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| Dr Bryce Wilkinson | Senior Fellow | bryce.wilkinson@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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The current legislation is overly prescriptive. Businesses and workers must comply with a plethora of procedures. The incentives to ensure that the benefits to those affected exceed the costs seem to be very weak. Expressed differently, well-being is not a focus. (A benefit is an increase in well-being, as perceived by the person affected. A cost is a negative benefit. So, when perceived benefits exceed the costs, well-being is improved. People who oppose cost-benefit analysis do not understand that they thereby oppose well-being assessments.) The focus on greater safety as a goal in its own right is of the same ilk. Safety contributes to well-being, but not in lock-step. People who drive cars put themselves at risk because what they are doing improves their well-being. As do those who play body-contact sports, ski, or work in risky occupations. There is substantial economic literature on how much more workers get paid for riskier work. It is significant. The trade-off is real. Greater safety is not the only goal. What this means is that businesses forced to make jobs safer will find themselves paying workers less. This is another trade-off. Businesses can compete for workers by offering a range of options between wage rates and safety. Workers can choose according to their own risk-wage rate preferences. In contrast, the current system has a silo safety focus. It is not a well-being focus. For example, the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015) aspires that: “… workers and other persons should be given the highest level of protection against harm to their health, safety, and welfare from hazards and risks arising from work or from specified types of plant as is reasonably practicable”.
Worker preferences are irrelevant, and determining what is “reasonably practicable” is a can of worms. So how did New Zealand get to this point? In 1974, government replaced a well-behaved tort system for penalising negligence by a no-fault Accident Compensation scheme. That was bad for safety. So what has evolved to restore business liability is the current wasteful regulatory excess. That multitude of wasteful orange traffic cones is just the most visible aspect. That is why the Government’s announcement last week is so welcome. |
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| Dr Michael Johnston | Senior Fellow | michael.johnston@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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This week, the New Zealand Initiative released a new report, exploring the implications of AI for education. Welcome to the Machine analyses the risks utopian thinking about AI poses to education. But the report does not take a dystopian view. It also explores promising potential for teachers to use AI productively. Some AI enthusiasts have argued that AI can free young people from the need to commit knowledge to memory. Instead, they believe, students can focus on critical thinking and creativity. This is superficially plausible. Notwithstanding the odd hallucination, AI can produce a factual summary on just about any topic. Unfortunately, the idea that AI can liberate students from the hard yards of learning basic knowledge is as misguided as it is appealing. The things that the techno-utopians would like them to focus on – critical thinking and creativity – depend on knowledge. When we commit knowledge to long-term memory, we build cognitive schemas. Our schemas collectively provide us with a working model of the world. We draw upon that model constantly when we think. When we hear a claim, we test it against our knowledge schemas, using reason, to see if it is likely to be true. The more we know, the more likely we are to be able to sift truth from falsehood. Knowledge, then, is the raw material for thinking critically. Creativity also depends on cognitive schemas. When we think creatively, we introduce an element of randomness into our schemas. Much of the time the results will be no good. But occasionally, we come up with a gem of an idea. Our knowledge schemas enable us to distinguish our good ideas from our bad ones. The more knowledge we have, the more likely it is that our creative endeavours will be successful. Rather than using AI as a substitute for learning knowledge, its greatest promise in education is as a virtual teaching assistant. Rather than giving students ideas, it might coach them to improve their own, by asking probing questions. It might provide formative feedback, helping to move students towards their learning goals. Like any teaching assistant, though, AI must be supervised by teachers. Used well, AI will provide powerful support for students and teachers alike. But we must not allow personally held knowledge to be supplanted by overreliance on technology. Dr Michael Johnston's report, Welcome to the Machine: Opportunities and risks of generative AI in education, was published on 17 June. |
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| Dr Oliver Hartwich | Executive Director | oliver.hartwich@nzinitiative.org.nz | ||||||||||||
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When it comes to international diplomacy, few nations can match New Zealand’s knack for unintentional hilarity.
This week, we have once again found ourselves in the global spotlight, thanks to a series of aviation mishaps. The latest chapter involved our Prime Minister. Christopher Luxon is a man keen on making global connections, but his travel plans keep getting disrupted by faulty aircraft. The situation was made even more absurd by the fact that Luxon has a previous career as the CEO of an airline. Luxon’s mission to spread Kiwi ingenuity to Japan was grounded by the Royal New Zealand Air Force’s antiquated Boeing 757. It became stranded in Papua New Guinea after the plane’s fuses kept playing up. Incidentally, the only other person still flying a 757 seems to be Donald Trump. But his personal “Trump Force One” seems to be in better shape. And its seatbelts and fixtures are 24K gold-plated, too. In a way, the RNZAF’s aircraft is a fitting metaphor for our nation: charming, quirky, a bit dysfunctional, yet somehow still captivating to the rest of the world. But here is the real punchline: the RNZAF proudly displays the emblem of the kiwi as its logo, a bird rather ill-suited for any aerial endeavours. After all, a kiwi’s chances of achieving flight are about as slim as finding a fighter jet in our Air Force. Or even a functioning Boeing 757. Other nations’ air forces boast fearsome predators like falcons, eagles, and hawks emblazoned on their fighter jets. New Zealand’s air force, meanwhile, has chosen a bird that could not fly if its life depended on it. It is all a contradiction in terms, like much else about New Zealand these days. Not so long ago, we had a Foreign Minister with an aversion to travel. Now we have a Minister of Finance who has no money. And let us not forget our Minister for Regulation who likes nothing more than deregulation. It all fits with our famous “Yeah, nah” response, a linguistic quirk that allows us to agree and disagree in the same breath. It can be helpful in international diplomacy, even though it may occasionally lead to misunderstandings. But by embracing such contradictions, we show the world we are unafraid to poke fun at ourselves. We can only wonder what the Prime Minister would have told his Japanese hosts about his odyssey once he eventually made it to Tokyo. But he probably thought to himself, “I should find the RNZAF someone who knows how to run an airline.” |
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