Blindness, hairy palms, and varicoceles

I have a bit of fun with some recent reporting on fitness and eligibility for the Chinese People's Liberation Army over at our Insights Newsletter.

Spanking another dodgy stat

It’s too easy for bad statistics to influence policy. About a decade ago, BERL added up every dollar spent by heavier drinkers, counted some other costs twice, and claimed that alcohol use cost New Zealand $4.8 billion per year.

The number still floats around when someone wants to justify the next round of restrictions on drinking. So I pay a bit of attention to dodgy-looking statistics.

The Los Angeles Times last week reported on Chinese youth boot camps encouraging boys to shape up into ‘alpha males’ rather than emulate ‘boy band’ idols. It all seemed a bit humdrum. But a supporting statistic in the piece was eye-catching.

According to the Times, the People’s Liberation Army Daily newspaper complained that “20% of recruits were not fit enough to pass the fitness test for admission because they were overweight, watched too many cellphone videos, drank too much or masturbated too often.”

I couldn’t let a statistic like that just pass by.

What proportion of recruits failed the fitness test for each of those reasons? And how could the PLA possibly know about that last one?

While China has compulsory registration for military service, Wikipedia says volunteers staff their army. So the statistic likely wasn’t generated by opportunistic ticks of a box on a recruitment form (or worse!) to avoid the draft. Getting out of the army can’t be that easy, Klinger!

So I wondered again, how could they know? – and, with horror, realised that a government spying on everyone’s movement and their web history could probably make a pretty good guess. Ceiling Xi is watching you.

I tracked the statistic to an August 2017 article on the Chinese Ministry of Defence’s website – which Google Translate helped me read.

I couldn’t find the 20% statistic. But of those unfit for service, 17% were ruled out on a blood or urine test, 46% by an eye exam, 20% due to obesity, 8% due to varicoceles, and 13% for heart conditions or high blood pressure.

And then, without any justification, the military website blamed mobile phones for eye problems, and that for the varicoceles. While embarrassment prevented me from calling up our GP, neither WebMD nor the Mayo Clinic website listed that as a risk factor for or cause of varicoceles.

Dodgy statistics can be bad for policy. Hopefully, this one winds up providing more amusement than harm.

I had to do a lot of Googling around using kinda dodgy search terms for this one. Are varicoceles really caused by that? What other euphemisms can I find for that that can help avoid the content filters on newsletters? Do people still know what I mean if I refer to that simply as Portnoy's primary hobby?*

Fortunately, I haven't yet started seeing the kinds of ads you might expect from that search history.




* Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Sokath, his eyes opened! This problem seems to be getting worse with the fragmentation of culture - which has generally otherwise been to the good, but does mean that attempts at metaphor and euphemism inevitably become in-jokes for those who know the reference. Like Ceiling Xi. I'd originally had "and Portnoy's Complaint for the varicoceles" in the penultimate paragraph; that was dialled back when I was reminded that I was already requiring people to remember who Klinger is, what Ceiling Xi might be, and that they'd probably (like me) have to Google to find out what a varicocele is (it's a varicose vein in the relevant area - who'd have guessed?).

Parent Visas

New Zealand stopped processing parent visas under the prior government. 

The background story you hear on it around town, which may or may not be the truth, is that there was concern that Chinese migrants who'd here received permanent residence would bring their elderly parents over to live in the Auckland Grammar zone and raise their kids, while heading back home to China to earn far more than they ever could earn here. End result: more pressure on the Grammar zone, no income tax revenue, and schooling costs. And, sometimes, PRs who'd abscond on their promised bond to support their parents and leave their parents here alone to struggle.

By that account, a few bad cases spoiled things for everybody else. I have absolutely no clue whether that story ever happened, or the frequency of it if it did, but I heard it enough times that it seems rather likely to have been part of the political reason for halting things.

Thomas Coughlan reports that more than 5000 parents are now in that queue.

Deputy Leader Winston Peters also said that the decision was that of the Minister of Immigration, but added remarks that implied he was unlikely to back the rule being reinstated.

“With the greatest respect, if I go to the United States I can’t bring Uncle Tom Coughlan and all,” Peters said, referring to this reporter's name. 

But that isn't quite right. American permanent residents who have naturalised (received citizenship) can petition for a grant of permanent residence for their parents.

And that might provide a solution to the impasse here. If I'm right about the background policy worry, allowing New Zealand citizens to petition for their parents' visas would knock out anyone who hadn't progressed from permanent residence to citizenship. I've not bothered with it yet but should likely get around to it. A permanent resident is eligible for citizenship if they've been living as a new Zealand resident for at least the last 5 years, and if they have spent at least 240 days in New Zealand in each of the past 5 years, and at least 1350 days across the 5 years. And you must intend on continuing to live in New Zealand.

That would rule out anyone who's established a nominal base here but who isn't really committed to the place. And it would likely finally have me tip over the line to finally sort out my own citizenship.

Platforms and incentives

Politico's Jack Shafer doesn't really like the New Zealand press's agreement to avoid reporting on racist tirades that the Christchurch murderer may wish to provide.

Shafer views the ban as infantilising - as deeming readers being vulnerable and susceptible to the murderer's views and in need of protection.

I come at it from a rather different angle. I see no need to protect anybody from hearing obnoxious views. But in a world where people are willing to incur very high personal cost, and impose massive cost on others along the way, in pursuit of infamy and the dissemination of their views, committing horrible acts should not provide that reward.

The point of the ban, in that view, isn't to protect people from hearing evil. It's to protect us against evil people who would happily repeat this kind of action if it gave them their few days' fame in the witness box to promulgate their own manifestos.

Think of it as analogous to a Son of Sam law where fame and attention, rather than cash royalties, is the currency. New Zealand news outlets working together to minimise those rewards for evil acts seems appropriate.

Short Ireland?

Outgoing Treasury Secretary Gabs Makhlouf will be picking up the reins at the Irish central bank.

Chris Hutching called me for comment about it; after a wide-ranging chat, I'd sent through a potentially quotable-quote that wasn't picked up in the final piece (above-linked). I'll share it here instead.

“Secretary Makhlouf is best known for advancing Treasury’s “wellbeing” approach to economic analysis. There is some merit to that approach: economic analysis always should take a very broad approach in considering costs and benefits. But successful implementation of the approach requires a depth of competence in economic analysis. That depth has eroded substantially during Makhlouf’s tenure. Treasury shed competent senior economists and hired junior analysts who often had little or no training in economics. Makhlouf’s real legacy is not the wellbeing agenda; it is rather a severely weakened Treasury.”

Hutching cites the Treasury card game - I'd given it more as example of the woolier side of wellbeing at Treasury, and where things risk heading with the erosion of economic competence there. I'd referred to the plethora of wellbeing indicators in the wellbeing framework as potentially providing too many analyst degrees of freedom; I don't know how many feelings are in the card game.

We're what, six weeks or so away from the next Treasury CE needing to be in place? Nobody seems to know anything about the next appointee; I understand it is not normal for this not to be known by now.

I take it as a good sign though. The most simplest explanation is that the appointment process has been delayed or reconsidered relatively late in the game. And I expect that to be more likely to have happened for good reasons than for bad reasons. Treasury needs a very strong appointment.

It's an interesting appointment for Ireland though. Secretary Makhlouf has an undergraduate degree in Economics and a Masters in Industrial Relations. A strong background in monetary economics may matter less at Central Banks that are under the ECB; Ireland has had some history suggesting prudential bank regulation may there be of greater importance. And Treasury here has done more thinking about that than you might expect.

Markets and meth

Damian Christie expects worries that allowing pharmacy sales of pseudoephedrine would see an increase in meth supply, or at least a resumption of home cooking.

I'll work through my logic here; y'all can tell me what I've messed up.

Prior to the ban on pseudoephedrine,* folks would go from pharmacy to pharmacy buying up enough cold medicine to start cooking, then they'd use that to make meth. Under that system, pre-2009, meth sold for about $700 per gram. That price would reflect the cost of materials, the hassle of collecting them, the time involved in cooking, compensation for the expertise involved in cooking, the costs of sourcing a site for cooking, and a hefty risk premium for being involved in an illegal market.

Since the ban, the market has shifted to importation of finished product. That finished product sells at less than $500 per gram.

I think that some of the disagreement here comes from how we're viewing costs and prices.

If you think that the underlying 'real' cost of home-cooking meth is just the cost of getting pseudoephedrine (buying it, time spent walking from pharmacy to pharmacy), the cost of additional chemicals, and maybe a bit of compensation for the cook's time, then it's easy to imagine being able to undercut the $500/gram price. So allowing pharmacies to start selling the stuff again then sounds risky.

But if that were the case, why wasn't there massive entry into p manufacturing prior to 2009? If there were decent returns to be had at a $500/gram price point, the profits at $700/gram would have been substantially higher. Why wasn't the price of meth, back in 2009, bid down to $500/gram or less if there were still substantial profits there to be made?

To me, evidence of 2008 prices well in excess of current prices suggests strongly there would be no substantial resumption of cooking meth from pseudoephedrine if we again legalised the decent cold medication. The current supply chain is able to deliver meth to consumers at a much lower price point than the previous supply arrangement. That suggests the costs involved in the current supply chain are far lower than the costs under the prior regime.

Potential objections, and I think there are some potentially good ones:

1. If that's all true, why didn't they adopt the current supply chain earlier? 
2. There could have been a generalised reduction in risk premiums in meth that has hit all potential ways of running a meth supply chain. 
3. Prices also reflect industry organisation. Ex ante prices depended on local cartel behaviour enforced by local gangs. Current structure may differ from that. So the 2008 prices were propped up by the prevention of entry enforced by the gangs. 
4. Something else I haven't thought of.

Ok.

The first one I owe to Paul Walker on Twitter. There are a few potential reasons why the 2008 meth supply chain hadn't shifted to the current supply chain. Local gangs may have lacked international supply contacts, and may have worked to keep out potential entry by international players. There could have been fairly substantial fixed costs in establishing those supply chains that none of the 2008 players were willing or able to front. Perhaps someone who knows more about the local industry can help fill in the blanks here.

The second one - imagine that the police just kinda gave up on meth. They stopped reporting on progress on meth back in 2015, when it was looking pretty obvious that the drugs had won the drug war. If they gave up, then it would be cheaper to cook meth from pseudoephedrine now than it was in 2008, so that product could be delivered at a lower price point. Alternatively, if there have been tech developments in small-batch cooking that have radically lowered the cost of production in that sector since 2008, then 2008 prices may not be the best guide. If that's happened, and someone can point me to evidence on it, that'd be helpful. In either of those cases, you could see a re-emergence of a local industry making meth out of cold medicine.

Finally, industry organisation. Imagine that, pre-2008, we had a monopoly gang running meth supply. Imagine it controlled everything and restricted supply to keep prices up. The early prices then reflected monopoly profits rather than just real production costs and real risk premiums. But for that to affect the relative cost of importing meth versus cooking it from pharmacy medicines, the switch in the supply chain would also have had to have broken the cartel/monopoly. In that case, current prices are competitive; prior prices were inflated by monopoly/cartel profits; and, relative prices between the two points don't tell us about the relative costs of the two production methods. If we still had a monopoly importer/distributor that just flipped supply chains, the lower price would reflect monopoly profit maximisation under a lower cost structure. It feels like you need the current model to be far more competitive than the prior model to reckon out of this that cooking meth from cold medicine might have any cost advantage. And that just seems odd when the prior model had lots of small scale folks buying cold medicine and the current one has more sophisticated import methods.

It just doesn't seem plausible that small-batch cooking is in any way cost-competitive with the meth that's currently imported. There are mechanisms that can get you there, but they just seem far less likely than the rather simpler model: it's just gotten a heck of a lot easier to import methamphetamine out of Asia that's reportedly of better purity.

Bottom line: my odds-on expectation is that a resumption of pharmacy sales of pseudoephedrine-based cold medicine would not see any substantial re-emergence of that way of making meth. There might be a few cases here and there of folks giving it a go for their own supply or a bit of social supply, but they'd have a tough time competing with current imports - unless something happened to make importing meth a lot harder.




* Yes I know that it's still available by prescription. But that's a ban in all but name. If the worst of a cold takes 48 hours to pass and it takes 48 hours to get a doctor's appointment to get a prescription, you just can't get decent cold medication when you get a cold. You have to have a doctor willing to provide a prescription in case you get a cold later, and a pharmacist willing to fill the prescription, and the hassle of setting a doctor's appointment, and the cost of a doctor's appointment.

W=MP is a harsh mistress

I love today's SMBC

Read it over at SMBC to get the alt-text, and to push the red button. 

This should be on every labour economics syllabus. 

Corollary: masochists are more likely to take up hobbies like chess, where your own relative position in the world is very quickly made clear by an unambiguous points ranking. 

PBRF

I do not miss having to worry about PBRF evidence portfolios.

The 2018 results are now up.

I hadn't realised how small Canterbury's econ group now was relative to the econ contingents at the other universities - at 10 FTE, they're now the smallest economics group in the country. Note that the measure doesn't count R ranked staff as those staff would not draw PBRF funding; I doubt including Rs would change that since there are only 10 in econ at Canty.

It's a good group - only Waikato seems to have a stronger research ranking, per capita, on an eyeball metric. So kudos!

Update: that eyeball metric is wrong. Waikato is top with 85% A or B-ranked. Otago's next with 73% so-ranked. Canterbury's very slightly behind on 70%. Everyone else is miles behind that.

I keep remembering an economics department of about 16-18 people from 2007. I miss that place.