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From this news release I can’t make heads or tails of what was really going on in the BERL report on partial asset sales, which is a pity because I would like to read what they put down – and hopefully learn a bit more about what is going on.
Does anyone have any idea where this report is?
Update: Report on the Green’s site. Eric Crampton, along with links from all over Offsetting Behaviour.
I’ll be honest here, I don’t watch TV at all – I follow written news feeds while I’m writing and working, and I find that just works more efficiently for me than sitting down and enjoying the spoken prose of someone.
However, I’ve noticed in the TVHE twitter feed that people are very upset about the loss of Media7.
Now the question I have is this, if the resource is so valuable why aren’t people willing to pay enough for it to be on pay-per-view? Surely, if it is adding such an important view to peoples lives they will be willing to put funds towards it.
The common argument against this is that it has other social benefits, such as educating the public. But I was under the impression that the viewing numbers were very low – how can it be educating the public if only people who have either already set their opinions or would get the information from other sources are the ones viewing it?
Now I’m sure its very good, and that the information it provides is superb. But unless people are willing to put their money where there mouth is, the point of view I’ve expressed here makes it understandable that the government is keen to scrap it. Now, I would be more than happy to be convinced otherwise – and to be shown significant and important social benefits. However, if anyone mentions the GC their comment is not going to be treated seriously 😉
Yesterday, Statistics New Zealand released fancy new GDP figures for the New Zealand economy. The new industry classification it uses (ANZSIC06) provides a more consistent, and modern, treatment of different industries in terms of production GDP – and in this sense, it is going to be exciting going through and seeing what this data series says about the evolution of the New Zealand economy.
However that is not what I’m going to do here 😉
Instead, I’d like to point out a couple of things from the release that Stat’s NZ nicely provided:
I will be spending a lot of the next month rolling around in these figures, and occasionally I might pop on here and say something who knows 😉
From Rogeberg on rational addiction:
Theories of rational addiction make assumptions concerning the choice rule, preferences and beliefs of people, and derive the resulting consumption plans. … Some economists claim support from the famous as-if methodology of Friedman 1953 … which explicitly identifies prediction as the only aim of “positive economics.”…[Such] explanations may prove excellent predictive devices as long as the empirical regularities they describe remain stable… [but] this defense comes at a cost: Since someone acting as-if he was rationally solving some decision problem would not behave optimally unless this was the actual decision problem he faced, assumptions matter when we turn to welfare analysis. Nor can as-if theories claim to explain in the sense of describing the mechanism or causal process underlying a phenomena, their aim is just to relate observable quantities in the simplest, most empirically successful way. To use a metaphor… an as-if theory of a car would be of no help to a mechanic if the car broke down.
The reference point for optimality depends upon the model you’re using. If it’s not a good causal explanation of the problem then it cannot tell you about the optimality of the agent’s decision.
It’s just another reminder that we need to be really careful when moving into the realm of welfare economics because it implies numerous additional assumptions that we don’t need elsewhere.
A paper out of Otago university finds:
Every time Parliament passes a new act it costs the country an average of $3.5 million, according to a new study. And… even just a piece of regulation costs around $530,000…
Researchers in Wellington and Otago came up with the figure by analysing the number of acts and regulations passed between 1999 and 2010, and looking at the costs of running Parliament and getting policy advice.
…
The price range for a new act was from $2 million at the low end, up to $6.2 million.
“This is because the size of new legislation varies greatly, from just a few pages to hundreds. So when considering both acts and regulations, we calculated the average cost per page of legislation at $45,000.”
They included the cost of Parliamentary time and the cost of the policy analysts’ time.
From the philosopher Jon Elster in a trenchant critique of Gary Becker’s approach to everything:
If Gary Becker didn’t exist, we would have to invent someone like him. For close to four decades he has been taking economic theory beyond its usual domain of applications, almost single-handedly creating the economics of discrimination, human capital theory, the economics of crime and punishment, and the economic theory of the family.
…
Although I disagree sharply with much of it, it has raised the level of discussion enormously. Before Becker, most explanations of addiction did not involve choice at all, much less rational choice. By arguing that addiction is a form of rational behavior, Becker offers other scholars the choice between agreeing with him or trying to identify exactly where he goes wrong. Whatever option we take (I’m going to take the second), our understanding of addiction will be sharpened and focused.
Even if you don’t like the argument, the conclusions, or the framework, we can all agree that using a consistent analytical framework is a good thing!