Loss aversion or mistakes?

Super-neat paper coming out in the AER by Ryan Oprea: Decisions under risk are decisions under complexity. 

The abstract:

We provide evidence that classic lottery anomalies like probability weighting and loss aversion are not special phenomena of risk. They also arise (and often with equal strength) when subjects evaluate deterministic, positive monetary payments that have been disaggregated to resemble lotteries. Thus, we find, e.g., apparent probability weighting in settings without probabilities and loss aversion in settings without scope for loss. Across subjects, anomalies in these deterministic tasks strongly predicts the same anomalies in lotteries. These findings suggest that much of the behavior motivating our most important behavioral theories of risk derive from complexity-driven mistakes rather than true risk preferences.

There are piles of experiments showing what seem to be anomalies from rational choice; behavioural economists lump these into categories like loss aversion. 

But experiments testing for these things require participants to make complicated choices. That complexity can matter.

Oprea sets experiments where people are faced with risky choices, and equally complicated variants of the choices where there is no risk. People have to compute expected value in both cases, and not everybody is good at that on the fly in the lab. In the deterministic treatment, people get the expected value of the choice with certainty. In the risky treatment, they only get it probabilistically. But the computational complexity is the same across treatments.

While the literature interprets the resulting valuations of lotteries as certainty equivalents –

the certain dollar payments subjects value equivalently to risky lotteries – the same interpretation cannot be applied to mirrors which contain no uncertainty. Instead values for mirrors are simplicity equivalents: the simply-described payment amount subjects value equivalently to the more complexly described (but no less certain) mirror. Our question throughout the paper is whether simplicity equivalents have the same properties and suffer the same anomalies as certainty equivalents.

To the degree the classical pattern is indeed driven by risk preferences (i.e. tastes for risk

that cause valuations to deviate from expected value), it should disappear when we remove risk from lotteries in our Mirror treatment. Because mirrors pay expected value with certainty, they effectively induce risk neutral EUT preferences in subjects, making any valuations that depart from expected value dominated mistakes under any rational theory of subjects’ own native preferences. Thus, to the degree this distinctive pattern continues to arise in the absence of risk, we have evidence for an alternative interpretation of the classical pattern: that it is a pattern of systematic mistakes, arising not because lotteries are risky, per se, but rather because they are complex (costly or difficult to properly value).5

Oprea then finds that situations without risk generate the same kinds of patterns that people have interpreted as loss aversion in risky contexts. 

What predicts errors that look like loss aversion etc?

Finally, we collected a number of additional pieces of data in our main experiment that we correlate with the severity of the classical pattern in lotteries and mirrors (see Supplemental Appendix A.5 for details), giving us some insight into the behaviors that drive the classical pattern. For instance, we find that (i) fast decision-making, (ii) noisy, inconsistent choices in repeated instances of the same task and (iii) poor performance on cognitive reflection tasks administered post-experiment are all positively correlated with the severity of the classical pattern. We also asked subjects after the experiment (iv) how likely they believed it was that they made suboptimal choices (measuring “cognitive uncertainty,” a’la Enke & Graeber (2023)), (v) how imprecise they thought their decision-making process was (on a 100-point Likert scale) and (vi) how little attention subjects believe they themselves paid to payoffs and proportions in the descriptions of mirrors (again, using a 100-point Likert scale), and found that all of these were significantly correlated with the pattern too. These results therefore link the classical pattern in both lotteries and mirrors to hasty, noisy, imprecise and inattentive decision-making and suggest that subjects were largely aware that they were making imperfect decisions in these valuations (i.e. in important respects they know they are heuristically valuing these objects). Importantly, this is virtually identically true in lotteries and mirrors: we find highly consistent correlations between the classical pattern and all of these measures in the two settings, reinforcing our conclusion that the pattern is driven by the same behavioral mechanism in lotteries and mirrors.

Putting these strands of evidence together, the twin appearance of the classical pattern in lotteries and mirrors suggests that it represents a response not to risk but rather to the complexity of valuation. Perhaps surprisingly, this complexity does not seem to be primarily rooted in the arithmetic required in valuation, but in other cognitively taxing aspects of the task. For instance simply thinking through how one’s preferences connect to the primitives of lotteries and mirrors and articulating the implications for behavior plausibly requires significant mental effort, even if one has little diffculty with the math once the problem is “set up.” We speculate that subjects make a kind of “extensive margin” choice when deciding how to approach valuation tasks like these, deciding first whether to (i) do a precise, careful job of evaluation, or instead to (ii) casually or informally approximate value using heuristic methods. Following approach (i) requires more mental effort, strain and time than approach (ii), leading many subjects to pursue approach (ii) instead. Auxiliary evidence from Supplemental Appendix A.5 seems consistent with this account, since this evidence shows that features of behavior that we would expect to accompany casual or informal valuation procedures (e.g., hasty, inconsistent, imprecise inattentive and error-prone choices) are highly predictive of the severity of the classical pattern.

Just a super important result. And the kind of test that when it's pointed out, you have to wonder why nobody had tried it before. Great stuff. 

Monkeypox and Medsafe

In a sane world, medicines and vaccines already approved by trustworthy overseas regulators would automatically be able to be used in New Zealand as well.

New Zealand is not sane. But neither is anywhere else really on that standard. Other places are just faster than NZ in getting things approved, with more practicable pathways for expedited review. 

If a medicine is unapproved, it can still be accessed under restrictive provisions of the Medicines Act. Medsafe summarises it here. 

Those restrictions include bans on advertising and marketing. 

Monkeypox has been an obvious risk for some time. Jynneos was approved by the EMA in 2013 for smallpox and was recommended for monkeypox in 2022. It was approved by the FDA in 2019, and given emergency use authorisation for monkeypox in 2022. The "Emergency" in the EUA was the monkeypox outbreak. 

Nobody applied for Medsafe authorisation until 2023.

Medsafe took over a year to approve it, despite its already having been approved in Canada, the US and Europe at the point at which application was made.

It was available in New Zealand through Section 29. However, you can't advertise unapproved medicines. 

The Post noted the difficulties in letting at-risk communities know about the vaccine, because of s29 restrictions. 

 

Radio New Zealand notes that greatest transmission risk is concentrated among men who have sex with men, and those who have sex with men who have sex with men. 

The outbreak from the Queenstown Pride Festival now counts five in total. 

It sure would have been great if it hadn't been illegal to advertise the vaccine earlier and to make it real easy for folks to get the vaccine.   

Or if Medsafe had been required to automatically approve medicines already approved by two others - which would have had it authorised in New Zealand in 2022.

We are ruled by Vogons.

Levine on arbitrage

I should have signed up for Matt Levine's newsletter ages ago; finally did so. 

His bit on the Spotify arbitrage play was magnificent. 

I don’t know, man. We have talked a few times about Avi Eisenberg, the Mango Markets guy, who found a manipulatable cryptocurrency market, manipulated the heck out of it, made tens of millions of dollars, was arrested, defended himself by saying he was an “applied game theorist” who spotted a good trade that was allowed by the market, and got convicted because nobody ever wants to hear a defense like that.6

Please legalise new supermarkets

Jaw-dropping bit from the Grocery Regulator, in interview at Interest.co.nz:

“What we've been told by these players is when they come and they want to open up a large store in New Zealand, the cost to get a spade in the ground is double that of Australia,” he says in a new episode of the Of Interest podcast. 

“Now that is significant. And when they look at 'do we open up a store in Wagga Wagga or Tamworth or wherever in Australia' versus coming to open up in Auckland where there is massive demand or any of the other centres, really, the cost is double that of Australia. And the timeframe often is more than double as well. So when they do their business cases, they look at that and say, 'well, we're going to be better off by going elsewhere rather than here.' Now the government is saying that they're going to change things to make New Zealand more competitive for international players. And that's really what we're looking at.”

The Commerce Commission released its first annual grocery report on Wednesday which revealed ComCom’s efforts to boost grocery competition over the past year hasn’t had much impact. 

Later in the podcast, he says that Costco would already have expanded to more places in NZ if expanding in NZ weren't so freaking hard. 

It shouldn't be surprising that the grocery regulator hasn't chalked any wins as yet. The real problem is largely out of the regulator's hands: RMA, Overseas Investment Act, Council processes. 

On council processes, just look at this clusterfxxk. This is what an incumbent who has been here forever has to deal with: a company that knows the system. If even they can't get through it, what hope for someone who's new to NZ?

Woolworths has backed out of its fight to install a new entrance and signage to its FreshChoice store in Greytown.

It’s left heritage campaigners and business owners, who have spent almost a decade fighting the plans, breathing a collective sigh of relief.

The supermarket giant appealed to the Environment Court after an independent commissioner for South Wairarapa District Council declined it’s proposal to create a new access to the store from Main St in December last year.

The plan included the demolition of the existing house at 134 Main St, the installation of a 8.3 metre-wide new vehicle crossing and an internally illuminated 3.6m high, freestanding sign.

Matthew Grainger, Woolworth’s director of property in New Zealand, said it hadn’t been able to find “a solution that would work for everyone”.

“We simply haven’t been able to reach an outcome that would be satisfactory for the community and viable for Woolworths which is why we’re withdrawing our appeal."

It marked the end of a “diabolical” process that had dragged on for nearly a decade, Gina Jones from the Greytown Heritage Trust said.

Minister Bishop's move to set mixed use by default in places subject to intensification under the National Policy Statement on Urban Development is a great start in opening things up.

But I'd love it if retail grocery had access to the fast-track consenting regime. If an entrant could put dozens of sites up and down the country up for simultaneous approval through that regime, rather than waiting for consents to dribble through over the next decade...

 

Let's ban Mazda Demios and put an end to ram-raids

The post title is obviously stupid, right?

Mazda Demios are pretty common in ram-raids but:

1. Ram raids have started coming down off their peak;
2. People can use all kinds of cars for ram-raids;
3. Most Mazda Demios are not used in ram-raids. Other people drive them too.

Now consider the National Party's proposed "Let's ban disposable vapes and vapes that use non-refillable pods or tanks to put an end to youth vaping" policy.

Disposable vapes are pretty commonly used by youths who vape - more than tanks or pods. But:

1. Youth vaping has stopped increasing (and came down a bit in the most recent Year 10 survey);
2. Youths can use all kinds of devices, not just disposables and non-refillable pods and tanks;
3. Adults use these too. Adults who used them to quit smoking, and who were attracted by the convenience and cost of non-refillable systems. 

The proposed ban is so stupid. 

In late August, I had a column over in the Post on it [ungated here]. I noted the very obvious problems with the proposed ban. The vape systems that are hardest to use would be the only ones left on the market, which will screw things up for adult vapers who can't handle those systems while making it easier for screw-ups to happen. 

The Government will ban vaping products that are more affordable and that are easier to use – for everyone, adults included. The measures seem to be aimed at reducing youth vaping by increasing the cost of vapes. But if the Government wanted to increase the cost of vaping, excise would make more sense than banning specific types of vapes.

Vaping is a lot less risky than smoking, but there are ways for vaping to go wrong. If someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing mixes their own vape fluid in a tank-based system, they could get a higher dose than intended. Or they could experiment with adding things into the mix that should not be there. Or they could let the tank run dry, resulting in overheated coils and potentially noxious fumes.

Self-contained disposable vaping products and pod-based devices avoid those risks. They are designed to avoid hot dry heating coils. The vaping fluid is pre-mixed and cannot be adjusted. But those are the vaping devices that the Government is going to ban.

Let’s say that again. The Government is proposing to ban the safest devices while leaving the potentially riskier ones on the market, and says it is doing this because it wants to protect kids.

The Ministry hadn't yet put up the RIS on the ban. It was fun to read through it - they'd written it before my column, but hadn't released it yet. And they said much the same that I'd said: if you want to target cost, excise or minimum pricing make more sense but there are tradeoffs with that. Banning pods and single-use tanks goes beyond what's needed and will have adverse consequences for adult vapers. 

What did the Ministry say? 

1. Daily vaping has been stable for three years but is high in international perspective;
2. Youths who vape most frequently choose disposables: twice as common as pods, three times as common as tanks)
3. "There is risk that reducing youth access to vapes will lead to higher youth smoking rates"
4. "Actions to reduce youth vaping need to be targeted towards young people and minimise any barriers on adults wanting to access vapes to quit smoking"
5. "While banning disposables may prevent further young people taking up vaping, it may not stop vaping in those cohorts who are already doing it regularly."
6. Existing rules that came into effect end-December ban disposables without removable batteries; this removes most traditional disposables from the market already.
7. Broadening the ban on disposables won't be a material barrier to adults; three quarters of adults use pods and tanks.
8. Cabinet's preferred broad ban brings safety concerns because you're forcing everyone to refill tanks. 
9. "There is also the potential risk that a more comprehensive ban incentivises an illicit market. Whilst not directly comparable, tighter regulation in Australia has seen the rise of a significant illicit market with 87% of Australians who vape reporting sourcing vapes illegally."
10. "accessibility of use for adults who smoke and wish to vape to quit smoking would also be impacted."
11. If the government wants to increase the cost of vapes, excise and/or minimum prices make more sense but have trade-offs when thinking about encouraging adults to shift away from smoked tobacco.

The Ministry preferred the much narrower ban. 

And it's great that they pointed to the risk of illicit market access under a broader ban. Otago's public health people like to pretend that those worries are invented by industry. 

I went through the Ministry's RIS over at Newsroom this week. This will wind up biting National unless they fix it at Select Committee:

And here is where we shift from the measures just being poor policy to also being a political mistake.

Under the previous Labour government, then-health minister Ayesha Verrall had legislated a ban on cigarettes that contain any appreciable amount of nicotine, an annual increase in the age limit for smoking, and reductions in the number of retail outlets allowed to sell cigarettes.

Measures from that legislation had not come into effect by the time of last year’s election. And, to some surprise, the incoming Government’s coalition agreements reversed that legislation while committing the Government to considering a broader range of reduced-harm alternatives to smoking.

Labour strongly opposed the Government’s reversal of its legislation, claiming its legislation was needed to continue the path to Smokefree 2025.

Many ex-smokers use the vaping systems that National is due to ban. Smoking rates could well be increasing again in the lead-up to the 2026 election. If smoking rates are on the rise, Labour will have its choice of rod with which to beat National. It could point to the vaping rules, or to the coalition’s reversal of Verrall’s legislation, or both.

The legislation may provide the Government with a temporary reprieve from parents and teachers worried about youth vaping. But the Ministry of Health’s Regulatory Impact Statement suggests the ban is far broader than is really necessary. If the government does not reconsider its options through the select committee process, it may yet find that bad policy becomes bad politics.

Labour's been curiously silent on this one. 

In other instances in which National set tobacco/nicotine policy that MoH disagreed with, Labour and Radio NZ have been sure it's because National/NZ First are corrupt. Haven't heard from them yet on this one - probably because they're following Napolean's warnings against interfering when an enemy is making a mistake. 

Uber messy

Caught a fun phone call from an accountant after this week's column over at the Dom Post (and Christchurch Press, etc) on the court's decision in the Uber case.

If Uber drivers are employees, rather than contractors, as the Court sees things, how will depreciation on their cars be handled? Contractors can count all those expenses against their earnings. Employers will pay you mileage if you use your own car for work purposes, but that seems like a nightmare in this case. Uber would have to start caring about what kind of car you use, where it can otherwise leave it to the driver-partner. 

I'd not thought about that one.

A snippet of what I had thought about:

If the court is right about the law, and it’s more likely to be right about it than I am, then the law is wrong. It makes it impossible to operate models that make both drivers and riders better off. Drivers who prefer an employment arrangement rather than contracting already have an obvious option: send a CV to a traditional taxicab company.

The Government will have to legislate around this mess.

The Government could set a new category into employment law for platform workers so companies could offer benefits without fear of workers being deemed employees, and so workers could maintain valuable flexibility. However, any new set of boundaries between categories will bring its own future challenges.

Alternatively, it could liberalise employment law more broadly. If Uber and its drivers agree that they are in a contracting relationship and nobody is forcing drivers to work with Uber, the courts could be required to recognise voluntary agreements among consenting adults. That approach would be flexible against changes in real-world circumstances, but more at risk of changes in government.

Perhaps the safest option would be a combination of the two. A broadly workable category for platform workers combined with the ability to contract voluntarily could preserve the former against future governments opposed to the latter.

 An ungated version should show up on the Initiative's website in due course. 

Basic income, again

This week's column for the Stuff papers covered the excellent new US work testing the effects of a UBI. 

From November 2020, 3000 low-income people were randomly assigned into two groups for three years. One thousand people each received $1000 per month in unconditional funds for three years. Two thousand people each received $50 per month.

Both groups filled in detailed surveys on how they spent their time, on their purchases, their health experience and more. Participants had blood tests to check health outcomes. Government administrative records were combined with the survey data to provide more detail.

The UBI amounted to about a 40% increase in recipients’ income – large enough to matter.

The researchers pre-registered their study design to guard against, well, fiddling. If you have dozens of potential outcomes that might be affected by the cash transfers, there are many ways for studies to accidentally find effects that are not there, and even more ways to put a thumb on the scales. Trial pre-registration says in advance how statistical testing will be run.

...

What did the experiment find?

Households receiving the UBI were able to enjoy more leisure than other households. Leisure is good and should not be underrated. But that was the largest actual effect. Their overall earnings, including the transfer, were higher – but labour force participation and hours worked fell. Households receiving the UBI earned about $5000 less per year than the control group, not counting the transfer, or about $6000 more than the control group when counting the transfer.

People receiving the transfer spent more time unemployed if they became unemployed, but more time for job search did not help. There was no effect on job quality – and a good study design meant they could rule out even small effects.

Remember that the funding for the study came from donors. Any real-world UBI would need to be funded by taxation that would have its own pernicious effects on work incentives. And a permanent UBI would have larger effects on work choices than a three-year programme.

What about health? In the short term, people receiving the transfer enjoyed reduced stress and greater food security. But those effects quickly faded. There was increased uptake of health services and some healthy behaviours. We can be more confident that a UBI benefit would not be blown on drugs and alcohol. But the study found not even minimal effects on physical health. And initial improvements in mental health disappeared after the first year.

While poverty is certainly associated with worse health outcomes, very large and sustained cash transfers did not improve health. Worth remembering when reading the next public health study asserting that more income redistribution would improve health outcomes.

They put a heck of a lot of work into this trial and its evaluation. To the extent that they got a law change so that the payments wouldn't be considered taxable or affect eligibility for other benefits - so they knew it was the same $1000/month increase for everybody. 

The disemployment effects were a bit larger than I'd expected, so I've updated my expectations on that. My priors on health effects were reinforced; in richer countries, the income-health gradient is going to be an artefact of an underlying correlate of both.

I was a bit more surprised by zero effects on job quality. I'd put some weight on that less time-pressure to match with a new job when unemployed could yield better job matches. But the 1.1 extra months' duration of unemployment spells relative to the control group cashed out into precisely estimated nil effects on a whole big range of job quality items. 

You can catch a twitter thread by Eva Vivalt, of the researchers on it, here.

But UBI-stans seems to be some of the stranger beasts out there. I mean, look at this. 

Eric Crampton must have been reading another study from the report he describes in his hostile critique of basic income (‘Putting a UBI to the test’, July 29). The US cash transfer project he eulogised was not a test of basic income.

There have been over 100 experiments which show positive results. The one he cites is not one of them. By definition, a basic income is a modest amount paid regularly to all usual residents, individually, without means-tests or behavioural conditions, regardless of income, gender, marital status or work status.

The study Crampton cites does not pretend to respect that definition. Several limitations make the results irrelevant for assessing basic income.

It was a means-tested benefit paid to 1000 individuals spread across 19 counties in Texas and Illinois, about 50 per county. That is hardly universal. The individuals self-selected. They only received the cash if they could prove they were poor. It was only paid to individuals aged 20-40. It was only paid to one individual per household, if nobody in the household was receiving disability benefits and they were not in publicly-subsidised housing. It deliberately over-sampled those from minority groups. Those features invalidate any claim to randomness, unconditionality or universality.

Ok. Where to start. If you want to run a UBI trial, you can try saturation where you enroll an entire town. In that case you get the second-round effects from the spending of UBI income and the like and interactions among people who all get the UBI, but you really need to set the thing so it's funded by the community receiving the benefits so you get the effects of imposing the taxes necessary to pay for the thing. That would get you more of a total effect. 

Or, you can do what this group did and test just the effects of the transfer on outcomes for those receiving it, leaving out both potential community-wide benefits from everyone getting it (whether social stuff or spending effects) but also the incentive effects of the taxes necessary to pay for it. 

They targeted the group whose responses are of most interest for this policy agenda: lower-income people of prime working age. Randomisation was achieved by randomly putting people from that group either into the treatment or control groups. Payment when assigned to the treatment group was unconditional. You didn't have to do anything to get the money. If you filled in the time use surveys you got extra payments for that - as did people in the control group. And payment was universal within the treatment group. 

I suppose you could take the position that the only real trial of a UBI is to actually implement it across an entire community, but we quickly get into No True Scotsman issues. Did the trial encourage inward or outbound migration? Well, gonna have to apply it to the whole country aren't we for it to be a real trial. 

I think we can pretty confidently say that a UBI providing an after-tax transfer on the order of 40% of non-UBI income for low income people will have effects like the ones found in this experiment, but very likely with larger labour market effects both because of the permanent income hypothesis (a permanent transfer will have larger effects than a known-to-be-time-limited trial), and because of the effects of tax rates required to fund the transfer. And that there won't be the hoped-for improvements in health or job quality. But that there won't be increases in problem drinking because of it, and that people choosing more leisure probably consider themselves better off. Anyway, here's one of the authors on this:

Since this study captures the pure income effect of giving cash, without any of the substitution effects that might occur with a means-tested program, it tells us how much people prefer more leisure on the margin, even without disincentives to work. 37/

— Eva Vivalt (@evavivalt) July 22, 2024

Leisure is a normal good, people. 

The experiment began at the height of Covid, so it is surely a marvel that a cash transfer only resulted in a drop of just over an hour a week in paid labour.

Covid affected both treatment and control groups. The control group wasn't in some no-Covid place.  Maybe the argument is that the transfers gave people the ability to better hide from Covid if they wanted? Remember too though that there were all kinds of work-from-home and other changes that will have hit both groups, as well as Covid payments. And that the trial ran for three years, finishing in the second half of 2023. 

Moving towards a basic income for every resident citizen is a matter of common justice, freedom and basic security. Economists have shown it is affordable without raising income taxes.

Guy Standing, Co-president, Basic Income Earth Network; Professorial Research Fellow, SOAS University of London

The first sentence here is a values assertion. 

The second one, well, Treasury in NZ showed that we'd need a flat income tax of more than 50% to fund it and it still wouldn't be enough to replace all other benefits. A small one could be done without raising taxes - say if you abolished NZ super and split that money equally regardless of age. The transfer would be pretty small though. Or maybe he's expecting it to be funded out of some other tax he's not mentioning.  

The basic tradeoffs in a UBI are the same as I'd pointed out in the Spinoff ages back. We now have some better numbers on the likely effects. 

Read the NBER papers for yourself though. They're here. 

Also fun to compare the study's results, with what people had hoped would be the results. I guess those whose expectations were most dashed and who were most committed to specific beliefs about outcomes are most upset about it? 

I asked GPT4-o to complete the UBI experiment abstract based on the first part: pic.twitter.com/shLDQDYMeG

— John Horton (@johnjhorton) July 22, 2024

But you can also check Table 16 of the paper comparing expert predictions of what the effects would be and the eventual effects - which is just so neat as method.

I was on with RNZ's The Panel last night on this one. Would have been far better for them to have had on one of the study's authors, but I'd written a column on it and I'm local. 

So I went through what I'd gotten from it. 

And as I got up to leave, the host (subbing in for Wallace Chapman) read out a text that came through. 

"We need to be reminded that the New Zealand Initiative is part of the Business Roundtable. It supports its own conservative right-wing ideology." 

Classy as always RNZ. 

RNZ remains on-form

There are a few basic bits of reality that I'd hope we could agree on.

Minister Costello has set a lower excise rate for heated tobacco products as a bit of a trial to see whether it proves successful in encouraging remaining smokers to flip to something less harmful.

Even without any change in tobacco excise, a smoker shifting to an HTP will result in a drop in tobacco excise. Or at least I'm pretty sure. I'm pretty sure that a heated tobacco stick contains less tobacco than a cigarette does. And I'm pretty sure that heated tobacco draws the lower excise rate that applies to cigarillos and the like. The combination of the two means less excise in a heated tobacco stick than in a cigarette.

If the trial proves successful and a lot of smokers shift from cigarettes to heated tobacco, tobacco excise revenue will drop. The more successful the trial is in encouraging shifts from smoked tobacco to heated tobacco, the bigger the drop in excise revenue. If a lot of current vapers or non-smokers take up heated tobacco, excise revenue will increase on that margin.

While Philip Morris is a dominant supplier of heated tobacco products, heated tobacco competes with smoked tobacco and with vaping. So PMI does not face a vertical demand curve for its product. And even if you model them as a monopolist in the market for heated tobacco, a monopolist will pass through at least some of an excise reduction. 

This is basic Econ 1 stuff. The monopolist sets marginal revenue equal to marginal cost looking across the quantity axis, then traces up to the demand curve to find price. That's the price that maximizes profit. If costs drop, the profit-maximizing price drops too. It's just math. 

I hope that all of this is completely uncontroversial. 

Some mornings I am more annoyed than usual about being forced to pay for Radio New Zealand. This morning was one of those mornings.

Guyon Espiner had his latest update on Minister Costello's reduction in heated tobacco excise.

Let's have a look here.

Govt set aside $216m to pay for heated tobacco product tax cuts

Ok, so RNZ's main focus is going to be on the potential excise losses. 

Now we know, from basic facts of the world, that there can only be substantial reductions in tobacco excise if the policy is incredibly successful in reducing smoking rates.

Let's continue.

The government has agreed to set aside $216 million it may need to pay for tax cuts for heated tobacco products (HTPs).

RNZ reported earlier this month that Associate Health Minister Casey Costello - who is also Customs Minister - had implemented a 50 percent cut to the excise tax on HTPs, where the tobacco is heated to a vapour rather than burned.

Costello's office had not publicly disclosed how much that would cost the government but a Cabinet paper, released without fanfare on the Health Ministry's website, shows Cabinet agreed in May to set aside $216 million as a contingency fund to cover the estimated lost revenue.

The excise tax cut is something tobacco giant Philip Morris has lobbied for in the past. Its IQOS product is a dominant player in the New Zealand HTP market.

The Cabinet paper, signed off by New Zealand First MP Costello, showed it was not even clear whether the tax break would be passed on to consumers.

"Because this product currently has a monopoly market in New Zealand, the extent to which a reduction in excise duty on HTPs would be passed on to consumers via lower retail prices is unclear," the paper noted.

I've highlighted a relevant bit here. Let's look at this section of the Cabinet Paper.

The Cabinet Paper isn't saying that there might be no pass-through. It's saying that they don't know whether there will be one-third pass-through or 100% pass-through. 

Officials could perhaps have been clearer that even a complete monopolist facing a downward-sloping demand curve is going to pass through at least some of a tax reduction, but they could be forgiven for thinking that it was awfully clear in context. They note one study finding a 31% pass-through rate, and that officials have advised to assume 100% pass-through. So the extent of pass-through is likely going to be somewhere between those. 

But RNZ put this as a question of whether there would be pass-through. Not the extent of it. 

If there is zero pass-through, and again this is just math, and it won't happen because even a monopolist will respond to a cost decrease by reducing price, there cannot be more than negligible effect on excise revenue. Why? The price of heated tobacco will not have dropped relative to smoked tobacco. It will not have driven any flipping from smoked tobacco to heated tobacco. Philip Morris would get a transfer equivalent to half of what they currently pay in excise. Excise from heated tobacco was just under $6 million in 2023, so the policy would transfer $3m to Philip Morris. $216 million is right out. 

But RNZ sets the framing to have people expect a $216 million tax cut benefitting PMI that might have no pass-through to consumers. 

Let's continue, again.

Costello declined an interview with RNZ and her office did not address questions about whether that monopoly position referred to Philip Morris.

In a statement the minister did say that she expected the industry to reduce the cost of its products.

"That means I'm expecting the excise reduction to pass to consumers, this is what we were advised would happen by officials and it is something we will also be monitoring," she said.

She also said she did not expect the cost to the government to be "anywhere close to what was modelled", as the tax collected on HTPs was only $3.62 million in 2022 and $5.97 million in 2023.

"Officials noted there is a lot of uncertainty around the modelling and fiscal impact because it was based on the very rapid increase in HTP use that happened in Japan, where vapes were unavailable."

Philip Morris did not respond to RNZ's questions.

Good context from the Minister here, and good that RNZ reported it. 

Unfortunate that they didn't think through what those numbers mean. If current excise from heated tobacco is only on the order of $6m, what would have to happen in the real world for a drop in excise on heated tobacco to result in a $216m excise loss? It would have to mean that there was substantial pass-through of the excise reduction and consequently substantial switching to heated tobacco, which means substantial reductions in exposure to the bad things that come out of combusted cigarettes. 

Another fun bit from the Cabinet paper. Guess which line of this paragraph RNZ chooses to emphasize? Hint: it's not the one saying that even the FDA recognizes that heated tobacco means less exposure to harmful chemicals. 

As always, RNZ's reporting on tobacco needs health warnings. 

Another pitch by the pharmacy guild

Recall that Chemist Warehouse found a structure that let them operate in New Zealand despite pharmacy guild regulations that had seemed aimed to block such entry. 

The pharmacists are having another tilt at it.

In Australia, a pharmacy that wanted to fill prescriptions could not set up within 200m, 1.5km or 10km of an existing pharmacy depending on whether it was in a shopping centre, suburb, or town.

Community pharmacists were calling for similar regulations here, warning if nothing changes, the community bond that came from knowing every customer by name could be a thing of the past.

Right.

"Hello, I am the owner of the local pub, where everybody knows your name. I worry about the potential entry of a new pub in a 10km radius, not because of its effect on my profitability!, but because it would erode the community bond that comes of having a single pub where everyone goes and where everyone knows your name. Please ban any such entry. Thank you."

And repeat for the local dentist. Or the local greengrocer. Heck, even the local bank. Could roll this one out for all kinds of things.  

Interchange fees

A few years ago, MBIE ran an inquiry into credit card interchange fees.

Most of the analysis seemed predicated on an assumption that retailers could neither impose surcharges for card transactions nor avoid accepting cards.

So I started taking pictures of EFTPOS terminals with tape over the credit card button or with obvious signs noting credit card surcharges to accompany my submission on it. The MBIE paper seemed to take "Well, anything's possible in two-sided markets so we should regulate" approach. 

Now it's ComCom that's proposing to regulate credit card interchange fees. 

But they did commission a couple papers. 

And this seems a key bit:

Moreover, it is theoretically argued that if the no-surcharge rule is lifted, interchange fee regulation is harmful for total welfare. Regulatory attention should in this case shift to merchants, rather than focusing on card networks. If surcharging is to be allowed, the optimal cap is equal to the merchant fee minus the merchant’s convenience benefit from card payments. In other words, the merchant should not surcharge more than his own incurred “transaction” cost of a card payment. This result is perfectly in line with the proposed “merchant indifference test” or “tourist test” to optimally cap merchants fees keeping the merchant indifferent between a cash payment vis-à-vis a card payment. Yet, recent cost-based surcharge regulations seem too lenient, as they allow surcharges up to the merchant fee – or even higher (Gomes and Tirole, 2018).

And remember that NZ retailers can set surcharges if they want. All of us see them all the time. Maybe John Small doesn't. 

It then goes on to note evidence from other countries about smallish proportions of transactions attracting surcharges.

But think about it for a minute. 

High volume retailers have some power in those relationships. You might expect that surcharges imposed on transactions at the grocery stores would be lower than the surcharges in other places. And it wouldn't just be about the supermarkets being big enough to have some heft. It would also be about the cost of providing the ancillary services that credit cards provide. You're going to be a lot less likely to see chargebacks for undelivered or unsatisfactory goods on a weekly grocery shop than you might for a mail order shipment that's gone wrong or, say, payment for your kid's trip out to space camp. Credit cards provide insurance; EFTPOS doesn't. That insurance is valuable, but more valuable in some cases than others. Those differences matter and I'd expect affect the charging structure that the card companies set. Nobody's doing a credit card chargeback if there's a broken egg in the darned carton when you get home. 

Another key bit, if you remember that NZ retailers very regularly set surcharges for credit cards.

Moreover, many payment networks have frequently imposed restrictive – and potentially “regressive” rules – on the merchant side, such as no-surcharge rules or honor-all-cards rules.31 Effectively, this implies that payment cards that are more expensive for merchants to accept, such as credit cards, will be cross-subsidized by cheaper means of payments such as debit and cash. As high-income consumers are the ones most likely to hold and use cards with higher reward schemes that are more expensive for merchants to accept, the cross-subsidies between the payment methods are regressive transfers from low-income consumers to high-income consumers (Felt et al., 2021; Wang, 2023).

I remember MBIE relying on this kind of argument in making its case, seemingly unaware that NZ retailers can and do set those surcharges. Hence my photography while out grabbing lunch. 

If ComCom tightly restricts credit card fees, expect a whole pile of services currently bundled with card transactions to disappear.  

It's annoying when there's a world of real problems that need to be dealt with and agencies like ComCom go off on these kinds of tilts. 

Fun antitrust application

David Harvey reports that AI scraping could wind up being part of the revised NZ Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. 

Having defined what an AI system and an AI service is the Bill goes on goes on to link an AI system to news content for the purpose of training the AI system.

The focus is upon the way in which news content may be used to train a digital platform or AI system.

The first element is that an AI system must be trained using news content. This links to the definition of news content in the Bill. The training must generate outputs which happens if the AI system enables or facilitates the generation of outputs.

He continues through with technical elements on whether the definitions work and whatnot.

The better underlying question seemed to be why anyone thinks there's a problem here to be solved.

It's simple for a website to restrict against scraping. It would similarly be simple for a news site to licence its content for AI training, if anyone wanted to pay them enough to allow it. There is no obvious reason government needs to be involved in any of this. 

But there's a fun potential antitrust angle, and then conflicting priorities. It looks like Google has licensed Reddit content for AI training, and that part of the deal might mean that Google is now the only search engine that works on Reddit.

Reddit wouldn't have set an exclusivity deal unless the exclusivity deal gave it more money than licensing its content to multiple agents. 

Government-types have claimed to be deeply worried about news sites not being able to adequately monetise content, with consequences then for the public good aspects of journalism. And they've tried to punt the bill over to tech platforms rather than just fund a public good out of public funds.

Here we have a news content site that has made a voluntary deal with a platform for content access for AI scraping - the very thing that NZ's Parliament seems to want to legislate to force - and folks are worried that the exclusivity arrangements that mean more money for the news sites also give the platform too much power. 

Today in Antitrust: when we force (or even allow!) AI companies to sign deals w/ content producers for old content or API access, there is obvious way to "raise rivals' costs" and lock in market power, dynamically making things worse for content producers. https://t.co/5wvRIoE0mU

— Kevin A. Bryan (@Afinetheorem) July 24, 2024

I'm not saying there aren't potential competition issues here. But there are trade-offs. Ban exclusivity arrangements and you'll reduce the amount of money going to news content providers, and then you'll have other parts of government looking for convoluted ways to force additional payments. 

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the browser tabs:

• The Commerce Commission blocks NZ DJ software company Serato from selling out to Japanese DJ product company AlphaTheta. One lesson: don't do tech startups in NZ if your exist strategy is selling out to a larger company.


• New Zealand's bureaucrats have apparently been considering a harmonised set of plain packaging rules on infant formula with Australia, which would force an important part of dairy processing overseas. Hopefully the government stops this one while issuing a pretty hard "please explain" to the officials involved. 


• Aaron Smale's reporting on the Inquiry into Abuse in Care has been superb throughout, and is great again this morning at Newsroom. He asks the right questions about state accountability. I expect that those who helped cover up the state's abuses are more likely to earn knighthoods than to face charges. 


• Gas shortages have Huntly importing more coal. 


• The Department of Conservation has more opportunity than any other part of govt I can think of to realistically improve its own finances through user charges and concession auction. Newsroom reports this morning that they're facing "huge financial pressure". There is an obvious solution here.

Right to Repair

The Green Party has a Member's Bill up arguing for a consumer right of repair; Auckland University's Alex Sims has written a few columns in support of such a thing. 

I'd had an email asking about that legislation; figured I'd share my response here - tidied up a bit.

If it’s more expensive to produce a product that can be easily disassembled for repair, there will be trade-offs. Consumers could choose an offering with lower up-front costs, but hard to repair, or one with higher up-front costs, but easier to repair. There’s no reason for legislation to privilege one choice over another. 

If one car company makes vehicles that can only really be repaired by dealers, and another uses a more open standard, the latter could easily advertise that ease of repairability. I remember back on our farm we had a very strong preference for tractors made by Versatile, because field-repair was dead simple and you didn’t have to wait for a couple days for some tech to come out with a diagnostic kit in the middle of harvest. Folks who could afford fleets of John Deere tractors to cover twenty square miles of fields could have a couple in reserve; we couldn’t on 1000 acres. Trade-offs and consumer choice. The John Deere machines were great for folks in situations different from ours.

But even leaving that aside, New Zealand has to be a regulation-taker in this space. We import all this stuff. A bespoke rule could require separate production lines for products destined for the NZ market. That has to increase costs while sharply limiting the range of products here available. And if Europe or some other crazy kind of place sets rules requiring more repairable versions, nothing stops anyone from bringing the Euro-standard products into New Zealand. 

Also important to remember that avoiding putting things in landfill can itself be wasteful. Landfills charge people for dumping things. Important to make sure that user charges there are set to fully cover the cost of disposing of stuff in landfill. If the landfill charges are set properly, and it's cheaper to buy something new and dispose of the old one than it is to repair the old one, repairing the thing would be wasteful. It would take more real resources to effect the repair. 

And if there are competition issues around vertical integration in repair, that’s for ComCom right?

I hope the legislation does not progress. It could easily see a sharp reduction in the range of products offered onto the NZ market.

The current Consumer Guarantees Act amounts to an information requirement on this stuff. 

If a manufacturer does not undertake to provide parts or repair services, they inform the consumer. That's the exception provided at Section 42 and signaled in Section 12. It arguably increases consumer information and enables better-informed choices. I'd still argue that manufacturers of easily-repaired goods already have plenty of incentive to advertise that fact to customers, but it's harder to see that the Act does harm where that exception is provided.

Deleting that exception while extending the requirements placed on manufacturers willing to sell into the NZ market really wouldn't be good. 

Shakedown finances

There are a lot of problems with the Paul Goldsmith / Willie Jackson media bargaining bill. 

I hit on some of those over in the Stuff papers this week.

A snippet:

If the bill goes ahead with only that change, some things are predictable.

Meta will exit news in New Zealand, as it is set to do in Australia. Australia’s government has been mulling over whether it ought to compel Meta to continue providing news in Australia – which is a bit odd. This all started from a notion that Meta was stealing news. One normally doesn’t encourage thieves to keep at it because of the benefits of the fines assessed against them.

When Meta leaves, outlets where Meta provides a lot of free distribution and links will take a substantial hit. They will appear at the minister’s door asking why he has done this to them. They will be right to do so. He will have to come up with an answer despite the fiscal situation and explain to his Cabinet colleagues why he needs to boost media subsidies.

Moreover, New Zealand’s reputation among tech investors will decline. What should they think about places that shake down the tech sector to subsidise other industries?

There is a completely defensible case for public support for journalism. This bill fails to help and causes substantial additional problems.

I wish Minister Goldsmith luck.

The more I think about it though, the more the tax policy aspect of it really bothers me.

NZ has had a decent tax policy process overall. Some bits are incoherent - depreciation settings on commercial buildings and interest deductibility for rental property businesses seem to flip on political whims rather than on any sound basis. But overall, the generic tax policy process is good.

What Minister Goldsmith and National are setting up here is an end-run both around the generic tax policy process and the vote allocation process. 

The legislation that Minister Goldsmith wishes to progress would set the Minister as decider on whether to designate a platform for compulsory bargaining. A Minister could tell Meta/Google/Twitter/Microsoft that if they give some specified amounts to whichever media companies, that would be enough to avoid designation. 

Whatever the resulting de facto tax is, it will not have gone through any kind of IRD tax policy process. Nobody will have checked whether it makes sense, how it interacts with other taxes, what it does to BBLR norms. It won't have to be voted on by Parliament, except in the legislation enabling the Minister to act as extortionist. 

Normal drill in spending measures is that different Ministries put budget bids up to cabinet. Those bids fight against each other for scarce public funding. There's an implicit evaluation of all of them against each other - ideally via cost-benefit assessment, but often also against political considerations. 

None of the money handed over to media companies through Goldsmith's extortion bill will go through that process. Nothing will adjudicate whether the money is appropriately allocated across media outlets/objectives, or whether spending in that area is more important than in other areas that normal vote bids have to compete with.

It is an end-run against both IRD and against the normal vote allocation process. We wind up with tin pot funds for different things, contributed to 'voluntarily' by sectors heavied to make the contributions. 

It is terrible precedent. 

If Government learns that it can avoid all manner of fiscal and procedural constraints by heavying a disfavoured industry to fund a favoured sector through regulatory impost or through promise of regulatory forbearance if the heavied sector does 'enough' to pay off the favoured sector, do not expect it to stop with tech platforms and news media.

Other applications are obvious.

The Grocery Regulator could be instructed to go hard against supermarkets in areas that are of little public benefit but massive cost to the sector, unless the grocers 'voluntarily' agree to do enough to supply food banks free of charge. Who could object? Anyone who does would be painted as either being in the pockets of Big Supermarkets, or as hating the poor, or both - good policy be damned. 

It isn't hard to come up with more of these. 

It's a terrible path. 

I hope Paul Goldsmith comes to his senses. 

Food waste

There are some areas where it's hard to get a solution without government intervention. Carbon prices, for example. Not saying it's impossible, it's just hard.

There are also plenty of areas where policy is probably wrong and could use advice from a Chief Science Advisor. For example, setting an air quality standard for schools that balances cost of cleaner air against benefits from fewer teachers and kids out sick. Seems important. Naomi Wu's put up interesting stuff on far-UV light. Does the science stack up? What would it cost to put those in schools, if government ordered at scale for every school in the country? Would doing so bend the cost curve and set an example for others to follow?

Little things like that. Might matter. There have been a lot of illness-related school absences, and the government has claimed to be keen on reducing school absences.

The Prime Minister's Chief Science Advisor just put out a report on the critical issue of... food waste.

Normally you want to start with whether there's a potential policy problem. 

But every part of the system has strong incentive to avoid food waste.

A cabbage that doesn't make it onto the truck to get to market is money that the farmer doesn't get. Farmers like having money. They will invest in getting food to market up to the point at which getting the next cabbage onto the truck costs more than it's worth. Reducing spoilage isn't free. Farmers have to balance things. They are best placed to do so on their end. Who could know better than they do?

Transport companies that can't get their act together to deliver food in good condition wind up losing customers to those who can. That also means money. Transport companies prefer having money to not having money. They will invest in reducing spoilage up to the point at which the expected costs of doing so are greater than the benefits. Reducing spoilage isn't free. Shipping companies have to balance things. They are best placed to do so for their part of the production chain. Who could know better than they do?

Grocers that throw out a lot of spoiled food are throwing away money. They paid for the goods, and get no revenue from the ones they throw out. Grocers like having money. Didn't we just have an inquiry into whether grocers like having money too much? Spoiled food is wasted money. Grocers will invest in reducing spoilage up to the point at which the next dollar invested in it saves less than a dollar's worth of food. Reducing spoilage isn't free. Grocers have to balance things. They are best placed to do so for their part of the production chain. Who could know better than they do?

Households that throw away spoiled food are throwing away money. They paid for the food, and don't get to eat it. Households like having edible food and like having money. Don't we regularly hear news stories about people not being able to afford enough food? Spoiled food is wasted money. Households will invest in reducing spoilage and avoiding waste up to the point at which the next dollar's worth of effort in doing so saves less than a dollar's worth of food, as the household values things. Reducing spoilage and waste isn't free. Households have to balance things. They are best placed to do so for their part of the production chain. Who could know better than they do?

Spoiled food winds up in a few places. If it's in a household's compost bin, it can result in GHG emissions that aren't priced. But government seems to like composting. If it goes down the waste disposal, it winds up in the city's sludge plant along with human waste. I'm pretty sure those plants are in the ETS. If it goes into the trash can, it winds up at landfill. Landfills pay for their emissions, and have every incentive to reduce those emissions. Some capture and use the captured methane. If it winds up being fed to pets or to livestock, it displaces other feed and needn't be worried about.

And then we get the press release on the PMCSA's report from NZ Food Waste Champions. Where do you even start? 

They want a national food waste strategy with Targets! and Structures! and Systems! and Mechanisms!. 

The recommendations delivered to the Government include the need for a national food loss and waste strategic action plan, a reduction target, and structures and systems to empower stakeholders to act on them; mechanisms for ensuring more New Zealand-specific reliable and comprehensive food waste data; better strategies aimed at preventing food loss at  source; and enabling conditions that promote food rescue and upcycling to ensure edible food is never treated as waste.

The report gives a bullet-point list of first steps in preventing food losses in production. One of them was "exploring the potential of cooperative business models to improve farmers' market power." 

It is ...not obvious... why a coop would be preferable or how market power enters into any of this. The report seems to worry that buyers with market power can insist on high standards for delivered food, resulting in diversion of 'nutritious food' (ie potentially unpalatable to their customers, but still edible, and could be on-sold to Wonky Box) away from tables. There seems little consideration of that high standards by grocers might encourage producer practices that avoid bruised fruit that has a shorter shelf-life. 

There was one sensible bit in the press release.  

Dawson cites food packaging decisions as an example. “Moving to more sustainable packaging solutions is important, but what if that packaging means the food inside has a shorter shelf-life, which leads to higher levels of waste with greater levels of emissions?”

If grocers have chosen those options because consumers want them, they've made the balancing. If consumers want dumb-forms of packaging because they falsely believe those versions are somehow better for the environment, then maybe government could decide to run fewer anti-plastics campaigns. If grocers have chosen those options either because compelled by regulation or under threat of regulation if they do not, or because of misguided government-sponsored messaging around sustainability, then government has skewed the balance and done harm. Regulation doesn't do the comprehensive balancing that grocers would otherwise do. 

Similarly, the report recommends evaluating the Grocery Supply Code on "trade term driven food loss and waste." If the regulator sets supply terms that aren't what willing parties would contract to on their own, there's again the risk that government has skewed the balance and done harm. Regulation doesn't do the comprehensive balancing that grocers and suppliers discover through negotiation. 

Highlighting how regulatory mandates can inadvertently create waste is great. It's the kind of thing a new Ministry for Regulation could be doing. 

Another potential area for investigation - not sure whether it's in the report, though - would be the darned restrictions against building things on Precious Agricultural Land. Where those things can include restrictions against putting processing facilities on that land, they wind up requiring that food be trucked farther away before processing, which increases damage and waste. It's one of the things that National promised to look into; the restrictions on use of agricultural land are entirely a government-caused problem.  

The rest seems madness.

They apparently wrote four reports on this stuff. In this government budget situation. And with rather more important areas where scientific advice could improve government policy where there is an actual policy problem. With 500 "experts and stakeholders across the motu" having had to spend time on it. 

It all does make one wonder about waste-reduction.

Sheltered workshops and wage top-ups

It's hard to tell what the actual state of play is, but pretty easy to tell what it should be.

People with severe disabilities will often have great difficulty obtaining employment. In cases of intellectual disability, the point of employment is far less about what gets produced and far more about social connection and a feeling of worth for those engaged in activities. 

If you apply the minimum wage rigidly in those cases, people will instead be unemployed unless philanthropists are willing to fund sheltered workshops or equivalent roles. 

If you allow sub-minimum wages, a lot of people who otherwise would be unemployable will have some chance of finding meaningful activities. 

If people are employed at sub-minimum wages, activists will decide that it's awful and unfair and insist that the minimum wage be applied rigidly, and damn companies as selfish if they do not pay $23.15/hr for work that might produce $2/hr of value. It's inevitable.  They cannot see the next step, or don't care because it gives them a chance to rail against the evils of capitalism when that employment ends. 

Labour had proposed a reasonable solution to that mess: top-up wages. Budget 2023 had had them coming into effect from mid-2025, but I do not know whether or for how long that had actually been funded.

Ending the Minimum Wage Exemption

The Government will end the discriminatory Minimum Wage Exemption (MWE), which allows disabled people to be paid less than the minimum wage, by mid-2025.

“This unfair exemption currently affects about 800 disabled people who are legally able to be paid less on the basis they’re perceived to be less productive,” Priyanca Radhakrishnan said.

“Some disabled people in New Zealand are paid under the minimum wage and that needs to end. We will start this work immediately.

“This Government made a manifesto commitment to replace MWE permits with a wage supplement, ensuring all disabled people receive at least minimum wage.

“Under the Wage Supplement, approximately 800 disabled people will have their wages increased to minimum wage. This will support some disabled people to shift off the benefit into paid employment and decrease their reliance on the welfare system,” Priyanca Radhakrishnan said.

The rhetoric here is a bit nuts; it's playing to their activists around fairness. But the underlying policy would recognise that people with severe disabilities would not find employment if the employer had to pay the minimum wage, and had government wage top-ups making up the difference. 

If the state were not topping up wages, it would be providing other benefits instead. So the government isn't out the full amount of the wage top-up. It's out the difference between the wage top-up and the cost of whatever other supported living payments would otherwise have been provided if there were no wage income. I would expect that the EMTR on the wage top up will be pretty high, given the other income-linked benefits that would claw back.  

If the state wants the wages of severely disabled people to be high enough to support their living costs, doing it through wage top-ups makes a lot of sense. It keeps people in work and puts the burden of support broadly on the tax base, rather than expecting the employer to bear the burden itself. 

The Herald reports that the government is not going to go ahead with the top-up payments, with cost savings to the government reported at around $11m per year - or just under $13,000 if there are 900 affected workers. I expect, but don't know, that that is net of any increase in supported living payments and the like. 

Most important is not abolishing the minimum wage exemptions for people would could never find meaningful employment from willing employers at the minimum wage, and it doesn't look like the government is abolishing that. They're also maintaining support to help employers accommodate disabled workers. 

Supplemental assistance through supported living payments would have these workers no worse off than disabled people who are unable to work. There aren't good choices here, only trade-offs. 

What Labour had proposed was good, but did mean that someone who is completely unable to work would wind up with less money than someone whose work is really more of a social activity than productive. And you might not like that. 

National's version has support instead through supported living payments, which means some so-supported workers don't get to enjoy that support through a paycheque, and total support will be at a lower level than what Labour had promised (but had not yet put in place). And you might not like that. 

What I worry more about is whether the proposed version will prove politically stable. Most important in a lot of these cases is going to be the fulfilment of being able to go to work, not the paycheque itself. I hope that the next turn of the electoral cycle would have a Labour-led government reinstate top-ups, rather than ban employers from paying sub-minimum wages. 

Previously: Karl du Fresne's excellent piece on sheltered workshops.

Morning roundup

A selection as I read through the morning papers.

• Twenty-three MPs claim an accommodation allowance to stay in their own Wellington properties.  Well, consider the alternatives, which the story doesn't.
  • You could pay all MPs much higher salaries and tell them to sort their own accommodation, which would mean higher effective pay for Wellington-area MPs who wouldn't need to pay for a second residence.
  • You could means-test access to accommodation support which would basically scale MP pay by prior wealth. It would also tilt things to discourage candidacy of middle-to-higher wealth MPs from outside of Wellington.
  • You could raze Premier House and put up halls of residence for MPs and the Prime Minister (and maybe have a reality show based there).
  • Or you could provide non-Wellington MPs who have a Wellington property with a strong incentive to sell off any Wellington properties by not providing the payment to MPs who don't live in Wellington but who have a house here.
  What do you think sucks least? Because I'm not sure there are other options.


• The Government is to run a Parliamentary inquiry into rural banking.

  The Federated Farmers’ campaign for an inquiry was led by farmer Richard McIntyre.
  “I have been inundated with phone calls and emails from farmers, and even some former bankers, wanting to tell their stories,” he said.
  “And there’s been some pretty harrowing stories.”
  The worst of those involved farmers losing farms that their families had owned for generations, he said.

  Parliament might consider whether difficulty in foreclosing on failing farms, because of this kind of response, provides a strong disincentive to lending on rural properties.


• I love that Xero is now putting out productivity data. The data is depressing. But great that Xero's doing it!


• My gawd people. We have a competitive electricity market. New supply can come in if demand increases - though we need to make consenting for it easier. Emissions from mining and from electricity are in the Emissions Trading Scheme. If you want fewer emissions, reduce the number of unbacked units the government will issue or allocated between now and 2050. But wanting to block a gold mine because it will use energy and might have CO2 emissions is nuts.

Expert advice

There are a few things you'd hope would be common knowledge about the Emissions Trading Scheme.

For example, the scheme caps net emissions. If emissions go down in one sector, another sector's emitters can buy the slightly-cheaper NZUs and use them. The only thing that reduces net emissions in the covered sector is government auctioning or allocating fewer units. 

And that the scheme wasn't designed by idiots. You can get credits for growing trees. But if you cut down the trees, or if the forest burns down, there are obligations: surrender the carbon credits or replant to sequester an equivalent amount of carbon. 

If the scheme didn't require surrendering credits if the forest burned down, it would be a pretty stupid design. 

MPI explains it in really simple language.

Natural disasters and other accidental events can damage forest land. Where this damage fells, burns, kills, uproots, or destroys the forest, the forest is treated as cleared in the ETS. This can result in a need to pay (surrender) New Zealand Units (NZUs or units) for the decrease in stored carbon.

From 2023, you can apply to pause carbon accounting if such an event damages your forest. This is called a "temporary adverse event suspension". If your application is approved, you won’t need to pay units for the decrease in stored carbon.

This pause will last until your forest:

• is re-established (replanted or regenerated), and
• achieves the same level of carbon storage as it had before the event.

So it's fun to read today's Carbon News:

The former chief science advisor for the Ministry of Transport says the current government isn’t even pretending to try to reduce carbon emissions from transport.

For the past six and a half years Simon Kingham, professor of Human Geography at Canterbury University’s School of Earth and Environment, was seconded two days a week to the Ministry of Transport as chief science advisor, to advise on the evidence base of government policy.

Kingham says the coalition government is taking a completely different approach to the former Labour-led government. “The previous government was working to reduce transport emissions. The current government is not even pretending to try.”

There is a long list of transport emissions reduction policies that the coalition government has binned. “They’ve cut back the Clean Car Discount, reduced the Road User Charges exemption for EVs, they’re winding back the Clean Car Standard, reducing funding for public transport, reducing incentives for walking and cycling, they’re building more roads which increases emissions, they’re encouraging density but also encouraging sprawl, which induces demand."

He continues:

The government seems to be focussing more on net emissions and offsetting, Kingham says. But that’s not a straightforward solution. “If the emissions reductions are not coming from transport or agriculture that puts a lot of pressure on tree planting.”

While the government issues carbon credits for tree planting, we don’t know if that sequestration is necessarily durable, Kingham says. “Do they get to keep the carbon credits if the forests burn down? As well as tree planting there’s talk of biofuels. That all adds up to a lot of land that’s going to be used and I don’t know if anyone has thought through the implications of that.”

While relying on the Emissions Trading Scheme might work to decarbonise other sectors, Kingham says it won’t work for transport. “The ETS is not going to deliver reductions in transport because the price it would have to go to is politically unpalatable. You’d have to add a dollar to the price of petrol and no-one is going to want to do that.”

One nice feature of the carbon price is that it tells us where emission reductions are most cost-effective. If one sector won't decarbonise much at a carbon price of less than $100, that tells us that there are lots of other ways of reducing net emissions for less than $100/tonne.

But it could be a fair critique to want transport planning to be making its best guesses as to what people will want as transport options when the carbon price rises to $100 or $150/tonne.

Anyway, it's always fun to gauge understanding of the ETS.

I'd always counted things like the clean car discount as pretending to try to reduce emissions.