Discussion Tuesday
Let’s discuss this comic by Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal – as it is particularly good.
Just to kick you off, I’d say it definitely relates to both of these posts.
Study at Vic day today
It is study at Vic day today, so if you or someone you know is a Year 13 then the Year 13 needs to head up to Victoria University – so that we can convince them that they should study Economics. [Economics is up at10.25 at HM205 and 1.10 at HM104.]
But if you can’t make it, here is a brief plan of what I’m aiming to cover (with quotes at the top which I will throw in at random times).
Caution advised before using Tourism Industry Association numbers
The Tourism Industry Association New Zealand (TIA) has recently released an array of regionally-tailored media releases in conjunction with its Tourism 2014 Election Manifesto. Although we welcome healthy debate on economic issues in regional New Zealand, we are dubious of the methodology used to estimate regional tourism employment and advise extreme caution beforeutilising any of the TIA’s regional data.
The TIA’s report generates extremely unusual results. For example, the Association claims that 15%of Upper Hutt residents’ jobs depend on the tourism industry, while only 9% of residents’ jobs in Queenstown-Lakes District depend on tourism. This result defies logic and an assessment of the TIA’s methodology suggests that it should be taken with a grain of salt.
Epsom Property Rights
I had been thinking a bit about the apparent inconsistency between David Seymour arguing against intensification in Epsom whilst simultaneously being part of the ACT party, which wants to repeal the RMA is generally against regulations. I first read about it in Russell Brown’s post The Ides of Epsom.
Apparently, Seymour reconciles these things through appealing to an argument about “property rights”
What I’m arguing is that the people of Epsom have bought into certain property rights and the character of their community …
Now, most economists would agree that it is important to have a good system of property rights,so I was intrigued by this argument. I was going to examine this issue myself, but Eric Crampton has put this to bed quite succinctly in the tweet below. As Eric points out, unless there is a covenant in place, there is no “deal” that is being broken, which is what economists would be worried by.
@LouisMMayo @actparty @frankmcrae Only if you bought into a development with a restrictive covenant barring such devt. Otherwise, no.
— Eric Crampton (@EricCrampton) August 24, 2014
Update: Eric has a much fuller discussion on his blog here
Discussion Tuesday
Given I’m currently heavily heavily busy I’ll have to pull another comment from this Top 10 at 10
Economists don’t have universal truths, which is why I can’t understand how it is called a science. Without those universal truths all you can expect is opinions.
Questions:
- Does science have universal truths?
- Is it true that without universal truths all we have are opinions?
- If 2 is true, then is it a lost cause – or perhaps is there a mechanism that makes some “opinions” relatively more valid/persuasive/closer to “truth”
Note: I hope one of the other bloggers will cover off the National and Labour policy announcements – as I haven’t had any time to look at them at all – *wink wink*. If it doesn’t happen during the week, I’ll see if I can manage something in the future.
Green party costings
I kindly received an email via the Green party yesterday pointing me to the costings on their website. I see that the costings (here) were looked at by two independent economic consultancies – BERL and Infometrics (which is my workplace).
I haven’t been involved with any of it, or talked to any of the people involved. So I’m going to give my views. This is independent of any affiliations I have of course – on this blog I prefer to call a spade a spade rather than worry too much about what other economists think of me 😉
One thing I will point out, after reading the Infometrics report for the first time, is that they don’t say the things in the Green’s summary – but if you do a costing for a party, that is the way they will sell it. The BERL tables on the other hand do imply what the Greens take from them – and that is very disappointing as they are misleading.
Still I’m getting ahead of myself. Remember what this blog is like – it isn’t that policies are “bad” or “good”, those statements largely require value judgments. Instead, there are trade-offs, and also for certain policy aims different policies may be a more direct way of getting to those aims. Those are the types of constructs we’ll work over when looking at all party policies, and as a result the tone will sound critical irrespective of whether I like the policy or not – as almost all policies do have losers, which politicians understandably don’t want to talk about.
Something else I’ll note – if any other party does something like this, could someone send it to me. I am very busy at this moment and struggle to keep up with political news on top of the types of things I am focusing on for work 🙂