Afternoon roundup

A closing of the browser tabs:

• New Zealand's space industry keeps growing. Here's BusinessDesk on Dawn Aerospace. So neat. 
• America's economists are very sceptical about the latest round of tariffs on imports from China.
• Ancient bugs hiding in NZ amber.
• Statistics New Zealand is shifting out of central Auckland because of increasing levels of 'intimidating behaviour' in the neighbourhood. Police victimisation stats had a surge in crime in Auckland Central West in 2023 that's since abated, but the number of victimisations there remains far higher than in the Lambton area around the SNZ Wellington office. 
• Easy to find claims that public ownership is better than private because private operators are too short-term oriented. Meanwhile, half the board of Christchurch City holdings has resigned. Why? "...the decisions council has subsequently taken over 2024 to maximise short-term dividends at the expense of paying down group debts and investing in the future of its companies has caused us to lose confidence in council's ability to responsibly own core strategic infrastructure."
• Satya Marar at Mercatus on America's populist turn in antitrust policy. 
• Modern desalination is pretty cheap. The energy required for desalinating a household's water is roughly on par with the power needed for its refrigerator.
• Whenever you're depressed by NZ problems like deteriorating council infrastructure, messes in government IT systems, and crises in public media funding, always worth checking over at Canada's seemingly worse problems in the same areas.
• Concrete is neat.
• There is no good version of a central bank digital currency.
• Eli Dourado wants floating cities.
• Worried about the de-banked - people who can't reasonably access normal banking serives? Fix AML.
• If I were still teaching Public Choice, this would be added to the syllabus. If you want the implicit models behind critiques of the left's shift into identity politics from folks like Chris Trotter, it's a good read.
• Cass Sunstein's 'Economic Constitution of the United States' would also hit the syllabus. I've viewed the Public Finance Act and Reserve Bank Act as being part of New Zealand's economic constitution. Sunstein here makes the case around the rules around regulation and regulatory impact assessment.

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies:

• Immigration restrictions on spousal work rights are dangerous.
• 28 months jail for tobacco smuggling
• Pseudoephedrine is legal. Now we just have to wait for pharmacies to stock it.
• Really neat stuff on NZ board directors. 
• When Wisconsin school districts got to decide how to pay their teachers, shifting to flexible pay "raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort), and improved student achievement." HT: John Dickson.
• RBNZ's estimates of the neutral interest rate
• Rocket Lab's increasing success in landing US DoD contracts. 
• Ikea is spending just over $400 million to open its NZ shop.

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.

Morning roundup

The closing of the tabs....

• Free speech used to be a US left-wing value. On American campuses, only conservative students would support allowing a controversial speaker they disagreed with to speak on campus. This is very bad. 
• There's some support for free-speech on the NZ left, mostly Chris Trotter and Josie Pagani and Bryce Edwards. The rest pretends that free speech is some American neoliberal imposition and that we need nuanced approaches in which enlightened Wellingtoneans (themselves) would get to tell everyone else what speech is allowed. I wish we had better data on broader preferences.  
• The growth of the public sector over the past six years.
• The US National Institute of Justice rated the South Dakota 24/7 sobriety project as promising. Their whole database is likely useful for those keen on approaches that have some evaluation. 
• A $1 increase in US minimum wages is associated with a 0.92 percentage point reduction in percentage of employers offering health insurance and a 1.93 p.p. increase in prevalence of plans with deductibles. Always remember that total compensation bundles are more than just wages, and that squeezing one element of that bundle may affect the others. 
• The Paul Ramsay Foundation thinks Evidence Institutes, which trawl the lit [like the US National Institute of Justice, above] are a good idea. 
• Oh, I'm going to have to come back to this one as a dedicated post or column. Luming Chen's job market paper at UW-Madison. Policy uncertainty around wind energy destroys $5.9 billion in value in the US. 

Morning roundup

The morning's clearing of the tabs...

• Price theory is the core of everything that's good in economics. Albrecht and Hendrickson explain the basics. Price theory emphasises exchange and emergent outcomes. Public choice studies politics as exchange. It's fun to think about what would happen if an incoming government required Ministry Chief Economists to pass a test based on workouts in the old Alchian & Allen textbook.  
• Like the idea of government paying a bonus to people for having kids? Robin Hanson has a neat way of doing that. But I doubt that proponents of baby bonuses will like it. 
• This came out a while back but I'd missed it. Surprisingly enough, hydrogen deposits seem to form underground in spots where olivine is prevalent in the presence of heat and water. NZ has a lot of olivine, and heat, and wet. I wonder if anyone's gone looking for hydrogen - geological deposits hadn't previously been thought possible. If we have some, stick a pipe in it to power a boiler and generator above the deposit, and you'd have electricity that generates water rather than CO2. Seems a longshot, but would be pretty sweet.
• Chris Trotter is nostalgic for a joyous left. Excellent piece. 
• This kind of thing pushes electricity toward a global law-of-one-price, doesn't it?
• Henry Thompson on the Industrial Organisation of the Mafia, forthcoming in the JLE.  
  

  This paper uses economic reasoning to analyze the organization of one of the most successful criminal groups in modern U.S. history: La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Drawing on recently declassified FBI reports and a hand-collected dataset, I argue that the costs of violent disputes are key for an economic understanding of LCN’s core institutions. Violent disputes were costly for LCN as they consumed resources to produce and were destructive. However, violent disputes were especially costly to LCN because of its need to keep a low profile. As a member did not bear the full costs of a profile-raising police investigation, each had a perverse incentive to resolve a dispute with violence. Hierarchical firms and a sophisticated court system were LCN’s solution. They gave bosses the authority and incentive to limit violent disputes and to use violence judiciously. LCN’s longevity and success are, in part, a testament to the institutions’ efficacy.

   

Afternoon roundup

The worthies, on a long-overdue closing of the browser tabs:

• Colby Cosh explains to Canadians something Kiwis have known for some time: the Party commanding the confidence of the house gets the Prime Ministership. And that might not be the largest party in Parliament. 


• New Zealand's judges keep bringing the administration of justice into disrepute. 


• Attempts to stop people from renting their houses to tourists on AirBnB. If cities just let people build more housing, none of this would be any kind of issue. 


• Agriculture emission pricing gets punted to post-election. It would have been heroic for Hipkins to hit this while milk prices are tanking.  


• ACT proposes weakening the medical licensing cartel. 


• The government adds a pile of cost-increasing conditions for receipt of film subsidies. It may have the laudable effect of reducing demand for film subsidies. Or, perhaps down the track, lead to higher subsidies to offset the cost imposed by stuff like carbon footprint audits. 

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies:

• If you want to know why rail in NZ is all messed up, look at how the thing's structured. Egads. 


• New York going back to phonics, after noticing that whole-language ideology caused a lot of illiteracy.


• Matt Nolan on inflation and the Australian budget.


• A National Party candidate out on the campaign trail, handing out flyers for a Law and Order public meeting, walks in on a dairy robbery. Wonder what'll happen when a Labour candidate walks in on one. Seems higher odds than it ought to be. 


• The Motor Trade Association wants vehicle emission checks as part of the Warrant of Fitness. Not crazy for vehicles generally used in places with air quality problems. 


• Alberta's NDP are picking up a policy that was tried and failed at the Federal level: a tax credit for kids' sport. The thing mainly subsidised families who already had kids in sport. 


• Another council leaves Local Government New Zealand. 


• I'm not the only one expecting at least some inflation-adjustment of the tax thresholds. I'd hope that they'd be announced in the budget next week. 


• Worries about government deciding to censor whatever it considers to be disinformation aren't just fever-swamp ravings. Look at what Canada's Liberal Party is putting up for consideration.
  

  The story, it is now admitted, was true. Mr. Chong’s family was being targeted. The Globe’s sources were right, and The Globe was right to report what they had to say – even if they remained unnamed. Had it not, the matter would never have come to light, Mr. Chong would never have been told, and no Chinese diplomat would be going home.
  
  And yet even as the Liberal government was tacitly endorsing The Globe’s use of unnamed sources, the Liberal Party was busy demanding the practice be outlawed. Resolution 472 at the party’s national convention, passed without debate, calls on the government to “explore options to hold on-line information services accountable for the veracity of material published on their platforms and to limit publication only to material whose sources can be traced.” How very tidy.
  
  Understand: the government has no more business “holding” anyone “accountable” for the “veracity” of anything. But the second part, urging the government to ban all material whose sources cannot be “traced” – material like, say, The Globe’s reports – is frankly chilling. Any crank can present a motion of course. But it was the party at large, the party in power, that passed it.

  It really feels like appetite is being whetted about pressing need for crackdowns on whatever a government can consider to be disinformation, and that it will end very badly if it's allowed to happen.
  

Low-hanging fruit and criminal justice

If there are obvious answers around what to do with kids under 12 who steal cars and use them to ram into shops to steal stuff, those answers aren't obvious to me.

But in other areas... the low-hanging fruit is just so obvious. 

The results of South Dakota's 24/7 programme have been obvious for years.

How does it work?

If the court assigns a no-alcohol condition, you either get an alcohol monitoring ankle cuff, or you have to show up at the police station to keep blowing zero on a breathaliser. The ankle cuff is simpler. 

If you're found in violation, you spend a night or two in the cells soon after - possibly the next weekend. Punishment is certain, swift, and short. 

Initially set to deal with repeat drink drivers, it wound up even reducing domestic assault. It also reduces mortality among drink drivers assigned the no-alcohol condition. RAND ran the numbers on it. It works.

It would easily mesh with New Zealand's Drug & Alcohol courts, so long as they kept the aspects that seem to make it work in the US: the certainty of swift consequence. Not going back to have a conversation with your probation/parole officer that might or might not lead to something in a few months. The certainty of that you'd ruin your next weekend if you breach conditions. 

It's not hard to see how it works. If your mates insist that you come out drinking with them while you're on a no-drinking parole/probation condition, it's a heck of a lot easier to say no if everyone involved knows that that means you'll soon be spending a night or two in the cells. 

When Mark Kleiman came out to give a talk on this stuff for the NZ Drug Foundation almost a decade ago, he noted that offenders coming off the no-alcohol condition in Hawaii's version of 24/7 sometimes asked to be kept on the requirement, as a way of binding themselves to the straight and narrow. If you have a metapreference against drinking, because you know that your future self will be tempted and can't handle it, the programme helps. 

Anyway, I was reminded of it when reading this.  

The driver behind a fatal car crash which claimed the life of mother-of-five, Kat Broad, has pleaded guilty.

Brent James Tiddy, 26, who appeared via audiovisual link, entered the guilty plea to the charge of reckless driving causing manslaughter before Justice Cameron Mander in the Dunedin High Court on Tuesday morning.

Kat Broad, a 42-year-old mother-of-five, was a passenger in a white Honda Accord which crashed into a tree near the southern entrance to the Otago town of Waikouaiti about 11.20pm on January 23

The court heard the Palmerston-based labourer held a driver licence, and was forbidden from driving by police.

The night of the crash he was driving Broad’s Honda, with Broad in the passenger seat.

...

A crash investigation showed he lost control due to excessive speed, with speed data retrieved from Broad’s cellphone showing the vehicle travelled up to 158kmh.

Tiddy’s blood alcohol level was recorded at 140 milligrams (mg) per 100 millilitres (ml) of blood, the legal limit is 50 mg.

He was remanded for sentencing at August 20.

A monitored no-alcohol condition, with certain, swift, and short punishment for violation, can be a more powerful deterrent than a driving ban where breaches are unlikely to be detected - unless something very bad happens.

It's impossible to say if 24/7 would have stopped Tiddy from deciding to get drunk and then violating his no-driving condition.

But the US evidence suggests that 24/7 stops an awful lot of people like Tiddy from doing this.

I don't know why we aren't running 24/7. It's simple. There are a lot of hard problems in justice. This isn't one of them. 

Vigilante grandmothers

I hate that it's come to this, but I do love the story.

Instinct took over when a grandmother on an early morning coffee run in Cambridge noticed a ramraid in progress on the main street.

She wasn’t having it, not at 5.30am on Easter Monday.

“I just thought, right, this is not happening,” the 63-year-old, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday.

She had all her family staying for the long weekend - her eight grandchildren and three of her children – and had earlier nipped down to BP for coffee beans.

Coming back down Victoria St without her phone (it was lost on the couch) she noticed a white car rammed into the Spark store, a getaway car and someone with a mask on.

“I crossed the median, there was no-one around - it was like a ghost town – and just rammed his car.”

The offenders, who she describes as youths, came running out of the shop, yelling.

“It was quite hilarious. One rather chubby guy, he fell over, he was in jandals. I saw his builder’s crack.”

She started to feel a little concerned as her car, a Toyota Rav4, wouldn’t go into reverse.

“But then it did, I had my horn going, and they were still getting in the car, so I rammed them again, and I pushed them up onto the garden. I just didn’t want them to get away.”

They did, however, break free so she chased them up Victoria St onto Hamilton Rd, where they did a u-turn and went up Grey St.

“I had my horn going for about maybe 10 minutes. They then went down a one-way street, I followed them, and I was thinking, oh gosh this is not good. I was starting to lose my braveness and I lost them.”

She went to the police station, which was closed, so waited at the Spark store where a passing woman called the police after hearing her story.

The whole drama was then relayed to her husband.

“He has never done anything wrong ever, never had a speeding fine, nothing. I rang him up and told him the story in a crybaby voice, and he said, I will come down ... I looked at him walking down the road, and he put his arms up, and I fell into his arms and he said, don't worry darling. I think it’s worth it.”

The family made her bacon and eggs for breakfast, and the coffee beans were put to good use.

“I have seen my friends in jewellery shops, they’re off work for a week because of what these young kids are doing,” the woman said. “They don’t care, they're not frightened. And no-one is doing anything. I think I always knew if I saw something I would stop it.”

She has suffered a few sleepless nights and the impact hurt her back.

Her Rav4 was wrecked and at the local panel beaters. She’s unsure if insurance is going to cover the repairs.

“It costs you to be brave, it costs you to stand up to these kids. It's cost me a few sleepless nights, it’s cost me the damage to my car, but I will happily do that because they can’t do it any more. Well, not in Cambridge.

“We are all sitting back waiting for the Government to do something. Well, it’s not going to happen and the police’s hands are tied.”

If she winds up being out of pocket on the panelbeating costs, I hope someone sets up a donation fund. I'd chip in.  

Afternoon roundup

So many browser tabs before the rebooting can happen...

• In praise of the Auditor-General
• Economists flocking to Silicon Valley
• NZTA runs ads supporting local government candidates who support NZTA cycleways. It's win-win. But probably not win-win-win.
• The Character Protection Racket. See also: Mt Vic, Wellington. 
• Fuelling the Energy Transition - a report from Energy Resources Aotearoa, which includes some neat case studies on marginal abatement costs and carbon prices driving uptake of lower-carbon tech.
• Globalisation and regional energy markets
• Pattrick Smellie on the polytech reforms
• What AirNZ status do you have to hit to make sure that you don't get seated next to the violent Mongrel Mob guy with Nazi tattoos on his face who's shirtless because they asked him to take off his Mongrel Mob jacket and he wasn't wearing anything under it?

They're depraved on account they're deprived!

If you've seen West Side Story, it's hard to hear RNZ's Morning Report on youth crime without hearing Gee Officer Krupke! in the background.

For those who haven't seen it, here's the clip.

See if you don't start hearing it next time they cover it. They're depraved on account they're deprived!  

And the lyrics from the Broadway version:

1957 BROADWAY LYRICS

ACTION

Dear kindly Sergeant Krupke,

You gotta understand:

It's just our bringin' upke

That gets us out of hand.

Our mothers all are junkies,

Our fathers all are drunks.

ACTION AND JETS

Golly Moses, natcherly we're punks!

Gee, Officer Krupke, we're very upset;

We never had the love that ev'ry child oughta get.

We ain't no delinquents,

We're misunderstood.

Deep down inside us there is good!

ACTION

There is good!

ALL

There is good, there is good,

There is untapped good.

Like inside, the worst of us is good.

SNOWBOY

(Spoken) That's a touchin' good story.

ACTION

(Spoken) Lemme tell it to the world!

SNOWBOY

Just tell it to the judge.

ACTION

Dear kindly Judge, your Honor,

My parents treat me rough.

With all their marijuana,

They won't give me a puff.

They didn't wanna have me,

But somehow I was had.

Leapin' lizards, that's why I'm so bad!

DIESEL

(As Judge) Right!

Officer Krupke, you're really a square.

This boy don't need a judge, he needs a [sic] analyst's care!

It's just his neurosis that oughta be curbed.

He's psychologically disturbed!

ACTION

I'm disturbed!

ALL

We're disturbed, we're disturbed,

We're the most disturbed,

Like we're psychologically disturbed.

DIESEL

(Spoken, as Judge) In the opinion on this court, this child is depraved on account he ain't had a normal home.

ACTION

(Spoken) Hey, I'm depraved on account I'm deprived.

DIESEL

So take him to a headshrinker.

ACTION (Sings)

My father is a bastard,

My ma's an S.O.B.

My grandpa's always plastered,

My grandma pushes tea.

My sister wears a mustache,

My brother wears a dress.

Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess!

A-RAB (As Psychiatrist)

Yes!

Officer Krupke, you're really a slob.

This boy don't need a doctor, just a good honest job.

Society's played him a terrible trick,

And sociologically he's sick!

ACTION

I am sick!

ALL

We are sick, we are sick,

We are sick, sick, sick,

Like we're sociologically sick!

A-RAB

In my opinion, this child don't need to have his head shrunk at all. Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease.

ACTION (spoken)

Hey, I got a social disease!

A-RAB (spoken)

So take him to a social worker!

ACTION

Dear kindly social worker,

They say go earn a buck.

Like be a soda jerker,

Which means like be a schmuck.

It's not I'm anti-social,

I'm only anti-work.

Gloryosky, that's why I'm a jerk!

BABY JOHN (As Social Worker)

Eek!

Officer Krupke, you've done it again.

This boy don't need a job, he needs a year in the pen.

It ain't just a question of misunderstood—

Deep down inside him, he's no good!

ACTION

I'm no good!

ALL

We're no good, we're no good!

We're no earthly good,

Like the best of us is no damn good!

DIESEL (As Judge)

The trouble is he's crazy.

A-RAB (As Psychiatrist)

The trouble is he drinks.

BABY JOHN (As Social Worker)

The trouble is he's lazy.

DIESEL

The trouble is he stinks.

A-RAB

The trouble is he's growing.

BABY JOHN

The trouble is he's grown.

ALL

Krupke, we got troubles of our own!

Gee, Officer Krupke,

We're down on our knees,

'Cause no one wants a fellow with a social disease.

Gee, Officer Krupke,

What are we to do?

Gee, Officer Krupke,

Krup you!

Afternoon roundup

A very long overdue closing of the browser tabs brings these worthies:

• There's now a big solar plant running in South Taranaki. Remember: this is the ETS and the electricity market working. The electricity market doesn't care about the source of the power; it pays the going rate. The ETS increases the cost of thermal and especially increases the cost of coal. This plant's from Todd Energy. 
• If I'm reading this right, we could have a free trade agreement with India if we had more liberal immigration settings. That sounds like win-win, post-Covid. Unfortunately, political pressure in India leans against free trade unless it also helps make migration easier, and the current New Zealand government hates migrants and migration. 
• Alcohol & Drug use, crime, and a proposal for Victoria building on both RAND's 24/7 study and New Zealand's Drug & Alcohol courts.  
• Hungary's communist revolution didn't much affect intergenerational mobility. Greg Clark and co-authors look at surnames there 1949-2017 and find social mobility under communism was about the same as social mobility post-communism. 18th Century nobles families still do well. Romani do poorly under both. Did you know that Nicolas Sarkozy's Hungarian minor-nobility origins is indicated by the y at the end of his name?

Complex needs

Closed borders ended tourism and left motel rooms empty. The government's booked out a fair few of those spaces as emergency social housing. But the whole thing seems a mess. Vulnerable people fleeing bad family situations are placed near rather dangerous types who also use social housing. 

Jane Patterson at RNZ has been tallying it up.

Demand just keeps escalating, under a system where motels and other providers get paid on a weekly basis, or sometimes slightly longer, to house people in urgent need of somewhere to stay.

Hair-raising stories continue to roll in to RNZ about what life is like for some tenants and moteliers, who're recounting stories of constant crime and gang harassment being confronted with knives and in one case a room burnt to the ground.

One of the government's own ministers describes some living conditions as "inhumane" and the current system "inefficient and unacceptable".

It is costing $1 million a day for emergency and transitional housing; the vast bulk - $900,000 - is spent on the former, prompting calls for much better oversight of some places described as dangerous and crime ridden. There are no contracts between the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) and those supplying the rooms, nor specific obligations tagged to the millions being paid out.

Some moteliers are also speaking out, saying they're being demonised while trying to do right by their guests; dealing with crime, intimidation and violence all too regularly - driving some out of business altogether.

Read the whole thing.  

It's experiences like these that will drive local opposition to social housing being built nearby. Having gang affiliates next door in a motel room is bad enough, but at least the motel should hopefully be a temporary situation. 

Social Development Minister Carmel Sepuloni says the "majority of MSD clients who use emergency housing are good people who are looking for a roof over their heads while we help them find somewhere permanent".

However, some people "have high and complex needs and can act out in ways which causes damage to motels", she says.

When this happens, it is paid out through an emergency grant, and is then "recovered from the person who caused the damage".

"I know this creates a debt to the people who have caused the damage, but it's important that if someone damages property they are held to account for their actions," Sepuloni says.

 ...

One Canterbury motelier - who has since left the business - made six rooms available during last year's lockdown for short term, urgent housing administered by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

That was to give shelter to the homeless, the rough sleepers, those at the sharp end of the housing crisis.

"I had to have two rooms empty, I couldn't open them to the general public because you can't put members of the general public next to these people screaming and shouting and threatening each other with knives and stuff", he told RNZ.

Furniture and rooms were trashed, he says, and in one instance burned down. The tenant had "stolen two e-scooters and he was trying to patch them together to make one good one and he got the wiring wrong and the battery exploded - that's why the fire destroyed the room", he says.

"Damages wise, I would say, I'd have to go back and look at all the invoicing but I'd say we're up to about $30,000. And that was for just for 10 months. That's not for a whole year."

Carpets and coffee tables were ruined with cigarette burns, with one man falling asleep in the bed and he "must have had a cigarette in an outstretched arm, which then set fire to the couch" which was destroyed.

Frightening confrontations, too, while doing a routine room inspection; a man "obviously high on drugs, I knocked on his door and he just opened a door and lunged at me with a carving knife, you know, he didn't know what he was doing", says the former owner.

He has given up on the motel after the constant stress and physical danger.

"I walked away from it, with the family, because basically the family's mental health was suffering as well."

I wonder whether there would be less opposition to nearby social housing if neighbours had a mechanism for voting out the current tenant if they wound up with a violent aggressive neighbour rather than a single mum hiding out with her kid. I also wonder whether the risk of being voted out would change tenant behaviour. 

I also wonder why motel rooms are considered appropriate housing for people with a habit of lunging at others with knives; we do have a few secure facilities for those kinds of complex needs as they await trial for lunging at others with knives. I know Corrections now views jail as a very last-resort option; they might wish to have non-jail secure alternatives to motels. 

24/7 Sobriety

A few stories this week reminded me of South Dakota's 24/7 Sobriety programme.

• There's concern about fewer offenders attending rehab programmes while in prison;
• Repeat drink driving remains a problem; even on-duty police seem to have the occasional problem. 
• At least some very vulnerable people are being placed in emergency housing alongside "gang members, and people with drug and alcohol issues", with predicable negative outcomes. 

I've previously talked about South Dakota's 24/7 programme. RAND's research on it is here. Bottom line: no-alcohol conditions as part of probation or parole, monitored, with certainty of a short sentence for violation, results in reduced alcohol consumption among those with demonstrated abuse problems, and consequent reductions in offending.

I don't know how many of the more violent people in emergency housing near very vulnerable people are on parole or probation that could have come with a monitored and enforced no-alcohol condition. 

And I wonder whether running 24/7 here might improve things. A short spell in the cells for breach of no-alcohol conditions could result in net reduction in nights in cells by reducing reoffending. 

Morning roundup

This morning's worthies on the closing of the browser tabs:

• This one was a long time coming: difficulty in insuring apartments in Wellington (NBR, maybe $). I wonder whether parametric insurance paying out a sufficient amount in the event of a Mercalli VIII event would satisfy bank mortgage requirements.


• Stuff has a new data visualisation up that they're calling the Homicide Report. They introduce a particular innovation: car crashes involving alcohol use are counted as homicides. I fully expect that this statistic will make its way into the wild without the surrounding context of that the figure is mostly car crashes. It would make complete sense to include cases where the driver was convicted of manslaughter. This isn't that. UPDATE: It is that. They only count car crash deaths where murder or manslaughter charges resulted. I need to read more carefully. 


• Glenn Herud reminds farmers that they need to win the hearts and minds of the public, and that facts won't be enough to do it. He points to Jonathan Haidt's work. Those keen on Haidt should be sure to join us in Auckland on 1 August. 


• Meanwhile, Politik ($) reports on agriculture and methane targets, and the Greens' continued opposition to GE ryegrasses that can reduce agricultural methane emissions. If you think that climate change is an emergency, banning one of the more promising ways of improving the ag sector seems a bit odd in a country where agricultural emissions matter. This kind of work has been at least nine years in the making. And we still make it impossible to use GE ryegrasses to improve pastoral emission profiles. Over in Taranaki, the government decided the best way to help folks there adjust to a hasty and badly informed decision to ban their main industry was to have James Cameron fly over and lecture Taranaki about the need to also end livestock farming. The writers for the past few episodes here have been terrible. Coughlan's reporting on it (the prior link) is excellent though. 


• Michael Reddell continues his critique of the RBNZ's proposed increase to bank capital requirements.


• Patch Notes for GoT Episode 5 (spoilers, obviously)


• If you haven't donated to the Internet Archive before, you should consider it. Remember how the Soviets used to erase people from old photographs when their presence in those pictures became politically incorrect? There is non-trivial risk of reasonable chunks of the internet being memory-holed like that. 


• Federalism allows experimentation. Denver's just had a referendum effectively decriminalising (lowest law enforcement priority) magic mushrooms. If the sky doesn't fall (except as perceived by some users during a bad trip), other places may be able to follow suit. If it does, it's easier to undo the experiment in one place. Would that New Zealand could allow more regional experimentation.


• Police Minister Stuart Nash backs a national firearms registry. Never mind that Canada's cost billions, achieved nothing, and was scrapped in an IT cost debacle the likes of which should entirely be expected given New Zealand's track history with this stuff. National might be encouraged to start by asking what unique identifier will be used to ID a firearm in the system. I know it all sounds simple. We register cars! But a car has a VIN. Firearm serial numbers are not necessarily unique. Adding a unique identifier to a firearm is non-trivial. The discussion thread here is a good starting-point. I expect National to let Labour make a serious mistake here rather than try to block or fix things, knowing that the costs of another colossal screw-up will sheet back to Labour. 

Police effects

Geoff Simmons makes some good points about overreliance on prisons, but I think he's got this part wrong:

The Labour/NZ First answer of more police is also no real solution either. More police means more people in prison and we know more people in prison just leads to more crime.

Empirical work on police numbers and crime is hard because of obvious endogeneity issues: police hiring is also a response to crime rates.

But the best approach I've seen to the problem finds an elasticity of crime with respect to police numbers of -0.3. A ten percent increase in the number of police reduces the crime rate by 3 percent in US work. If we figure that police have diminishing marginal effects at the relevant margins, and that our policing intensity is lower than America's, then effects here would be stronger. I'd done some back-of-the-envelope reckons on this a while back suggesting that police hiring could be rather cost effective. Increasing the probability of being caught can be pretty strong deterrent.

In defence of flogging, revisited.

I'm a fan of Moskos's essay on flogging.

It looks like Zach Wienersmith is too. Hit the link for proper viewing. And for the red button.

Morning roundup

A few of the worthies as I close out the browser tabs before Chrome eats every last bit of my system's resources:

• Thomas Lumley's travel guide for Auckland visitors for a statistical computing conference may be useful beyond that conference's attendees.
• The Washington State Institute for Public Policy's evaluation of boot camps suggests that they're very effective. I had previously thought there was a typo in their tally: they had a negative cost listed for the things, which had me thinking they had a spreadsheet error. But it's correct - confirmed by email. Boot camps are cheaper than other juvenile detention facilities in Washington State, and so they're of negative cost relative to the counterfactual. And they also seem effective: 100% chance of providing net benefits. 
• Vlad Tarko's take on apparent deregulatory trends: you can reconcile survey measures of declining regulatory burden with other data on increased staffing and budgets for regulatory agencies in a model in which competing regulators offer the regulated opportunities to select the one that sucks least. He says regulatory capitalism is a better term than neoliberalism for the current state of play. 
• Where the state is weak, others can be strong. In Nigeria, churches are building what look like private cities. Attention Charter Cities fans. 
• Great piece by Andrew Sullivan on tribalism in American democracy. I don't share his optimism about Trump yet being able to come around to solve all this, but the diagnosis in the first three quarters of the piece seems right. 

And hopefully on closing Chrome, there will no longer be a long lag between moving the mouse and seeing the cursor move. It's really annoying. 

Priorities

If it puzzles you that the New Zealand Police can find resources to run raids on marijuana growers, which sometimes turn into armed standoffs, but cannot find resources to solve burglaries, remember this:

The Criminal Proceeds (Recovery) Act enables police to seize assets believed to be the proceeds of crime, with or without a conviction.
Since it came into effect, $382 million worth of assets has been restrained (which means the police hold on to it during an investigation), while $85 million has been forfeited altogether. The funds recovered are used to fund law enforcement initiatives.
Police Minister Judith Collins says police have been “extremely successful” in investigating and seizing the “dirty money” of criminals and gangs since the legislation was introduced.
About 96% of forfeitures and 86% of restraints are linked to drugs and organised crime.

What profit is there in solving a home break-in? Anything you seize has to go back to the property's owners. But if you go after the folks who only commit victimless crimes, well, there's nobody who has to be compensated out of the seizures.

I hate saying I told you so, but I did tell you so.

The cops will tell us that the standoff's lesson is that police should be better armed. But when was the last time that the police needed to do raids, armed or otherwise, on a brewery or a distillery? Or on the Petone cigarette plant? The better lesson is that legalised markets are less violent and have less need for armed cops.

Update: Commenter Ben rightly notes that the funds don't go directly to the police. Here's the NZ Drug Foundation on that:

The lion’s share (70 percent) has gone to Police, Customs, Justice and Corrections. Health gets the rest.

Ganging up on gangs

My column this week in The NBR looks at that "Costs of Gangs" study. A snippet:

Appeals to the social cost of someone’s preferred way of being are a pretty standard way of rallying voter support against them. People like me might be sympathetic to gangs so long as they stick to selling illegal drugs. But if gangs actually cost me through the tax system, that might change my mind about them. And it might make people like me more supportive of anti-gang measures.

In the twenty-two years studied, from the start of 1993 through the end of 2014, MSD tells us that 92% of gang members spent some time on benefit, with an average duration of 8.9 years. Older gangsters spent more time on the benefit as they’d had more time to be able to be on benefit. The total lifetime fiscal cost of main benefits and other assistance provided to gang members and their relations over that period was $714 million.

Now that’s a nice big fiscal cost number. The Dominion Post this week told us that summer costs ACC $2.2 million in sun, sand, barbeque and ice-cream related injury claims. Gangs then cost the country 325 summers, if we follow this general line of reasoning.

But we should pause for a moment and go back to some classic Australian television: Hollowmen. That dark satire of Australian politics had boffins warning a politico against rolling many years’ spending into one big headline figure: “It might get you some headlines, but who needs that?” So the politician of course rolled all the annual numbers together into one big headline figure, because politicians need headlines. 

One minor slip-up on my side: the per capita measure of $6000 per year attaches to the welfare assistance component of $525m, not to the total fiscal cost of $714m. The per capita (over 22 years) figure I'd grabbed was just on the welfare assistance component, not on the whole she-bang. The annual per capita cost that goes with the $714m figure should have been about about $8200. Still far cheaper than NZ Super.

Update: NBR's kindly corrected things in the online version. Subscribe!