I'd like to thank the Academy...

Really, I should be thanking Luis. Here's the University of Auckland Stats Department's inaugural winner for bad stat of the week:

The nominations were all fascinating for a variety of reasons and much could be written about each of them. We’ve chosen Eric Crampton’s nomination of John Pagani’s heated blog post on youth unemployment:

In the midst of extensive discussion of the rise in youth unemployment starting around Q4 2008, Pagani points to changes in apprenticeship funding as a policy shift that could have generated the change (arguing against changes in the youth minimum wage as having been the cause). He writes:

“If it wasn’t the removal of the youth minimum wage that caused youth unemployment to increase, then it would have to have been caused by something else that happened around the same time.
One other big change was the a sharp fall in young people getting skills for work.
In December 2008 there were 133,300 people in industry training. By the end of last year, there were 108,000. ”

You could be forgiven for assuming that about 25,000 kids had been kicked out of apprenticeships – it sure looks like he’s referring to youths. All the other discussion is on youth unemployment. But the number he’s citing is overall enrolment in training and apprenticeships. And the drop in youth enrolment in training – about 4,000 – is nowhere near large enough to provide a plausible alternative explanation.

Congratulations Eric!

I'm going to point here next time somebody puts up changes in industry training as having caused the big increase in youth unemployment.

I'm looking forward to nominating the social costs of alcohol or tobacco when next somebody cites the number in press....

Green Growth or Gas Guzzlers

Video from the "Hot Energy" debate is now up. Hopefully the embedded file works. If not, the link back to the Lincoln site is below.



It is also available at the Lincoln website. I've tried embedding it here, but Blogger has issues with my uploading a 300+ MB file. I start around the 20 minute mark, after they sorted out some issues with the microphone. The draft text for my opening was posted here a few weeks ago.

Afternoon roundup: special narcissism edition

• Roger Kerr on the costs of alcohol


• Lance Wiggs also weighs in


• Kiwiblog on my murderous nature


• Walker's had a fair bit to say lately


• So has Drinkwater


• I'm apparently currently in the top twenty of Kiwi bloggers, and I think I'm the only academic in the list. Does that count for anything in PBRF?


• Scott Beaulier likes my explanation of the Tullock Theorem


• And finally, something utterly unrelated to me: piracy and parallel importing: the downfall of Kiwi-made pornography?

Canada-Czech disputes: Throw Eric from the train edition

Canada and the Czech Republic are again ramping up disputes about the number of Roma fleeing the Czech Republic and claiming refugee status in Canada.

The last time this happened was about 10 years ago. Canada and the Czech Republic had a visa waiver agreement. So, all the tour guide books said that Canadians didn't need visas to visit. In the late 1990s, a documentary aired in the Czech Republic encouraging Roma to become refugees in Canada.

A 15-minute television report spurred the exodus of Czech Roma to Canada in 1996, according a report from Radio Prague in 1997. On Aug. 5, 1996, a documentary entitled “Na vlastní oči” (With Your Own Eyes) aired on Czech commercial broadcaster TV Nova that depicted a Czech Romany who had immigrated to Canada and was living a very comfortable life. It portrayed Roma families living well with state support while they waited to be granted asylum.

The days following the broadcast were full of reports from local officials of Roma selling their possessions and property in preparation to leave. One week later, the Canadian Embassy in Prague was receiving hundreds of calls a day—reportedly 90 percent were from Roma. Various reports and experts, including the report from Radio Prague, stated that mayors in some localities were exacerbating the situation by offering to provide funding for Roma who were seeking airline tickets to leave.

Canada then started demanding visas for Czech citizens visiting Canada. The Czech Republic later retaliated by demanding Canadians also get visas to visit there.

The new visa requirements came in after the publication of the guide book on which Sue was relying when she made our travel plans while I was on a post-doc at ZEI in Bonn in the fall of 2003. And so, a bit after 3 in the morning we were woken in our sleeper car on the train heading to Prague. Sue, an American, had no trouble: the visa waiver still applied. But not so much for me. And so I was thrown off the train at 4 in the morning at an empty and closed train station near the Czech Border: Marktredwitz. Sue decided to stick with me rather than continuing on to Prague. And so our planned tour of Prague became a tour of Bavaria once the train station opened two hours later.

My Czech colleague Andrea Menclova had a similar experience in traveling to Canada while in grad school at New Hampshire.

In Canadian-Czech disputes over Roma, it's always the innocent academics who get hurt.