Giving SkyCity the convention centre was a very big mistake - Peter Singer edition

Another for the Eric was wrong file.

I had thought that the SkyCity deal was the least bad way of getting a convention centre conditional on the government wishing to be involved in paying to have a convention centre.

I don't think that governments should be involved in paying for convention centres.

And we should view the regulatory concessions granted to SkyCity in that deal as having an opportunity cost to the state equivalent to what those regulatory concessions would have been valued at had they been put up for auction. So while the SkyCity deal was meant to mean that the government didn't have to "pay" as cash payment, it did provide very valuable regulatory concessions. It wasn't free. People would pay a lot for the regulatory concessions that SkyCity bought? How much? Well, think about how much governments have to pay in other places to get convention centres built. It would be surprising if it were a lot less than that.

There are complementarities between casino operation and convention centre operation which could mean it would be less expensive to have the convention centre there. When I'd looked at that lit at the time, convention centres tied to or near casinos seemed to fare less badly than ones that were not. It can be part of the draw in getting some of the bigger conventions.

So I'd figured that the whole thing was the least bad outcome.

I hadn't reckoned on cancel culture coming to New Zealand, and the implications of that where a very important venue would be managed by an operator with incredible sensitivity to its perceptions of the social preferences of its various regulators.

SkyCity did secure some incredible regulatory abatement in its deal to provide the casino. But there are always a hundred margins on which the regulators could cause them to cease to be. Just how the money laundering regulations would be applied to them, for example, and at what kind of cost and stringency. How liquor licences will be handled in a venue where there is gambling going on and the effects of alcohol on continued gambling may be a concern. How the sinking lid policy on video lottery terminals would apply to their competitors, where they have some security on their own numbers - the worse for others, the better for them. Just what penalties and sanction might apply when they are not seen to have done enough about problem gambling. There will always be margins.

One hears incredible-sounding, but utterly utterly credible, stories about just what sorts of things companies operating under the shadow of the regulators here will get up to in attempts to buy the goodwill of the regulators. I'm not talking about payoffs or corruption or stuff like that. I'm talking rather about expensive measures taken expressly because they think it will leave the regulators with a warm feeling about them when next their particular regulatory issues come up for discussion.

I guarantee you it is happening in general.

And I suspect that that is what is driving Sky City's very very public campaign around inclusion and diversity. Everyone sees an incongruity between 'social justice' pushes and the company's core gambling business. It isn't incongruity, it's self-defence.

And so we get SkyCity's hair-trigger response to a minor amount of complaint about their hosting Peter Singer.

Disabled rights activists protested that Singer would be talking at SkyCity's venue. This sort of thing is rather common. But SkyCity cancelled him.

Danyl Mclauchlan covers it well at The Spinoff. I disagree with some of what he says but, unlike Singer's other critics, Danyl has read and understood Singer's project. I disagree with Danyl on two points - one minor to the case at hand, and one substantive.

On the minor point, I think it is important that Singer presents his arguments in the way he does because it forces the moral reckonings and thinking - the benefits of that outweigh the discomfort among those who choose to read him badly.

But the major point is a bit different.

Danyl argues that SkyCity is a private venue and should be able to choose who it hosts.

I agree with that. Every private venue and platform has to decide on what works for them, and what doesn't. A church hall should not be compelled to rent out its facilities for an erotica event, and a gay bar should not be forced to host a homophobic comedian just because it rents its facilities to other comedians. Property rights matter. And if the loss in future profits from hosting one particular event outweighs the profit of that particular event, that gives a way of weighing things. It speaks to effective demand.

But SkyCity they had a contract with Singer, and abandoned it under pressure.

I think that they abandoned it because they live in the shadow of the regulator. It is not a normal commercial decision. Even if SkyCity thought there would be zero consequence in attendance at their venue, they would fear the ill-will of the regulator.

"Oh, SkyCity. Yeah. We have to look at their renewals. What was that thing a couple of years ago where disabled people were furious with them? Like, what's wrong with them if they managed to make those people angry? Maybe we should look a bit more closely."

Avoiding that is the simplest explanation.

And it is consistent with other things SkyCity has been up to.

And it is also a very good reason that they should never have gotten the concession to run the Convention Centre. I hope that anyone considering booking anything with them for any reason will take very seriously the risk that SkyCity will cancel their event at the slightest pressure, because the regulatory risk they face will not be going away.

Does it seem plausible that cancelling Singer, who was to be talking about effective altruism and charity and the importance of doing the most good possible in the world, was a normal commercial decision?

Is it a free venue choice thing when they fear the hammer of the state? I don't really think so.

And it is a kind of a testable hypothesis. Here's the Masters thesis project, for those who choose to accept it. I bet the result would publish reasonably.

There exist company Corporate Social Responsibility rankings. How do company CSR rankings vary by the regulatory threats facing those companies and the industries in which they operate? You could use surprise state-level election results to identify effects for companies subject to state-level regulation, or changes in the composition of the relevant congressional oversight committees. 

I talked about some of this with Mike Hosking this morning.* Not about the broader potential research question, but about this particular instance.

It looks like Peter Singer's found another venue. In the interim, those keen might want to listen to my own chat with him in 2015 at the Christchurch WORD Festival. The link takes you to my post at the time that excerpted the best bits, including some fun around whether vegans should consider eating Canterbury lamb.

And if you get the chance to attend in Auckland, you should.



* Hosking introduced me as a member of the Free Speech Coalition. I'm broadly supportive of the Free Speech Coalition, as I am very much a fan of free speech, but I don't think I ever signed up with them. I don't really join things. I don't know whether my own position on this stuff corresponds with theirs, but I'd hope it does. And I don't keep close enough tabs on every position they've taken to necessarily endorse every bit of it. That's one reason I don't join things - it requires too much attention.

Fun with Singer

I'd talked with Peter Singer back in September at the Christchurch WORD festival. Our conversation is now up! I've embedded the audio below, but use the link if it doesn't work. I really enjoyed the event. A few of the highlights:

• Around the 10 minute mark, I noted the push-back from parts of the NZ NGO community against measurement and testing effectiveness and asked whether that were just a NZ thing. Singer talked about the practical difficulties of measuring effectiveness and the importance of getting the donors onside. NZ's problem's been a bit different: good chunks of the government are on-side, and they're a big donor.


• At around the 17 minute mark, I proposed setting up a register of effective charities, and shifting their tax treatment such that donors would get a full dollar tax credit for each dollar so-donated rather than just the $0.33. He liked the idea in principle. I like the implication that we shift to letting people direct their donations rather than having the government do it. Singer liked the implication that we would be doing more to help poor people in poor places rather than focusing on relatively poor people in New Zealand who are, globally, relatively rich. 


• At the 21 minute mark, I followed on more directly: if we could cut funding from New Zealand public health so that the least effective third of what it does were eliminated, with the money going instead to preventing blindness and repairing fistulas in the third world, should we do that? He said he'd push the button to divert those resources. I would too.


• At the 33 minute mark, I asked Singer about the utility of false beliefs. New Zealand's churches seemed able and willing to step up to help New Zealand take on more refugees than anybody else, really. Altruistic atheists just don't seem to be able to get that kind of coordination. Singer said that there is obviously some utility of that sort, but you need to take it up a level and weigh it against the disutility you get on other parts of the bundle. I think that was a bit of a cop-out because it's easy to specify as thought experiment cases where there are net increases in utility. I pressed him a bit: if I enjoy utility from false beliefs, is that ok? He reckoned it ok so long as it didn't have spillover costs. Into the experience machine we go.


• At the 39 minute mark, I had my absolute most fun. As best I can tell, free range lamb raised in New Zealand loves having had the chance to exist. Lambs are joyful. They play and frolic and have a bad day at the end, but I'd sooner get to have that existence than no existence. Then, if those who care about animal ethics all flip to vegetarianism rather than eating free-range Canterbury lamb, they do substantial harm. Demand for ethically raised meat drops, so the supply of it drops, and the balance is tipped toward factory farming. By the 42 minute mark, we got to the nub of it. And Singer saw exactly where I was going to push things and so pre-empted it by just laying it out and agreeing. If we take his position on potential children's utility and the ethics of aborting one that would have a less-good life in favour of a later one who would have a better life, then potential beings' utility counts. And once that happens, the lives of potential joyful lambs matter too. Said Singer: 

  "I think that there is a defensible argument for saying that if the purchase of Canterbury lamb is a necessary condition for lambs to have what is for 99% of their existence a really good life and even the bad days are not like a day of being tortured for 24 hours... I do think that that ... would be a defensible diet."

I had a ridiculous amount of fun. Later, at dinner, I had the lamb. He didn't.

Other people got Singer to sign their copies of his book. I got this instead:

Huge huge thanks to the Christchurch WORD festival for letting me have this much fun.

Doing the most good we can

I really rather like my piece in this week's National Business Review ($). I there discuss Peter Singer, effective altruism, Wellington's hordes of bucket-wielding sidewalk charity collectors, and outcome-based funding of NGO service delivery.

A snippet:

It is hard to resist Professor Singer’s call for more effective altruism. Whatever your charitable preferences and wherever you most want to help, doing the most good you can toward your chosen ends requires being careful about where you give. It also poses a challenge for the charitable sectors. The government has been increasingly insistent on outcome-based performance measures in its contracting for services and some charities seem uncomfortable with the rigorous evaluation that such measures require.

It is not easy to measure the good that you can do. But organisations chafing at performance-based contracting with the public sector should not sit back and hope the fad passes by.

As more private donors start watching the kinds of evaluation being provided by places such as Give Well and demand better measures of the good their dollars do, charities wanting to keep those donors will have to keep up. It might get harder to rely on the bucket brigades.

A pre-pub is here. But you should subscribe. There's great stuff in this week's issue from Matthew Hooton on Seymour and ACT and Hosking on international tax issues. And they've provided the country's best coverage of the ongoing saga of earthquake building standards.

Land use policy and the good we can do

Let's put a few things together.

First, Peter Singer argues that effective altruists should, in most cases, aim to earn as much as possible so that they can give it away to charities that are proven effective in saving and improving lives.

Second, high human capital types are best able to do this when in locations complementary to their human capital. High earners do best when able to live near downtown.

Third, land use policy has made it ridiculously expensive to live close to the downtown of most major cities. Restrictions preventing densification downtown and preventing mid-rises and townhouses in the inner suburbs work to capitalise the productivity benefits of living downtown into land prices, building wealth for those who happened to be there early on. In other words, living downtown so you can earn more mostly gets eaten up by the cost of living downtown. Effective altruists then are less effective than they otherwise could be.

Fourth, land use policies will particularly affect those committed to effective altruism. Those who are committed to minimalistic lifestyles and smaller apartment living will have a tougher time where land use regulations mandate minimum apartment sizes and minimum amenities that some of these altruists would prefer to forgo in order to give more to effective causes.

Finally, one of the most effective national policies for improving global well-being is vastly more open immigration policy. Giving a thousand dollars to a poor person in Africa is incredibly effective. Letting that person move to a place where they can live a better life is even better still. But getting increases in immigration, let alone in refugee numbers, immediately hits onto the "but they'll take our precious scarce houses" constraint.

Conclusion: liberalising land use policies is one of the most effective humanitarian measures a government can put in place. It's a metapolicy allowing other things to work better. Effective altruists can be more effective. We could accommodate more immigrants and refugees. We could make housing costs less burdensome for the domestic poor, reducing pressure to provide them transfers rather than providing transfers to those in greater need abroad. Blocking such liberalisation, because of your particularistic concern for your neighbourhood's character, is the opposite of what humanitarians should do.

Corollary [self-interest watch, though]: Effective altruists might consider supporting organisations helping to liberalise land use policy.*

This will be among the things I plan on discussing with Singer on Monday.

* And here's another good one.

Singer Bleg

I'm to be having an extended conversation with Peter Singer at the Christchurch WORD festival next week. I've been prepping with a fair bit of reading and watching other interviews with him, but are there any burning questions you think it would be fun and productive for me to ask him? We will mostly be talking about his work on effective altruism, but it can be broader ranging than that.

Drowning children

Jason Brennan says Singer's standard requires too much.

Recall that, in Singer's thought experiment, if you'd be willing to ruin your $500 iPhone by jumping into a pool to save a drowning child, you should also be willing to spend $500 to save a child's life. Since there are plenty of charities in the third world that can save lives at fairly low cost, people are not consistent if they would do the former but do not do the latter.

Jason ably points out a problem:

But the central problem with Singer’s thought experiment is that it is *not* analogous to the situation we find ourselves in. In Singer’s drowning child thought experiment, I save one life at some personal expense, and then move on with my life. I don’t remain in perpetual service to others.

What Singer needs, for his thought experiment to be an actual analog of our current situation, is something like this:

Many Drowning Children

You’re walking alone one day, when you come across millions of drowning children. The children you save will for the most part remain saved, though some might fall back in. However, no matter how many you save, there will always be more about to drown. You can spend your entire waking life pulling children out of pools.

Singer’s entire argument rests upon people’s moral intuitions in the One Drowning Child. But One Drowning Child doesn’t do the work he needs it to do, because One Drowning Child isn’t analogous to the situation Singer thinks we actually find ourselves in. Instead, what Singer needs to do is determine what people’s moral intuitions are in Many Drowning Children. Even if you judge you must save the one child in One Drowning Child, you might not judge that you must dedicate your life to, or even spend a huge amount of time on, saving children in Many Drowning Children.

Note that I am not claiming that Singer’s conclusions are wrong, just that his argument for those conclusions doesn’t succeed.

I'm reminded of a time I was walking our then four year old to daycare. We came upon an earthworm on the sidewalk. The rain had ended and the worm would likely die without intervention. We picked up the worm and put it onto the lawn. Then we turned the corner and saw several hundred worms on the sidewalk. She prepared to start picking them all up, and I instead brought her on to daycare. There are only so many hours in a day.

Effective Altruism

I'll be chairing a discussion with Peter Singer in Christchurch in September. If you're anywhere in the neighbourhood, by which I mean within a 3-hour flight, you should attend.

I have never loved and hated and been changed by a book as much as Singer's Practical Ethics. I threw it across the room more often than any other. Actually, I think it's the only book I've ever hurled against the wall. But his arguments are almost impossible to resist.

The morning that I got the call from the Christchurch Festival inviting me to this, I'd walked in to work with Eleanor, then aged 4. On the way, that morning, I'd explained trolley problems to her - as you do with your four year old. She proved a very strict utilitarian. She then went on to propose ever differing bundles of who might be on which rail lines and whether you'd pull the switch - she was basically running hypothetical choice experiments to find out my marginal willingness to pay across options. Most of the options involved kitties of varying cuteness against family members, so it was all pretty easy for me. Then I got the call asking to come in to talk with Peter Singer. It was a great day.

I'll be discussing Singer's latest work on effective altruism. I'm really looking forward to it. Hit the link at the top to register and get tickets.

ON EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM


How can we do the most good? Peter Singer, often described as the world’s most influential living philosopher, presents a challenging new movement in the search for an ethical life. Effective altruism requires a rigorously unsentimental view of charitable giving, urging that a substantial proportion of our money or time should be donated to the organisations that will do the most good with those resources, rather than to those that tug the heartstrings. Chaired by Eric Crampton.
Peter Singer is the author of more than 20 books, including the groundbreaking work on ethics, Animal Liberation, The Ethics of What We Eat, The Life You Can Save, and his latest, The Most Good You Can Do. He teaches philosophy at Princeton and Melbourne Universities.
Eric Crampton is Head of Research with The New Zealand Initiative in Wellington and Adjunct Senior Fellow with the Department of Economics and Finance at the University of Canterbury. He blogs at Offsetting Behaviour.

Another fun bit: the Christchurch festival folks invited me, in part, because I'd blogged on the ridiculousness of charity races some time ago.

Utilitarian GMOs

Peter Singer makes the case for GMOs.

Genetically modified crops are now grown on about one-tenth of the world’s cropland, and none of the disastrous consequences that we Greens feared have come to pass. There is no reliable scientific evidence that GM foods cause illness, despite the fact that they receive much more intense scrutiny than more “natural” foods. (Natural foods can also pose health risks, as was shown recently by studies establishing that a popular type of cinnamon can cause liver damage.)

Although cross-pollination between GM crops and wild plants can occur, so far no new superweeds have emerged. We should be pleased about that – and perhaps the regulations that were introduced in response to the concerns expressed by environmental organizations played a role in that outcome.

Regulations to protect the environment and the health of consumers should be maintained. Caution is reasonable. What needs to be rethought, however, is blanket opposition to the very idea of GMOs.

Kim Hill will be hosting this year's EnviroTown debate at Lincoln University; they'll be talking GMOs. Hopefully we'll start getting a bit of sanity into the discussions.