The government keeps enacting legislation with potential for substantial fines for getting things wrong. The government then keeps being sur...

When you're cautious in taking sexual risks, you help both yourself and your partners. The former effect can be purely selfish optimisat...

Combine tough potential penalties for failing to prevent accidents at workplaces with  Worksafe decisions that can seem like ridiculous over...

Suppose that, as a company director, you were potentially personally liable if you did not exercise due diligence in ensuring that the comp...

I really don't like "costs to the public health system" as reason for taxing and banning stuff. But it's always fun to l...

Will Wilkinson on the stuff that encouraged my emigration to New Zealand : Shutting down sledding hills is inspired by the same sort of simp...

A reader emails me that the revised health and safety regime, which brings criminal penalties for company directors, will also apply to volu...

If the government makes company directors personally liable for criminal charges if they've not exercised sufficient due diligence aroun...

New Zealand schools are pretty free-range relative to America : no security guards, playground equipment that would have been banned in Amer...

Radio New Zealand reports international student visa numbers are down ; they blame the high dollar. The real cost of tertiary education in...

I love how newspapers always catch the really scary carcinogens in the Group 1 list for comparison purposes. Turns out diesel exhaust is a G...

Economists measure the value of a statistical life by looking at the compensation required to induce somebody to take a known risk of death....

Two nice bits of data came of the last round of dog panic. Here's ACC : There were 3,435 dog attacks reported to 72 New Zealand cou...

Patri Friedman will think less of you if you drive a motorbike: they're just too risky. He cites stats of fatality rates twenty times ...