I still don't get why there aren't more food carts on Wellington's waterfront. On a good sunny day, you might find, along a stretch of gorgeous waterfront more than two kilometres long, all of it close to downtown, 2-3 food carts.  Meanwhile, downtown Christchurch restaurants are worried about the Arts Centre's plan to host around 30 carts not just on weekends: every day. They point to the rates bills they pay and consenting hassles they deal with that food carts avoid; they want Council to cut its subsidy to the Arts Centre if it doesn't abandon its food trucks plan.  My column for ..read more

I gave a short talk for a new student group last week, Generation Screwed. The event was joint with Students for Liberty, who seem to be setting up in NZ! They'd asked about debt, tax burden, and intergenerational issues. I put together a few starter-notes to let them know where I was coming from; I've copied those below.  The cleanest measure of the tax burden is government spending. Governments will try to hide the burden by shuffling it off to future through debt. Always watch spending rather than just taxes. The only real tax cut is a spending cut. The Public Finance Act tries to con ..read more

New Zealand's immigration bureaucracy isn't in the best of shape.  So it's interesting to read this piece from the Niskanen Center on Biden's refugee resettlement programme, and how it provides an example of rebuilding state capacity.  President Biden set ambitious refugee resettlement goals—62,500 for 2021 and 125,000 for 2022. However, the U.S. lacked the capacity to meet these targets. The resettlement system, significantly weakened by previous cuts, struggled to reach even 10% of the target. While the policy was clear, the necessary infrastructure was woefully inadequate. There ..read more

New Zealand's newspaper chiefs' views on how the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill works is somewhat at odds with the text of the Bill.  Google today, admirably, said they'll stop linking to New Zealand news outlets in search if the Bill goes ahead.  News Publishers' Association's Andrew Holden and Stuff's Sinead Boucher aren't happy about that. But contrast what they say with what the legislation says.  News Publishers' Association spokesperson Andrew Holden said Google had deliberately misrepresented the legislation in its blog and demonstrated “the kind of pressure that it h ..read more

Super-neat paper coming out in the AER by Ryan Oprea: Decisions under risk are decisions under complexity.  The abstract: We provide evidence that classic lottery anomalies like probability weighting and loss aversion are not special phenomena of risk. They also arise (and often with equal strength) when subjects evaluate deterministic, positive monetary payments that have been disaggregated to resemble lotteries. Thus, we find, e.g., apparent probability weighting in settings without probabilities and loss aversion in settings without scope for loss. Across subjects, anomalies in these ..read more

In a sane world, medicines and vaccines already approved by trustworthy overseas regulators would automatically be able to be used in New Zealand as well. New Zealand is not sane. But neither is anywhere else really on that standard. Other places are just faster than NZ in getting things approved, with more practicable pathways for expedited review.  If a medicine is unapproved, it can still be accessed under restrictive provisions of the Medicines Act. Medsafe summarises it here.  Those restrictions include bans on advertising and marketing.  Monkeypox has been an obviou ..read more

I should have signed up for Matt Levine's newsletter ages ago; finally did so.  His bit on the Spotify arbitrage play was magnificent.  I don’t know, man. We have talked a few times about Avi Eisenberg, the Mango Markets guy, who found a manipulatable cryptocurrency market, manipulated the heck out of it, made tens of millions of dollars, was arrested, defended himself by saying he was an “applied game theorist” who spotted a good trade that was allowed by the market, and got convicted because nobody ever wants to hear a defense like that.6 ..read more

Jaw-dropping bit from the Grocery Regulator, in interview at Interest.co.nz: “What we've been told by these players is when they come and they want to open up a large store in New Zealand, the cost to get a spade in the ground is double that of Australia,” he says in a new episode of the Of Interest podcast.  “Now that is significant. And when they look at 'do we open up a store in Wagga Wagga or Tamworth or wherever in Australia' versus coming to open up in Auckland where there is massive demand or any of the other centres, really, the cost is double that of Australia. And the timeframe ..read more

The post title is obviously stupid, right? Mazda Demios are pretty common in ram-raids but: Ram raids have started coming down off their peak; People can use all kinds of cars for ram-raids; Most Mazda Demios are not used in ram-raids. Other people drive them too. Now consider the National Party's proposed "Let's ban disposable vapes and vapes that use non-refillable pods or tanks to put an end to youth vaping" policy. Disposable vapes are pretty commonly used by youths who vape - more than tanks or pods. But: Youth vaping has stopped increasing (and came down a bit in the most recent Yea ..read more

This week's column for the Stuff papers covered the excellent new US work testing the effects of a UBI.  From November 2020, 3000 low-income people were randomly assigned into two groups for three years. One thousand people each received $1000 per month in unconditional funds for three years. Two thousand people each received $50 per month. Both groups filled in detailed surveys on how they spent their time, on their purchases, their health experience and more. Participants had blood tests to check health outcomes. Government administrative records were combined with the survey data to p ..read more