According to the Dom Post there is new research out showing that banning smoking in places that people socialise will reduce social smoking: New Zealand researchers believe fewer people would take up smoking socially if smoke-free rules extended to areas outside bars. Alone, that sounds pretty innocuous. But how does it justify a headline like: …
Category Archive: Government Policy
Permanent link to this article: http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2012/02/21/6723/
Feb 21 2012
Newsreading game of the day
From the Positive Economist: Government, whatever it is, isn’t a grumpy gatekeeper protecting a bottomless barrel of stuff and saying “no, no, no”. We can disagree about what government should do, of course, but let’s not pretend that there aren’t constraints. How many stories does this apply to in a daily newspaper?
Permanent link to this article: http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2012/02/21/newsreading-game-of-the-day/
Jan 25 2012
A note on redistribution
There is a point to keep in mind following the state of the union address in the USA. We may believe that more redistribution is required to meet/maintain our social contract. That is fine. We may believe that more redistribution is “morally right”. That is fine. But lifting taxes in of itself isn’t redistribution. The …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2012/01/25/a-note-on-redistribution/
Jan 17 2012
The sustainability of meat
There is an excellent post over at Offsetting Behaviour discussing the reasons why people go vegetarian, and discussing the separation of moral and allocative issues that lead to this choice. The way I see it, there are three main reasons why a person may go vegetarian – these can be mixed and matched of course, …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2012/01/17/the-sustainability-of-meat/
Nov 03 2011
The Economist on ‘job creation’ in the energy sector
A very timely opinion piece in The Economist here on how energy policy should not be confused as with job creation. Too often investment in the energy sector, especially around low-carbon energy, is held up as a way to ‘create’ jobs for the economy. This article dispels the myth: At the risk of being obvious: …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2011/11/03/the-economist-on-job-creation-in-the-energy-sector/
Nov 02 2011
Have you read the PREFU yet?
Below is an excellent guest post from Andrew Coleman on the PREFU – pointing out one of the weird assumptions that the government is relying on to “balance the books”. “Have you read the PREFU yet?” bellowed one of my colleagues as he sauntered down the corridor at Otago University last week. “Of course not …
Permanent link to this article: http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2011/11/02/have-you-read-the-prefu-yet/
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