Talkin' 'bout organs

I spent a bit of time talking with Kathryn Ryan on Radio New Zealand's Nine to Noon Monday morning about proposed changes to New Zealand's organ donation regime. The interview is here.


I hit the same topic earlier in the morning with Spanky at RDU's breakfast programme; the audio should be up eventually.

This weekend's Sunday Star Times should have a piece on organ donation and LifeSharers; I've sent through a few quotes for use and will look forward to seeing what the final piece looks like.

Small fixes for Christchurch

Without a time machine, we can't go back and revisit Christchurch Council's complete and utter failure after the September 2010 earthquake to ease up on land supply constraints so that the market could have responded after the February quakes by supplying places for people to live. It is completely nuts that Christchurch property values are now above their pre-quake 2007 peak given the massive reduction in the amenity value of living in Christchurch; it reflects that demand wasn't cut by nearly as much as supply and that the combination of regulatory barriers to supply and real time-to-build problems have more people left homeless by the quakes who want houses than there are available houses in Christchurch.

What can we do in the interim, given the very real world constraints of:

• Very limited Council capacity;
• Very real infrastructure constraints that can put limits on extensive brownfield densification;
• Time to build even if we moved right now to whatever the perfect zoning rules might be?

John Fountain, my colleague here at Canterbury, has been trying to help square the circle. How? John has a house in Governor's Bay that's larger than he needs. He wants to build a flat into the house. But it is against Council regulations to put in a flat. Christchurch Council has made it illegal for John, and people like him, to help to make more housing available quickly. Yes I am shouting. More people should be shouting. I'm surprised we haven't seen bricks going through planner windows. I'd certainly never condone such behaviour, but I'd understand.

Here's John, who's more typically Canadian in tone:

There are a few nice features of the new Christchurch City temporary accommodation scheme that permits the construction of an “accommodation unit”. An accommodation unit is  “a structure of no more than 150m² in gross floor area for the purpose of providing temporary residential accommodation. The unit may include facilities normally associated with residential accommodation such as a kitchen, living area, bathroom, toilet and bedrooms. Accommodation unit may also include a campervan or caravan.” There is a fast tracking system for getting pre construction advice and approval in 3 to 5 days  – for free. Of course all building consents need to be in place…but this isn’t necessarily a big hurdle for a well designed and well constructed unit.

The problem is that  “earthquake related” accommodation units are surrounded by a host of ancillary use constraints and regulations that strangle the (apparent)  intentions behind the scheme …: eg whatever faciltiies are constructed  must be temporary,  one-storey,  relocateable,  used only for accommodation by and for   households directly dislocated by the earthquake, and removed when their temporary need has dissipated or when CERA instructions say so or when CERA is disbanded four years away in April 2016.

John then slowly walks through how it's unlikely to be in any property owner's financial interest to build a flat into their existing property if it has to be pulled out four years later.

And, worse, the regulations require that the units accommodate specific persons who are earthquake-displaced. The thing about housing is that even if you accommodate somebody who isn't specifically earthquake-displaced, you're still making room for the displaced person to go where that newly accommodated person otherwise would have been. The first big tick-box on the Council consenting check-list requires you to indicate whether your flat would accommodate somebody whose house was destroyed, who's displaced because of reconstruction, who's displaced because of land remediation, or who's displaced because of risks posed by adjacent structures. You can't use it to accommodate somebody who's moved into town to run a big construction crane even though building something to accommodate that guy frees up a space for an earthquake-affected person elsewhere.

So John reckons he could, for about $110k of his own money, put in a 70 square meter 2-bedroom unit at his place that would rent out for about $300 per week. That makes sense if he can pay off the investment over a term longer than 4 years, and if he doesn't have to pre-specify, before he even builds the freaking thing, who'd live there and guarantee it would be an earthquake-affected person.

It would be very easy for Council to ease up on the current draconian regulations to let people permanently build self-contained flats into their existing properties. These would be dispersed around the city; you wouldn't expect to have large effects on trunk infrastructure. Council wouldn't have to spend anything - just get out of the way. Here's John again:

So…what do we conclude: willing buyers , willing seller but the transactions that would help alleviate accommodation shortages for the next few years are effectively stymied by inadequate regulations . Multiply this 1000 fold and you’ll see why “temporary”  inadequate approaches to zoning regulations – ones that don’t challenge the existing order – are a real bottleneck for dealing with rental accommodation shortages.

The plain fact is that the new  temporary accommodation orders, while well intentioned, simply avoid the underlying regulatory problems that limit the development of small scale private investments that could do plenty to alleviate our city’s accommodation problems. It’s just old wine in a new wineskin  – CERA and the city managers say we’ll facilitate something for you but then enclose it in a shrink wrap agreement that precludes it being used!

The temporary accommodation order itself would have been redundant had the zoning and development regulations been tweaked to permit residential activities to have secondary suites, as in Vancouver and many other Canadian municipalities – something that I am arguing in my other posts..

Here's John on how this kind of solution works in Vancouver. Here's more from John on secondary suites. Here's where John hit the kitchen "stumbling block" for developing a flat on his property.

Is there any plausible negative effect of allowing this kind of subdividing that outweighs the benefits? Why does Christchurch Council make it illegal for my colleague to help ease Christchurch's very real housing shortage? We have an earthquake-Czar who's supposed to be able to ride roughshod over Council stupidity to get things done. This is worth getting done. It would open up a pile of new rental properties that are currently in scarce supply, and it would do it faster than building new.

Every other city in the country should be looking hard at its existing set of regulations and weighing up just how much fragility they've built into their systems in case of sudden and devastating reductions in housing supply.

Update: See also John's post here that points to a City of Vancouver study on secondary suites.

Buttering cats

I'd not heard of the buttered cat paradox until commenter JC referenced it:

Frankly, both these scenarios horrify me so I guess we'll get some ungainly version of the the "buttered cat" bouncing between the two extremes.

I couldn't imagine a buttered cat would bounce, so I proposed the following experiment, the results of which (thought experiment conducted in my head) I also reported:

Hypothesis: A buttered cat will not bounce but rather will sit and lick itself until clean.
Materials: One cat. Butter.
Method: Butter cat. Drop from 1' height onto solid surface. Observe whether cat bounces or stops, sits, and licks self until butter is gone.
Observation: Cats do not being buttered. Pointy ends matter.
Conclusions: Do not butter a cat.

Turns out, somebody's actually run the experiment. Except using buttered toast. The cat wins.


As always, my commenters help me to learn things I didn't know before. Thanks!

Deterrent?

As tobacco excise rises, so too do incentives to grow illicit tobacco for excise-free sale.

I'm a bit surprised that the fine for rather serious excise evasion was this low:

A 60-year-old Motueka man has been convicted and fined $6000 for illegally growing tobacco leaf.

Lawrence Reginald Jury apppeared in the Auckland District Court on Monday charged with being a party to the unlawful manufacturing of tobacco.

In 2010, Customs officers searched Jury's address and found 4,790 kilograms of tobacco leaf.

Customs says that would represent almost $2 million in revenue if the tobacco leaf had been manufactured at the time.

Spokesperson Shane Panettiere says Jury was providing flue-cured leaf to a person who he knew was unlawfully manufacturing tobacco.

Ross Ferguson, 64, of Wellsford was convicted and fined $1500 for unlawfully manufacturing tobacco with Jury.

This level of penalty can be efficient if there are large nonpecuniary costs associated with any conviction and if the probability of being caught conditional on growing illicit tobacco is very high. I don't know how obvious illicit tobacco production is, nor do I know whether it's more expensive to hide than illicit marijuana production should enforcement ramp up with excise increases. But I am a bit surprised that Radio NZ gave this one the headline "Illegal tobacco crop ends in hefty fine". I'd have expected fines more proportionate to excise avoided - perhaps even multiples of the avoided excise if the probability of detection isn't that high. But maybe there were extenuating circumstances about which I'm unaware; there's suggestion that the growers intended the grown tobacco for other uses. @MarkHubbard reminds me that IRD will likely be pursuing separate action; I'll be interested to see what the final penalties are.

I still think it would be fun to try to benchmark the elasticity of illicit tobacco supply by comparing sales of loose tobacco with sales of filters or tobacco papers as excise changes, correcting for time trends in reported marijuana use. Alas, I don't think there's available data on consumer purchases of 'roll your own' supplies.

So we won't all be fired then

Whenever I read stories about the growth of MITx or other equivalents, I get a bit nervous about the long run for academics. I've consoled myself with that academia is really a rather more complicated product than just book-learning: there's all kinds of consumption and complex human capital formation bundled in with it; MITx can't easily replicate that bundle.

Noah Smith helps ease my mind.

Economists (including at least one in my PhD graduating class) have dedicated untold numbers of papers to showing that college doesn't produce useful skills. But I think that this is missing the point; useful skills, which you mostly learn on the job, are not the only valuable form of human capital. There are three extremely important forms of human capital that you can't acquire on the job:
1) Motivation,
2) Perspective, and
3) Human networks.
These, I believe, are the types of capital that college is designed to build, both in Japan and in the United States.

Motivation, in Noah's setup, isn't about showing that you can complete arbitrary tasks on a deadline (like assignments); rather, it's about building a network of people who will smack you around if you slack off.

Perspective is what you get when you're immersed in a rich environment different from the one you came from - you learn from others just what it is that you want to do. I knew going into university what I didn't want to do: farming and working outdoors where temperatures can hit -40. I didn't know that I wanted to be an economics prof until a few years into study.

And the human networks are self-explanatory.

MITx can replicate the book learning. If it's awfully careful in how it sets up local tutorial groups, it might be able to replicate some of the motivation aspect, but not unless you can get a substantial number of high quality students to flip from traditional universities to the MITx model. I have a harder time seeing how it replicates the "figuring out what I want to do with my life" aspect of university; human network formation too requires some push from the university equilibrium to the MITx equilibrium.

College is useless as a mechanism for signaling intelligence. It's probably somewhat useful for signaling the ability to work hard and resist temptation, at least in the U.S. where many colleges require hard work (but not in Japan). It is about consumption, but it's too concentrated in time to be mostly about consumption. College is really about human capital, of the kind not conveyed in classes - motivation, perspective, and networking. Rather than a hideously, inefficiently expensive signaling mechanism, college is an ingenious technology for building the kinds of human capital that are scarce among smart people in rich countries.

The biggest risk isn't from students wanting to switch from universities to online options like MITx, it's from governments deciding that massive subsidies to help high human capital types better network with each other isn't worth the public investment. The best counterargument is that publicly funded tertiary education with a strong bias towards subsidizing lower income students directly rather than having broad-based tuition subsidies or interest-free loans is probably the best way of facilitating upwards mobility among kids born in lower deciles but with higher innate ability. Noah's 'Perspective' argument here seems pretty critical. If you go to trade school to become a mechanic, you learn to be a mechanic, but you don't get exposure to the wider range of potential life options.

Oh, Christchurch

As of November last year, more than 6,500 residential properties in Christchurch were in the red zone, indicating the land is not suitable for rebuilding. Residents have to move elsewhere. More sections in Southshore were red-zoned last month. Other properties have been red-stickered, indicating that the building itself is dangerous and not suitable for current habitation; some of those will be in the red zone, but others can be repaired or rebuilt on-site. Some of the red-stickered properties will be multioccupancy units, like the downtown apartment buildings now coming down.

We need a lot of new houses in Christchurch.

But, we're still exporting houses:

This red-zoned Burwood house will be the first of 50 an Auckland businessman will roll out of Christchurch on a truck from this weekend.

Quake Proof Solutions director Gary Muir is recycling and relocating red-zoned homes to minimise demolition waste and fill housing shortages in the South Island. 

He is moving his first two to Gore, but anywhere is possible. In the next year, he plans to move at least 50 houses. 

''Wherever someone wants a house, that's where we'll put it, " he said. "We're looking to move as many as we can."

Insurers and the Earthquake Commission have deemed at least 6000 homes too costly to repair.

Insurance companies needed the land cleared for rebuilding but instead of demolishing, sold them to Mr Muir to take away.

"This is mutually beneficial, " Mr Muir said. "We can recycle about 90 per cent of a house, for half the cost of rebuilding.

"It's either this, or we put a bulldozer through the middle of it." 

Cheap land, resource consents and stable sections were easier to find outside Christchurch. But Mr Muir would try and make any site work, even in the city.

..."We've had a lot of paperwork stoppages, " he said. "Every day they're changing the documents."

...He was one of the lucky few to gain accreditation for red-zone house removals. It took him 13 months to get the tick of approval for his first project. [emphasis added]

And, we've hardly started building replacements:

The first three months of this year saw local councils issue consents for just 60 new homes in the region, double the 30 issued in the last quarter of 2011, according to Statistics New Zealand.

Between the first quakes in September 2010 and the end of April this year, consents for 152 quake-related rebuilds were issued in Canterbury, as well as 149 consents for portable homes in temporary villages.

...The total number of homes needing to be rebuilt in Canterbury will depend on how many insurers deem uneconomic to repair, and these will join red- zoned homes and dangerous dwellings already brought down on the rebuild list.

Breaking down the consent data for permanent earthquake rebuilds month by month does show a shaky but upward trend:

2011 May 5 June 8 July 8 August 5 September 4 October 13 November 10 December 6 2012 January 17 February 24 March 16 April 17

We have to be careful to distinguish between the Stats NZ series on earthquake-related new building, cited above, with the total number of new dwelling units approved: Christchurch City had 1271 new dwelling units approved in total from April 2011 through April 2012, the most recent available stats. But it can take a while for approvals to turn into houses.

It really isn't hard to connect the dots from Council taking way too long to allow more subdivisions to current housing shortages.

Meanwhile, Environment Canterbury is barring people from installing logburners in rebuilt homes. ECan has been moving for a while to reduce the number of logburners in town in order to reduce the smoky smog that can sit over town in winter; you're not allowed to put logburners in new houses, but houses with existing logburners can keep and update them. Newer low-emission burners are supposed to be only a few years away; ECan might let people start putting those in when they're available. But, until then, you're barred.

I can understand ECan worrying that manufacturers might not be in a hurry to release worse-performing but lower emission logburners if they can still sell the old ones. But I would have thought the better way to keep the incentives straight would be to mandate the stricter standard only when some manufacturer brought a new compliant burner to market. That manufacturer, or importer, would then have a temporary monopoly. It would take a little while longer for older burners to cycle out of use and for emission levels to drop off, but we need also to put some value on the security of supply a logburner provides when earthquakes or heavy snow can knock the power out.

The Press's editorial nails this one:

The earthquakes have provided an opportunity to hasten the phasing out of inefficient woodburners which ECan has taken by sticking to the policy it has had since 2002 of not permitting woodburners in new homes.

This means that ECan is refusing to allow homeowners who had a woodburner and whose homes have been destroyed by the quakes to install another one in any new home they build. For many with access to a supply of cheap woodfuel the policy risks adding additional financial hardship to the many others they are already facing.

ECan said last week that its policy could change in future but this would not be until ultra-low emission woodburners were developed. That is not likely to happen for several years. As a practical concession to present problems it is useless.

Even the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, recognises the inadequacy of ECan's response.

...Something other than continuing the ban adopted before the earthquakes would show that ECan truly understands that circumstances have changed.

Why not just deem on-site earthquake rebuilds to be a continuation of the existing consent for ECan purposes?

People with destroyed houses are caught by pre-quake regs that sought to slow any urban expansion; those able to rebuild are caught between pre-quake regs designed to slowly phase out logburners and power prices that keep ramping up as building new hydroelectric power dams for lower cost power supply seems effectively banned. It'll be interesting to see what power prices look like in a dry winter after everyone's switched to heat pumps if we've not increased supply.

It's hard to tell what's satire

Joe Bennett wonderfully sends up Turia's army. New Zealand's Associate Health Minister in charge of tobacco eradication recently suggested that Kiwis violate the traffic code by honking their horns at people seen smoking in cars carrying kids.

[S]he proposed other drivers put social pressure on those smokers.

"Maybe one of the ways we could do better is to encourage people who see people smoking in cars, tooting to them and doing the 'you shouldn't be doing that, mate' [gesture]."

She wagged her index finger in a scolding gesture to demonstrate how this could be done.

In the accompanying NZ Herald web poll, 22% agreed they'd honk to shame a smoker; a further 12% said they might; 39% worried about being opening themselves up to road rage. A spokesman for ASH downplayed road rage fears while endorsing Turia's suggested honking and finger waggling. I would love to have a high-res version of Turia waggling her finger disapprovingly. I could put it in every tobacco post henceforth.

Here's NZTA advice about using your horn:

The horn should only be used as a reasonable traffic warning. It should not make an unnecessary or unreasonably loud, harsh or shrill noise.

Joe Bennett goes the step further:

Sometimes, and you'll find this hard to believe, the smoking murderers kick back, blasting their own horns and giving me the fingers. Well they don't scare me. I follow them, stick right on their bumper, giving them a blast every few seconds to let them know I'm not giving up. I follow them all the way home.

"That's where they live, kids," I say when they pull up. "Remember that address, eh. " I don't have to say any more.

An evening or two later the kids don their little brown shirts and announce that they and their classmates are just going out to play for a bit. "Good on you, kids," I say, "and here's a snack for the road," and I hand them a tray of rotten eggs that I've been saving specially.

"Oh and no throwing stones," I say. "They can do terrible damage to windows."

Off they go, my little darlings, and my heart just swells with pride and with love.

Do read the whole thing.

When I first read it, I didn't know that Turia had actually recommended finger-waggling and tootling; I thought the whole thing was satire of a possible plausible next ridiculous thing Turia might recommend.  And so I was amused that commenters were taking it seriously. But the only satire was Bennett's purported endorsement of the suggestion.

Meanwhile, a Twitter feed purporting to be the Twitter arm of a new anti-tobacco "wiki"* site started providing some rather absurd offerings. I wasn't sure if the Twitter feed and the wiki were set up to make the anti-tobacco movement seem a bit silly. It looks now like the wiki is real while the Twitter feed is a parody. Again, it's hard to tell anymore. The Wiki warns about libertarians:

The tobacco industry has increasingly aligned itself over the last few years with a growing number of libertarian bloggers, think tanks and activists, who in turn argue that individual liberty and freedom to choose where to smoke should be more important than further restrictions on smoking.

Suspicious, that. Aligning themselves with those who are philosophically predisposed to valuing individual rights instead of, well, people who would prefer to waggle fingers and tootle horns.

*Is it still a wiki when you have to apply for editor rights and sign a bunch of disclaimers? It's hard to imagine that the same folks who set up the fake Twitter feed wouldn't have had an awful lot of fun with a wiki that didn't have that restriction, so it's not nuts that they have that restriction. But is it still a wiki?