Australia and vaping

Action on Smoking and Health NZ's Prof Beaglehole went on tour in Australia. Other NZ public health academics who want to copy Australia might consider a similar trip.

He writes:

What I found was revealing. Legal cigarettes were widely available, although expensive, costing A$40 to A$60 (about $50-$74) for a pack of 20. Yet illicit cigarettes were easy to obtain, starting at A$9 a pack. One shopkeeper even offered some unsolicited business advice: “If you want to get rich, open a tobacco shop and sell cheap cigarettes.”

Then I went looking for vapes. The contrast was striking. Illegal vapes were easy to find. Regulated legal vapes were not. They are available only through pharmacies, which are not required to stock them and most do not.

Smoking and vaping are not the same thing. It is the burning of tobacco and inhalation of smoke, not nicotine, that causes almost all the disease and death caused by smoking. Vaping is not harmless, but the evidence strongly supports it being substantially less harmful than smoking.

 ...

Of course we should continue to protect young people. Age restrictions should be enforced. Marketing should be tightly controlled. Products should be properly regulated.

But we should be just as determined to help people who smoke quit.

Some New Zealand experts have argued that vaping products should be supplied only through pharmacies, as they are in Australia, to reduce youth vaping. But any proposal to make vaping less accessible should confront a simple question: what will people who smoke do instead?

My Australian road trip offered a reminder that public health policies should be judged not only by their intentions but also by their consequences.

For those concerned about youth vaping, there is a very obvious and easy policy move. Selling vapes to those underaged is illegal and draws penalties. Social supply by older friends is unregulated.

The Sale and Supply of Alcohol Act, at s241, makes it an offence to supply alcohol to a minor without the parent or guardian's permission.

It is exactly the right framework to use here, where you'd want to maintain parent ability to supply vapes if the kid has started smoking. 

You could take the first three parts of s241, go through with a crayon, cross out the word alcohol, write in the word vape, stick it into the Smokefree Environments Act, and call it done. 

I do not know why public health people concerned about youth vaping aren't arguing for this move. 

Against laissez-faire democracy

Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman have fun applying standard market failure arguments to democratic politics. 

A snippet:

Each of the major market failures which supposedly justify government intervention appear in democratic voting and elections. Indeed, some of these failures are anomalies in markets but are baked into democratic elections. Accordingly, there is a prima facie case for regulating democratic voting with the same mechanisms used in market regulation.

Converting this prima facie case into an all-things-considered case requires a few more steps. First, we need to discuss how regulation might work, considering the possibility that regulation will fail, be too expensive, or make things worse. Note that the burden here, as with market regulation, is not to show that regulation will decisively solve all problems, but rather than it will perform adequately, with the benefits exceeding the costs. (We doubt most readers think that market regulation must be perfect and problem-free to be justified. They should apply this same standard here.) Second, we need to consider disanalogies and objections, including arguments which hold that people have a special right to engage in democratic failures free of regulation.

The article is open-access for those keen on reading the whole thing.  

American questions about Australian online safety

The US Embassy in Canberra has raised a few concerns about Australia's Online Safety Amendment (Duty of Care) Bill. 

The same concerns will apply to any NZ equivalent. 

A few choice bits:

Speech & Platform Design Concerns – The United States has serious concerns about the Australian government’s stated goal of mandating broad duty of care requirements that dictate how platforms manage content and users’ feeds.  Concerns include:

1. how the Australian government, or the Communications Minister, would designate what constitutes “foreseeable harm”; 
2. any resulting requirement that platforms alter their algorithmic systems to suppress expression that should be protected in order to avoid liability, or, if not an explicit requirement, any approach that would likely result in platforms defaulting to pre-emptive censorship to avoid the risk of liability.

• We are particularly concerned by potential mandates that would allow regulators to impose rigid, one-size-fits-all platform design requirements – such as forced chronological feeds or opt-in recommendation systems.
• A framework that empowers governments to enforce vague definitions of “harm” risks becoming a mechanism for viewpoint-based censorship, as platforms will be incentivized to over-moderate speech that should be protected to avoid regulatory penalties.
• Such a framework also risks reducing the reach of independent journalists or other voices whose content touches on sensitive or controversial topics that platforms may preemptively demote to comply with overbroad safety mandates.
• We ask that Australia clarify how exactly “harm” and “risks” shall be determined, if there are any standard definitions that will be utilized, and by whom in the context of the proposed plans, ensuring these definitions do not encroach on protected speech.
• If Australia compels platforms to aggressively filter content in algorithmic feeds to satisfy a government mandate, and such filtering draws in protected speech, the effect on a disfavored speaker or media source’s reach would not be meaningfully different than outright removal.  The U.S. government would likely consider such a measure as facilitating censorship.

The Embassy also notes the extraterritorial reach of Australia's policy, and the American government's clear "opposition to foreign measures that result in extraterritorial censorship of protected speech by Americans online."

The case for unilateral recognition

Bilateral, plurilateral, and multilateral are words that New Zealand's civil service love. There is nothing that can't be improved by doing it in concert with others. 

Sometimes there's good reason for just doing stuff. 

New Zealand made the right decision when it unilaterally slashed all of its tariffs. It also progressed all the other trade agreements that helped make trade easier. But it didn't wait for those lengthy processes. Just cutting tariffs earlier was just fine. 

A couple of weeks ago in Newsroom, I made the case for doing the same thing with standards recognition. We already do it with automobiles. We don't need bilateral or any other agreements between New Zealand and other places to make sure that the cars we import are safe. Instead, there's a long list of standards that New Zealand considers to be good enough, whether the standard-setting countries like it or not. Pretty unlikely that they'd object though. 

New Zealand is part of FSANZ - a bilateral standards-setting body for food-labelling. NZ and the Australian States jointly set the product labelling rules. But it also means that imported foods that aren't labelled for the NZ-Oz market have to carry the stupid little stickers that add cost but no real value. 

Like it did with cars, New Zealand could unilaterally say that products labelled for the American, Canadian, Singaporean, UK, Irish, or EU markets (so long as the labelling includes English) is good enough for here too. We don't need bilateral, multilateral, plurilateral, or any other kind of -lateral agreements to do it. We could just do it. 

Sure, it would be even better if those countries all said that FSANZ labelling is good enough for their markets. But getting that agreement seems impossible for Canada, and probably hard for the rest. And much of the market-access benefit can be achieved through unilateral recognition. If NZ unilaterally said that products labelled to Canadian standards were good enough for NZ, then a NZ producer targeting the Canadian market could just label everything to the Canadian standard and sell that version here and there. 

First best would be everyone just agreeing that everyone has been stupidly precious about all of this, and that the labelling for any of these markets is good enough. Then nobody would have to set country-specific labelling runs. And if it were likely that NZ could have agreements with piles of countries to accept each others' labelling, then an NZ producer wouldn't have to decide which of those markets it was targeting. NZ labelling would be good enough for all of them. 

But bilingual labelling in Canada is best viewed as a religious commitment. 

MinReg this week put up an excellent report on the costs of this kind of labelling nonsense. It makes the case for, among other things, mutual recognition of international labelling standards with trusted jurisdictions. 

I don't disagree, conditional on those agreements being feasible to achieve in finite time and not precluding NZ acceptance of other country standards as well. 

But unilateral recognition should also be on the table. Having UK-labelled stuff on the shelves here would be just fine. And it'd make it easier for a UK-based supermarket to open stores here, if it wanted to.

Migration or Stagnation

Michael Clemens shows that a rise in noncitizen worker prevalence in Korea from 3% to about 14% over four decades would offset the effect of Korea's demographic shift. 

The Republic of Korea (ROK) faces an economic crisis driven by rapid population aging, approaching negative economic growth. I quantitatively examine the full range of policy responses and find that enhanced temporary labor migration is necessary, sufficient, and feasible to offset demographic drag. It is necessary because no other policy channel (including capital accumulation, artificial intelligence adoption, elderwork, education, or pronatalism) has the clear quantitative potential to meaningfully offset aging in the best available forecasts. It is sufficient because a rise in noncitizen worker prevalence from 3% to about 14% over 4 decades would offset most of the demographic drag on economic growth in the ROK. And it is feasible because this trajectory resembles that already experienced by Malaysia and Australia. Many advanced economies will follow in the ROK’s demographic footsteps and have much to learn from its decisions.

I'd run some rough figures earlier in the year. If NZ maintained net migration of around 1.8 young net migrants for every person turning 65, you could maintain the current under-65 to over-65 ratio. The absolute number of migrants would have to go up as resident migrants age. If other ways of changing NZ Superannuation are ruled out, this would be an alternative.

Potential deregulations

Cato's Handbook on Affordability provides a set of policy recommendations for reducing unnecessary government-imposed costs. 

There's the usual stuff you'd expect, much of which is US-focused.

But a few bits are worth thinking about here too.

In the chapter on healthcare, Cato suggests automatic removal of prescription-only requirements from medicines. They write:

• Eliminate prescription regulation. The FDA makes medicines less affordable by requiring patients to obtain unnecessary and costly prescriptions. Adults can safely self-medicate with many medicines—including birth control pills, HIV prophylaxis, and GLP-1s—for which the FDA currently requires a prescription. Overall, prescription regulation increases prices, increases the nonprice costs of obtaining medicines, reduces access, and ironically reduces patient safety. While direct-to-consumer platforms such as TrumpRx, Cost Plus Drugs, Amazon Pharmacy, and GoodRx can theoretically reduce prices by injecting transparency and competition, the more effective reform would be to strip the FDA of its power to require prescriptions. 
• Remove unnecessary prescription requirements. If Congress cannot take prescription regulation power from the FDA, then Congress should enact rules that automatically remove prescription requirements after a certain period of time, which would allow consumers to purchase more medicines directly. Greater over-the-counter access would reduce the price and nonprice costs of medicines. 

John Key made pseudoephedrine-based cold medicines prescription-only. It seemed unlikely to substantially affect access to methamphetamine. Within about four years it was very clear that the policy failed. But it took about a decade more before that prescription-only status was removed. 

New Zealand could schedule review of longstanding prescription-only classifications, with a presumption favouring equivalent access where trustworthy overseas jurisdictions allow non-prescription access. Maintaining prescription-only status would require published justification that takes into account the added cost and burden imposed by prescription requirements.

In the chapter on childcare, Cato recommends expanding the supply of au pairs on the J-1 visa, simplifying the administrative burden facing households employing in-home care, broadening visas for childcare more generally (noting that a 10 percent increase in low-skilled immigration may reduce childcare costs by 2 percent), easing degree requirements for childcare workers, and subjecting car seat mandates to cost-benefit review.

A lot of those recommendations could carry over to here. 

The benefits of car seats for older kids aren't that big, and the costs are real. 

Immigration NZ guidance says that a niece or cousin visiting for six months to help with childcare is likely to count as working, with consequent need for a work visa. And if that work tallies to more than 30 hours per week, the relatively-simple IR56 isn't available. Surely a simplified visa and tax process could apply. 

The rest of the report's worth looking at - but mainly focuses on US issues or things that I've already covered otherwise. 

For a sense of proportion: datacentre water use

I like this chart, from Andreas Heuser and Phil Whittington's excellent piece making the case for datacentres.

Nobody has a sense of perspective on industrial-scale water use.