Campus speech

Victoria University's panel on free speech at universities seemed designed to be tedious, providing the smallest target for criticisms of the university. 

Rather than any discussion among panelists, we heard a series of statements in response to less-than-useful questions from Corin Dann. 

Because of Dann's framing, a pile of discussion was around who should be allowed to speak on campus.

Dann could not be expected to know that there has been a standard solution to this. Or at least there was for the period I was on campus at Canterbury. It worked well. Michael Johnston briefly alluded to that standard solution, but that didn't stop the 'but who should be allowed to speak on campus' bit. Or "Should someone be allowed on campus to debate cutting off Corin Dann's head" - as one of the panelists put it. 

Someone can speak on campus if they have been invited to do so by a member of the academic community. 

An academic can invite guest speakers to present to their class. 

Departments invite guest speakers to present working papers in regular workshops. Ours were on Friday afternoons, followed by excellent beer at the Staff Club. 

If an academic wants to host a guest speaker for a more public event, they need to get a room booking. At one point that was done through the Department because we controlled a couple of our own lecture theatres; later, that required centralised room booking. But the academic's name was on the booking; the academic had thought the speaker worth hearing out.

If a student group wanted to host a guest speaker, they could do it at the student union, or they could ask a member of faculty to book one of the lecture theatres. I think the student union restricted that to recognised student groups - but there was a broad set of recognised student groups, from ACT On Campus to Maoists. 

In any case, the guest was there because a member of the academic community thought they were worth hearing. 

For plenary speakers where there might be resourcing issues, or if it were part of a University named lecture series, that would need sign-off from whoever ran that series. Not getting signoff didn't mean the person couldn't speak on campus. It just meant they wouldn't speak in that slot. If other ways of financing a visit could be worked out, the academic could just book a room. 

The test shouldn't be some big public discourse about who is or isn't worth hearing, or who is or isn't presenting misinformation. 

There was useless, tedious discussion of whether Julian Bachelor (an activist favouring one reading of the implications of the Treaty of Waitangi) should be allowed to talk on campus. 

The only test should be whether a member of the academic community thinks he is worth hearing. Not whether his views are respected in, say, the Faculty of Law. I expect they think he's nuts, and they could well be right. It isn't my field. 

But I know that the Accounting Department regularly hosted speakers that folks in econ/finance thought were barking mad. And one fine Accounting colleague would often send all-college emails about how all of economics is wrong, as proven by their guest speaker who didn't have a clue about the content of intermediate micro, just that it was 'neoliberal'. 

The test wasn't whether we thought the speaker was an idiot, or wrong, or providing misinformation. Some of the Accounting guests were all three - at least in the view of the econ tea room. 

The test was whether the people in Accounting thought that the speaker was worth hearing. 

An equilibrium where we would have gotten to veto speakers that we thought were idiots and they got to veto speakers that they thought were idiots would have been terrible. 

So there's a simple answer on the Bachelor, or anyone else, question. They should be allowed to speak on campus if a member of the academic community has asked them to do so. 

That raises a separate question: would faculty still feel safe in inviting speakers that they think are very much worth hearing, but that might draw complaint?

Update:

After the session, I walked back toward the train station with a couple of Vic academics that I ran into outside the event. 

They noted that they’d been approached by a journo for their views.

They said they’d politely declined.

They also said that they hadn’t told the journo the reason for declining. Namely, that Vic is not a safe place for freely airing one’s views on such matters. They did not expect the Uni to have their backs if there were pushback, and they were surprised how many of their colleagues in the audience appeared supportive of restricting speech on campus. 

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the tabs...

• Transport is in the ETS. Therefore, bus networks do not need decarbonisation strategies. Councils can just assess the all-up costs of different options - with a measure for the cost of particulate matter pollution in places that are less windy than Wellington. I don't know why NZTA has funded research to models weighing up 'different bus decarbonisation strategies'. 


• Canterbury's Mike Grimshaw on the fundamental underlying problem with NZ's universities.


• Ryan Bourne on the War on Prices


• The CFTC had been the safe harbour that let the IEM run. They've since been taken over by Vogons. 

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies:

• How universities killed the academic. Great piece. 
• NZ Drug Foundation's report on drug use in 2022/23. One fun bit if you check back against the NZ Health Survey data: more people aged 15-24 (7.7%) use cannabis at least weekly than smoke tobacco (5.8%) at least monthly.
• Making Kiwisaver compulsory will be great for the default providers who get to clip tickets on fees I suppose. Not so hot for those with US tax entanglements. 
• Mayor Whanau presides over a council that blew hundreds of millions of dollars on town hall, library, convention centre, and is turning itself into a bank to provide cut-rate loans to a multinational movie theatre company, and blames stingy ratepayers for the pipes falling apart.
• Probably not good that Russia's still occupying that Ukrainian nuclear plant.
• Really neat paper on the adoption of property tax codes across Canadian First Nations, along with institutional detail on the First Nations Tax Commission and the First Nations Fiscal Management Act. 

Afternoon roundup

The tabs!

• “Is it unfair on everybody else that has paid for that road and doesn't use it? I mean, this equity stuff's bollocks, this is about traffic. ...Consultation’s bollocks as well.” Mayor Brown ain't wrong.
• Predictions that Labour and Te Pati Maori will strike a deal where TPM seeks only the electorate votes in Maori districts and Labour seeks only the party vote in those districts. Biggest question is why MMP has avoided these kinds of rorts so far. They're the obvious play. 
• Good time to be a liquidator.
• 35 kilograms seems like a lot of cocaine to seize in one go for a country of 5m people. Are there reasonable measures of demand elasticity? One could perhaps work out the size of the market based on price movement. If the price doesn't move much, either the market is huge or suppliers are able to quickly plug even a 35kg hole. If it moves a lot and stays high for a long time, less so.
• My normal drill on carbon forests and biodiversity is that if you want more biodiversity, don't screw up the ETS accounting - use a separate policy instrument. But if this is right, then biodiverse forests sequester more carbon. And if it also applies to NZ forests, then making sure the settings accurately reflected sequestration would encourage greater biodiversity. 
• Don't envy Shane Reti this hospital pass. The health system is not in good shape. 
• Works in Progress on Upzoning NZ
• Maybe post-prison half-way houses should be next door to judges' primary residences. Skin in the game and all that.
• NZ needs a dedicated agency whose only task is infectious disease. Indeed.
• Andrew Norton on Australian attempts to centrally plan higher ed.
• Why We Need Taiwan.
• Mercatus on cutting zoning down to size. Tons of good stuff in here on problems with single-family zoning. 
• Good News! New Zealand is at less of a competitive disadvantage relative to Australia! Bad news: it's because they dropped by more than we did.

Afternoon roundup

The tabs!

• Universities continue to be very quick to cancel events. 
• NZ Pharmacists warn that if the $5 co-pay on prescriptions returns, customers might start using Chemist Warehouse again rather than community pharmacies. 
• David Harvey argues for a licensing regime instead of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. I don't think it'll work either. If the fee is high enough to save the media, the platforms would probably block news links altogether. Just let the Bill die at committee.
• Reasonable Covid wave coming through; your reminder of what to do.
• Which cuisine will reign supreme? All of them, thanks to globalisation. 
• Consumer NZ wants to turn audiology into a government-enforced cartel. That outfit's becoming increasingly reliable as a "do the opposite of whatever they're on about" signal. 

Morning roundup

The morning's worthies.

• Medsafe allows low-dose CBD over-the-counter. +1 for Medsafe. Unfortunately, no CBD products are here approved and we don't just automatically approve medicines that have been approved by trusted overseas agencies. -50 for NZ.
• Danyl McLauchlan's alt-centrist manifesto, or at least steps toward one. 
• A presidential succession horror story
• A post-mortem on the Gino case. I keep remembering back to my time at Canterbury, and how the administrator appointed as Pro-Vice Chancellor, and the leftists in Accounting, wanted Econ to catch up with the times and start teaching all the "people aren't rational" stuff that's since fallen apart in replication or was downright fraud. 
• Wellington has more than enough problems of its own without central government funded busibodies trying to close all the bars. 
• Take a bow, Australia, Canada, Willie Jackson - and compatriots. Y'all have made news too much of a hassle to be worth the trivial amounts of revenue associated with linking to news. 
• Will be interesting to see what the next Wellington LTP looks like. Council could avoid the scenario that Castalia has put up, or at least some of it. If they're spending hundreds of millions on Town Hall, they could decide from day one just to demolish the opera house and the Fowler Centre.

Afternoon roundup

The tabs...

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

Afternoon roundup

The tabs. There are too many.

• Dan Brunskill asks 20 economists how they'd define recession. A bunch of us pointed to how NBER does things. 
• Believing that recycling does much of anything to reduce GHG emissions is wrong and gets you laughed at. Believing that reducing your consumption of things covered by the ETS will reduce GHG emissions is also wrong, but generally gets you plaudits. 
• A paranoid person might start to think that government-funded media goes on crusades to name and pillory pseudonymous critics of the government who do not share their cultural views. 
• The last $5b of the Covid fund was blown on a bunch of populist vote-buying exercises. Good luck getting cross-party consensus to take on just-in-case debt in the next crisis. Labour has really poisoned this well. It is very bad if you think that future governments need to be able to do this. 
• Harvard should protect whistleblowers.
• Michael Gordon has a substack. And he provides a helpful reminder about SNZ's work trying to figure out why the jobseeker numbers are so out of whack when compared to the unemployment figures. 
• Susan Edmunds checks on CTU Craig Renney's claims that the economy's doing great. I pointed to a couple cautions, but also one area where he might have understated things: employment rates were at or near historic highs before Covid hit. 
• Oliver Lewis points to the ways that National's housing policies will likely fail. I still wish National and Labour could have maintained consensus on MDRS by setting a price target for exemptions. 
• There were a lot of appropriate condemnations of poor forestry practice leading to bad outcomes during the recent floods. And a lot of that turned into the usual "it's all neoliberalism's fault" nonsense. Anyway, here's Queenstown Council doing exactly the same thing, causing similar problems.
• I still think the funniest chaos outcome for the election would be Labour winning, but only because it loses enough party votes to the Greens that it gets a substantial overhang from its electorate seats. One can engineer scenarios where National and ACT get 51% of the vote and still lose. It's not entirely plausible, but it would make for a chaotic election night. Here's Greg O'Connor stumping for the electorate vote.
• Remember how I wanted a public health agency laser-focused on contagious disease so it wouldn't just shift back to its usual BS? Pandemic's still going, and they're already back on their usual nonsense. 
• Ngāi Te Rangi is importing houses from the US to build here. I still think that iwi should declare themselves to be their own consenting authorities and tell naysayers to sue them if they don't like it. If council makes it tough for iwi to build houses on their own land...
• BusinessDesk has a series on cost blowouts on infrastructure. On average infrastructure costs have been 23% over their initial budgets. The paper's really worth the sub. 

Afternoon roundup

I cannot count the tabs. A pruning:

• Danyl Mclauchlan on the depressing kludgeocratic budget.
• I still don't like that they're subsidising videogames.
• Peter Dunne expects capital gains taxes and wealth taxes to feature in Labour's platform
• V as classic and excellent antifascism
• Officials are looking at a carbon dividend. I sure hope it's in place before the government stops auctioning NZU. 
• A few bits from me on the budget, over at Interest.co.nz
• Hooked on Phonics worked for the UK. An older piece in AEJ: Ec Policy.
• The San Francisco Doom Loop
• New report out, covered at Newsroom, on failings in freshwater management. There still are better options...
• Don Brash is appropriately scathing about housing policy.
• For a new Great Exhibition.
• One advantage of being at a think tank: I can say what I believe to be true. 
• The government still doesn't fully understand that Covid is airborne. No mention of ventilation in the winter health plan. 
• My column in last week's Insights newsletter, on government public health forgetting there's still a pandemic on and turning back to telling us what to eat and drink...

Evening roundup

The accumulated worthies:

• Dave Heatley on the publicly-provided goods that should, and should not, draw user charges - and how to tell the difference. Public transport should be charged. I'd add that, when congestion charging is finally in place, the case for subsidising public transit really goes away. Or at least the economic case for it. 
• If you think that NZ hosting FIFA matches is worth at least $11 per capita in fun and festivities, then that's fine. But there might be better uses of the money. And if you think the spending buys us anything other than a festival, you're deluding yourself. A few bits from me in this piece. 
• New Zealand's holiday pay rules are so complicated that the Ministry of Health has spent $50 million on consultants trying to deal with it. They now estimate that they owe backpay of $1.8 billion due to incorrect holiday pay calculations. 
• Otago's public health people prefer prohibitionist approaches to vaping, with restrictions ramping up as smoking rates decline. 
• Westpac argues for vertical separation of the supermarkets to encourage competition. Their report ignores regulatory restrictions against new large-scale entry, other than nodding at removal of covenants. Bizarre from a sector that's likely to be hitting its own market study soon, and ought to prefer that interventions have sound logic. 
• New Zealand has a new policy in the event that boatloads of refugees arrive: detention. UNHCR has some reasonable concerns. 
• Concentration in graduate economics education.
• Scott Sumner on Noah Smith's pessimistic vision.
• Water flows downhill and restrictions on housing supply drive housing price growth. Nathaniel Baum-Snow in the Journal of Economic Perspectives. 
• Want affordable housing? Make sure there's ample excess zoned capacity. 
• Council-owned wastewater treatment plans are often a mess. Regional councils seem to feel constrained against properly enforcing their regulatory duties. 
• An oldie but a goodie: Alex Tabarrok on The Happy Meal Fallacy
• Some cautions about the "Gas stoves cause asthma" hypothesis. A lot of the underlying research isn't that sound. 
• Remember how SCTV came up with Bob & Doug McKenzie in response to a demand for 2 minutes more Canadian-content per episode? Think about that when considering CanCon rules for pornography in Canada....
• The Spinoff has a pre-budget roundup. Six months ago I'd have put very high odds on some form of a carbon dividend showing up. Now, with some problems in the last auction, it's harder to say. Still some odds of it though. A few bits from me in this piece. 
• Peter Griffin on Rocket Lab's successes. This really was one where NZ's regulators stepped up to quickly set an enabling regulatory framework. 

Afternoon roundup

It's been a while since last posting. The tabs...

• Gita Gopinath on Covid's lessons for inflation and central banking


• Long-Covid and labour markets. There is still far too little data on this. 


• Expect it to get weirder


• Be careful about audit studies that use racially-loaded names to signal race. They can signal other stuff at the same time. And they aren't perfect signals on race either. 


• Matt Levine on Silicon Valley Bank


• Very strong NZ public support for incentive payments to local councils. Good.


• Ian Powell on some of the messes in health system reforms. There will not be the back-end efficiencies the government may be looking for. Ian McCrae suggests these reforms for the next policy bonfire.


• Pattrick Smellie on lame government industry transformation plans


• I expect a NZ version of this would find similar results: the decline in marriage and the rise in social problems. 


• Doesn't it make more sense to finally deal with the messy problem of setting FBT on employer-provided parking than to try to FBT-exempt every single possible substitute for driving? Should sneakers be FBT-exempt for those who walk to work?


• Electricity generators warning that proposed Resource Management reforms are going to completely screw up building new power generation. 


• Rebecca Macfie argues that a pile of contractors wind up working for less than minimum wage and so contractor law reform was needed. I have difficulty squaring the assertion about low low contractor wages with the fact of very tight labour markets where hospitality and retail are having to pay margins above the minimum wage even at entry level. Is it illegal for these workers to just go and find a different job?


• 72% of Kiwis think that farmers should be allowed to use genetically modified grasses that reduce methane and nitrate emissions.


• It really looks like the guy running NZ's newly merged polytechs hasn't got a clue about academic freedom.

Raising rivals' costs - research edition

Leave aside for the moment noble intentions and think through effects. 

Academics have discretion over what research questions get pursued, and over approaches for answering them. Some questions are general and could find useful data anywhere. Others are more specific.

Suppose you substantially increase the cost of pursuing quantitative work on a subset of the population in a country that has only ever been of peripheral research interest to the major journals in any field. 

What are the likely effects?

Academics with discretion shift from topics that can only be answered using data on that population subset to questions that can be answered using other groups, and from using data involving those groups for answering more general questions to using data from other groups.

And research focused on that group is left to qualitative researchers, and those quantitative researchers with the strongest idiosyncratic interest in that subgroup. 

So. 

Colonial approaches to data by universities are harming Indigenous communities throughout the world.

That’s a finding from the 10th International Indigenous Research Conference, hosted in Aotearoa last month and attended by more than 600 researchers from across the globe.

Now, a collaboration of academics from the conference are urging universities to fundamentally shift the way they collect, analyse, store and distribute indigenous data.

AUT Professor Jacquie Kidd (Ngāpuhi) was part of that collaboration and said a key problem for universities was a lack of involvement in the research process.

“So we know that ethics committees are really interested in how indigenous data is collected and managed and made available,” she said.

“Increasingly, they're looking at the principles of data sovereignty, but universities tend to step outside of that.”

If this goes ahead, expect fewer research projects that answer questions relating to outcomes among indigenous peoples, that research in those areas becomes less quantitative, and that any findings in the area become less open to being examined and contested by external views. 

If you don't want those outcomes, you're going to need substantial funding boosts for research in these areas if you want to encourage quantitative researchers to front those costs. 

Afternoon roundup

Minor notes on the closing of the browser tabs:

• Andre Brett asks good questions about Auckland rail. Don't agree with some of the conclusions, but they're good questions. 
• The Onion's Amicus Brief in favour of parody is excellent.
• The tertiary education union is going on strike, seeking an 8% cost of living increase. Perhaps a bit difficult for the universities to avoid declining real wages for staff when tuition fee increases were capped at 1.7% for the year and international students might still be trying to figure out how to get visas. 
• There are way fewer nuclear warheads now than there were in the late 1980s. Dropped from over 60,000 to about 10,000. It's still a lot, and Russia has about half of them. 
• Charlie Gates interviews perennial Christchurch local government candidate, and eccentric, Tubby Hansen. 
• Stefanie Stantcheva explains how to run surveys, if you want to create identifying variation. 
• Oooh, yeah. That'll matter. Productivity measures can be upward-biased if some of the labour cost has shifted onto customers: pumping own fuel, supermarket self check-outs. It has to be more efficient than having paid staff do it, or else it wouldn't be done, but the full labour cost of producing the output includes the customer's time. 
• Dileepa Fonseca wishes we had more ghost houses. It would mean there is a surplus of houses, rather than a desperate shortage. He is absolutely correct. It's on the back of a report finally showing that there really aren't that many of them.
• John Cochrane reminds central banks that there are risks out there other than climate change. 
• British power companies are pelletising wood from old-growth forests for use in power generation. I don't know whether the economics would stack up for shipping pine pellets from NZ, but we might wind up seeing more of that kind of power generation here. 
• "What made JASON possible was the convergence of two factors: a competent research community willing to strictly act as advisors, and political officials who wanted that advice to be truthful rather than convenient." When elite physicists advised Washington.
• Inflate grades or get fired at NYU. 
• Oliver Hartwich reminds us that, unlike Truss, Thatcher started by balancing the budget. 
• Jonathan Milne on problems at Ports of Auckland. 
• Between ownership and rangatiratanga: Thomas Cranmer on the Three Waters reforms

Morning roundup

The computer begs to be rebooted. But the tabs...

• There's an underlying demand-side problem to misinformation. You can't con an honest man...


• Some days, I love our Environment Minister. Here's David Parker giving Auckland Council a deserved slap for nonsense around character designations. People who want to protect character are "entitled to do that in respect to their own property. But in other parts of their suburb, there will be areas where more intensive housing will and should be built." EXACTLY!! If only central government would fix the incentives that encourage councils to do this...


• New Zealand regime around medicinal cannabis remains a broken mess. I think it was allowed to fall into disrepair on expectation that legalisation would be coming and make it redundant. It has to be very frustrating for anyone who needs cannabis as treatment, and anyone who wants to supply it. The Newsroom column is gated today, but I think will ungate tomorrow if you pull out the /pro from the link. In addition to all the other problems, medicinal cannabis suppliers have a tough time finding banking or insurance. 


• Kate MacNamara keeps digging on the messes around Covid testing regulation. Just impossibly frustrating. You can use a LAMP test to meet the testing requirements to fly to NZ. It's way more accurate than a RAT. But they're banned in NZ. If you try begging permission to use one here just to give some added assurance before going to visit a vulnerable relative, the Government just doesn't answer. Vogons would give the MoH an award for being more Vogon than anything they'd ever come up with. 


• One problem for all the "let's base policy on happiness" people at Treasury and elsewhere: the measures are crap and you can't do anything with them. Here's Bond & Lang, JPE 2019:

  "The necessary conditions for nonparametric identification are strong and unlikely to ever be satisfied. Standard parametric approaches cannot identify this ranking unless the variances are exactly equal. If not, ordered probit findings can be reversed by lognormal transformations. For nine prominent happiness research areas, conditions for nonparametric identification are rejected and standard parametric results are reversed using plausible transformations."

  If you can just run a plausible transformation on the dependent variable to reverse a result, you've got another degree of freedom to justify whatever policy you'd wanted to rationalise. 


• National Party leader Chris Luxon says he doesn't like corporate welfare in the climate response. Good! But the ETS revenues are hypothecated. Does he support putting them back into general revenues? Or, better, would he support a carbon dividend? I like National's emphasis on an ETS led approach, but that's harder if you don't rebate ETS revenues back to households. If he's not going to, he should promise to end the hypothecation that's let Robertson have a slush fund. 
  


• Princeton no longer supports academic freedom.


• Regulatory regimes can embed fragility against shocks. NZ building materials supply, US baby formula...

Ok. I think I can reboot now. 

Afternoon roundup

A closing of some the browser tabs brings a few worthies:

• Roland Fryer Was Railroaded
• Brian Easton on the perils of ignoring economics
• Pay for defection. It raises the cost of attacking. 
• The Canadians get stuck with a copyright term extension. Cosh is excellent here. Why does the Canadian government figure it can ignore the dairy provisions in trade agreements but bound by dumb copyright stuff?
• The extortion attempt continues. [Me on this, previously]
• Ontario's Housing Affordability Taskforce report from February has a lot of good stuff. I'll need to read through it more carefully. Looks like Ford won't be implementing it but there are ideas worth thinking through for NZ. 
• Superb BusinessDesk piece on the cost of building infrastructure in NZ. I wish Auckland could outsource both construction and all of the approvals for its transport/infrastructure projects to whoever sorts that out in Seoul. 
• Liberal Education
• Ages back, Hess & Orphanides found that discretionary wars were more likely for first term Presidents presiding over poor economic conditions. Simple little model. Re-election depends on demonstrating competence, two margins for demonstrating it, if you've failed at the one worth the punt on the other. Ashani Amarasinghe has a forthcoming piece at J. Pub that's far more extensive. Lots of governments aim to distract from domestic turmoil. But it doesn't work all that well.

Academic freedom - survey says

The Free Speech Union was kind enough to share the data from their survey of NZ academics on academic freedom. 

Their survey compared means across different questions, between universities, across academic ranks, and among academics of different age and gender.

I threw it into Stata.

The questions seemed to load onto a single factor - one factor had an Eigenvalue around 5 with the rest below 1. 

So I stuck it into a principal component model to get scores for each respondent for that factor. 

The nice bit with a PCF is that the predicted values on the factor are mean zero, standard-deviation 1 by construction. So the coefficients on all the different dummy variables can quickly be understood. A 0.5 coefficient on something means that something is associated with a half a standard deviation increase in the dependent variable. 

Higher scores here mean higher academic freedom.

Here are the results from a straightforward OLS with the principal component from the factor analysis over on the left hand side, and the kitchen sink on the right hand side. T-stats below coefficients; stars mean their usual thing.

 

	Principal Component
Institution
Victoria University of Wellington
(Reference category)
Otago University	-0.335
	(3.42)**
AUT	-0.516
	(4.12)**
Massey University	-0.380
	(3.81)**
University of Canterbury	-0.141
	(1.33)
Auckland University	-0.262
	(2.51)*
University of Waikato	-0.336
	(2.74)**
Gender
Male
(Reference Category)
Female	-0.103
	(1.61)
Gender Diverse	0.542
	(1.90)
Field of Study
Arts
(Reference category)
Business	-0.256
	(2.33)*
Creative Arts	-0.272
	(1.36)
Education	0.384
	(2.63)**
Engineering	-0.487
	(3.51)**
Health Sciences	0.104
	(0.97)
Laws	0.002
	(0.01)
Science	-0.123
	(1.23)
Other Area	-0.060
	(0.48)
Rank
Lecturer	0.192
	(1.78)
Senior Lecturer
(Reference Category)
Ass. Prof	-0.099
	(1.15)
Prof	0.160
	(1.93)
Senior Management	0.145
	(1.01)
Other	-0.091
	(0.82)
Age
Under 30	0.314
	(1.77)
31-45
(Reference Category)
46-64	-0.315
	(4.27)**
65+	-0.171
	(1.89)
Constant	0.504
	(4.27)**
R2	0.10
N	1178

Just a bit of fun - a quick and dirty run through the thing. 

Vic Uni comes out well. 

Rank doesn't do much controlling for age. Gender doesn't do much. 

Folks in Education seem to feel relatively unconstrained; whether that's due to academic freedom or to constraints that match their ideological preferences and so are non-binding is harder to tell. 

Newsroom reports on the survey, and also notes the ongoing mess at the Royal Society. 

The Free Speech Union could do well in academia, given what other views there on academic freedom look like. 

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the browser tabs:

• The Niskanen Center goes through the problems with intellectual property. They remind that independent re-discovery needs to be allowed; I take it as meta-point that they mention Landes & Posner nowhere in the piece, which re-derives much of the Landes & Posner framework in different terms.
• Things have gotten really bad in US academia. (ungated link)
• The latest John Lott mess
• The case for an Australian carbon tax and dividend
• I don't know if Google's new language model can think, but it can run logical inference.
• Larry Summers chats with Ezra Klein on inflation
• The Infrastructure Commission's report on the housing crisis is excellent. I'd threaded the key figures here.

International Ed

Australia's reopening to international students.

New Zealand isn't. 

This is just getting crazy. 

There are safe protocols that can be run here. 

New Zealand could allow travel from safer countries, with a pile of testing and vaccination requirements. 

Start by requiring up-to-date full Covid vaccination for getting a student visa. That's pretty simple. Vaccination requirements have been part of international student visa requirements all over the place long before Covid. 

Then add in some testing. Require the standard PCR test a couple days before travel. Add a requirement that travelers pass a rapid antigen test administered at the gate before boarding, with Covid-positive students denied boarding. Add another RAT on arrival, with any remaining positive cases shunted into isolation. Remember that this is the protocol that was used in a trial for travel between the US and Italy late last year through early this year. There were just under 10,000 travelers. The RATs caught 4 positive cases at the airport before boarding and one more on arrival - among a group of people who'd all recently passed a PCR test. The folks running the trial concluded the RATs were pointless because 5/10,000 wasn't that risky. But we could do it. We could require it for airlines departing for New Zealand. 

And we could make it even safer. Take a saliva sample on arrival for PCR testing, require everyone to get the Covid tracer app, and require them to provide contact details. Add in a requirement to present for a Covid test a few days after arrival. 

Sequences of tests make it increasingly less likely that anyone passing all the tests are infected. There's just no way that someone coming in on that regimen is more risky than the random-draw person in Auckland currently. 

Or do all that and have the universities run a few days of MIQ, as they proposed doing back at the start of all this. It's far less risky now that vaccination is available. 

The borders are looking increasingly absurd. There are safe ways of doing all this. 

From TEU to FSU

Jack Heinemann's take on academic freedom in New Zealand provides an excellent on-campus recruitment opportunity for New Zealand's Free Speech Union. 

The Free Speech Union, as a registered union, has rights to enter workplaces to talk to workers. They should plan a round of campus visits.

Here's Jack:

Making conscience central in all activities of a critic and conscience of society might avoid some future clashes in Aotearoa. Academic freedom is the right to bring forth unpopular or controversial opinions, not to promote opinions popular with those who have social or financial privileges.

For example, white/Pākehā academics making comment on mātauranga Māori in defence of “science” don’t need to use academic freedom because the westernized institution of science already has disproportionate power and influence in any clash with indigenous knowledge systems. So when a university takes a neutral position, treating the academic protagonists and academic responders equally based on narrow ideas of a right to free speech, the institution stumbles as critic and conscience of society. Moreover, it fails to both preserve and enhance academic freedom.

Other examples include attempts to use university campuses as platforms for racially or genderised “forums”. Those without power or privilege don’t need tertiary institutions to criticize them, turn their backs on criticisms of them, or to host it. The desire of majority members of white paternalistic societies to have their ideas spoken on campus is not equal to the right of minority ethnic and non-binary groups to feel accepted and safe there.

Privilege is an asymmetry of power that marginalizes and excludes others. No history of academic freedom is consistent with the notion that it speaks privilege to power.

So. If your research shows that claims of oppression in the case you're studying are overstated, or that an institution isn't as colonialist and evil as others have suggested, you should probably shut up about it because that doesn't count under critic and conscience. Because it reinforces power or something. 

If you haven't joined the Free Speech Union yet, and you're a New Zealand academic, they may be more likely to have your back than the TEU, if it comes to it.  

Affirmative action in NZ academia

David Farrar points to some changes coming for PBRF. 

Evidence portfolios submitted by Māori (and Pacific) staff will have a 2.5 (2.0) funding weighting applied. 

The subject area weighting for Evidence Portfolios assessed by the Māori Knowledge and Development panel (the Pacific Research peer-review panel) will increase from 1 to 3 (2.5).

I get the problem they're trying to solve here. I'm not sure this is the right way of going about things. 

I'd emailed a friend about it a while back, when news of this first made the rounds. A mildly edited version of that is copied below:

Here is my attempt to steelman the policy. Parts of it I disagree with, and overall I still don’t like the policy. But this would be an argument in favour:

PBRF weighs heavily research contributions. That’s its job. But assessment panels always have an easier time dealing with contributions that fit the international mold. And the top international journals in important disciplines simply do not care about issues that matter in New Zealand policy.

In economics, papers based on New Zealand data addressing New Zealand policy issues would make a top journal in the unlikely event that the issue accidentally creates a nice natural experiment that speaks to broader theoretical or methodological issues that economists publishing in the top journals care about. Otherwise, it will wind up in New Zealand Economic Papers, a third-tier journal. And PBRF rates top contributions highly.

International academic reputation already depends heavily on publishing in top journals. Combine that with a PBRF system that amplifies the already-huge rewards for publishing in top journals, and you have a recipe for discouraging NZ academics from doing any work at all that’s of relevance to NZ.

Māori academic staff who may be more naturally inclined to pursue research of direct interest to their home communities will be punished for doing so in their international academic standing, in their journal placements, in their PBRF rankings, and consequently in their promotion prospects. And similarly for Pacifica. A thumb on the scales offsets that effect.

But even more brutally, academia is an international game. The best in the world get their training in the US, and the best of those then get jobs at top US universities. Kiwis are a small proportion of the world's potential profs, and presumably an even smaller proportion of those who've gotten decent degrees in the US. And an even smaller number will either be Māori or Pacifica. If they come out of one of those schools with a doctorate, and they’re able to publish in top journals, they’d be a bit crazy to come back to New Zealand (or have strong preferences, which is kinda the same thing). A thumb on the PBRF scales encourages those who want to do this kind of work to come home to do it. 

Now why do I not like the policy anyway? It turns NZ academia into a niche play that’s outside of the global academic conversation. It sets too hard a division between the incentives in the local game, and the game that the rest of the world is in. It risks making NZ an insular academic backwater. 

If the government wants to fund more research on NZ-specific policy areas, particularly with a focus on Māori and Pacifica issues, it could boost Marsden for a dedicated funding line in it. Or set its own dedicated fund. And remember that PBRF also weighs external research grants.

The current set-up would more than double-weight the research portfolios of Māori academics doing work in theoretical physics, or abstract higher-order maths, or a host of other areas where there really isn't any relevant local-penalty. The local penalty applies for work in locally relevant social science questions that aren't quite aligned with questions of interest in the top international journals. I can see the problem in encouraging research in locally relevant stuff, and can see how that would particularly apply for Māori and Pacifica research. But I would have thought that just setting better contestable research funding in those areas would have made more sense.