Alas, it was not to be

It would have been just one bad part of an overarching very silly policy. Exempting it from the policy regime I suppose makes the policy a bit more tractable. But it also makes it a lot less potentially funny.

New Zealand's government supports the creation of cultural content by paying for it through various grants. TV stations and streaming services can then run it, or not, as they want. 

Canada does things the dumber way. I'm sure they also have direct subsidies. But they also have Canadian Content regulations that prescribe the proportion of each day's broadcasting that must be Canadian content.

It was bad enough in the linear TV era. The ridiculousness of it all had the excellent SCTV pad out the extra couple of minutes of the Canadian version of the show (fewer ads than on the US side) with a very explicitly Canadian segment: the most over-the-top CanCon possible. Bob and Dough MacKenzie - the hosers.

The first segment including them had a lengthy scroll after the segment explaining how the segment meets official Canadian guidelines for what counts as Canadian content and was almost as funny as the MacKenzie brothers.

That was fifty years ago now - or thereabouts.

Times change. 

A decade ago, Canada decided that its regulatory reach extended to the entire internet if the internet could be viewed from Canada. If you wanted to stream to Canada, you'd have to meet CanCon rules. Quite how to make that work when people choose what they want to watch and plenty of potential platforms might not really care what Canada things about anything - well, they've been taking a while figuring out how to apply the principles. 

And they've finally decided that, despite or perhaps because of the uniquely Canadian content that might be created, to great hilarity, to meet the rules, the CanCon rules will not apply to pornography streamed in Canada. 

This has long been one of the more onerous demands of the CRTC, given the relative dearth of erotic media that would meet their terms as “Canadian content.”

Article content

Under the CRTC’s definition of the term, it’s not enough to have a Canadian performer or a Canadian setting.

Article content

Rather, it’s determined via an elaborate “points” system that, among other things, requires the producer and at least one of the lead performers to be able to prove Canadian citizenship.

Article content

At least three quarters of the financing must also come from “Canadians or Canadian companies.”

Article content

In extreme cases, this means that a video of a Canadian couple having sex in Canada and directed by another Canadian would not qualify as Canadian content if only 74 per cent of the financing was provably Canadian.

Whenever one despairs about policy in New Zealand, Canada and the UK provide superb reminders that the rest of the world generally remains even worse. 

Meanwhile, Australia's looking to impose Australian-content mandates on streaming services. 

The federal government has put laws requiring streaming services to produce Australian content back on the table after postponing them due to concerns about how they would interact with Australia's trade agreement with the United States.

The government has confirmed it will introduce legislation this week to mandate that any streaming services with more than 1 million Australian subscribers must produce Australian drama, children's, documentary, arts or educational programs.

I wonder whether there are enough subscribers to any single platform for Australia to run into Canada's difficulties here. It would be very funny if there were. 

Afternoon roundup

A closing of some of the tabs

First, a set from closing a pile of the week's accumulated stories from the Stuff papers. I wonder whether the people who complain about the absence of real journalism bother reading what The Post and Sunday Star Times have been putting out lately. 

• National's 'tax relief' won't be a tax cut "because the only real cut is a spending cut, anything else is just rearranging who pays what and in which generation."
• "If Health New Zealand can't find doctors, his iwi will." Some of the social services already being provided by Ngāti Toa.
• Andrea Vance asks "How did the cost of moving two schools blow out to more than $400m?"
• Promising work on methane vaccines for cows. Including great context from Dave Frame. [And here's Dave Frame and Adrian Macey over at Business Desk on methane]
• A path from John Birch through to anti-fluoride activism in NZ that runs through ZAP - a group I'd not heard of for at least a decade. Just great stuff from Charlie Mitchell here. 
• Poor response rates in the 2023 Census, and speculation that it might be the last census as we know censuses. 
• This one is just beautifully written. Joe Bennett on a walk up a hill.

  There’s a lot to be said for being a cattle beast. You live with friends. Your food is all about you. You own nothing but an ear tag. And castration frees you from the main source of worry and expense. Admittedly you make one bad journey in the end, but you don’t see it coming, and your mates go with you. And you’re spared the horrors of old age.

And the rest of the tabs. Or some of the rest. I'm drowning here but the computer needs to be rebooted.... 

• One hypothesis on why Google Search doesn't work as well as it once did.
• Another climate stress test, another finding of zero systemic risk justifying RBNZ's continued prudential excursions into climate issues. Unless prudential reg now is meant not to guard against systemic risk and instead starts from assuming that bank directors are idiots and that bank shareholders need to be protected against bad decisions.
• NZ's NPS-UD doesn't go hard enough. British Columbia's enabling apartments up to 20 stories near transit stations. 
• A new (to me anyway) metastudy on workforce diversity. Effects are significant and positive, "but insubstantial."
• "If the government believes making it more difficult to recruit offshore is going to get 50,000 people off the dole they are as deluded as all those who came before them who wanted to believe the same thing. I get the politics. I don't get the economics."
• RBNZ now investigating whether we should have a central bank digital currency.
• The Government really ought to push ahead with the Rule of Two for Medsafe Approvals. It would unlock access to RSV vaccines. Come on......
• Taiwan wants NZ to do more in supporting anti-authoritarianism. I wonder whether we ought to be doing more in supporting scholarships for promising students from the Islands to study in NZ.
• After my Insights column on the Christchurch Cathedral cost-benefit assessment, a reader pointed us to the business case for a major Tauranga city redevelopment project. I'd hope that, if central government is putting money into this, it pushed hard on checking whether the increases in tourism are plausible (and net national rather than within-country diversion). And whatever arguments one wants to have about appropriate discount rates for social projects as compared to infrastructure projects, expect infrastructure spending (like museums) to be portrayed as social investment where the lower discount rate allows a higher NPV for purported benefits. Bit of a Lil Lisa's Slurry problem here. 
  
  
  

Afternoon roundup

The tabs!

• Universities continue to be very quick to cancel events. 
• NZ Pharmacists warn that if the $5 co-pay on prescriptions returns, customers might start using Chemist Warehouse again rather than community pharmacies. 
• David Harvey argues for a licensing regime instead of the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill. I don't think it'll work either. If the fee is high enough to save the media, the platforms would probably block news links altogether. Just let the Bill die at committee.
• Reasonable Covid wave coming through; your reminder of what to do.
• Which cuisine will reign supreme? All of them, thanks to globalisation. 
• Consumer NZ wants to turn audiology into a government-enforced cartel. That outfit's becoming increasingly reliable as a "do the opposite of whatever they're on about" signal. 

Afternoon roundup

The end-of-week closing of the browser tabs

• Seeing like a Bank. Superb explanation of bank IT systems, tradeoffs between customer fees and customer experience, how helpdesks actually work, and problems in cobbled-together systems. It explains a lot more than banks. 
• Interesting piece on price dispersion in generic pharmaceuticals. One snip: "Regulations around pharmacy ownership in Australia and New Zealand make them more difficult to compare." Indeed. 
• If you think the social discount rate should be very low, you should support reductions in transfers to the elderly. Forthcoming in Econometrica. 
• The Rocket Lab launch failure a while back comes down to an electrical arc in a power supply under partial vacuum; they're enclosing and pressurising the power supply system. 
• Wellington Council selling its shares in the airport to have less exposure to quake risk seems sensible. 
• Low attendance at school, Covid is given as one reason. Meanwhile, schools still aren't properly ventilated, nobody uses masks, and the government bans boosters for those under 16. Kinda crazy. Government requires scaffolding for jobs where a ladder would be perfectly safe, with company directors liable for risks. But government bears no liability for unsafe schools and prohibitions on full youth vaccination. 
• "What's so scary about Bryce Wilkinson?" The caption under a smiling picture of Bryce. What indeed! Bryce is lovely. 
• An 88 megawatt solar farm blocked in the Mackenzie Basin. There's uncertainty about how some native plants might change because of shading and sheltering from the panels on a sheep paddock. NZ officials do not want net zero. They want a return to the Pleistocene. 
• Turns out that there's a summer camp for training left-wing activists in NZ. Wonder whether the reporting on a pro-liberty version would be as friendly.

Afternoon roundup

A closing of the browser tabs

• Dave Frame batting back the usual (often older) arguments from those who don't like climate science. 
• Alice Evans on the origins of 'Dayooth'
• Ben Kepes on the Māori parallel to the Jewish experience
• Consumer NZ figures that if one of our grocers lowers its back-end costs, there could be zero passing-on of savings to consumers. Even a standard monopoly model would have a reduction in price. It would be a fun microeconomics problem set question: come up with conditions under which Jon Duffy could be right (if any), and provide an answer simple enough for him to understand. Consumer NZ just keeps getting more absurd. 
• I like that NZ's Accident Compensation Commission is hiring a Lead Advisor, Econometrics.
• Pharmac's posted its final decision about pulling 27 drugs from funding consideration, 24 of which were proposed to be pulled because there was no apparent prospect of Medsafe registration. They've decided to pull 24 drugs, 22 of which are because there's no prospect of Medsafe registration. Tafamidis and Cefuroximine might get onto Medsafe's radar. This system is so stupid. 
• But the new stadium would really put Christchurch on the map, just like Ogdenville and New Haverbrook. 
• Interesting proposal around investment in buying out IP rights to make lower-carbon tech more affordable in developing countries. Loyal readers may remember that I've long argued that NZ could do something similar as moonshot on ag biotech. If AgResearch figures out low-emission pastoral systems, GE or otherwise, with government funding, don't try to earn money on any patent. Release it globally on a royalty-free licence that simply requires that a small fraction of the resulting global emission reduction credits to NZ's account. Lowish chance it pans out, but if it did, it would have high return. 

Afternoon roundup

The tabs. There are too many.

• Dan Brunskill asks 20 economists how they'd define recession. A bunch of us pointed to how NBER does things. 
• Believing that recycling does much of anything to reduce GHG emissions is wrong and gets you laughed at. Believing that reducing your consumption of things covered by the ETS will reduce GHG emissions is also wrong, but generally gets you plaudits. 
• A paranoid person might start to think that government-funded media goes on crusades to name and pillory pseudonymous critics of the government who do not share their cultural views. 
• The last $5b of the Covid fund was blown on a bunch of populist vote-buying exercises. Good luck getting cross-party consensus to take on just-in-case debt in the next crisis. Labour has really poisoned this well. It is very bad if you think that future governments need to be able to do this. 
• Harvard should protect whistleblowers.
• Michael Gordon has a substack. And he provides a helpful reminder about SNZ's work trying to figure out why the jobseeker numbers are so out of whack when compared to the unemployment figures. 
• Susan Edmunds checks on CTU Craig Renney's claims that the economy's doing great. I pointed to a couple cautions, but also one area where he might have understated things: employment rates were at or near historic highs before Covid hit. 
• Oliver Lewis points to the ways that National's housing policies will likely fail. I still wish National and Labour could have maintained consensus on MDRS by setting a price target for exemptions. 
• There were a lot of appropriate condemnations of poor forestry practice leading to bad outcomes during the recent floods. And a lot of that turned into the usual "it's all neoliberalism's fault" nonsense. Anyway, here's Queenstown Council doing exactly the same thing, causing similar problems.
• I still think the funniest chaos outcome for the election would be Labour winning, but only because it loses enough party votes to the Greens that it gets a substantial overhang from its electorate seats. One can engineer scenarios where National and ACT get 51% of the vote and still lose. It's not entirely plausible, but it would make for a chaotic election night. Here's Greg O'Connor stumping for the electorate vote.
• Remember how I wanted a public health agency laser-focused on contagious disease so it wouldn't just shift back to its usual BS? Pandemic's still going, and they're already back on their usual nonsense. 
• Ngāi Te Rangi is importing houses from the US to build here. I still think that iwi should declare themselves to be their own consenting authorities and tell naysayers to sue them if they don't like it. If council makes it tough for iwi to build houses on their own land...
• BusinessDesk has a series on cost blowouts on infrastructure. On average infrastructure costs have been 23% over their initial budgets. The paper's really worth the sub. 

Canadian cautionary tales

My column in the weekend Dom went through Canada's messes in trying to make Google and Facebook subsidise Canadian newspapers. 

The Canadian Government passed Bill C-18, the Online News Act. And now, Canadians wanting to link to a news story on Facebook see this notice instead.

Earlier this week, I interviewed the University of Ottawa’s Professor Michael Geist about the problem. He’s the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law and has been following C-18 more closely than anyone.

The New Zealand Initiative · Podcast: Media funding and regulation

Bill C-18 requires Facebook to pay whenever a user puts up a link to a news site. It is not a cost that Facebook can easily control or predict. It brings potentially unbounded liability.

News links are not particularly valuable to Facebook. If anything, links to news stories encourage users to click away from Facebook rather than stay on the site scrolling through pictures of relatives’ pets and children, and seeing ads delivered through Facebook while they’re there.

Facebook provided plenty of warning that they'd sooner stop allowing user links to news on their platform than be subject to unpredictable and potentially very large payments for allowing such links. 

Willie Jackson says the NZ government will have legislation in the background in case Google and Facebook don't fork over enough money to NZ media companies. It would go to arbitration. 

Listen to his interview, above-linked, and tell me this isn't a tin-pot shake-down. There can be defensible public-goods arguments for subsidising news production, but I just can't see why that ought to be funded by some tax or shake-down of tech companies.  

It sounded like he figures that Google fronting up $50 million might cover it. Who knows. 

But threat of going to arbitration with unknowable potential liability is what's had Meta pull news links in Canada. Listen to my chat with Michael Geist on it, or read his substacks. 

From my column again:

Finally, on August 1, Facebook began pulling the plug. Canadian Facebook users will no longer see news links and content. It affects not just Canadian news sites but also international news for Canadian readers, because the Online News Act can also be read as requiring payment for links to international sites too.

The big newspapers are getting exactly what they asked for. They thought that Facebook was stealing from them by linking. It’s always been nonsense – even the report commissioned by New Zealand’s Ministry of Culture and Heritage found that “digital platforms provide considerable commercial benefits to news firms”.

But, like Trump, they’d convinced themselves that they could have something for nothing. They could have media funding and make Big Tech pay for it. And it’s worked out about as well as Trumps’s wall.

Professor Geist explained that some of the biggest losers from Bill C-18 have been small independent news sites that have relied on links from Facebook for traffic.

I hope that our Minister for Broadcasting and Media, Willie Jackson, is paying attention to Canada’s cautionary tale.

Extorting payments from platforms to meet the Government’s news funding objectives isn’t just thuggish. It also doesn’t work.

 Will look forward to seeing the eventual legislation...

Afternoon roundup

The worthies from the tabs:

• Kate MacNamara tracks down all the Covid funds that wound up diverted into the road use subsidy. $1.3b and counting. 


• A reminder that it can be easiest to innovate by leaving academia. 


• Messy claims that the UK sugar tax reduced obesity. Looks like green jellybeans. 


• People keep telling me cancel culture isn't real. And yet I keep seeing stories like this.


• Great to see that the sponsored refugee regime has been working out. Genuine good news. Let's hope it expands. 


• Treasury's hiring a Director, Economic Systems, meant to have a significant leadership role in macro and growth. Nothing in the job requires an economics degree. I hope that properly qualified economists do apply, and that good applications drive out bad. 


• Men on Tinder are not intimidated by highly educated women. 


• Markups and inflation. How markups move can tell you whether you're dealing with a supply-side or demand-side issue. Price Theory is great. 


• Bill English's 2005 Chapman Lecture. Some issues are timeless. 
• Helen Dale on the Return of the Pagans.


• Tap Yellowstone for basically limitless power. But it would cost on the order of $3.5 trillion to build. Not huge when compared to overall annual energy spend in the US, depending on marginal cost of running the thing and whether it could generate low-cost hydrogen for vehicle fleets. But it is a very big number.


• I would love to know how much Council time and effort went into this mess. A developer wanted to turn a ruin of a former dairy into housing. Council didn't want her to. They eventually relented and let her build, on condition that the houses have wooden window frames. What incredible value Council added here. Kudos. They should all be very proud. Especially the resource consent team leader who argued that the developer should have first tried putting up a fish and chip shop or a laundromat. 

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the tabs:

• Environmental review laws have long been used for NIMBY purposes. This is a new one. The best that could come of this is a recognition that environmental review needs to be fixed.
• If Australia starts enabling nuclear power, NZ should consider a trans-Tasman approach that would let us piggyback on some of their regulatory efforts. There are economies of scale in this kind of reg. And Australia should be sure to kick NZ out of the arrangement if we start behaving like dicks. 
• The simplest explanation for Labour's approach to labour-market regulation is that they base their expectations of employer behaviour on how government behaves when it is a monopsonistic employer. 
• The simplest explanation for occupational regulation for medical workers is that it's a cartel arrangement that proved sticky when conditions changed.
• They've stopped pretending to be playing at anything other than extortion. “By doing things with news organisations, Facebook was attempting to reduce the risk of government hitting them with a big invoice,” one publisher said. “By pulling out, they’ve made it more likely that they will be whacked with regulation.”
• Could make for a fun test around Peltzman effects, if they gathered numbers on it.
• More reasons to be sceptical of the value of peer review, in some disciplines. The most obvious explanation for the problem (department demographics will reflect international demographics in the field, with some home-country bias, rather than home-country demographics full-stop) is ignored. But the paper's problems are bigger than that. Almost reads as a Sokal hoax. But it seems sincere. At U Manitoba, where I went for undergrad, there were more profs who were US Vietnam draft dodgers than there were in the Winnipeg population overall. An overrepresentation of them necessarily means an underrepresentation of the Canadian-born. Which is totally fine. Canadians will be overrepresented on US university faculties too. 
• David Harvey on problems in proposed changes to hate speech regs.

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the many tabs:

• EU trade talks with NZ are on. European consumers who worry about food security, food prices, and access to the only lamb that, to the best of my knowledge, Peter Signer has granted caveated ethical approval - they should be telling their governments to ditch the tariffs and quotas on NZ ag exports. 


• Elizabeth Rata has a blog.


• That doesn't solve the problem, Camus. Like sure, you're right - but in a trivial sense. You've just pushed the question up a level. 


• How not to build a stadium. Or, better, perhaps they shouldn't be building a stadium. 


• NZ fares poorly in the latest world competitiveness rankings.


• It's especially when you have low-quality informal institutions that competent mayors matter. I wonder what a replication of this work for NZ would look like. 


• NZ has a lot of options for drivers who want to take jobs on apps. Uber, obviously. But also Lyft, Ola and anyone else can enter the market if they want. The Employment Court is trying to decide whether Uber drivers are employees. It's an odd kind of employment if someone can have three or four different apps open at the same time, taking jobs as they come. Macfie takes a very union-sympathetic position; haven't seen other reporting on the court case.  


• A new taskforce to try to unblock building materials, with a focus on plasterboard. Looking to consenting will matter, but the overarching issue will still be getting councils out from under joint-and-several liability. 


• Radio New Zealand cheering on the creation of a new cartel, mostly because they have no clue how occupational licensing works. 


• Bad news for beer drinkers - price is going up (as it is for everything else).


• AML rules still killing remittances.


• Jenny Ruth picks up Geof Mortlock's worries about RBNZ.

Afternoon roundup

I've got tabs, they're multiplying. And I'm losing all control - why can't Chrome be as good as it was a decade ago?

So time to clear them. The worthies:

• The ag sector's plan for dealing with ag emission pricing was released yesterday. I'm still thinking through this one. It is definitely not a first-best. Trying to figure out whether it's a second-best or a fifth-best. Executive Summary here, full report here. Stuff covers it here and here, and here with very minor comment from me. And here's BusinessDesk.
• Prohibitionists get mad that Emerson's Brewery donated to a breast cancer research fund. I'm pleasantly surprised that there's a cancer charity that cares more about cancer than about anti-alcohol activism. 
• Labour's proposals around supermarkets are populist nonsense. I worry that they're a foreshadowing of what's coming down the track for more sectors. Labour's falling in the polls, the next year will bring some horrible combination of high inflation and higher unemployment, and an election's due for 2023. Populist stuff like this will be tempting. 
• If water takes were under a cap-and-trade regime, this sort of thing would be better policed.
• A Grand Inquisitor has been appointed who seems likely to be very diligent. 
• America's welfare system has some worse EMTR cliffs than New Zealand's.
• The Ministry of Health continues to be a dangerous clown-show. 
• Winnipeg has a new slogan: 'It's made from what's real.' Bartley Kives ahs a thread of alternatives...
• Set density restrictions on bars and outlets, create rents for incumbents. Tullock's Trap. 
• The Commerce Commission has published submissions on regulatory barriers to entry in key building supplies. The Affordable Building Coalition's submission is very good.
• Maybe it would be a good idea to make it easier for foreign-trained GPs to practice in New Zealand? Maybe?
• There's maybe one degree of separation between everyone in New Zealand but come on.

Health warnings on reports from HSBC

HSBC's Stuart Kirk gave a provocative talk on how investors should be thinking about climate risk, so he was fired. 

His presentation had been approved internally at HSBC before he gave it, but they fired him for it afterwards.

 

I've watched the talk. Couldn't see much to disagree with. 

Climate change is real and important, but directors forcing their companies into disproportionately weighting climate risk are doing a disservice to shareholders. 

And consumers of reports from outfits like HSBC should upweight the chances that their reports will have had a strong political correctness filter placed over them. 

If a report from HSBC conforms to the received view, it is impossible to tell whether their truthful analysis led to the conclusion, or whether it was politically massaged, or whether contrary reports that diverged from the received view were put into a file drawer. 

Afternoon roundup

The afternoon's worthies

• Covid tests considered reliable enough to let you board a flight to New Zealand aren't considered reliable enough to be allowed to be imported into the country. We truly are run by Vogons. 


• Glad to hear that Michael Reddell is feeling better. On 7 March he posted that his household had caught Covid but all was well. On 29 March he posted that he'd been unable to maintain concentration for any sustained period: "Reading one 8 page memo bright and early yesterday morning completely did me in for the day." 28 April, he notes things are improving. I'm very glad that things are improving.  


• Parliament is scrambling to put some kind of enforcement regime around its stupid road user charge holiday. I feel bad for NZTA here. I expect they were blindsided on this one, that they told government that all of this was stupid, and they're stuck having to administer it. But I'll have to wait for the OIA results to find out. 


• David Dodge, former Bank of Canada Governor, argues for very large and rapid interest rate hikes. Stimulatory monetary policy in an overheated economy is a bad idea. Meanwhile, Adrian Orr assures us RBNZ has everything in hand and thinks his interest rate increases thus far are courageous. I miss the old Tui Billboard "Yeah, Right" campaigns.


• Darian Woods sings about GDP on this Planet Money episode. Very suitable for NCEA classroom use. Darian was in the same superstar cohort with James Graham (now teaching at Sydney) and Nick Sander (Bank of Canada). Good times. Here's an old RNZ piece on his album with Lucy Botting. 


• Russians supporting the current thing


• The Auditor General's worried about Covid spend. Treasury hasn't seemed really able to keep on top of this spend. And Treasury noted that it only likes the government's new debt ceiling if there's a focus on value-for-money in spending. So we have a new public finance regime that requires more vigilance from Treasury, an not a lot of reason to believe that Treasury is up to the bigger task. 
• Next time we're out near Dunedin, we'll definitely be checking this out for the kids: a 12 year old down there is running her own business, doing horse riding experiences for other kids. 


• A private backer was ready to sponsor Moana Pasifika - but the NZ government prefers to crowd out private investment. 


• Divorce rates are down, but largely on the back of marriage now largely being only chosen by those with strong preferences around being married. 51% of babies born in 2021 had married parents. Yikes.


• The convoluted ownership structures for the proposed amalgamated water entities might not even achieve balance sheet separation.  


• Hard to tell if this is the normal RMA stupidity, or bureaucrats sticking it to Peter Thiel just because. Either way it ain't great. 


• Monetary policy in pandemics. "If the activist policy was appropriate, by year end 2022, inflation will be on the way back down to 2 percent with an unemployment rate remaining near 4 percent. If the nonactivist policy would have been better, inflation would remain near double digits and would recede only with a recession."

Morning roundup

Today's closing of the browser tabs is also a bit of an inbox roundup. A lot of these wind up being from BusinessDesk's excellent news summaries.

• Tyler Barugh aims to either be the monopoly supplier of milk to Wellington, or to have Wellington Council abolish its antique and unused century-old milk supply legislation. 
• NZ's natural gas shortage has eased a bit, but there's still risk that industrial users will be asked to curb their production if electricity companies need the stuff. Meanwhile, Red Radio worries that NZ's ban on oil and gas exploration isn't tough enough. 
• The Auditor General isn't happy about how the NZ Govt handed out tourism grants. It looks like there was ample opportunity for dodginess given the lack of process.
• Mastery, then innovation.
• Seventy of some 400ish Fellows of the Royal Society of New Zealand have signed an open letter wishing that the Royal Society return to favouring science - and noting that more would have signed on except they said they feared reprisals. Something is deeply wrong with the Royal Society. 
• RBNZ is reviewing its monetary policy remit.
• More on the traditional media (ie Murdoch) using government to strong-arm tech platforms. 
• The government continues to ease official Covid restrictions. My personal restrictions remain in place:
• Wear a solid N95 mask when indoors; wear a decent mask (like my Cactus Outfitters one) when outdoors in more crowded spaces;
• Avoid indoor places that attract unmasked people;
• Prefer places that continue to enforce vax passes, as they will discourage riskier people from attending;
• Do not dine or drink indoors unless very sure that the ventilation is very good indeed.

Afternoon roundup

The closing of the browser tabs, so the poor thing can reboot, brings some worthies:

• Work from home is proving sticky in New York. The number of workers going into NYC offices is well under half of what it was pre-Covid. They're looking to turn underused commercial skyscrapers. That's what living with Covid looks like, in places that have been living with it longer than us. I don't think removing NZ's traffic light settings are going to return us to December 2019. 
• Nice. Now do contracting for PCR testing. 
• Face it. The NIMBYs are going to try to block your development in court no matter what you do to appease them. Spread the costs of inevitable lawsuits across more dwellings.
• It's not cancel-culture, it's cancel technology. 
• The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment warns against locking into hydrogen. Always the danger with winner-picking: you might bet the wrong one. Why not just let ETS prices take lead?
• Oh this is neat. ORBIS gives you the travel time between places in the Roman world. Rome to Alexandria in July? 14 days by fastest route and by cheapest route. Rome to Londinium? 39 days by cheapest route; 27 days by fastest route. 
• Fix the select committees already. 
• Covid testing is cheap relative to the alternative, but costs are still adding up for businesses.
• The return of the shibboleth.
• This looks fun: Townscaper.
• NZIER's tallied up employment, contribution to GDP and such for the alcohol sector. Here's the media release from the NZ Alcohol Beverages Council, and here's the report. We have 134 distilleries! There's a lot of the usual drill in portraying employment as a benefit rather than a cost, but it's a useful compilation of a pile of stats. I expect I'll be regularly googling the blog here to re-find the link to it. 
• Paranoia about the Mont Pelerin Society. Alas, it's just not that influential. 
• Would that more public goods could be coin-operated. 

Afternoon roundup

The tab-closing worthies:

• ACT supports a carbon dividend. Good!
• I had to point a lot of people at this last week on Twitter. The 2018 TWG's advice about GST. Says the same thing as the prior National Government's TWG. Good backgrounder for those needing background.
• Peter Martin worrying that Australia picks up NZ's stupid excise holiday.
• Matt Nolan also doesn't like the excise holiday.
• A helpful reminder that at least some of lockdown's costs were inframarginal.
• The borders are opening. Hope there's more hospital capacity by then, or that visitors are provided with appropriate warnings.
• Rotorua asks to be counted as a Tier 1 City, so it can more easily build houses. It's a fun one to think about. Nothing in the Medium Density Residential Standards rule applied to Tier 1 centres is outside of Councils' ability to do on their own. They could upzone on their own. Perhaps best to think about it as a way of binding to broad upzoning, and avoiding the salami-slices that councillors might otherwise be pushed into?
• Larry Summers worries we're heading for stagflation. I wish I had confidence that RBNZ has the competence to navigate the waters ahead.
• Running urban development through environmental planning processes gives NIMBYs lots of room to veto things. Here's Will Rinehart on how it plays out in California under the California Environmental Quality Act. Sounds a lot like New Zealand's Resource Management Act and its problems. PRI has reform suggestions for California.
• Nobody expects the Royal Society's inquisition. Fortunately, it has now been dropped. 

Afternoon roundup

High time the computer gets a reboot. And so, the closing of (some of) the browser tabs:

• The Australians approve vax for 5-11 year olds. Omicron is spreading, though not in NZ yet as far as we know, and there is some indication it is sending more kids to hospital. Canada has been vaccinating kids since 23 November, and America weeks before that. But Medsafe, like a New Zealand city council that just doesn't wanna approve a resource consent, has punted the application back to Pfizer for more detail. Medsafe Delenda Est. 
• Maybe, for Labour, Immigration NZ being a complete mess and chasing away potential migrants is a feature rather than a bug. 
• Aranui, Avonside, Woolston West, Rawhiti, Wainoni, Bexley, Styx, New Brighton. Sounds like a rollcall of neighbourhoods most hit by EQNZ in 2011 (maybe not Woolston West). But it's the Christchurch suburbs with the lowest vaccination rates. 
• Hayden Donnell on the anti-housing media blitz. 
• Point of Order on the mess at Royal Society. Bottom line: Profs should be joining the Free Speech Union rather than either the Royal Society or the TEU. 
• City Journal has a couple of excellent pieces on corporate culture. The Genealogy of Woke Capital and Why Woke Organisations All Sound the Same. A usual rule of thumb is to avoid pieces with 'woke' in the title. Don't miss these. Gabriel Rossman is author on the latter - seriously good academic sociologist. 
• From the "Well, can't blame 'em for trying it on but really?" files: Council adds sand to some Auckland beaches, prompting nearby property owners to assert that their riparian rights extend further down the now extended beach. 
• If car insurance companies could overcome collective action problems, there would be a case for them to fund wolf reintroduction programmes in US states with a lot of deer. 
• The Herald has started putting up lovely tables showing case and hospitalisation rates sorted by vaccination status.
  
  
  

Morning roundup

 Ok. It's down to one Chrome sheet. The worthies!

• Wokeness as Saddam statues. Great story on how Saddam Hussein might not have even wanted all those statues of him, but lower-level officials would ramp themselves up in demonstrating allegiance. The mechanism does go back a distance; Mark Twain described a similar one back in Connecticut Yankee.
• Months ago, we'd called for just giving residence to everyone who's been here since the March 2020 lockdown. The government's alternative misses a few who should have received residence, including people who had to flip to short-term visas while here. 
• The Government's big emission plan is more than a little disappointing. Remember how Rod Carr said it wasn't his job to think about whether any of his measures passed any kind of cost-benefit, because that was the next guy's job? Well, James Shaw doesn't think it's his job either. No cost-per-tonne on any of their proposals anywhere to be found. And we know that the US version of what he's proposed, Cash for Clunkers, cost hundreds of dollars per tonne. Some of the other measures are detailed here. Me and Matt had a chat about it yesterday. 
• If you hadn't caught it last week, the Government got told they were too slow on saliva-based testing. Indeed. My column from last December. Oh, and they also didn't bother scaling up contact tracing, presumably because they were super-confident in their super-risky way of running MIQ. And at yesterday's 1PM standup, Director-General of Health Bloomfield could not answer a fairly simple question from a journalist: how many ICU beds do we even have? He could only point to the percentage of open spaces. Of course we know the problem with that. If you have 3 beds and 33% are empty, they'll all be full soon. If you have 3000 beds and 33% are empty, we have almost certainly invested too much in increasing capacity. But do we have 260 staffed beds? 280? 320? 340? It's somewhere in there right? 
• A New England Journal of Medicine piece from last November making the obvious point: one rapid antigen test might not be all that accurate, but taking them every day is more accurate. The government last week announced that they'll start being allowed in more trials. Bit of a shame that we didn't have them for daily use at workplaces in Auckland running at L3/4, between PCR tests. Meanwhile, Auckland case numbers keep rising. 
• I'm quoted in this piece on how the Government hasn't been bothering to prioritise getting medical staff into NZ through the MIQ system. 
• My column in the Herald, last week, on Covid response, summarizing my report on it, which also came out last week. 
• Oops

Conversations with Atwood

Not everyone seems to have enjoyed Margaret Atwood's book forum in Auckland with Chloe Swarbrick.

I wasn't there.

But I did catch Tyler Cowen's superb talk with her. The podcast and transcript are all up here. A few highlights below. Cowen's breadth always amazes. You look across the range of folks he's interviewed, and the depth he'll cover...

COWEN: I’m a big fan of your novel, Hag-Seed, which I believe is your latest. A few questions about that and Shakespeare: How sympathetic is Shakespeare to Caliban in The Tempest?
ATWOOD: Shakespeare himself, when he was doing The Tempest, I think, saw Caliban as one of his comic figures. But as always with Shakespeare, nothing is two-dimensional. So The Tempest underwent a number of different metamorphoses in performance since Shakespeare. We have The Tempest. Then we have Oliver Cromwell. The theater gets shut down. The tradition is broken.
When the theaters come back, they can’t actually remember how these things were done. So in the 18th century, The Tempest was an opera, and they added some people. They added a person called Dorinda, who is Miranda’s sister, so that they could have an ensemble group of singers, obviously. Then they added another guy so that Dorinda would have somebody to marry. Then they learned how to fly Ariel, and Ariel flew around.
Then when they tried to bring back the original Tempest, nobody liked it because they wanted the opera. They wanted Dorinda and the flying Ariel. In the 19th century, when Ariel was always played by a woman who flew around, Caliban became a romantic sort of Byronic hero, oddly enough. Because by that time, people had caught up with slavery in the United States, and noble savages and other things like that that were of the 19th century.
COWEN: And he has real charisma.
ATWOOD: Well, it depends how he’s played. It really depends, and I’ve seen, by this time, a lot of performances of The Tempest, including film ones. One by Julie Taymor, in which Prospero is Prospera — she’s the duchess of Milan — has a pretty good Caliban.
But he has a lot of resonance. He’s given the most poetic lines in the play, actually. There’s a big question about him, which is, what happens to him at the end? We’re not told. It’s another of these open questions. We just don’t know.
COWEN: How sympathetic are you to Prospero? There’s a line in Hag-Seed: “He would seem to be the top jailer in this play.”
ATWOOD: Well, he is.
COWEN: Do you like him?
ATWOOD: Like or dislike, it kind of doesn’t matter. Whether I like or dislike him, I’m sympathetic to him in some ways. But he says himself that he got himself into this. He was the duke. He didn’t do his dukely duties. He didn’t behave in a duke-like way. He went off to study magic instead, and he let his brother usurp the kingdom. By doing so, of course, he threw his young child into danger and ended them up on this island.
If you want to know why he wants to get off of it, look at the menus, which I did. I did a little foodie piece for a food magazine on what they were actually eating. It’s not fun.
COWEN: As Leggs suggests in Hag-Seed, is there any chance that Prospero is Caliban’s dad?
ATWOOD: Think about it.
COWEN: Someone has to be, right?
ATWOOD: Think about it. Somebody has to be his dad. So, if we’re not accepting the devil as being the progenitor of Caliban, who is? I ask you. They’re both in the magic business. Why would they have not met up at a convention? Sort of a one-night stand producing Caliban.

COWEN: Handmaid’s Tale — is it an accident that you started it in West Berlin in, I think, 1984?
ATWOOD: Wasn’t that corny? It was very corny, but I couldn’t avoid it. If I had been able to do it in some other year, I would have because, inevitably, this question comes up. But I just happened to be in West Berlin. I didn’t go there on purpose to do that. But there I was, and how handy it was because it was the wall all around. And being Canadian, I could go into places like East Germany and Czechoslovakia and Poland easier than German nationals could. So I did.
COWEN: You had had a prior trip to Afghanistan. Did that influence the book at all?
ATWOOD: A bit, yeah. I was lucky enough to see Afghanistan six weeks before the present unpleasantness started. Six weeks before they assassinated Daoud. It was clear, and it always has been a crossroads, and it’s always been desirable. It’s always been desired by China, by Russia, and by anybody else in the vicinity because things went through it.
At the time we were there, there was a great big Chinese embassy. There was a great big USSR embassy. And there was a great big American embassy. Daoud was doing quite well by playing them off against each other and getting stuff out of them. They should have stuck with him. But it’s been chaos ever since. I saw it at the last minute before a lot of things just got blown up.
COWEN: Did reading the Book of Genesis serve as an actual influence on Handmaid’s Tale? Or it’s just a connection you noticed later?
ATWOOD: Oh, no, it’s right there in the epigraph. So the question to you is, if you’re going to take the Bible literally, how literally would you like to take it?
COWEN: Is it the Jacob version of this story or the Abraham-Sarah-Hagar version of the story that grabbed you? Usually you mention the Jacob version of the story.
ATWOOD: Yeah.
COWEN: There’s the second one. Why?
ATWOOD: Because it’s got more people in it.
COWEN: But the first version has a happy ending, right? You get Isaac, you get Ishmael. They each found tribes.
ATWOOD: Why would I write a book with a happy ending?
[laughter]
ATWOOD: Yeah, it’s not such a happy ending. It’s a very ambivalent ending, I would say. Abraham is a very dicey character in the Bible. But there’s a wonderful book called God: A Biography, which is by Jack —
COWEN: The Miles book, yeah.
ATWOOD: Yeah, it’s a wonderful book. I love it. It’s got the best exploration of the Book of Job that I’ve ever read. I think it’s brilliant.
But remember where my roots are. I’m Canadian. We took the Bible in school. There wasn’t any separation of church and state. Then I went to college and studied with Northrop Frye. Then I went to Harvard and studied with Perry Miller. And for all those people, you had to know the Bible.

Go read or listen to the whole thing. I had no clue about her entrepreneurial ventures and patents.

Afternoon roundup

The worthies on a very much belated closing of the tabs:

• Nice roundup in Nature on psychology's problems in social priming

  A promising field of research on social behaviour struggled after investigators couldn’t repeat key findings. Now researchers are trying to establish what’s worth saving.

• Somebody is gluing miniature cowboy hats to pigeons in Los Vegas.

  “They look like happy pigeons to me. It is hard to know, of course, because they will not talk to us.”

• This one's more depressing. The Dean of the University of Virginia's School of Education writes a column for the Washington Post on education and education funding. You'd expect the column would be decent, right? The Washington Post is one of the newspapers that seems to be doing well on subscriptions; heck, I pay for a subscription there. And he's the Dean of the School of Education at one of the top universities in the US. But he claims that real per-student education expenditures have been dropping. Corey DeAngelis points to the actual data showing a 36% real increase over the period. This was a couple days ago, and there's as yet no correction at the Post.


• Average is over: geographic segregation edition. An ultra-Catholic community in Kansas. Excellent long-read; the kind of thing I'd have pointed to Denis for Arts & Letters Daily, back in the day.


• Randy Holcombe on Gordon Tullock on inequality and redistribution. Self-recommending. We might note, though, that New Zealand's overall system has been one of the more targeted ones - I wonder how that ranking's been affected by sillier policies like extra free years of tertiary study.

  People can afford to be charitable with their votes when they know their one vote will have no effect on the outcome of an election. This may be Tullock’s most important contribution to the literature on redistribution and inequality—the observation that because of incentives inherent in the political process, people are likely to vote for redistribution programs they would not choose if the choice were theirs alone.
  
  Tullock (1971) anticipates the arguments made by Brennan and Lomasky (1993) and Caplan (2007), explaining how people can vote expressively and even irrationally for outcomes that redistribute more than they privately prefer. This adds a wrinkle to Tullock’s analysis of motives and justifications for redistribution. Tullock (1997) dismisses justifications for redistribution and looks at motives—the desire to receive transfers, the wish to help the poor, and envy—to conclude that government redistribution will not be very effective at helping the poor. But he suggests government redistribution is larger than the median voter would prefer because of the incentives in the democratic political process that cause people to be more charitable in their voting behavior than when considering private charitable giving done individually (Tullock 1971). Perhaps this unintended consequence of democratic decision making renders democratic government a better mechanism for helping the poor than Tullock (1997) recognized.

• When New Zealand's declining PISA scores were released, we heard a lot about how PISA scores don't matter. I rather prefer Australia Labor MP Andrew Leigh's take on Oz's declining scores.

  Forget how we’ve slid relative to other countries -- it’s enough to compare our own students with their predecessors. Year 9 students today score worse than year 8 students would have done at the turn of the century. If this was a sporting contest, we’d be running slower, dropping the ball more often, and missing more goals.
  
  The PISA tests matter because they are designed to capture the skills that young people will need in the workplace. These tests don’t measure memorisation and rote learning -- they aim to capture the essential talents that will be needed in the labour market.

• Kudos Doc Nolan!


• Phil Twyford continues to provide speeches showing he gets housing better than anyone in Parliament. I don't agree with everything in here, but it's good. And we finally now have the infrastructure financing legislation coming through - the Bill has been introduced, and they're expecting to have it done mid 2020. About three years after they came into office. New Zealand's electoral cycles are too darned short given the length of time it takes to get substantial legislation ready.

  I now want to look in a little more depth at housing and land markets, and transport.
  
  I started by saying urban planning has lacked an economic underpinning. An example of this is the use of the urban growth boundary which is a common planning tool ostensibly to stop cities growing outwards, often described pejoratively as sprawl.
  
  Sprawl is often meant as development on the fringes of a city, far from the centre. But I want to make the point that the better way to think of it is in relation to the time value of travel.
  
  If you are building homes let us say in Pukekohe in the south of Auckland, where people who work in the city centre might face a drive of 90 minutes on a bad day, that might be characterised as sprawl. But when we electrify the rail line to Pukekohe, and build an additional line on the main north-south corridor, as we are about to do, those people will have a 30 min express commuter ride into the city, is it sprawl then? I don’t think so.
  
  The most harmful effect of the urban growth boundary where there is rising demand is to create an artificial scarcity of land driving section prices up.
  
  The boundary is much loved by land bankers whose business model is to buy up rural land and sit on it until the local council shifts the boundary in response to growth pressures, changing the zoning from rural to urban, and then sell it sometimes at ten times its former value.
  
  My intention is not to vilify land bankers. Their behaviour is a rational response to bad policy.
  
  If the urban growth boundary wasn’t bad enough, restrictions on height and density, often justified as protecting the amenity of the low-rise garden suburb, ration floor space, stopping the city growing up and restricting the supply of apartments, and of course driving up prices across the market.
  
  Urban planning has too often failed to grasp that whenever rules stop people building or living in places they want to (typically close to amenity, jobs or transport interchanges) they deny people housing choices, restrict supply and drive prices up.
  
  As Ed Glaeser says, every time you place a restriction on intensification you deny a family access to the city.

• More evidence against Sachs's Millennium Villages. Small or null results on core indicators, no spillover benefits.