Afternoon roundup

The tabs...

• Earthquake strengthening costs on one Wellington performance venue have increased from $90m to $182m and now to $329m (Dom, Herald). We have no clue what strengthening the recently quake-designated Michael Fowler Centre and Opera House might cost. Would it be crazy to expect a billion dollars across all three? After $100m more than necessary on a library? All for a town of about 200,000 people where the water pipes are a century-old collapsing mess? It's a good thing Wellington's pretty...
• Mothers of underweight babies below a cut-off get substantial US government support; those just above the cut-off don't. Run the RDD and find no effects of funding on outcomes. 
• NZ's National Party promises non-finance spending two percentage points of GDP higher than Ardern promised in the 2019 Wellbeing Budget. 
• Devastating New Yorker piece on the Ariely / Gino mess. Harvard's Business School is not a serious place. 
• Admin staff at the Auckland Uni law school are substantially happier than faculty. I keep wondering when somebody might set up a union that represents only academic staff. 
• Superb BusinessDesk piece on Sean Colgan, who backed Rako in its fight with the Ministry of Health. And has leant David Seymour a plan for the election campaign. 
• My piece in this past weekend's Stuff papers covers two recent NBER working papers on zero-sum thinking. 
• California's math curriculum is nuts. Unfortunately, this kind of nuttiness is also infecting New Zealand.
• A lot of US voters are confused about whether Robert F Kennedy Jr is Bobby Kennedy. They identify the picture of Bobby Kennedy from the 1950s, the father of Robert F Kennedy Jr, as being Robert F Kennedy Jr. He's aged remarkably well if so; the father would be turning 98 later this year. Every time you learn a little bit more about voters, just be amazed that the world isn't even worse. 
• For six years, NZ had a government that expressed commitment to wellbeing as its highest goal, and yet this. 
• So Sanitarium ran into some supply issues and cut supply to The Warehouse before either Foodstuffs or Woolworths. Which seems more plausible: that the whole thing is a stitch-up by the big supermarkets to get Sanitarium to cut out a low-price potential competitor, with a new grocery regulator watching? Or that the big supermarkets have longstanding contracts where they pay a bit more to have clauses providing greater security of supply? I'd bet on the latter, but nobody else seems to have considered that possibility.