Today's Top 10 is a guest post from Eric Crampton, a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Canterbury. He blogs at the ever-popular Offsetting Behaviour.
As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to david.chaston@interest.co.nz.
And if you're interested in contributing the occasional Top 10 yourself, contact gareth.vaughan@interest.co.nz.
See all previous Top 10s here.
1. Unbelievable opportunities
Twitter had a blast making fun of Maurice Williamson's discussion of the potentials, and policy challenges, of 3D printing.
It will never transmute lead into gold. But ChemPrinting is likely to allow home manufacturing of chemical compounds sometime in the next few decades.
The coming disintermediation, when individuals can go directly to the printer for drugs or pharmaceuticals without having to see either a doctor or a dealer, is exciting. I'm looking forward to someday being able to print pseudoephedrine when I have a cold to get around Peter Dunne's ban on the only useful cold medication.
And there will be policy challenges for those who don't like that kind of freedom, and even for those who do.
We already have pretty serious problems with over-prescription of antibiotics yielding drug resistance. What happens when anybody can print the most restricted and powerful antibiotics?
But I am, on the whole, more inclined to agree with Gareth Hughes: 3D printing will offer some exciting economic opportunities.
2. Rational response
Transport Minister Michael Woodhouse proposes making cars a lot more expensive. He didn't frame it that way, but how else should we interpret a regulation that will phase in mandatory electronic stability control on all vehicles by 2020?
There are always trade-offs in these kinds of regulations. Those new and used cars that continue to be imported will be of a slightly higher quality than otherwise. But, by knocking a lot of used Japanese cars out of the market, the regulation will also encourage Kiwis to keep older and even less safe cars on the road for longer.
It's not clear to me that this will improve safety, once we account for that people will keep running their 2000 Hondas for longer if they can't get a cheap 2010 model in 2020.
3. Judging bias
If you thought that the judging in a lot of the Winter Olympics events was plain nuts, you're right. It isn't just a coincidence that skaters from countries sending judges to the Olympics earn higher scores than skaters without that advantage.
Economist Eric Zitzewitz shows that the processes for picking the judges matter for outcomes. Bottom line: don't let national sporting federations pick the judges they send to the Olympics. But culture matters too.
4. Have you ever been told to check your privilege?
If not, you're lucky. The latest trend among left-wing activists on the web is "intersectionality".
Be grateful if you've never heard that term either. Julie Burchill explains the insanity. Isn't the highest form of privilege having nothing better to worry about than whether some columnist has paid sufficient attention to every possible intersection of race, culture, ability, gender and sexuality?
5. What if it's legal?
Russell Brown, in the NZ Drug Foundation's Matters of Substance magazine, cross-published with The Fix, looks at the legalisation of cannabis in Colorado, Washington and Uruguay. Given public ridicule of Don Brash's pro-legalisation musings a few years ago, I don't expect it will hit the New Zealand policy radar soon.
6. Productivity questions
If we did legalise cannabis, should we worry about the productivity costs if some people decided to work a bit less and spend a bit more time at home playing video games? How about if obese people, or smokers, earn less than others? Maybe. But if we worry about those, why shouldn't we worry about your decision to take 5 weeks' leave instead of 4? Or that you told your employer that you don't want to put in overtime while your kids are young?
I argued here that these kinds of productivity costs really shouldn't count as policy-relevant externalities. Mind the Stalin Gap.
And if we think regulations on fatty foods are justified because of the costs to the public health system, shouldn't we tax risky sex to avoid the social costs of sexually transmitted diseases?
7. While we're talking about obesity, is it really the case that it's just cheaper to buy fatty foods?
Richard Meadows goes mythbusting. While he's comparing a bit of home cooking to takeaways, it's pretty clear that the barrier to healthy eating isn't income poverty but either lack of time or simply not knowing how to prepare food. I'm not sure fat or sugar taxes would solve either of those problems.
8. Statistics NZ releases on alcohol availability are a bit of a Rorschach test.
If you're from Alcohol Healthwatch, you worry about the increase in the total volume of beverages containing alcohol that were available in 2013. If you're me, you notice that there has been zero change in the amount of pure alcohol available per person. And that "aggressive marketing" can hardly be held to blame for this zero increase.
9. Oh, Christchurch.
I don't agree with everything in Barnaby Bennett's take on the Christchurch Rebuild, but he's not far out. Many of the anchor projects seem misguided at best. Meanwhile, the discussion document for the government's review of the EQC legislation, promised for mid-2013, still hasn't been released.
Wellington is next in line for a big shake. The politicians and bureaucrats who could fix EQC will all wind up having to deal with EQC if they don't fix it. They haven't yet. And they may yet wind up like some of my neighbours.
10. Finally, Chris Dillow discusses the latest findings from Andrew Clark.
Clark finds that, despite rising income inequality, inequality in happiness has been dropping. Why?
Absolute poverty has been declining, and all the extra hours that the highest earners have to work come with some pretty serious costs.
If happiness is what fundamentally matters, maybe growth is the best equalising policy after all.
19 Comments
Well a low value consumable is much lower cost to get through customs and can be used for multiple purposes thesefore is less time critical. As opposed to to high value specific part with a specific use and known customer. For a consumable the customs official doesn't necessarily know who the end user will be so less opportunity to screw a time critical, perceived deep pocketed importer.
And as for a corrupt supply chain it can be totally bypassed. If you are in the back of beyond or a country without a manufacturing base these things will be gold. Hence the military is right into it.
I remember being in a operation where a fairly simple spare part took months to get to the operation and had 17 signatures on the receipt. 3D printing will help that.
And think of the base resources it will save though more efficient designs.
Sometimes the glass is half full.
"If you are in the back of beyond or a country without a manufacturing base these things will be gold." I think you are seeing more in these than is there is. So for instance to make a high quality metal part that takes abuse, pressures, temperatures, stress?
Lets say a knife blade, or rifle barrel replacement, sure the 3D printer can make a part very accurately, but I wouldnt want to fire a gun with a barrel made via a 3d printer...
chain saw blades?
I mean the carrtrides are going to have to hold these materials in powder form and form these into one with the same mechanical strength and functionality as a solid metal.
I think there is a long way to go yet.
regards
"However, there was a breakthrough in the industry last year when GE Aviation said its new LEAP jet engine would use 3D printed metal fuel nozzles."
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/01/23/3dprinting-arcam-idUSL5N0KV3Y…
Exactly....much of the hype is around ppl not understanding technology, let alone 3D printing.
I mean, print gold off it????? print drugs?
As a point a 3d printer is $4.8k,
http://www.noelleeming.co.nz/shop/computers/printers/3d-printers/makerb…
and then there are the consumables, hardly a great buy to make a $200 Microwave with moving parts.
HP pillages you know for ink costing $50cents....
Ah yes moving parts.....so you print up all the bits and then have to assemble it yourself, while eyeing the $200 one on the shelf,
http://www.noelleeming.co.nz/shop/kitchen-laundry-appliances/microwaves…
Most ppl couldnt assemble a fork let alone a microwave.
Yes it makes so much sense.....really.
regards
Theer are many new entrants to the market depending on what type of printing you're wanting to do.
There is also a spooling device recently completed it's crowdsourcing that takes several common pallet types and creates the spool cable that serves as input into common cheap 3d printers. reduces the cost of printing by an order of magnitude.
There is also several 3d scan (and depth) devices that enable a physical object to be automatically scanned into computer form, then using the computer software, render a 3d print file.
It all depends on just what people want from their 3d print. At the moment, most arent water proof (they have tiny holes between the "dots") and the physical from the "dot laser" style printing is very limited. So models and artistic renderings are easy, although colour will cost much more.
Final product and product with tensile strength are possible but using more traditional CAM techniques not "printer" technology.
Same as always you want cheap, speed, flexibility, convenience, strength or accuracy (pick two...)
Your 2: you may well be right that this measure is likely to make the average age and safe-ness of the NZ car fleet as a whole worse in the short to medium term as people keep older cars on the road, before it gets better in the medium to long term as people are forced by the WoF requirements to get rid of their old cars and either buy a safer one or don't buy a replacement.
But isn't that preferable to the average age and safe-ness of the NZ car fleet never getting better?
Like all proposals to raise standards, that depends on whether you think it's better to
- allow people to choose and pay for poor quality - thus dragging down average quality - or
- not to allow them to own it at all if they can't or don't want to pay for high quality - thus raising the average quality, but worsening the distribution, of whatever good or service is in question.
Standards is an equality issue.
Everybody isnt expecting hyper-inflation, Austrians maybe? The Steve Keen's and Paul Krugman's of this world say deflation I believe. Oh and me too.
and as for commodities, which ones are falling? Looking a global markets they are flat or rising, but then we are already in a recession..
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=food-and-beverage-pric…
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=metals-price-index&mon…
Maybe he's mising the rise of fuel oil and its affects on the above?
http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=petroleum-price-index&…
I mean we can look back a decade at these rises, way before QE was in place.
regards
Thanks for compiling a Top Ten for us, Eric. I find your Offsetting Behaviour posts a useful complement to our discussions here so it's great having you just bring it all over here.
Word of advice: try not to mention local government, planning or affordable housing.
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