on academic freedom in New Zealand provides an excellent on-campus recruitment opportunity for New Zealand's Free Speech Union. 

The Free Speech Union, as a registered union, has rights to enter workplaces to talk to workers. They should plan a round of campus visits.

Here's Jack:

Making conscience central in all activities of a critic and conscience of society might avoid some future clashes in Aotearoa. Academic freedom is the right to bring forth unpopular or controversial opinions, not to promote opinions popular with those who have social or financial privileges.

For example, white/Pākehā academics making comment on mātauranga Māori in defence of “science” don’t need to use academic freedom because the westernized institution of science already has disproportionate power and influence in any clash with indigenous knowledge systems. So when a university takes a neutral position, treating the academic protagonists and academic responders equally based on narrow ideas of a right to free speech, the institution stumbles as critic and conscience of society. Moreover, it fails to both preserve and enhance academic freedom.

Other examples include attempts to use university campuses as platforms for racially or genderised “forums”. Those without power or privilege don’t need tertiary institutions to criticize them, turn their backs on criticisms of them, or to host it. The desire of majority members of white paternalistic societies to have their ideas spoken on campus is not equal to the right of minority ethnic and non-binary groups to feel accepted and safe there.

Privilege is an asymmetry of power that marginalizes and excludes others. No history of academic freedom is consistent with the notion that it speaks privilege to power.

So. If your research shows that claims of oppression in the case you're studying are overstated, or that an institution isn't as colonialist and evil as others have suggested, you should probably shut up about it because that doesn't count under critic and conscience. Because it reinforces power or something. 

If you haven't joined the Free Speech Union yet, and you're a New Zealand academic, they may be more likely to have your back than the TEU, if it comes to it.  

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's closing of the browser tabs:

• Tons of port workers have been avoiding getting vaccinated. In principle this should have been simple: have public health nurses drive out to the sites and administer it. But it's not been compulsory, antivax stuff has been influential among those workers, and they're probably (and rightly) pissed off with the regular nasal swab test requirements that could have been replaced by saliva testing over seven months ago - which would feed into a strong 'not gonna do whatcha told me' attitude. More results are out on the effectiveness of the Illinois protocol saliva tests - the one that the government doesn't want to use. And, just for fun, a plague ship berthed at Taranaki, where port worker vaccination rates are low. Let's hope we keep getting lucky, despite tapdancing on landmines. Looks now like only 11 of 98 border workers involved in this one had any vaccine. 


• Bernard Hickey has a chat with me and Oliver about Oliver's column last week. The prior link is to his column; the podcast is here. Our Insights newsletter column, reprinted in the Stuff papers, called on the government to extend residence to everyone who has been here with us since last year's March/April lockdowns - as a way of rectifying some of the harm that our immigration system has imposed since then. Oliver, Matt and I chatted about it here as well. 


• We'll be getting proof-of-vaccination that can work as a vaccine passport, but so far only intended for use in international travel. If Covid is ever here circulating, I will be happy to pay a premium to exclusively attend establishments requiring proof-of-vaccination for entry. 


• Damian Grant has a superb column on corporate social responsibility. 


• Union leader Matt McCarten on the merits of not banning speech. I agree with him. 


• The Taxpayers Union points to some odd-looking public health grants. This stuff wouldn't bug me so much if they were also putting appropriate funding into classical public health - contagious disease, vaccination promotion, the usual kinds of stuff that you might expect in the context of a global pandemic. But I could only see two grants in the whole set that seemed to have anything to do with the pandemic, and a third on measles. Just under $900k to try to get an assessment tool gauging barriers to vaccination and $1.2m looking at mucosal delivery for vaccines (not specifically to Covid, but in general). Both of those seem like really good ideas. They're also putting $1.16m toward waning measles immunity - good! But they're also putting $1.2m toward research on alcohol warning labels. It feels like infectious disease is still the poor cousin of whatever public health has more recently turned into. 


• Donal summarizes the Competition conference that was on in Wellington this past weekend. I missed it; these things usually cost an arm-and-a-leg, presumably due to cartel activity by conference organisers in preventing other conferences from emerging. Plus, I was in Christchurch Friday and Saturday teaching Canterbury's MBA students about the Emissions Trading Scheme. The session on three waters regulation would have been excellent.

Afternoon roundup

An overdue closing of the browser tabs brings these worthies:

• Justin Giovannetti on New Zealand diplomacy and China.


• The New Zealand Principals Federation suggests merging the teacher colleges into the universities might have something to do with declining teacher competence. I was on faculty at Canterbury when the College of Education merged in in 2006. It never made much sense to me on academic grounds. Teacher training was vocational training. Experts in vocational training, of the kind provided at a College of Education, are not necessarily great fits at a university where research expectations matter more than teaching ability. It seemed likely to result in great teacher trainers being exited in favour of those able to get papers into low-grade education journals.


• A Wellington taxicab cartel? The Commerce Commission alleges they were trying to set minimum prices for fares from Wellington airport. I'm still glad I can just grab an Uber to avoid such rorts.


• New Zealand now has a trade union whose purpose is to defend the free-speech rights of those whose outside-of-work statements get them in trouble with their employers.


• It looks like the government will be using procurement rules to try to favour Māori-owned businesses. There's some evidence that these kinds of rules, in the US, increase black business ownership rates while also increasing government contracting costs by something on the order of 3.8% or 5.6% on those contracts.

Afternoon roundup

The tabs... there are so many of them.

A few notes on the closing of the tabs.

• Tyler Cowen is excellent on herd immunity. Those who urge us not to worry about the virus used to claim that herd immunity would kick in and the virus would burn itself out. Now they tell us not to worry because the death rate has dropped. But herd immunity was supposed to stop case numbers from rising. And even places with lotsa Covid aren't there yet - other than perhaps at San Quenton. 
• Sam Bowman has a neoliberal agenda for the 2020s: YIMBYism, support for immigration, and carbon pricing (he says carbon taxes, but if you've already got an ETS, that'll do the job). Neoliberalism is a bit of a political swear word. Oliver Hartwich goes through the history of the term - the actual neoliberals were more 'third way' types. Whether the term should be buried or reclaimed is a bit of an open question. 
• Steve Ambler and Nick Rowe on NGDPLT.
• Freedom of speech doesn't encourage terrorism. It reduces it. Here's Eskildsen and Bjørnskov in Political Studies. Why? They suggest "(1) more freedom of expression makes it easier for the police and intelligence agencies to gather information on potential terrorists and targets, and (2) freedom of expression works as an outlet for displeased citizens through which they can openly express their discontent instead of resorting to terror."
• Chris Bishop and Phil Twyford had an excellent panel discussion, hosted by Warren and Mahoney, in which they went through urban and transport policy. This kind of thing makes you really appreciate what we've got in NZ. 
• Get yourself a city councillor with a digger. It helps.
• Support for immigration improves, albeit on a bit of a tough to interpret question. If folks recently said that the amount of immigration should increase, are they thinking about policy as it was before Covid, or are they thinking about current border restrictions?
• Helen Clark comes out in support of the euthanasia bill. I agree with her. 
• Superb piece from Colby Cosh on tax and legal cannabis in Canada. It isn't enough just to look at the tax take on cannabis. Is it a complement or a substitute to alcohol or tobacco? What are the general equilibrium effects? 
• Every supporter of circular economies and zero waste should support this initiative.
• Can you build a new tech hub? It's harder than it sounds.
• Razib Khan on Brahmin Privilege
• Keas are awesome
• Arthur Grimes on getting targets back into government.

Afternoon roundup

A much belated closing of the browser tabs brings some worthies:

• Kiwibuild never made sense. If it were needed, it couldn't work because the same things that block private development would block Kiwibuild. And if it could work, it wasn't needed. The government tried anyway, sticking bloodymindedly to a stupid election promise dreamed up on the back of a napkin in a taxi as the legend has it. And it continues to be a disaster. I hate to say I told you so, but ...


• Kiwiblog links to Adam Creighton at The Australian on NZ's economic problems. Creighton's been on the crankier side when it comes to matters Covid, but he's not wrong on the economic worries here. Notable is that he has Graham Scott on record raising concerns as well; he's former Treasury Secretary and recently retired from the Productivity Commission. 


• Nouriel Roubini is more grim than usual:

  What I have argued this time around is that in the short run, this is both a supply shock and a demand shock. And, of course, in the short run, if you want to avoid a depression, you need to do monetary and fiscal stimulus. What I’m saying is that once you run a budget deficit of not 3, not 5, not 8, but 15 or 20 percent of GDP — and you’re going to fully monetize it (because that’s what the Fed has been doing) — you still won’t have inflation in the short run, not this year or next year, because you have slack in goods markets, slack in labor markets, slack in commodities markets, etc. But there will be inflation in the post-coronavirus world. This is because we’re going to see two big negative supply shocks. For the last decade, prices have been constrained by two positive supply shocks — globalization and technology. Well, globalization is going to become deglobalization thanks to decoupling, protectionism, fragmentation, and so on. So that’s going to be a negative supply shock. And technology is not going to be the same as before. The 5G of Erickson and Nokia costs 30 percent more than the one of Huawei, and is 20 percent less productive. So to install non-Chinese 5G networks, we’re going to pay 50 percent more. So technology is going to gradually become a negative supply shock. So you have two major forces that had been exerting downward pressure on prices moving in the opposite direction, and you have a massive monetization of fiscal deficits. Remember the 1970s? You had two negative supply shocks — ’73 and ’79, the Yom Kippur War and the Iranian Revolution. What did you get? Stagflation.



• If you haven't sorted out a VPN yet, you might want to. Tracy Martin wants to be the boss of what you get to see on the internet: content filters that always risk misclassifying content and creeping to cover more and more stuff. Just VPN around the stupidity.


• The Shane Jones problems in forestry continue: his musings about nationalising the industry (go ahead and call it something else if you want, but setting something up where Shane Jones gets to decide which logs get sold to whom and at what prices...) have stopped the expansion of a pulp and timber plant in Tangiwai. BusinessDesk has the details (you should subscribe).

  "Submitter after submitter have told the committee the consultation on the Forests (Regulation of Log Traders and Forestry Advisers) Amendment Bill has been farcical and its rushed implementation under Budget urgency an abuse of process.