Posts by Eric Crampton
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The 5+ standard is a nice way of getting really big numbers on problem drinking. Sometimes they'll use a 7+ standard for adults, which feels more like binging.
The $4.8 billion "social cost of alcohol" figure that gets bandied about for New Zealand relies on an assumption that anybody who drinks more than 4 standard drinks on average per day gets zero benefit from any part of their consumption - that lets them count $700m in individual expenditure on alcohol as a social cost.
As a good rule of thumb, most stuff on alcohol is just nuts.
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Nice post, Emma.
Note that most of this lit calls binge drinking 5+ standard drinks in a single session. Or about two pints of decent beer.
The problems you note here are everywhere in the alcohol literature - it isn't just a failing around reporting around bisexual drinkers. Comorbidity between depression and alcoholism is pretty high, for example: a lot of those already clinically depressed take up alcohol as a form of self-medication, though not a particularly good form of self-medication. Some of the social ills tallied up for alcohol use often come down to the kinds of things that lead people to become heavy drinkers in the first place.
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I don't like the discretion that "drunk and disorderly" laws can provide the police. But it sure seems a more direct approach to hitting the real harms: throw drunk belligerent people in the drunk tank for a few hours and send them away with a fine.
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Speaker: The Voyage: On Interpreting and…, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I think I said rather that profits sent abroad are compensated for by that the owner sent money into the country in some prior period to pay for that current outflow.
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Southerly: Liveblog: Moving House (Literally), in reply to Hebe,
We were very very lucky - we had a house to which to flee where the water worked and the power was on. But even if we hadn't, being able to get out to a grocery store on the west side of town was getting to be pretty important. We lived out in Wigram for the month, borrowing the house of a colleague who'd headed with the family up to Auckland to work from there.
We had no clue which petrol stations were going to be open and which weren't, and no way of finding out. We knew we wanted to get to Wigram, so Travis/QE over to Johns and pray for petrol along the way. Dark station, dark station, dark station... then the ones that were sold out.
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Southerly: Liveblog: Moving House (Literally), in reply to Sacha,
Sacha, take off the ideology lenses for a minute.
The current regs work to screw poor people. There's lots of nice happy talk about green this and sprawl that, but the net effect of minimum lot sizes, mandatory low density, and tight urban limits is to push up lot prices. It has to. If cities can't grow out and can't grow up, then the lot prices just get bid up. This isn't ideology, and maybe I could wish things were otherwise, but I can wish for ponies too.
There are real and complicated problems about ensuring that new developments don't impose cost burdens on other ratepayers. Pavletich's preferred municipal utility districts are one solution, but I'm not convinced that they solve the problem of trunk sewerage or water infrastructure that's at capacity. But I also worry that whatever scheme you want to put in place to allow for development charges will be used by Councils for things other than cost recovery.
I'd push the button for radically simplified consenting approval processes, allowing much higher density within-town so people could build townhouses or apartments to bring lower-cost housing options to market, and congestion charging (dynamic time-of-day and road-specific pricing) on commuting so that whatever congestion problems urban sprawl might bring are internalised.
Who cares more about homeless people, Sacha? Somebody who wants to keep zoning tight so they can never afford a house, or somebody who wants to set policies to knock down land prices so they can (or so that Housing NZ can on their behalf)? Honestly, I am fed-up-to-fxxk with do-gooders who want to call me a jerk for spending less time on showing-I-care than on figuring-out-what-works.
And yes, Sacha, I still think it would have been a VERY VERY good idea to have short period after the February earthquake where petrol prices doubled, with excess returns put into the earthquake recovery fund. I'm betting you don't live here. But I live in Christchurch's east. We were stuck in South Brighton from the Tuesday of the quake until very early Friday morning, without water or power. We'd heard bits on the radio about petrol stations on our side of town all being closed for lack of power, and about ones on the other side of town being sold out of petrol because of panic buying by lots of folks who already had a half-tank.
If we'd temporarily hiked prices with a promise that they'd be back to normal the next week, that would have broken the stupid equilibrium we were in where people were afraid to let their tanks run down a bit because of insecurity of supply. As it was, the 5 hour commute home Tuesday night drained our petrol tank to under a quarter, so we were absolutely stuck given huge congestion everywhere around town and no open petrol stations on our side. We wound up piling the kids into the car very very early Friday morning after I'd used my bicycle to find a route out of Brighton that worked with each and every bridge across the Avon shut down. We made it to a petrol station in Hornby on fumes - the other ones along the way were sold out.
Sneer all you like and call me names like neoliberal. But it would have freaking worked.
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Hard News: Media Mathematics, in reply to Lew Stoddart,
The decision might not hinge on the data, but the political sale-job will. Govt decides to do X for whatever reason. Nobody's paying attention. Announces X along with some bogus stat that justifies the decision. Minor perking up of ears, bogus stat seems to make sense, everybody goes back to X-factor. Bogus stats are the bane of this country: serious thin-market problems.