Afternoon roundup

If I'm lucky, this will close a third of the browser tabs.

• A damning indictment of the state of medical research, in the British Med J, from its former editor. "We have now reached a point where those doing systematic reviews must start by assuming that a study is fraudulent until they can have some evidence to the contrary."
• Jon Brewer is trying to make the MIQ booking system work. It is deeply broken. I hope he gets somewhere. It needs to be fixed. 
• It is difficult to take a hard line on covid testing results being a few minutes past the deadline when they aren't even bothering to check most folks' records. Chalk this one up as part of the problem in efficient punishment. Even if it weren't the case that the probability of being caught matters more than the fine if caught for otherwise expected-value-equivalent bundles, governments have a tough time imposing boiling in oil punishments in those cases. 
• I wonder whether Georgina Campbell also gets hatemail from the heritage people. Great podcast from her with RNZ on Wellington's heritage encumbrances.
• This is among the silliest arguments I've seen in the past wee while. There are serious issues with after-housing-cost incomes - agree! That can impinge on food budgets - agree! We need to solve the problem by setting a national food policy ensuring that food doesn't get exported if anyone is hungry - WTF? If you've got a housing shortage, a national food policy ain't where you should be looking for solutions. 
• We can't expand MIQ because we don't have enough nurses. But the government is refusing to process immigration applications by nurses and doctors who are already here. While the food policy proposal is silly, I doubt it's going to get anywhere. This is existing policy that is just nuts. 
• The government didn't bother ordering Pfizer vaccines until this past January. It is hard to explain how we wound up in that spot. 
• Me, at Newsroom, arguing that we should flip heritage protection from an off-budget regulatory imposition to an on-budget subsidy. Geoff Bertram disagrees with me in comments, increasing my confidence in the argument. 
• Related, on heritage, they're still fighting over the Adelaide Hotel. It's earthquake prone, too expensive to fix relative to its value, and it's all in the courts. 
• Adult entertainment establishments decrease sex crime by 13% per police precinct one week after the opening. 
• Renting sucks. That's what happens when there are too few places for rent relative to the number of people who want to rent. Building more would be nice. 
• Grimes, Reddell and McDermott on inflation targeting and house prices. 
• I loved this from Jo Moir in Newsroom's newsletter. On the vaccines mess where we can't build capacity to deliver vaccines without having vaccines but we can't actually order vaccines unless we have the capacity to deliver them: "The whole thing is a dizzying circle of very little sense and not dissimilar to the idea of waiting to build a house until the pipes are in place while the pipes won't be laid until the house is finished. Confused? Me too."

Afternoon roundup

Today's worthies:

• Cabinet has not yet produced a cabinet paper on the Taranaki oil ban, and Simon Bridges says that the government instructed officials not to provide advice on the ban. Even if you think that 'doing something about climate change' was part of a Labour/Green political mandate, wouldn't it make sense to make sure that whatever is done is the thing that can most cost-effectively abate emissions? If Bridges is right that the government instructed officials not to provide advice, can there be any good reason for that instruction? The most obvious explanations are not good. 


• Kiwisaver provider Simplicity runs a very low fees model that is very attractive. But not one that's attractive to me, since they seem to have very strong non-return preferences baked into their model. If tobacco, gambling, oil or porn stocks started looking like attractive investment options, would they change their mind about the ban? 


• The government's looking to repeal the three-strikes legislation. Farrar points out that three-strikes policy is fairly popular, but I'd be surprised whether people remember come 2020 unless crime figures become salient. I rather liked New Zealand's legislation, and especially in comparison to American examples. The point of three-strikes, from an economic perspective, is to maintain marginal deterrence. In short, you need a stronger expected formal penalty for a second offence or third offence than you do for a first offence to achieve the same deterrent effect. Why? Because the first offence comes with a giant informal "Now you have a criminal record and a whole pile of things you thought you could do with your life are now going to be very very hard" penalty. That informal penalty's sunk after you've got the first conviction, so you need a stronger formal penalty for the later offences. And where California induced problems by having the same harsh penalty for second and third strikes across broad classes of offences, New Zealand maintained proportionality by linking everything to the sentence-specific maximum penalty. But, all that said, I doubt there'll be any particular effect on crime. There were just too many high profile cases where judges thought any application of the strike penalties was unjust, and so invoked their discretion (in my view) inappropriately. If folks don't expect the penalty will be applied because the judges won't apply it, the law's useless even if it's great in theory. 


• Is there any simpler explanation for the meth-mess than that Housing New Zealand had excess demand for houses and using an insanely sensitive hair-trigger for evictions let them free up some houses? Plus the usual stories around how agencies are more likely to be punished for not being sufficiently risk-averse than for being too risk-averse? 


• And, finally, some good news. Catherine Healy is now Dame Catherine Healy. She heads the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective and helped see prostitution legalised in 2003. And how can you not love a union that, on seeing abuses of migrants on temporary visas illegally working in the sex industry, argues for legalising their work too instead of having more labour inspectors going around to deport competitors? America's ahead of us on marijuana reform, but we're miles ahead on this one. Too many Honours go to career public servants whose main merit was having diligently undertaken their day-job for 40 years. This one isn't like that. 


• David Friedman at Oxford Union on market failure. HT: Jim Rose.  

SOOBs and disamenities

Housing within Amsterdam's red light district trades at a discount. Here's Erasmo Giambona and Rafael Ribas.

We measure the externalities of prostitution by quantifying the discount that households require to live next to a brothel. In our tests, we exploit a unique feature of Amsterdam's Red Light District (RLD), area inside a perimeter naturally delimited by canals where private homes are located next to prostitution windows. Using a novel two-dimensional difference-in-discontinuity (DiD) estimator, we find that households require a discount as high as 24% on homes inside the RLD. We also find that this discount disappears when prostitution windows are forcibly closed by local authorities. By incorporating the exact coordinates of brothel closings, our empirical design allows us to establish a direct link between these closings and changes in price discontinuities. To estimate the economic impact on households outside the RLD, we look at the closings of all brothels in Utrecht (the fourth largest city in the Netherlands) in 2013. Households are found to have paid up to 12% of the value of their home to be some distance from prostitution. In both cities, the contraction of the paid-sex industry is also associated with a drastic reduction in crime rates. Overall, our findings suggest that the nuisances prostitution creates do more harm than good to residents. 

I wonder whether there's New Zealand data available on the location of brothels. Prostitution law reform and the emergence of suburban owner-occupied brothels, and varied council approaches to zoning and regulation, would provide plenty of room for diff-in-diff study. Red light districts could be rather different than smaller owner-occupied facilities. 

Another NZ advantage

Connecticut goes a little crazier, and New Zealand looks a little better by contrast:

Attempting to pay for sex could become a felony offense in Connecticut. Last week, newly sworn-in Democratic state Rep. Liz Linehan introduced a bill that would take the crime of "patronizing a prostitute" from a class A misdemeanor, punishable by a maximum one year in prison, to a Class C felony, which comes with a mandatory minimum prison sentence of one year and a possible 10 years in prison, plus a fine of up to $10,000. Linehan's measure would also require anyone convicted of the offense more than once to register as a sex offender.

"That we continue to punish sex workers—many of whom have been coerced into this work or do it out of economic desperation—without looking at the other side of the equation just doesn't make sense," Linehan said.

...

Connecticut is currently in the midst of rolling out another prostitution-related measure, passed in 2016. Under the new law, all hotel and motel employees are required to undergo training on how to spot human trafficking and "activities related to human trafficking." But like so many "human trafficking awareness" shams, the hotel-employee training really only encourages people to report any and all suspected prostitution—a move that not only harms sex workers but also those in groups most likely to be stereotyped as sex workers. (Already, we've seen flight-attendant "trafficking" training result in the detention of random Asian women.)

The new law also requires all hotels, motels, and inns to keep records and receipts for all guests for at least six months.

New Zealand legalised sex work in 2003. There've been minor local nuisance concerns since then around street solicitation in some neighbourhoods, and zoning fights about where suburban owner-occupied house-brothels might be located. Otherwise, life continues as normal.

Illegal leverage

Legalising prostitution wasn't enough to get the gangs out of prostitution in New Zealand. Joelle Dally's coverage of the Mellory Manning murder trial shows why:

Chilling insights into the Manchester St scene emerged during a just-concluded High Court murder trial, after which Mauha Huatahi Fawcett was found guilty of Manning's December 2008 killing.

At the time, the Mongrel Mob was vying for control of Manchester St.

The gang had set up territory at the Oxford St bridge on Manchester St, which they called "The Four Aves", where they minded their own girls.

But they also used standover tactics to "tax" working girls for $20 a job.

Fawcett, a Mongrel Mob prospect, was apparently told by senior gang members they "owned the streets".

Street workers who tout for business on Manchester St today recall the Mob presence being "full-on" right up to the February 2011 earthquake.

One, who had been working on the street for about 30 years, said when Manning was killed, "I just knew those mobsters were behind it".

"They've pulled away at the moment, the Mongrel Mob. I haven't seen them since I've been back out since after the earthquake. They used to be really intimidating," she said.

"Those boys will still creep back around here - push their drugs on to [girls], them buying their drugs. Then before you know it, you're ticked up so much, you're in debt."

All of this is well after prostitution was legalised. While legalisation means that sex workers can go to the police if they're being victimised, it does not solve the problem entirely where some sex workers are in the industry and choose street work over brothels (or aren't able to get employment in brothels) because of substance abuse issues. In general, post-legalisation outcomes have been good. But legalisation of prostitution by itself hasn't been panacea.

I doubt the Mongrel Mob could have had as much power over the Manchester Street workers if those workers were able to get drugs instead in legal and regulated markets.

I'd really like to know whether the Mongrel Mob's "standover" taxes were restricted to those girls beholden to them through debt, or whether they maintained broader intimidation despite legalisation. I can understand why addicts indebted to the Mongrel Mob might be reluctant to go to the police. I'm not sure what would have stopped workers not so beholden from going to the police. Were the police not credibly able to offer protection for those workers dobbing in Mongrel Mob members?

Outlaw prostitutes

It's worth remembering where the word "outlaw" comes from. An outlaw was someone who was outside of the protection of the law. That wasn't always a happy place to be. Recall that even the Catholic Church of late 13th Century England didn't fare well when outside the law's protection.

When prostitution is outlawed, prostitutes are largely outside the law's protection. Going to the police to report on their customers' offences means turning themselves in at the same time. And so customers come to expect that they can abuse prostitutes, and prostitutes then need pimps to provide protection instead.

New Zealand legalised prostitution a decade ago. It can take a while for local norms to change, but they are changing. The gangs that controlled prostitution prior to legalisation can now be sued; prostitutes know that they have the law's protection.

Christchurch has had an influx of migrant labour for the rebuild. And a lot of these construction workers haven't figured out that prostitutes here have just a bit more power than they might have back home.

Christchurch sex workers say they are being mistreated by migrant workers unfamiliar with New Zealand's prostitution laws.

Prostitutes' Collective regional co-ordinator Anna Reed said street workers had reported incidents of people from "other cultures" treating them rudely, trying to get more for less, being abusive or stealing money afterwards - "assuming that they wouldn't go to the police or tell anyone because they're just ‘common prostitutes'," she said.

"This is in the mindset of some people from some cultures, which we will not name," she said. "It's not that they are flocking but we're certainly noticing them in our stats."

So what's being done about it?

Community and Public Health (CPH) has produced a "man-friendly" pamphlet which outlines New Zealand prostitution laws and where to access health services and advice.

The pamphlet has been distributed to backpackers, accommodation providers, businesses who may be employing migrant or itinerant workers and has a free condom attached.

Medical Officer of Health Alistair Humphrey said the pamphlet was not just about informing migrant workers, but also the wider public about the new locations of health services.

Legalisation hasn't gotten rid of all of the problems. Some workers simply prefer streetwork to being in brothels. And streetwork can cause local nuisance.

CPH is located in Manchester St, where there had also been patch conflict between prostitutes, tension between prostitutes and residents, and "so-called minders" using dogs as weapons. Those matters also needed addressing, Humphrey said.

Licences for street workers - much like those required for busking - could be an option, he said.

If the licences came with a small fee, the Christchurch City Council could hire security guards to monitor the area.

"It would be good for the agencies to think about how this whole industry is kept safe for everyone," he said.

I've read of reasonably serious problems of nuisance and trespass affecting residents, though there's no particular evidence that that's worse than prior to legalisation. There seems no particular reason that street-based sex work shouldn't be subject to whatever regulation generally applies to other street-based vendors.

Sex Robots from the Future

Academia in New Zealand's always had a bit of a public perception problem. Because credential inflation came very late to New Zealand, a large number of very talented people have been successful without having bothered to go to university. They're sceptical about whether universities add much value.

The New Zealand press yesterday gave extensive coverage to research from the University of Victoria at Wellington predicting that, by 2050, we'll have extensive robot-based sex tourism, and it'll be based in Amsterdam. Here's the original paper.

At first I'd thought the least plausible prognostication is that customers would be paying €10,000 for a robot brothel experience, but the fault was in the reporting rather than in the original article. The press reported €10,000 as the typical price paid by tourists: wholly implausible absent massive inflation or really pernicious turns in patent law. But the original article says it's the price at the "top" club for business travellers. It's not nuts to think the Dominique Strauss-Kahn or Max Mosley of the future would pay those kinds of prices. Otherwise, the price seemed more likely to be on par with the cost of buying a robot, not the cost of renting one.

They reckon dangerous STDs are going to be a big push for robot-sex. I'd expect cheap personal tricorders would let customers and workers sort out really quickly whether STDs are an issue. The only thing that would stop this would be masking agents deliberately taken to avoid STD detection, but it's also pretty plausible that there would be reasonably strong criminal penalties attached to using masking agents.   And, it would then just be an arms-race with the tricorders. Once we've worked out tricorders, we probably wind up with an STD segregation equilibrium in dating and sex markets. I can buy improved services as a demand-based reason for the shift; I'd be very surprised if it were STD worries.

I should probably leave it there.

Government make-work

One way America can work to solve its unemployment crisis: Hire one group to hand out free condoms for sex workers; hire another to consider those condoms as evidence that the bearer is a prostitute, arrest the bearer, and confiscate the condoms. It's win-win. Jobs for public health workers, police, judges, lawyers, condom-makers, the prison-industrial complex; hard to see any fault with it, really.

With the prostitution-free zones, prostitution is understood to be a crime of intent. No one is actually arrested in the act of having or agreeing to have sex for compensation; only for appearing as if they might do so. In the same vein, arresting officers in DC and throughout the US routinely search people suspected of prostitution for condoms, confiscating them as evidence of a crime. For some cops, condoms serve the function that marijuana does in a stop-and-frisk encounter (only there's no actual law against possessing or using condoms), unless a cop thinks you might be a sex worker or otherwise wants to move you along and into custody. 

Sex workers and health and human rights advocates have pointed out that it makes absolutely no sense for publicly funded police departments to confiscate condoms that publicly funded health departments make so widely available.

Washington DC confiscates condoms from sex workers; LA tries to make them mandatory for actors in pornographic videos (previous critique). I'd thought that optimal policy was "Condoms for some, miniature American flags for others!" Or combine the two (markets in everything, egads).

HT: @dr_alexpadilla

Prostitution and nuisance

New Zealand legalized prostitution back in 2003; outcomes have been decent.

And as reminder that you don't need to outlaw prostitution to effectively regulate the actual harms from prostitution - the public nuisance aspect of street prostitution - the Christchurch police recently targeted those harms directly.

Christchurch police made 14 arrests over the weekend in an operation targeting street prostitutes, clients and their associates in the Manchester St area.

Acting central area commander Inspector Al Stewart said the operation was in response to public concerns.

"There is always an element attached to prostitution that causes public concern, whether it is their general activity itself or the behaviour of some of their minders or clients," said Stewart.

"Most of the arrests were for people wanted on warrants, while a few were for behavioural and dishonesty matters.''

Police would continue to actively focus on the area over the next few weeks, Stewart said.

"While the services being offered on Manchester Street are legal, some of the behaviour, which can be intimidating and offensive in nature, by associates of the prostitutes is not,'' he said.

Prostitutes have been working from the northern end of Manchester St, between Bealey Ave and Edgeware Rd, since the February earthquake left their usual haunt, the street's central city blocks, in the red-zone cordon.

I'd not be particularly thrilled if somebody decided to start selling services, prostitution or otherwise, on the sidewalk in front of my house. But existing nuisance regulations suffice.

Similarly, we don't need prostitution to be illegal to stop sex workers from offering services in exchange for Chicken McNuggets at the McDonald's drive through [HT: @S8mB]; effective use of existing trespass laws ought to suffice.

Strippers

Saturday night's hockey game* here in Christchurch had two cheerleading squads: one cheering on the Canadians, the other, the Americans. They were introduced as the Calendar Girls Cheerleading Squad.

For folks outside of New Zealand, Calendar Girls is a strip club. I'm not going to link there from here, but their site says the VIP rooms include a "full service" option; prostitution is legal in New Zealand.

So I thought it was remarkable both that a family-oriented event like a hockey game would have strippers as cheerleaders and that nobody would particularly mind. We were sitting a good distance from where the cheerleaders were, but they seemed more competent in cheerleading than I would have expected; Susan, who was watching the cheerleading more closely than I was (I was watching the hockey - seriously), was rather sure that one or two girls were far too young to be employed by Calendar Girls. She thought one of the Calendar Girls might have brought her daughter along. It all seemed really odd. I didn't see the girls well enough to gauge ages, but it didn't seem crazy to think that Calendar Girls might have diversified into other business lines with the loss of their downtown venue to the earthquake red zone.

Well, I was wrong on two counts. First, the girls' only affiliation with Calendar Girls was that they found out rather late in the game that they were sponsored by a strip club / brothel. And that then leads to the second: folks very rightly minded.

A row has broken out after a group of young cheerleaders, including one aged nine, was used to promote Christchurch strip club Calendar Girls.

The All Star Cheerleaders performed at an international ice hockey match on Saturday night at the CBS Canterbury Arena.

Coach Claire Stackhouse said the group did not expect to be associated with Calendar Girls.

She was not in town for the event but said she had been told the cheerleaders, mostly 15 and 16-year-old girls, were introduced as the Calendar Girls cheerleaders.

She said some parents were concerned.

The owner of Calendar Girls claims to have asked the cheerleading coach for an older group of cheerleaders and for that the cheerleaders be well warned of the sponsorship arrangement so that anyone objecting could pull out. The parents say they had no clue 'till the night of the event. I've no clue where blame lies, but I can well imagine that a whole lot of parents - and the cheerleaders - would rightly be more than a bit annoyed if the coach didn't tell them about the sponsorship arrangement.

I do like though that there would have been no controversy about the sponsorship had the group been older and informed.

*For those interested, a team of Canadian former NHLers and minor league players beat a similarly composed American team 7-3. The first period was dull: each team ran only two lines and were changing shifts every minute or less; the defencemen who should have run point would change shift when their team hit the offensive zone and the offensive line would change shift while the opponents then ran back to the defensive zone. Lots of back and forth, but only because nobody was playing very hard. Things really picked up in the third period: they actually kept the defencemen on point and so were able to start building plays.

Being in Christchurch in an arena filled with folks in NHL garb and surrounded by US and Canadian flags was surreal. One side of the arena was meant to be for Canadian supporters; the other side, for Americans. But there must have been rather more Canadian supporters as I didn't see any US flags over on the Canadian side where we sat but a fair number over on the US side.

Oh: @Asgardsfall seems to have caught me at the game...

Bordellos and Baptists

In the Sunday Star Times:

Most of central Auckland's red light venues are clustered around Fort St, a few blocks further downtown, and the Chow brothers' plans to bring organised prostitution into the mainstream entertainment district near the casino had upset some business owners and residents in the area.

However, the Chow brothers' choice of the Palace site to launch their entry into the Auckland market was probably based on a similar strategy they used successfully in Wellington, where they are the leading players in the capital's adult entertainment industry.

They had been quick to realise the business opportunities that became available when prostitution was legalised in 2003, opening Wellington's first legal brothel, Il Bordello, on the city's traditional red-light strip, Vivian St.

Their next venture, the Mermaid strip club and its associated facility, the Splash Club, were more controversial because they were located in the centre of Courtenay Place, the hub of Wellington's mainstream nightlife.

The Chows successfully resisted attempts by the council to curtail those businesses and would have benefited handsomely when planning changes were introduced to prevent similar types of operations opening up in the area.

The plan in Auckland appeared to be along similar lines – get established on a prime spot while planning rules allow it, then rake in the cash once the rules are changed to prevent any competitors setting up nearby.

And the cash-generating potential of the adult entertainment business should not be underestimated. Michael Chow said his Wellington brothels had not been affected by the recession.

I'd noted that most of the scraps now are about zoning. It's damned obvious in hindsight that incumbent brothels will have strong incentive to try to zone out new entrants. Bordellos and Baptists is an obvious extension of Yandle's Bootleggers and Baptists hypothesis: inefficient regulations are most probable where there's someone who'll profit from them and someone who'll provide the moral veneer.

I'd love to know more about the zoning decisions. Did the Chow Brothers just luck into locations that were likely to draw later zoning protection, or did they do anything to help things along?

Free for all?

Michael Morris, representing Canada's Attorney General, warns of a potential "free-for-all" should Ontario strike down the prohibition of prostitution.

Legalization may be associated with a drop in the price of services, but all the way to free? Surely not.

Joking aside, Canada would do well to look at New Zealand's experience. Prostitution was decriminalized in 2003 and operates as any other industry, subject to normal zoning and health and safety requirements. Results? Nothing spectacular. There are complaints about street prostitution in the same places that there have always been complaints about street prostitution - those workers will include some for whom working in a standard business environment with time sheets and shift requirements would prove difficult. Under-aged prostitutes still make the press occasionally, but there seem to be few of them; brothels employing illegal workers face prosecution. But outcomes for most in the industry seem better.

Concluded the Prostitution Law Review Committee in 2008:

The PRA has been in force for five years. During that time, the sex industry has not increased in size, and many of the social evils predicted by some who opposed the decriminalisation of the sex industry have not been experienced. On the whole, the PRA has been effective in achieving its purpose, and the Committee is confident that the vast majority of people involved in the sex industry are better off under the PRA than they were previously.

Most fights now are over zoning; there's some risk that brothels will effectively be recriminalized in some towns through restrictive zoning laws.

Here are the Occupational Health and Safety Guidelines for workers in the sex industry. Decriminalization is hardly a free-for-all.

Update: Note that some of the NZ effects may be due to Police having been fairly light on prostitution enforcement ex ante - brothels were tolerated if they were discreet. If brothels had been subject to greater restriction prior to decriminalization, then a greater fraction of sex workers would have been street workers prior to the law change and would have moved to brothel work after the law change.