Paternalist visions

Will Wilkinson and a colleague at The Economist have been sparring over paternalism. Where M.S., Wilkinson's colleague, argues paternalistic policy is an acceptable democratic way of getting towards desirable social goals, Wilkinson reminds us that a liberal democracy tries to leave a lot of decisions about the good to the individual.

Notice that we may convert any paternalistic argument into a benignly "democratic" argument simply by asserting that the intended subject of the proposed law is the character of society as a whole. Well, do we want a society in which the influence of heretics is left wholly unchecked, threatening public spiritual health? Torquemada didn't. The Taliban doesn't! Suppose we concede, just for the sake of argument, that this sort of public-spiritedness isn't paternalistic. Is it better than paternalism? It may be democratic. But is it liberal?

Liberal democracy is liberal in the first instance because it removes the protection of basic rights from the domain of collective deliberation. Do we want to be the kind of society that allows people to worship any way they like? That allows poor people to vote? That lets folks say sexy things, communist things, impertinent things, stupid things, Thomas Friedman things. Yes, yes, and mostly yes. Indeed, we think this stuff is so important, we mostly agree it ought to be illegal to put it up for a vote! My colleague suggests that there's something downright anti-social in making a principled argument against limiting the scope of peaceful individual choice. But I love society. Especially liberal ones.

The liberal society allows the existence of a personal sphere that's outside of the political sphere; I really like bright line rules keeping the two separate.

But I share Wilkinson's concerns about "Thomas Friedman things".

Brian Wansink and David Just, two of the academics on whose work Bloomberg leaned when pushing his ban on big soda cups, warn that their work really can't justify Bloomberg's ban; people forced to consume less than they'd like tend to compensate on other margins. Canada's Dan Gardner disagrees, suggesting changes in social norms coming from the changed cup size can, in the longer term, change consumption:

It wasn’t so long ago, remember, that no one expected to be able to buy 64-ounce soft drinks. Or even conceived of such a thing. If “mega jugs” were to go the way of leaded gasoline, the banning of which was also fought and resented, they would some day be forgotten. Like leaded gasoline.

It's an empirical question whether the ban winds up affecting anything. But there's a categorical difference between bans on leaded gasoline and bans on large soft drinks. Leaded gasoline increases concentrations of environmental lead and imposes harms on others; bigger drinks at the cinema might make a bigger mess if spilled on a non-drinker but otherwise only really affect the drinker.

If the state has no place in the bedrooms of the nation, why does it get a seat beside me in the theatre?

Happiness and process

The Economist notes that rising incomes in China in the last two decades haven't increased measured happiness as much as we might have hoped. Why?

“It is a mistake to think that rising income gaps are the main or even a primary source of popular discontent in China,” Mr Whyte says. It is, he adds, procedural injustices, abuses of power and the lack of recourse that make people angry enough to take to the streets.

Most migrant workers know first-hand what Mr Whyte is talking about. Lei Pengcai, 61, moved to Beijing last year from a small town in Hunan province and took work washing the dishes in a restaurant. His monthly wage is 1,400 yuan ($220), most of which he sends back home to his wife and family. Moving to Beijing has opened his eyes to the kind of wealth that some enjoy, but he sees income disparity as a fact of life. “I haven’t been, but isn’t there great inequality in America and England too?” he asks.

Mr Lei declares himself pleased with the past decade’s reduction in rural taxation; not too bothered by moderately rising prices of goods; and somewhat concerned that, although his basic health care is adequate, his coverage would not suffice if he were to suffer a severe illness or injury. But he is clear on the one thing that does make him unhappy: official corruption. In his hometown, official posts are handed out to friends or bought and sold. Once installed, he laments, officials can grab land, charge fines, and demand bribes under threat of closing down a business. They do whatever they want, he says, and the people cannot stop them.

Fairness matters. And, it's revealed more in process than in outcomes.

Exam security

Canterbury takes its invigilated exams pretty seriously.

Students in our big 100-level exams have to leave all of their materials at the front of the room save a pencil, pen, ruler or non-programmable calculator (as needed for the exam). Hats have to be left at the front of the room. We arrange students through the room in a checkerboard; we know where each student is seated so we can check scripts later on if we suspect somebody's copied from a neighbour. Two invigilators stalk the room throughout. We leave a blank row after every second row of students so the invigilators can get up to any student who's asking a question, or who is peeking a bit too often up a shirt sleeve.

What are the key features of this set-up?

• Students can't tell where they'll be seated before entering the room. They'll likely be seated near somebody with an alphabetically close last name, but they can't tell where in the room they'll be.
• Students can't easily smuggle answers in; the only materials they're supposed to have in front of them are the ones they have to have, though we'll usually allow a water or drink bottle.
• Students don't have access to the blank exam booklets, which vary colour from year to year and, occasionally, by whatever the lecturer happens to have had in his older stock. It's not always easy to predict what the colour of the exam booklet cover will be, so it's harder to smuggle in one that has notes inside.
• Invigilators can approach any student from an oblique angle; as they can be behind a student, it's hard for a student to tell when he's being watched.

Turns out that those measures would thwart most of the exam hacks that students taking this government cybersecurity course tried when they were instructed to try to cheat on the exam. The quiz asked them to write the first hundred digits of pi. Some of the hacks were very nice, but students didn't have to try all that hard given the reasonably lax exam setting.

 

Here's the working paper: Embracing the Kobayashi Maru. What did the students try?

• Variants of encoding the answer onto materials they were allowed to bring into the exam with them: textbooks; the back of name tags that always sit on desks; notebooks; course schedules; post-it notes; food; coffee cup sleeves; random materials that might be in a pencil case; hidden in a watch bezel; bringing in a pre-completed answer sheet hidden among other papers.
• Variants of hacking the exam room: writing on ceiling tiles; writing the answer on sheets of paper in the pile that the invigilators were likely to distribute on request for blank papers; hiding the answer within the computers on the desks;
• Hacking the grader's or invigilator's laziness: Memorize the first ten digits, then provide random numbers.

Most of these won't work given our processes. To what sorts of attacks could we still be vulnerable? Security through obscurity is a pretty poor solution and I'm sure our students are more creative than I am anyway. So here are a few potential options:

• Notes written on or around drink bottles or coffee cup sleeves;
• Notes hidden on one's person and accessed in the privacy of a toilet stall, especially if you've drawn the lucky straw and both invigilators are of not-your-gender;
• Small notes written on erasers or taped inside the sleeve of a programmable calculator;
• Small notes hidden inside pencil cases if the invigilator isn't strict enough on the "pencils and pens only" rule;
• A note hidden under a pony-tail or in dreadlocks.

Options are near limitless for variants on open book or open notes exams; fair systems would let students either bring in anything (completely open book) or restrict students to bringing in only one or two sheets of paper of specified size. Otherwise you're just encouraging students to encode notes on the cover or in the text of the book.

Perhaps I should include a "Please cheat on this question" question in the midterms next semester. Academic misconduct and a visit to the proctor for cheating on other questions, but only a zero on that question if caught cheating on it with bonus points for demonstrating the hack afterwards; then we'd have a better list of things for which to watch out for subsequent cohorts. But as I'm not even sure it's a good idea, it's pretty unlikely that I'd be able to convince the various "Powers That Veto" that it's all that hot.

No exam system will ever be hack-free. It's important to set a strong anti-cheating norm, demonstrating that students could reasonably expect to be caught if they try so they don't expect to be disadvantaged if they don't cheat. Our processes probably do more to encourage honesty by showing that we care about honesty and setting the right expectations than by thwarting the most determined of exam hackers.

Group One Carcinogens!

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

Here's the Toronto Star:

The decision is a result of a week-long meeting of independent experts who assessed the latest scientific evidence on the cancer-causing potential of diesel and gasoline exhausts.
It puts diesel fumes in the same risk category as noxious substances such as asbestos, arsenic, mustard gas, alcohol and tobacco.

Otago Daily Times:

The decision puts diesel fumes in the same risk category as a number of other noxious substances including asbestos, arsenic, mustard gas, alcohol and tobacco.

Our public broadcaster, OneNews:

Diesel engine exhaust fumes cause cancer in humans and belong in the same potentially deadly category as asbestos, arsenic and mustard gas, World Health Organisation (WHO) experts say.
...The decision puts diesel fumes in the same risk category as a number of other noxious substances including asbestos, arsenic, mustard gas, alcohol and tobacco.

3News:

Reclassifying diesel exhaust as carcinogenic puts it into the same category as other known hazards such as asbestos, alcohol and ultraviolet radiation.

But, 3News also helps put things in perspective:

"It's on the same order of magnitude as passive smoking," said Kurt Straif, director of the IARC department that evaluates cancer risks.

The Christchurch Press and NZ Herald give the same summary as 3News. But the Herald gave a scarier assessment in a second article:

The exhaust from diesel was added to the World Health Organisation's list of most carcinogenic substances yesterday. It ranks alongside arsenic, asbestos, formaldehyde, mustard gas and plutonium as a major health hazard.

Plutonium! That's really scary! Way scarier than passive smoking!

So, what else is in Group One? Here's the Cancer Society. Lots of scary stuff like plutonium. But also a few other things that are a bit less worrying. As I wrote back in 2009 when Doug Sellman was putting alcohol up against plutonium and Gamma Radiation and Mustard Gas:

But here are some other known carcinogens that could have been listed alongside alcohol instead and would have been perhaps a bit less scary: ciclosporin (used to prevent organ rejection after transplant), estrogen-based oral contraceptives and menopausal therapy, risky sex (Hepatitis B & C, HPV, HIV), the sun, mineral oils, salted fish, wood dust, painting, boot and shoe manufacture and repair.

I call a win for the news outlets that quoted the IARC specialist that diesel exhaust is about as bad as second hand smoke. It's a heck of a better way of putting risks in perspective than pointing to freaking plutonium. I call place for those that gave a range of risks that included UV radiation - people have a handle on the riskiness of the sun. And a great big loss to anybody reckoning plutonium comparisons helped enlighten their readers. It would have been helpful if the Science Media Centre had put up the quote from Straif that helps readers contextualize things.

I still don't get how import restrictions on older vehicles, including both petrol and diesel, make more sense than better smog checks on older cars. I sit behind an awful lot of very horrible smelly mid 90s Toyota LandCruisers in Christchurch. Old vans are terrible too. Banning the import of 2004 models seems a pretty roundabout way of getting those stinkers off the roads.

Talkin' 'bout organs

I spent a bit of time talking with Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon Monday morning about proposed changes to New Zealand's organ donation regime. The interview is here.


I hit the same topic earlier in the morning with Spanky at RDU's breakfast programme; the audio should be up eventually.

This weekend's Sunday Star Times should have a piece on organ donation and LifeSharers; I've sent through a few quotes for use and will look forward to seeing what the final piece looks like.

Small fixes for Christchurch

Without a time machine, we can't go back and revisit Christchurch Council's complete and utter failure after the September 2010 earthquake to ease up on land supply constraints so that the market could have responded after the February quakes by supplying places for people to live. It is completely nuts that Christchurch property values are now above their pre-quake 2007 peak given the massive reduction in the amenity value of living in Christchurch; it reflects that demand wasn't cut by nearly as much as supply and that the combination of regulatory barriers to supply and real time-to-build problems have more people left homeless by the quakes who want houses than there are available houses in Christchurch.

What can we do in the interim, given the very real world constraints of:

• Very limited Council capacity;
• Very real infrastructure constraints that can put limits on extensive brownfield densification;
• Time to build even if we moved right now to whatever the perfect zoning rules might be?

John Fountain, my colleague here at Canterbury, has been trying to help square the circle. How? John has a house in Governor's Bay that's larger than he needs. He wants to build a flat into the house. But it is against Council regulations to put in a flat. Christchurch Council has made it illegal for John, and people like him, to help to make more housing available quickly. Yes I am shouting. More people should be shouting. I'm surprised we haven't seen bricks going through planner windows. I'd certainly never condone such behaviour, but I'd understand.

Here's John, who's more typically Canadian in tone:

There are a few nice features of the new Christchurch City temporary accommodation scheme that permits the construction of an “accommodation unit”. An accommodation unit is  “a structure of no more than 150m² in gross floor area for the purpose of providing temporary residential accommodation. The unit may include facilities normally associated with residential accommodation such as a kitchen, living area, bathroom, toilet and bedrooms. Accommodation unit may also include a campervan or caravan.” There is a fast tracking system for getting pre construction advice and approval in 3 to 5 days  – for free. Of course all building consents need to be in place…but this isn’t necessarily a big hurdle for a well designed and well constructed unit.

The problem is that  “earthquake related” accommodation units are surrounded by a host of ancillary use constraints and regulations that strangle the (apparent)  intentions behind the scheme …: eg whatever faciltiies are constructed  must be temporary,  one-storey,  relocateable,  used only for accommodation by and for   households directly dislocated by the earthquake, and removed when their temporary need has dissipated or when CERA instructions say so or when CERA is disbanded four years away in April 2016.

John then slowly walks through how it's unlikely to be in any property owner's financial interest to build a flat into their existing property if it has to be pulled out four years later.

And, worse, the regulations require that the units accommodate specific persons who are earthquake-displaced. The thing about housing is that even if you accommodate somebody who isn't specifically earthquake-displaced, you're still making room for the displaced person to go where that newly accommodated person otherwise would have been. The first big tick-box on the Council consenting check-list requires you to indicate whether your flat would accommodate somebody whose house was destroyed, who's displaced because of reconstruction, who's displaced because of land remediation, or who's displaced because of risks posed by adjacent structures. You can't use it to accommodate somebody who's moved into town to run a big construction crane even though building something to accommodate that guy frees up a space for an earthquake-affected person elsewhere.

So John reckons he could, for about $110k of his own money, put in a 70 square meter 2-bedroom unit at his place that would rent out for about $300 per week. That makes sense if he can pay off the investment over a term longer than 4 years, and if he doesn't have to pre-specify, before he even builds the freaking thing, who'd live there and guarantee it would be an earthquake-affected person.

It would be very easy for Council to ease up on the current draconian regulations to let people permanently build self-contained flats into their existing properties. These would be dispersed around the city; you wouldn't expect to have large effects on trunk infrastructure. Council wouldn't have to spend anything - just get out of the way. Here's John again:

So…what do we conclude: willing buyers , willing seller but the transactions that would help alleviate accommodation shortages for the next few years are effectively stymied by inadequate regulations . Multiply this 1000 fold and you’ll see why “temporary”  inadequate approaches to zoning regulations – ones that don’t challenge the existing order – are a real bottleneck for dealing with rental accommodation shortages.

The plain fact is that the new  temporary accommodation orders, while well intentioned, simply avoid the underlying regulatory problems that limit the development of small scale private investments that could do plenty to alleviate our city’s accommodation problems. It’s just old wine in a new wineskin  – CERA and the city managers say we’ll facilitate something for you but then enclose it in a shrink wrap agreement that precludes it being used!

The temporary accommodation order itself would have been redundant had the zoning and development regulations been tweaked to permit residential activities to have secondary suites, as in Vancouver and many other Canadian municipalities – something that I am arguing in my other posts..

Here's John on how this kind of solution works in Vancouver. Here's more from John on secondary suites. Here's where John hit the kitchen "stumbling block" for developing a flat on his property.

Is there any plausible negative effect of allowing this kind of subdividing that outweighs the benefits? Why does Christchurch Council make it illegal for my colleague to help ease Christchurch's very real housing shortage? We have an earthquake-Czar who's supposed to be able to ride roughshod over Council stupidity to get things done. This is worth getting done. It would open up a pile of new rental properties that are currently in scarce supply, and it would do it faster than building new.

Every other city in the country should be looking hard at its existing set of regulations and weighing up just how much fragility they've built into their systems in case of sudden and devastating reductions in housing supply.

Update: See also John's post here that points to a City of Vancouver study on secondary suites.

Buttering cats

I'd not heard of the buttered cat paradox until commenter JC referenced it:

Frankly, both these scenarios horrify me so I guess we'll get some ungainly version of the the "buttered cat" bouncing between the two extremes.

I couldn't imagine a buttered cat would bounce, so I proposed the following experiment, the results of which (thought experiment conducted in my head) I also reported:

Hypothesis: A buttered cat will not bounce but rather will sit and lick itself until clean.
Materials: One cat. Butter.
Method: Butter cat. Drop from 1' height onto solid surface. Observe whether cat bounces or stops, sits, and licks self until butter is gone.
Observation: Cats do not being buttered. Pointy ends matter.
Conclusions: Do not butter a cat.

Turns out, somebody's actually run the experiment. Except using buttered toast. The cat wins.


As always, my commenters help me to learn things I didn't know before. Thanks!