Make your list

So it turns out that the NSA has been scooping up rather a bit of information about Version Verizon customers in the States. It hasn't been entirely a secret prior to now; it would be a bit surprising if the other phone companies didn't have other similar systems in place.

JD Tuccille notes that Americans travelling within America, but within 100 miles of the border, are getting stopped at checkpoints on the interstate for citizenship checks.

A couple of months ago, when Alex Tabarrok complained of his son's school being turned into a police camp, I noted some of the differences between American schools and the ones here, concluding:

You can choose to live like this too. Sure, New Zealand is getting worse, and it's definitely worse than some parts of the US if marijuana freedom is an important part of your bundle of liberties. But NZ is starting from a much better spot than the US, and it seems to be getting worse slower than other places.

Things aren't bad enough to leave yet? Fine. Freedom's a value, but so too are other things like distance from family and wealth differentials and access to Ethiopean restaurants. But write down today some bright-line rules that you think should trigger your future exit; it's easy to acclimatize to gradual changes for the worse.

If you really want to live free, write down your list of things that would actually be sufficient to trigger your emigration, then think about the places you might go that offer the best deal on the bundle of freedoms that matters most to you.

If you're instead happy getting consumption benefits from ranting about the deterioration of freedom in America, or from imagining that you'll be able to change things there, carry on.

Here in New Zealand, we should be especially vigilant against importing American spy regs. It's awfully tempting for some folks in Wellington to be seen to be team players by signing onto things the Americans want. I hope we're especially careful with the Telecommunications Interception Capability & Security Bill. New Zealand can become relatively more attractive simply by standing still.

Update: Emigration won't help you against this one. It might make things worse.

The National Security Agency has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other US internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by the Guardian.

The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed program called PRISM, which allows them to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats, the document says.

The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide Powerpoint presentation – classified as Top Secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims "collection directly from the servers" of major US service providers.

Although the presentation claims the program is run with the assistance of the companies, all those who responded to a Guardian request for comment on Thursday denied any knowledge of any such program. ...

The PRISM program allows the NSA, the world's largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.

With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

The presentation claims PRISM was introduced to overcome what the NSA regarded as shortcomings of Fisa warrants in tracking suspected foreign terrorists. It noted that the US has a "home field advantage" due to housing much of the internet's architecture. But the presentation claimed "Fisa constraints restricted our 'home field advantage'" because Fisa required individual warrants and confirmations that both the sender and receiver of a communication were outside the US.

I expect we instead need a Bruce Schneier guide on secure internet use.

Is there some Chinese version of Google I can flip everything over to? If somebody's going to be sniffing through all my email, family photos, chat sessions and the like, I'd sooner it be them. At least they're honest about it.

So where the bloody hell are ya?

Oliver Hartwich's column in the NBR reminded me of the old Australian tourism campaign that highlighted all the beautiful empty places there, then asked "So where the bloody hell are ya?"

Hartwich notes that New Zealand's openness to immigration and wide variety of skilled migrant categories for fast-tracked work visas that lead quickly to residence haven't turned into a flood of new immigrants; he says we gained a net 12 people in the year to January. Hartwich worries that the sales job we do for the tourists isn't the sales job we need to do to make people want to live here. "Clean and Green" is nice to visit. But there are lots of places like that.

New Zealand has far more to offer than its natural beauty. We should let the world know about it.

While the Australian tourism ads hide the ridiculously terrifying spiders, ours don't mention the cost of living. New Zealand is a very expensive place to live. Housing is exceptionally expensive for what you get by international standards. The government now seems committed to breaking the local urban planning nightmares that entrench high land prices. I hope they do a thorough job of it.

I agree with Oliver that the branding needs to change. New Zealand has an absolute advantage in beauty, but there are lots of other countries that have beautiful vistas. Our comparative advantage is our sane policy environment. We are growing insane more slowly than the rest of the world. There are threats to our "Outside of the Asylum" status. But, on the whole, we do well. Nobody here thinks the Prime Minister should have a button that lets him murder people, domestically or abroad, citizen or not, for example. And we don't have police checkpoints where thugs demand to know whether you're a citizen. New Zealand ranks as the most free country in the world. It's worth testing whether a campaign targeting that would work.

I met this morning with Chris Read, who took on my honours project this year to test the sensitivity of international migration to differences in measured freedom. That might be a first cut in seeing whether this kind of campaign could prove effective.

I worry that Americans claiming to love liberty, by revealed preference, might just really enjoy carping about civil liberties whenever their preferred party is in opposition. Few of the Democrats who hated what Bush did to civil liberties seem to mind when it's their guy with the murder-button; few of the Republicans rightly excoriating Obama said much when Bush started this all up. Moving, that's expensive, takes you far from friends and family, depreciates your social capital, and might cause an income drop. And being outraged on Twitter is more fun when the hated other team is in the same country. I'm starting to think that you people actually like US airport security because you get to complain about it when the other team is in office and fantasize about how your team would change things. Prove me wrong.

Oh - The Economist just listed New Zealand as the best place in the world for working women. We somehow managed this while having very free labour markets and minimal obligations placed on employers around maternity leave. Maybe New Zealand's been on the right track by subsidising daycare rather than making it really expensive to hire women of childbearing age. Again, we do well by being Outside of the Asylum.

Living free

Alex Tabarrok wrote a letter to his son's high school principal, hoping that the school will not become even more like a prison.

Thank you for requesting feedback about the installation of interior cameras at the high school. I am against the use of cameras. I visited the school recently to pick up my son and it was like visiting a prison. A police car often sits outside the school and upon entry a security guard directs visitors to the main office where the visitor’s drivers license is scanned and information including date of birth is collected (is this information checked against other records and kept in a database for future reference? It’s unclear). The visitor is then photographed and issued a photo pass. I found the experience oppressive  Adding cameras will only add to the prison-like atmosphere. The response, of course, will be that these measures are necessary for “safety.” As with security measures at the airports I doubt that these measures increase actual safety, instead they are security theater, a play that we put on that looks like security but really is not.

...

When we surround our students with security we are implicitly telling them that the world is dangerous; we are whispering in their ear, ‘be afraid, do not venture out, take no risks.’ When going to school requires police, security guards and cameras how can I encourage my child to travel to foreign countries, to seek new experiences, to meet people of different faiths, beliefs and backgrounds? When my child leaves school how will the atmosphere of fear that he has grown up in affect his view of the world and the choices he will make as a citizen in our democracy? School teaches more than words in books.

Tuesday I attended an lunch for international families at my five year old's elementary school. The school, like most NZ schools, is a series of buildings with no internal connections. So, kids run around between buildings pretty regularly. There's a low fence around the school property, but no real checks at the gates other than teachers having some idea of who might be parents. Visitors are asked to check in at the office; parents don't particularly bother though. And, part of the schoolyard is a short-cut from the University campus to a very good dim-sum place - I walked through pretty often even before the five year old attended.

Susan and I walked over to the building where the lunch was being held, bringing our pot-luck lunch contribution, said hello, and joined in for a pleasant lunch with other families. Nobody was checking that food was made in licensed kitchens. Nobody challenged us or checked ID. There are no metal detectors or security guards. There are no security cameras. Just peaceful people enjoying the kind of company that should be the birthright of everyone, and was common in the America of thirty years ago.

You can choose to live like this too. Sure, New Zealand is getting worse, and it's definitely worse than some parts of the US if marijuana freedom is an important part of your bundle of liberties. But NZ is starting from a much better spot than the US, and it seems to be getting worse slower than other places.

Things aren't bad enough to leave yet? Fine. Freedom's a value, but so too are other things like distance from family and wealth differentials and access to Ethiopean restaurants. But write down today some bright-line rules that you think should trigger your future exit; it's easy to acclimatize to gradual changes for the worse.

Previously:

• Reason to love NZ #57: Airports
• NZ airports (continued)
• ...and international travel is easy too
• Revealed preferences and liberty
• Libertarian diasporas
• Libertarian migration

Kiwi Freedom

New Zealand is the best country in the world if you weigh up a bundle of economic and personal liberties. I've argued this more than a few times, and I've teased American libertarians about their commitment to liberty if they're unwilling to consider emigrating here because of the drop in income or difficulty in convincing relatives to come along. This is no problem for a pluralist who weighs liberty up among other values, but it is a problem for folks who claim to put a very strong weight on freedom and who wear Live Free Or Die t-shirts.

For rather a while, we've had world economic freedom rankings that have placed New Zealand at or near the top. The Fraser Institute, the Cato Institute, and the Liberales Institut have today released an aggregate Human Freedom Index.

Using indicators consistent with the concept of negative liberty—the absence of coercive constraint—we have tried to capture the degree to which people are free to enjoy classic liberties in each country: freedom of speech, religion, individual economic choice, and association and assembly. The freedom index is composed of 76 distinct variables including measures of safety and security, freedom of movement, and relationship freedoms such as assembly or legal discrimination against gays. In this preliminary index New Zealand ranks as the most free country in the world, followed by the Netherlands and then Hong Kong. Australia, Canada, and Ireland follow, with the United States ranking in 7th place.

I have a few quibbles with the index (here is the full index), but I expect that they're all things that would be tough to incorporate with data for any large number of countries.

The index of government threats to individuals rightly includes extrajudicial killings, torture, political imprisonment and disappearances. But it doesn't include the number of individuals imprisoned for victimless crimes like prostitution and drug use. The US would fare poorly here, but New Zealand wouldn't do well on the drugs side either. Potential variables here could include an indicator for whether sex work is legal or illegal; an indicator for whether drug possession is legal or illegal; annual expenditures on drug enforcement; proportion of the prison muster whose offending relates to drug use or drug trafficking.

Threats to private property rightly include theft, burglary and inheritance takings, but miss civil asset forfeiture. I can't easily see how this could be quantified in a big cross-section.

One of the biggest regularly experienced differences in personal freedom between New Zealand and America is airport security. There is zero risk that this kind of thing happens in New Zealand. Again, I don't know how you could quantify this for any large number of countries.

Further, our police are unarmed and remain so despite the police rather frequently asking the government that they be allowed to carry weapons. One option that might capture the overall level of "police state" impositions would be to include the total police budget as a bad while also counting experienced crime rates as a bad. I suppose that America's ranking of 5 on "Extrajudicial killing" captures some of this (NZ scores a 10).

Finally, there's no accounting for the growing scourge of paternalistic regulation around alcohol, tobacco, and the like. Sin taxes as proportion of aggregate government revenues could be a start, and should be feasible, but it would be harder to get comprehensive data on whether you're allowed to brew your own beer, ease of starting a brewery, and restrictions on smoking on private property. I love that, in New Zealand, people can move really easily from goofing around in their garage with a completely legal home still or beer-making kit to selling their product to willing customers. In America...

The index a great start though, and I'm especially glad that this data has come out in this, the "setting honours projects" time of year. I'm consequently putting this up as a potential honours project; incoming Canterbury honours students, take note, but also note that this is my working draft of the project and that I might improve it based on comments.

The weight of freedom: economic and personal liberties in a gravity model of international migration.

We typically assume that people move from country ito country j because doing so makes them better off. But what precisely proves attractive? Karemera et al (2000) show that a modified gravity model can explain a decent share of international migration: origin-country population, destination-country income, and origin-country restrictions on emigration explain much. Lewar and Van den Berg (2008) show that institutions and distance also matter. Ashby (2007) shows that, within the United States, those states with greater economic freedom draw more migrants, but only because of increased expected income rather than because of the direct effects of freedom per se.

In this project, you will start by figuring out gravity models. Your supervisor has no experience with them either, but we can likely work things out.

Next, you’ll take the Fraser Institute’s newly created Freedom Index which compiles both economic and personal liberties to develop an aggregate freedom score: note that New Zealand is the best country in the world by this measure. The index compiles 76 separate variables relating to economic and personal liberties.

You will add these personal and economic liberties as explanatory variables into a gravity model of international migration to find out:

1. Does liberty enter positively into migration decisions? 
2. What’s the elasticity of migration with respect to economic and personal liberties?
3. What is the value of freedom? A standard deviation increase in personal or economic liberty counts as much as whatin a gravity model? I want you to be able to say something like “All else equal, a standard deviation increase in personal freedom [economic freedom] is the equivalent of reducing (or increasing, who knows) the distance between two countries by XXX kilometres or increasing the expected income jump from migration by $YYY.” How much less attractive would New Zealand be to international migrants were we to fall in this ranking? People deciding to emigrate often have choice among country destinations. Singapore is richer than New Zealand but ranks 39^th in overall freedom and scores only a 6.6 in personal freedoms. How much extra income does a move have to provide, in expectation, to make it worth dropping a point in personal freedom?

You’re going to have to sort out how to work with the OECD migration database, figure out what scope is feasible given that data within an honours project, and then run things. Do not select this project unless you have done reasonably well in undergraduate econometrics. But it’s going to be hellafun and I think it could be publishable if you do a decent job of it.

Initial Sources:

Ashby, N. 2007. “Economic freedom and migration flows between U.S. states”. Southern Economic Journal 73:3 (January), 677-97.
Karemera, D., V.I. Oguledo, and B. Davis. 2000. “A gravity model analysis of international migration to North America”. Applied Economics 32:13, 1745-55.
Lewer, J. and H. Van den Berg. 2008. “A gravity model of immigration”. Economic Letters 99:1 (April), 164-7.
OECD Migration Database available at http://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DatasetCode=MIG[or, if you can find a better database, go for it]
Watkins, T. and B. Yandle. 2010. “Can freedom and knowledge economy indexes explain go-getter migration patterns?” Journal of Regional Analysis & Policy 40:2, 104-15.

I love setting honours projects.

An endorsement

Forbes repeats what I've been arguing here for rather a while.

New Zealand ranks first on our list of the Best Countries for Business, up from No. 2 last year, thanks to a transparent and stable business climate that encourages entrepreneurship. New Zealand is the smallest economy in our top 10 at $162 billion, but it ranks first in four of the 11 metrics we examined, including personal freedom and investor protection, as well as a lack of red tape and corruption.

I wish that their rankings on personal freedoms were more granular; NZ and the US both get a 1st place ranking. On average, I'd put NZ a fair bit higher than the US, though recent referenda in Colorado and Washington State may yet wind up changing that.

I used to say that personal freedom cannot be the most important thing to you if you live in the US and haven't tried emigrating to New Zealand. It's fine to trade personal freedom for income, but not to do so while claiming the paramount importance of freedom. But if your bundle of freedoms includes marijuana, you're now better off moving to Washington State or Colorado.

I hope that New Zealand looks hard at marijuana legalisation, with regulated markets like those for alcohol. We can't be the outside of the asylum if America gets more sane than us on drug policy.