Why can’t we all just get along

Incorporating a modest sort-of book review of The Company of Strangers, by Paul Seabright, and The Spirit Level, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett.

Hmmm. This has turned out to be longer than expected. A short summary is called for:

• Trust between citizens in society is crucial to make life pleasurable.
• Trust in strangers is also crucial for the functioning of the economy – buying things you want depends on trading with strangers to an extent unprecedented in history.
• Trust is fragile and undermined by substantial differences between citizens, including income inequality. New Zealand has quite a high level of income inequality according to recent OECD figures.
• If trust is so important, then we want to craft public policy in ways that increase societal trust. Income redistribution is certaintly going to part of this, but there must be more to the picture too. The challenge is that these are complex, long-term, cultural issues and cause and effect are highly murky.

There you go. On with the show.

Trust and be damned

Trust in your fellow citizens is really helpful in an enormous number of ways. If you doubt this, consider all the effort you go to every single day because you can not be sure that someone else won’t burgle your house while you are out, or steal your car, or take your bag or your phone from where you leave it on the table in that cafe you go to. And imagine how much easier life would be with fewer ID checks, security scans, credit checks, locks or keys, and less fraud, theft, or violent crime, let alone less fear. What would it be like if you could really trust your neighbours, let alone those with whom you have more distant social connections?

I treat “trust” as being a firm and justified belief in the reliability, truth and good intentions of a fellow citizen. My hypothesis is that societies where people trust each other more create fewer conflicts between citizens, minimise protective behaviours (like locking doors) that are only necessary because of a lack of trust, and resolve conflicts that are created much more easily and positively. There is less mis-understanding, more helping out your fellow humans, and a higher level of what we might call “societal empathy”, which I think of as the ability to understand, share, and act as if you care about the feelings of someone else with whom you share space in society. As a result of this enhanced low-level (person to person) co-operation, there is less need for higher level (government to person) intervention, and society just becomes a nicer place to be.

I have read a couple of interesting books recently that touch on this issue of societal trust. Both authors argued that trust in society can not be taken for granted, and is undermined by substantial differences between citizens. This makes sense to me. You can’t trust people that you don’t empathise with, and empathy requires having some interaction with other people or some shared experience that makes you feel like you have something in common, and makes you willing to do something to help another person.

Friends with benefits

Paul Seabright’s “The Company of Strangers” tells the remarkable (but mostly unremarked) tale of how much your life depends on getting along with strangers. Mr Seabright thinks that we have reached the point where even the most basic activity relies on a web of international co-operation that functions without anyone being in charge overall. Just think about how you get the food you eat (probably in a supermarket – grown, processed and brought there from all over the world by people you will never meet), the clothes you are wearing (ditto – and even more complex than fresh food because it has a longer shelf-life), and the device you are reading this blog post on (likely built in Asia to a foreign design with components from all over the world, and charged using electricity brought to you through a complex process run entirely by strangers who have no idea who you are, or what you are using their product for).

Given how well this system works most of the time, one could be forgiven for thinking that it is the natural order of things. Mr Seabright says otherwise, reviewing the evolutionary history that has enabled humans, alone amongst all species, to come to trust strangers enough to co-operate on everyday activities to such a extraordinary extent. For most of human history strangers represented danger; they were to be avoided or treated with grave suspicion. Trading between unrelated people was a difficult and unpredictable business, and meetings between strangers could just as easily end in violence as in a mutually satisfactory exchange. But, once we really got the hang of it – which has only been in the last few hundred years – this trust and the trading that has resulted has enabled remarkable improvement in people’s lives all over the world, (as well, of course, as leading to a bunch of other developments of more questionable social value).

The trust system relies on a network of “institutions” – in the economist’s sense of sets of rules, both formal and informal that govern social behaviour – that mean that humans generally treat strangers as honorary friends. We are prepared to deal with strangers in accordance with the rules in the expectation that they too will follow the rules, and the rules or institutions that have been developed are robust, i.e., reliable enough to be taken for granted most of the time, and self-reinforcing to a large extent, i.e., in a variety of ways citizens punish those who betray others’ trust.

The economic system also works because no one really has to think too deeply about the systemic consequences of the actions they take in their little piece of the world. People proceed simply to make decisions that seem to them the right ones within a framework of rules set by the society in which they dwell, and the insititutions as a whole emerge from that behaviour – what we might call “short-sighted co-operation”. To use the example of a trading situation, I can sell you whatever it is that I make without worrying too much about the use you are going to put it to. As the extreme cases, Mr Seabright talks about firms that make cluster munitions, or people who work in nuclear weapons laboratories. In both cases, employees simply do not spend a lot of time considering the negative consequences of their jobs, but like most others, they focus on doing the job they have as best they can. These blinkers are not required in order to make the economic system work, but they do make it a lot more effective because they enable a lot more trading to happen. Consider the time and difficulty of buying a television on hire purchase (where you need to establish your creditworthiness) compared with paying cash for the same item (where you are relying on the credibility of the bank that issues your currency). If one had to be reassured of the good intentions and positive impact of all buying and selling, our market system would work vastly less effectively.

Mr Seabright discusses the limitations of the trust system. It can break down because trusted people turn out to be untrustworthy, or because the short-sighted co-operation leads to society doing things that are unsustainable for society as a whole. He talks about a wide variety of different forms of societal co-operation – cities, environmental issues, the market system itself, firms and families, the growth of knowledge, and also about social and economic exclusion in the form of unemployment, poverty and illness – and discusses why they have emerged, the constraints and difficulties they present, and the prospects for the future.

The book talks in some detail about the system of money and about banking, and discusses in particular lessons that can be drawn from financial crises. There is a particular application to the events of 2007 when, as the real estate market turned sour in the United States, banks quickly became extremely unwilling to lend money to each other, uncertain as to the others’ exposure to what were sure to be substantial property losses. The speed with which the disaster evolved and the extent of the damage it did – leading to both wide-ranging (and expensive) intervention by the US Federal government in the financial markets, and enormous financial losses for shareholders in affected banks – just emphasises how amazing it is that we put so much faith in the financial system as a normal part of our everyday lives. If my experience is typical, we do not really think at all about the risks we are taking in depositing our money in a bank, or borrowing someone else’s money via a bank to buy something that we want without having to save what it costs, like a house.

In the last section of the book, Mr Seabright discusses the development of collective action that societies take to respond to some of the perceived short-comings of the market system, both within their own borders, and in co-operation with other nations. And in the last twenty pages or so, he discusses how fragile this reliance on strangers is, particularly in terms of relations between states and what the prognosis is for the future.

Mr Seabright’s book is very good on economics: indeed, the book is in part a clever re-telling of basic micro-economic theory – when markets work well, when they don’t, what can be done about it in either case. His book is less focused on issues apart from market-based exchange, like the importance of trust and reliance on strangers for community life and the enjoyability of life in cities.

Nevertheless, I think his basic point is extensible beyond economics: modern life requires thorough-going trust of strangers, so modern life is going to get more and more difficult if people trust each other less. If this is right, then public policies that increase societal trust could be useful and indeed increasingly necessary.

Esprit de corps

“The Spirit Level”, by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett focuses on income inequality in societies, and links higher levels of income inequality with a very wide range of societal ills. Their basic point, substantiated with a great deal of data, is that societies with less equal income distributions do worse in a very great number of ways. They have worse mental and physical health, higher rates of obesity, lower life expectancy, worse educational performance, and higher rates of teenage pregnancy. They are also more violent, more crime ridden and suffer from less social mobility. This is shown both across countries and, for many of the same measures, across states in the United States with varying levels of income inequality.

Note that the negative effects referred to are not because countries or states are poorer than their comparators. They relate just to the level of income inequality, regardless of the total income level. Higher incomes are associated with higher life expectancy, to take just one example, but at any level of income, a less equal income distribution will mean lower life expectancy for the population. In this way the social ills tracked are shown to be related directly with income inequality.

Also note that the negative effects of income inequality are not just confined to the poor. It is true that, on many of the measures, poorer people in a society do worse, with lower life expectancy and higher rates of imprisonment, for example, that those with higher incomes. But, from the data, even those on high incomes are better off in a society with a more equal distribution of income. Greater equality helps the poor most, but helps all levels of society to some extent (except perhaps, say the authors, those who are very rich).

The scale of these differences between societies is enormous. As the authors say (p181 in my hard-back version), across whole populations, rates of mental illness are five times higher in the most unequal compared to the least unequal societies. People are five times more likely to be imprisoned, six times as likely to be clinically obese, and much more likely to be murdered. For all of a large number of social ills, living in a society with more equal income distribution means you will be socially far better off.

Put another way (p261), if the United States were to reduce its income inequality to about the average of the four most equal of the rich countries (Japan, Norway, Sweden and Finland on The Spirit Level data), rates of mental illness and obesity might be cut by two-thirds, teenage birth rates could be more than halved, prison populations could fall 75%, and people could live longer while working around two months less a year. At the same time, the proportion of the population feeling they could trust others might rise by 75%, with obvious positive consequences for the quality of community life.

Interestingly the book also refers directly to the impact of higher income inequality on trust within societies. There is long-term evidence quoted in the book that greater levels of income inequality reduce the extent to which people feel they can trust their fellow citizens and the extent to which they are willing to look out for them. In the terms of my hypothesis, greater income inequality makes citizens feel they have less in common with their fellow travellers, and this makes them less inclined to do anything to help others out.

How much equality

Usefully , there has been some news media recently about New Zealand’s relative level of income inequality. An OECD study has found that New Zealand and Sweden (!) have bolted up the international rankings for income inequality in the last 25 years. Most of the change apparently happened in the period from 1988 to the mid-1990s, with the nation above the OECD average level of inequality since then despite incomes becoming slightly less unequal since 1995.

The summary of the OECD study itself says several interesting things:

• Income inequality has slightly declined since 1995 after growing sharply for the ten years before that. There has been income growth for all, but the middle class has been doing particularly well, reducing inequality in the income distribution.
• Poverty has grown throughout the last 25 years to levels similar to the rest of the OECD (about 11% of people are now living on less than half of the median income, which is the definition the OECD uses for poverty).
• In terms of distribution, the proportion of children living in poverty has grown to 15% – at the higher end of OECD figures – and poverty among younger adults has also grown. Poverty amongst the elderly, on the other hand, is amongst the lowest in the OECD, at 2%.
• Poverty is highly correlated with unemployment. Almost half of people living in households where no one works are poor, compared with 4% of households in poverty if there are two or more people working.*

If societies with more equal income distributions are better places to live, then New Zealand became a less nice place to live through until the mid-1990s, and since then it has slightly improved. I guestimate that the sharp decline in equality after 1985 was caused in large part by sharply rising unemployment, which peaked in the late 1990s and then fell away to very low levels in the 2000s.

[then]

In terms of politics, the extent to which people think increasing inequality is a good thing or a bad thing varies quite a lot between even right-thinking individuals. And many people don’t like the idea of not liking inequality because it implies that they have to do something about it – especially by taking money from people who have more and giving it to people who have less.

I think some inequality is useful and important, but too much is likely to be bad, in the sense of doing more harm to society than good.

The economically useful part is when differences in income between different people reflect differences in the value of different jobs. These differences help guide people in making choices about what work they want to devote themselves to. Surgeons command higher salaries than baristas in large part because society is willing to pay more for quality surgery than they are for quality coffee. The differences in salaries between these two groups will help ensure that roughly the right number of people work as surgeons relative to the number that work as baristas. Income differences can be pro-social, i.e., they work for the good of society, in these circumstances.

Human beings, however, seem to have very strong views about fairness that limit appropriate distributions of income between different people. Some concept of fair play is built firmly into society, and so it seems normal for people to express concern and want to do something politically about income differences that are not justified or justifiable (my hypothesis is that this justification is made or should be made on the basis of the usefulness of a particular income distribution, from a society-wide point of view). We seem willing as a society to tolerate a level of income inequality, but once it gets out of hand, there is strong societal discomfort, condemnation, and public policy action to put in place a more even distribution. A lot of the debate that we see about economic policy seems to operate in these terms. Note that this is in a country where people generally do not get paid much by rich world standards, where the salary rates for the best paid do not reach the stratospheric levels of other nations, and where the systems for income redistribution are already very extensive.

What is to be done

If we are going to make public policy with a closer eye on how it might affect the level of trust between citizens, it is clearly going to require a much better understanding of what makes people care about others. As Rudyard Kipling wrote in “We and They”, quoted in The Spirit Level “All the people like us are We, and every one else is They”. If it is a good thing for society that everyone look out for each other more, how should it set things up so that people empathise with their fellow citizens?

The making of “they” can be incredibly powerful and I you see it all around me all the time. A person who receives public assistance is either one of us fallen on hard times, as the Dom Post had it the other day, or they are one of them – a work-shy dole-bludger in need of harsh treatment for his/her moral failings. Mr Seabright recounts an ingenious experiment from Benin in 2001 (p294) that demonstrated that voters would prefer policies that enriched them personally at the expense of neighbouring citizens over policies that would be of more general benefit to the nation. The tendency for politics especially to tribally appeal to supporters and define all others as different and dangerous is a constant threat even in liberal democracies like the one in which I am fortunate enough to dwell.

So the question is how do we encourage people in society to look out for each other, and not just those who are the same as us (although that would be a good start), but others who are different but not less worthy of our respect and, yes, assistance, because of that.

On my read, both books are less good on solutions and the policy agenda than they are on establishing their basic points. I am sure this reflects the long-term, uncertain and difficult nature of these problems – which therefore means they are more amenable to political solutions rather than careful policy analysis that weighs up the consequences of alternative approaches.

But from the books, some practical steps to build a more trusting society might include:

• Redistribute earned income, i.e., try to ensure that people get a more equal recompense from working. The most obvious way to do this is with policies that reduce unemployment, since unemployment is closely tied with poverty, and also policies that raise wages, i.e., encourage the nation to focus on producing things that the world is willing to pay a lot for, and ensure the education system makes the maximum contribution to educating people for high-wage work.As part of this redistribution, The Spirit Level also suggests constraining the forces that generate inequality, in particular the extremely high levels of CEO pay, which perhaps is less an issue in New Zealand. The British government is talking about introducing a simple mechanism for shareholders to vote on CEO pay, intending that this will give more direct control by company owners.

  The Spirit Level also suggests employee ownership as a solution (rather than such extensive ownership by investors with only a financial stake in the company. They argue that more employee ownership would encourage a more long-term, less rapacious and more fulfilling (for employees) style of capitalism if it were combined with more participatory management methods.

• Redistribute disposable income – i.e., a more progressive welfare system. It isn’t clear to me where the limits of redistribution lie, but it does seem to me that New Zealand is quite progressive already, with 70% of the tax being paid by 25% of the taxpayers. Other tax changes, like introducing a higher rate of income tax for those with very high incomes, seem to be mostly of symbolic effect – they don’t raise enough money to change the distribution of taxation very much at all.
• Provision of public services with public money, especially health, education and welfare services, can help even up society by effectively insuring citizens against the financial burden of education, ill-health or economic or social crisis. The quality of these services also matter: Mr Seabright discusses the importance of a “secular, multi-ethnic and liberal” education to ensure that citizens learn “how to live peacefully and profitably with people whose community and religion are not one’s own”.
• Socialise these ideas – The education system is far from being the only place where people learn how to behave. This point is really just a sustained effort to convince people that the world can easily be a different and more pleasurable place to live, and that improving things is partly down to them and how they live their lives every day. So get to know your neighbours, start a after-school programme, run a block party, join a community group. Get amongst it citizens, the health of your nation is at stake.

* The OECD also mentions that New Zealand does a good job of targetting its welfare at the poorest – one third of total cash benefits go to the poorest 20% of the population – only Denmark and Australia do better. Which is probably just as well, given how little money our nation has to distribute by comparison with the rest of the (much richer) rich world. (It amazes me that managing to get only one third of cash benefits targetted at the poorest 20% is considered a good performance – however, that is for another day).

** These specifics come from The Spirit Level, where the game is discussed from page 199.

Marriage – how often, when, how long

I read a fascinating article from the truly brilliant American National Public Radio on marriage between people of different ethnicities. It charts the change in societal attitudes towards inter-ethnic marriage: in 1968 only 20 percent of Americans thought it was okay for a white person to marry a black person. Fast-forward to 2011: 96 percent of African-Americans and 84 percent of whites Americans accept the idea, although inter-ethnic marriages are still rare – only 7.4% of marriages in the US are between two people of different ethnicities.*

This triggered my interest in marriage in general, especially because I thought that marriage was becoming increasingly popular – certainly everyone that I know seems very keen on it these days. And everyone loves a good wedding. Such a spirit of optimism, enthusiasm and hope.

Sadly New Zealand does not seem to have publicly available statistics on marriages by ethnicity. Although I have some other information on ethnicity sent by someone helpful at Stats NZ, so I might pen another post on that.

But we do know quite a lot about marriage from Stats NZ data, including how many people get married or civil unionised. The rate of marriage (adjusted for the size and age of the population) is gently falling over time, although the number of marriages is pretty static at around 21,000 a year. Men are slightly more likely to re-marry than women following divorce, and women are very slightly more likely to remarry after the death of a previous marriage partner (presumably this is related to the fact that women are lucky enough to live longer on average).

Not such good odds

For the year to December 2010, your odds of getting married were about 1 in 80, down from 1 in 22 in 1971 (the most popular year for marriage since records began in 1961).

Proportion of marriable people who got married by year**

Civil unions became possible on April 26 2005. (Good on those of you who were first in the door to tie the knot on April 29). There have been 2,200 registered since then (compared with nearly 130,000 marriages), and about 80% of them were same-sex civil unions.

Not so young

The median age for marriage has continued to go up reaching 30 for men and 28 for women first marrying in 2010. The median age for marriage overall (including second and subsequent marriages) is now 32 for men and 30 for women.

Stats presents another way of looking at it:

In 1971, 62 percent of men and 52 percent of women marrying for the first time were aged 20–24 years, compared with 15 percent and 22 percent for men and women, respectively, in 2010. Teenagers comprised 36 percent of women who married for the first time in 1971, but only 3 percent in 2010.

Below is the 2010 age distribution of marriage (this is for all marriage – not just first ones). You can see 30% of women and 27% of men who get married do so between the ages of 25 and 29.

Age distribution of marriages in 2010

Not all sunshine and lollipops

So basically marriage is getting less popular, and it is happening later in life. The reason I thought the opposite (given the behaviour of people around me) must be because I am of an age when people who are going to get married do so (although my friends have generally been at the older end of the scale – sigh), and I am yet too young to see many divorces (long may it continue).

Speaking of divorce, this is the trend in the number of divorces over time. I have put it on the same chart as marriages so you can see how many more marriages there are than divorces. On average over the past 20 years we have added ten thousand to our stock of marriages every year – with about twenty thousand marriages and about ten thousand divorces.

You can see that divorce numbers grew after the law changed in 1981 to allow no-fault dissolution of marriage after two years living apart, but the divorce numbers have recently fallen away a bit. Note that the number of divorces and marriages in any year are only indirectly linked. The number of divorces this year depends on the divorce rate and the number of married people, and therefore the number of marriages in the past, not the number in the current year.

Number of divorces and marriages over time

Divorce has become a bit less popular recently. Around 1.2% of existing marriages ended in divorce each year from 1985 until 2006. Since then though, the divorce rate has settled down to a more modest 1%. About 40% of divorces involve people with children aged under 17 – down from more like 50% twenty years ago.

So if 2012 is just like 2010, if you aren’t married, you have a 1 in 80 chance of getting married. And if you are already married, you have a one in a hundred chance of divorcing in the coming year.

Til death us do part

In line with the declining popularity of divorce, marriages are growing in length. Stats NZ says that about a third of marriages from 1985 had ended within 25 years, which is a glass-half-empty way of saying that two thirds of marriages last more than 25 years. I suspect the length of marriages is growing over time; partly as an effect of the falling divorce rate, but also because athough people are marrying later they are also living longer, implying longer marriages for those who stay together. Almost half of divorces take place after between 5 and 14 years of marriage. One in eight divorces is for couples together for less than five years.

Median length of marriage for those than end in divorce

Like rain on your wedding day

Stats also collect data on which month people choose for their nuptials. Unsurprisingly, people like to get married in January, February or March – 40% of weddings take place in the summer, compared with 14% in the winter. Ten years ago, it seems October and November were rather more popular than they are today. If we line this up with the number of rain days in each month (based on long-term average stats from NIWA), you can see why summer is so popular (the red line shows the number of rain days, the blue bar the proportion of weddings). Sadly there are no statistics on the impact of a sunny wedding on the likelihood of breakup in the future.

If you really want sunshine on the special day, Scott Base in Antarctica seems to be the sunniest place in New Zealand. It had an average of a remarkable 380 hours of sunshine in January when the sun never sets (data from 1957-1959). Although the cold might impose some restraints on the wedding dress, penguin would make an interesting feast. By comparison, sunny Nelson only gets 266 hours of sunshine in January – using data for the thirty years to 2000.***

Marriages and rain days by month

PS Unsurprisingly, I guess, the age of mothers having children has gone up as well as the age of marriage. Below shows the distribution of live births by age of the mother in 1961 and 2010. In 1961 more than a third of children were born to mothers between the ages of 20 and 24. Today that can be said only of 18% of children. The most popular age is 30 to 34 (28% of children born in 2010 had mothers this age), followed by 25 to 29 (close behind at 25%).

Age of mother at birth

* Presumably there is a higher rate of inter-ethnicity amongst new marriages but I don’t have a number for it.

** These figures are what Stats NZ call the “General” marriage rate – the number of marriages + civil unions per 1,000 estimated not-married people aged over 16. (There does not seem to be an upper age limit). I have converted it to a percentage to make it a bit easier to understand.

*** Weather data comes from NIWA

Taxing the rich

There was lots of talk about taxing higher income earners more in the election campaign. In particular:*

• Labour said it would introduce a new tax rate of 39 cents in the dollar for income over 150k (currently 33 cents), and reduce to zero the tax rate on income below 5k (currently 10.5%).
• The Greens proposed higher income tax rates at all income levels (including a 39 cent rate on income over 80k), except for those earning less than 10k, who would pay no income tax.

To some extent both proposals seem to be based on an argument that taxing those on higher incomes is fairer, and that at present the lowest income earners are too highly taxed. The Green party proposes to raise income tax for everyone except those earning less than 10k – so the justification for its proposal would presumably also be that higher taxes in general are useful and important to support other policy priorities.

It is worth noting though, that those on higher incomes already pay a lot more income tax than others. This is not just because they earn more, but also of course because the income tax rates get higher as incomes grow. The current tax rates start at 10.5% for incomes up to 14k, and go up to 33% for incomes over 70k. So anyone who earns more than 70k pays three times as much income tax for every extra dollar s/he earns than those who earn less than 14k.

It is interesting to see how these rates shake out in practice, i.e., applied to  incomes for real people. The Treasury releases the helpful “Facts for Taxpayers” with every Budget in May. From the table for the 2011 Budget, I have made this slightly simplified version of who earns how much and how much tax they pay.

Annual taxable income (Budget 2011)**

	Number of people		Amount of tax
	(000)	%	(m)	%
<10k	677	20	221	1
<50k	2519	75	6903	30
>50k	823	25	15907	70
>100k	164	5	6958	31

Some facts are immediately obvious:

• Incomes are low – 75% of those who pay income tax earned less than 50k in 2011 – this is 2.5 million people out of total of 3.3 million taxpayers.
• The tax system is quite progressive – i.e., the more you earn, the higher the proportion of your salary that you contribute. The 25% of people on more than 50k paid 70% of the tax in 2011. The 20% of taxpayers on less than 10k (which includes 244k people who have a zero income) pay 1% of the tax.

I had a look at the same numbers since 2002. These tables show the proportion of people in each band over time, and the proportion of tax they pay. If I had the genius of Keith Ng, I would do a data visualisation but sadly I do not.

Proportion of people in each salary band by year (%)

	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004	2003	2002
Salary band
<10k	20	20	21	21	21	22	22	23	25	26
<50k	75	76	79	78	80	83	84	87	86	87
>50k	25	24	21	22	20	17	16	15	13	14
>100k	5	5	3	5	3	3	3	3	2	3

Proportion of income tax paid by people in each salary band by year (%)

	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004	2003	2002
Salary band
<10k	1	1	1	1	1	1	1	2	2	2
<50k	30	32	36	34	37	39	43	45	45	47
>50k	70	68	64	64	62	60	57	55	54	53
>100k	31	29	26	29	27	27	25	24	24	24

We can see some interesting trends:

• Incomes are growing over time – The number of taxpayers earning more than 50k grew 7% a year from 2002-2011. As a proportion, taxpayers in the more than 50k bracket have grown from 14% in 2002 to 25% in 2011.
• Tax incidence is growing more progressive – Those earning less than 10k (including those with zero income) paid 1% of tax in 2011 – down from 2% in 2002. The proportion of tax paid by those on more than 50k is up from 53% in 2002 to 70% in 2011. Those on more than 100k pay 31% of tax in 2011, up from 24% in 2002.
• National’s tax cuts in 2010 do not seem to have made the tax system more regressive. On the contrary, the porportion of tax paid by higher income earners has gone up from 64% in 2008 to 70% in 2011.

Presumably a lot of this extra progression (i.e., the higher and higher proportion of tax paid by those earning more than 50k) reflects growth in incomes over time. The number of people earning more than 50k has grown 8% a year since 2002, while the number of people earning less than 50k (including those who earn nothing) has fallen a gentle 1%.

We can try to compensate for this growing incomes effect by calculating the amount of tax paid per person across income bands. This is just the total income tax for each band, divided by the number of people in that band. The results are shown below.

Average amount of income tax paid per person in each salary band by year ($)

	2011	2010	2009	2008	2007	2006	2005	2004	2003	2002
Salary band
<10k	326	348	373	364	388	468	462	474	553	547
<50k	2740	2937	3246	3492	3753	3502	3491	3454	3393	3393
>50k	19328	20635	20917	24480	24884	25807	25679	25281	25030	24997
>100k	42427	49106	49975	56420	57407	63042	62294	62179	61915	58870

You can see that the average amount of tax paid has fallen across all income bands since National came into power in 2008. For those on less than 10k (which includes those with zero income), this is a continuation of a long trend – tax has fallen from 547 in 2002 to 326 this year.

You can also see the impact of National’s income tax cuts:

• Those earning less than 50k (including those with zero income) have seen their tax fall from an average of $3492 in 2008 to $2740 this year.
• The average income tax paid by those earning more than 50k has fallen from 25k in 2008 to 19k in 2011.

From this you can argue that most of the tax cuts, in an absolute sense, went to those who earn the most. So the total tax paid by those earning more than 100k has fallen 14k (from 56k to 42k) since 2008, compared with the total tax paid by those earning less than 50k falling by $500 (from 3.2k to 2.7k). But this is a direct result of the progressivity of the tax system – i.e., tax cuts mostly benefit higher income earners because higher income earners pay most of the tax.

As we saw above, in practice the proportion of tax paid by higher income earners has grown over time rather than fallen. And the tax cuts have been reasonably even spread – the average amount of tax paid by those earning more than 50k fell 21% between 2008 and 2011, compared with 22% for those earning less than 50k. Those earning more than 100k did a bit better – their average income tax bill fell 25% – reflecting the impact of removing the top tax rate.

You can download the data I compiled from the Treasury’s Key Facts for Taxpayers. I can send you the documents from 2000-2006 as well if you like (the 2007-2011 versions are on the Treasury website and the Treasury helpfully sent me the 2000-2006 versions). Drop me a line on twitter or use the contact form.

 

* There is a lot more to both parties’ tax policies than this – the focus here is just on income tax.

** The Treasury says that these numbers include tax on NZ Super and major benefits, and exclude ACC levies, Working for Families tax credits, and anyone under 15. Data is projected for the year ended March based on the Household Economic Survey from Statistics New Zealand. The Ministry of Social Development says that nearly all households earning under $70,000 a year are eligible for Working for Families. So I would expect that higher income earners would be paying an even higher proportion of tax
if these tax credits were included in the numbers.

On pre-echoes and their practical relevance

A sort of book review of Tiziano Terzani’s book, “A Fortune Teller Told Me”

Told by a fortune teller in the 1970s not to fly at all during 1993, Mr Terzani, an Asia-based journalist for significant Western newspapers had a long time to consider his dilemma . Did he follow the advice of this prognosticator, change his professional life profoundly for a year, and implicitly accept that his western, scientific scepticism of those who predict futures was not the full story. Or did he ignore the advice, scoff at what might have been his fate, and continue to scoot about the place on planes?

The result of his decision forms the background for this thoughtful, charming and brilliant book, recently re-read after being unexpectedly found on a friend’s bookshelf. First published in 1997, it is many things: a brilliant literary travelogue through the countries of South-East Asia, a meditation on globalisation and the consequences of economic development, and an exploration of the world of fate and fortune-tellers – a personal tour through the layer of mysticism and superstition that underlies society, particularly in the east.

Mr Terzani venerates the past. He struggles to review the present dispassionately because he sees economic progress as fundamentally compromising traditions he has long respected – in his view progress evens out the differences in the world and makes the world a less interesting, less human place. And he is therefore fundamentally sceptical as to whether the future is a cause for hope or for despair.

I particularly like mysticism as a counter-point to our age of common sense, and cause and effect. It seems to me that practicalities too often intervene before motivation, by which I mean that ideas are killed by a thousands tut-tuts because it is thought that they won’t work even before the question is asked about whether we really want to pursue these ideas or not. The fact that there is no alternative is not a good argument for anything: it undermines the very creativity and participation that is helpful in resolving our societal dilemmas.

The effect of all this rationalism is that there are fewer and fewer places for non-rational thinking to hide in the world. Religion, art, dreams, superstition. These are powerful expressions of the limits of human reasoning, and the importance of surprise, principles, and unpredictable connections between ideas to our continued ability to flourish.

So, to my mind, all power to art, unpredictability, dreaming, foolishness, and creative thinking in the world. Boo to too much rationalism, over-assessment of the inherently unpredictable, and the intellectual arrogance of decision-makers choosing before they really understand. More scratch and sniff. Less wait and see.

To that end, I present my theory of pre-echoes. The idea is simple: once you have decided to do something, other people can get an idea of what is going to happen in the future as a result of your intention. So I am driving from Wellington to Auckland, and a friend sends me a message asking if she just saw me crossing Fort Street in downtown Auckland. I haven’t got there yet, but the pre-echo of my future arrival was already detectable. Or your mother suddenly pops into your mind, and a minute later she calls you. A coincidence from one point of view, but a pre-echo from another – you know that she is going to call because she has decided to. I think of it as like a radio on some distance away on a windy day. Sometimes you can just catch enough to know the name of the tune, sometimes events intervene to prevent it.

This is clearly a rather whimsical idea. Since it is impossible (I think) to test, it is fundamentally unscientific. I am surprised by many things every day, despite the existence of pre-echoes, and so clearly my theory is either not foolproof or it needs substantial refinement to fit the facts as I encounter them. My theory is also not especially helpful for predicting future events – another standard test of the quality of theories. It does not prevent people changing their mind or limit the ability of free-will. And I know not what the transmission mechanism is from someone else’s made-up mind to my own.

If I were in a mood to defend the science of my theory, I might note that science has moved along rather a lot over time and in surprising directions. The earth (not the sun) was once thought the centre of the galaxy, cholera was once thought to be caused by dirty air, radiation only showed up at the turn of the nineteenth century, vitamins remained a mystery until the 1950s, things thought impossible (space travel, mobile phones, decent coffee at petrol stations) have become reality. No reason to doubt, therefore, that science will stumble across pre-echoes at some point.

All of this science talk is all very well, but that is not, of course, the point of my pre-echo story. Pre-echoes come from a different world that exists alongside the world that we all accept as real every day. A world where time’s arrow does not necessarily travel in a single direction. A world where what would be called magic and dreams have a function and an effect. A world where things are connected in much more complex ways than the cause and effect story that we imbibe with our mother’s milk. A world, let’s face it, rather more intriguing and mysterious than the one we actually inhabit.

It is the same world from which come basic western superstitions. Some that I respect, for better or worse, are the importance of the 1st of the month for luck in the month following, a fear of doing anything too important on Friday the 13th, casting some salt over my left shoulder if I drop any on the floor, saying “bless you” when someone sneezes, and wishing on rainbows and over birthday candles.

Happily for me and my theory, Mr Terzani talks about something similar, referring to the thoughts of the prince soon to become Buddha in Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha when sitting on a hill looking at a river:

It strikes him that once the measurement of time is waived, the past and the future are ever-present – like the river, which at one and the same moment exists not only where he sees it to be, but also at its source and at its mouth. The water which has yet to pass is tomorrow, but it already exists upstream; and that which has passed is yesterday, but it still exists, elsewhere, downstream.

There are eddies and tributaries, dams and irrigation schemes, but that does not affect the basic point about the connectedness of what we call the past, present and future, and the powerfulness of the idea that our concept of time is not the complete answer.

Mr Terzani goes on, while looking at a river intersection in Laos:

It seemed to me that that conjunction and mingling of muddy waters was, like life – mine included – made up of so many streams. It seemed that past, present and future were no longer distinguishable one from another: they were all there, in that relentless flow. Fifty-five years had slipped away like the great river rolling towards the China Sea; the rest of my time on earth was already welling up in the Himalayan slopes, already underway moving towards me along the same channel, clearly defined and counted to the last hour. If I had had a higher perch than that hill I might have been able to see more of the river, in both directions. And thus could I have seen more past, more future?

This connection of past, present and future is a powerful theme throughout the book as Mr Terzani consults the most famed fortune-teller he can find in every country that he visits. As a journalist, he reports the differences and similarities in how they ply their craft, and gives his views on whether they actually have any unique capabilities. Rationally speaking, he assesses if they are sufficiently accurate in telling him his own past (something they all do as part of the process) that he can ascribe them some credibility as advisers on what is going to happen in the future.

As the book goes on and the number of fortune-tellers grows, he sadly concludes that most are in a business like any other, i.e., selling predictions of the future that others are willing to pay for. They have a standard patter, and present a hodge-podge of culturally-influenced generalisations that are true enough for enough people to sound profound, while any firm predictions are couched in such a way that they can not be obviously wrong. But predicting the future is not really the point of fortune-tellers, in his view. They are not actually selling predictions. They are selling a combination of reassurance and warning, helping people feel better about their pasts, and more secure or cautious – depending on the story – about their futures.

But intriguingly, Mr Terzani also continues to accept that there might be something in it. That there might be some fortune-tellers who really can do as they say on the tin. He quotes from a London-based fortune-teller called Norman, responding to the question of whether he can really predict the future:

‘Not 100 per cent, otherwise we would no longer have any responsibility for our actions’, he said. ‘The cards read the shadows of things, of events. What I can do is help people to change the position of the light, and then, with free will, they can change the shadows. That I really do believe: you can change the shadows.’

Which feels a bit to me like my pre-echo theory. Sometimes you can pick up the shadows of future events, without really knowing how or why.

Fascinatingly, it turns out that the author did in fact avoid an air crash by following the advice he was given 16 years prior. A helicopter he was meant to be on crashed near Siem Reap, Cambodia in March 1994.

There is also an interesting minor riff on the complexity of cause and effect throughout the book. Once the web of influences becomes sufficiently complicated, any event can start to look like magic, and disentangling what is actually responsible is more an act of story-telling than it is of science.

The chain of cause and effect that links human affairs is endless, and that means they remain without a real explanation. I was on that ship as the result of an infinite series of ‘becauses’, of which it was impossible to establish the first. That is the maddening thing about destiny – and the wonderful thing.

There is always an inexplicable bridge of San Luis Rey, where different people with different stories, coming from different places, meet by chance at the moment when the bridge collapses, to die together in the abyss. But the first step of each of the journeys which end in the assignation cannot be retraced.

In my case, any starting point that I might fix – the fortune-teller in Hong Kong, the escape from death in Cambodia, the decision in Laos, even my own birth – was not it. Perhaps because, when you come down to it, there really is no beginning.

It seems to me this question comes down, as usual with interesting things, to a question of underlying beliefs. Perhaps human action is like the weather, i.e., something that is very complex but fundamentally based on a few, knowable rules. If it is, then we could look forward to a time when the future can be predicted with total accuracy. All that is needed is enough information on the right things and sufficient computing power and time.

Mr Terzani meets a meteorologist who says that his science has almost reached this point. At present, the meterologist says that scientists can predict the weather with 99 percent accuracy for the next three days (I am not sure this is true of the weather forecasters I rely on, but however). The next step, says the meteorologist, is mastering the theory of chaos, and this will enable exact weather predictions two or three years in advance.

“Why can you not predict human actions”, inquires Mr Terzani, perhaps archly. “They too have complex causes and effects”.

Back from a cold place

The Coldest March – A review of the book by Susan Solomon

There is something at once compelling and horrifying about the stories from the heroic age of polar exploration. Perhaps the compulsion is the horror. A few absurdly hardy men, an indifferent, hazardous environment, a minimum three year stay at a tiny outpost of civilisation built on the shores of a frozen sea, and all to get the opportunity to spend three or four months hiking across the un-mapped interior, fighting every day against starvation and the cold, to see who will be the first to reach a point on the globe that looks no different from any other.

The mindset of explorers is hard to explain or to justify – the huge imbalance between apparent risks and reward, and the enormous effort required to undertake an expedition with deeply uncertain outcomes seem near assured to induce a bout of head-shaking amongst the mums of the world. Climbing mountains, visiting space, or plumbing the depths of the world’s oceans have similar characteristics. One gets the impression that the scientific goals, while worthy and important and looming large in the story of Antarctic especially, are a justification after the fact. Really the reason why is just because we want to see if we can do it, and in particular to see who can do it first.

There are many excellent accounts of and books on Antarctic exploration in the early years of the twentieth century. Amongst them are Scott’s diaries, Shackleton’s “South”, Roland Huntford’s biography of Shackleton and his account of the race between Scott and Amundsen, Apsley Cherry-Gerard’s “The Worst Journey in the World”, Douglas Mawson’s “The Home of the Blizzard”, and (from a little later on) Admiral Richard Byrd’s “Alone”.

One could be forgiven for thinking that there wouldn’t be much to add to this impressive record, particularly in the case of Scott’s last expedition, whose arc is so well known: the first expedition with Shackleton – later his rival, the long preparations for the second, the hard trudge to the South Pole only to find that Amundsen had beaten them there by a month, and then the walk back towards safety, fatal to all hands, with the bodies of Scott, Wilson and Bowers found in the tent that was their final camp, and the bodies of Evans and Oates never found where they fell earlier on the trek.

The competing hypotheses for what went wrong are also well-known, chief among them incompetence (especially by Scott – the competing views of history have him as either a true hero in the classic British mold, or a noted bumbler whose hopelessness determined his fate), disease (scurvy), poor preparation (wrong equipment, not enough dogs, poor rations), poor execution (too much walking, too much time spent on science), or bald misfortune.

Like authors before her, Ms Solomon reviews the main elements of Scott’s polar story, and wants to put forward her view of what went wrong. But, as an Antarctic weather expert, she has another hypothesis to test. She says that, while in Antarctica for her research on the ozone layer, she grew interested in the question of whether unseasonably cold weather in the March of Scott’s return trek could provide another explanation for some of his miseries and ultimately his demise.

Armed with new weather data from automatic stations placed in the 1980s along the path Scott took, and with all the data from Scott’s expedition carefully analysed by Dr George Simpson, Scott’s meteorologist, in his report of 1919, she finds support for her view: an unpredictably cold March was a major contribution to the untimely death of Captain Scott and his party. This is a clear-eyed reassessment of Scott’s story, not a hagiography. Ms Solomon does not shirk from pointing out Scott’s mistakes and failures – indeed, Scott himself was forthright about his errors – but Ms Solomon’s argument that weather played a fatal role is calmly argued and carefully supported through the text.

Along the way, Ms Solomon provides an education into important aspects of the Antarctic environment, and unearths some genuinely new insights and ideas about what might have happened down at the bottom of the world nearly a hundred years ago. I will leave you to read the book for yourself but the ending struck me as particularly inspired – a genuinely new take on a well-known story: a twist in the tail, if you will, informed by the new information from the weather record.

As well as a lot of new data, Ms Solomon brings one clever approach to the narrative. At the start of each chapter she presents a scene of a mythical, modern-day Antarctic visitor that demonstrates key information on Antartica and the main challenges facing a traveller walking to the South Pole pulling a heavy sledge, e.g., the basic geography, the impact of different temperatures on the ease of travelling across the surface, what counts as appropriate clothing, the effects of blizzards, or the dangers of frostbite. These scenes at the start of every chapter could easily come across as superficial or trite, but actually they really work to bring home the reality of the difficulties faced by Scott in getting through, and the unfairness of many criticisms levelled at him after his death (one expects mostly by those who had never experienced the environment themselves). These vignettes make it clear how tenuous the continuation of human life is in Antarctica. Even very tiny mis-steps lead inexorably to catastrophe.

Overall this book is an excellent addition to the stories of Antarctica. A compelling reminder of Scott’s herioc journeys, and the fine line between success and failure in any great endeavour, but also a genuinely new take on a very well-rehearsed historical issue, complementing the first-hand accounts of the explorers with analysis that has only become possible with modern weather data.

Ms Solomon’s book perhaps contributes to a reassessment of Scott, who was lionised in the first years after his death, and then came to be seen as an amateur who essentially killed himself and his party through his ineptitude and poor decision-making. These two views of the man still compete for attention today. No one element can be said to be the cause of the tragedy. There are many things that could have, should have or would have been done but for. Yes, if Scott had moved more quickly and started earlier on the polar hike (like Amundsen with more dogs and no ponies, which prevented a start in October), or yes if the diet of the party and its equipping and preparation had been better (more time on skis, better sleeping bags), or if Scott had consistently made choices with higher margins for error rather than choices that should have been okay but were not, then the outcomes could have been different.

But the polar party did keep generally to their planned timeframe. They expected to be returning across the last few hundred miles of the barrier in March as the winter came quickly on. And so they made very careful scientific assessment of what weather they should expect. As Ms Solomon shows, nothing in that assessment was seriously awry, and nothing could have led them to expect the weather that they ultimately encountered. As Ms Solomon concludes, the weather took their lives.

This book also inspired me to look more closely at the details of Cherry-Gerard’s wait at One Ton Camp at 80D South depot for Scott’s polar party, who were then struggling to what would be their deaths a mere 100 miles further south. To my mind this episode goes down in history as amongst the greatest moments in polar exploration. My personal list also includes Shackleton’s decision to turn around less than 100 miles from the Pole in 1909 when it was clear that he could be the first to the Pole but only at the price of his life and those of his party, Oates walking out of the tent to his death on the return journey with Scott, in a indescribably noble attempt (on his own birthday, no less) to save the lives of those he was travelling with, on the basis that he thought was slowing them down through his sickness, and Douglas Mawson’s nightmarish sledging expedition with two comrades in 1912 when one fell into a crevasse with much of the expedition’s food and equipment, and the other comrade died from what is now suspected to have been vitamin poisoning from eating dog liver, leaving Mawson, terribly unwell himself, to struggle back the last 100 miles alone.

Apsley Cherry-Gerard questioned many times in the course of his post-polar life whether, had he broken his orders and headed further south, he might have saved Scott and the then three remaining members of his polar party. Surely the physical challenges associated with such a mercy dash were enormous – Cherry-Gerard had no idea where Scott was, strictly limited cooking fuel and food for himself, his companion Dimitri Gerof the dog wrangler, and the dogs they travelled with, and unique difficulties with the cold environment (his glasses were not the ideal equipment in freezing conditions since they soon frosted up from condensation, rendering him effectively blind). In addition, by the time they reached One Ton Camp Dmitri was ill and the dogs were in a poor way. So even if he had gone further south in direct contravention of his orders, getting back could have been a very dicey proposition. In addition, the polar party were not expected at One Ton camp until March 10 at the earliest, and so, at the time when he had to consider the issue, there were no concerns at all for the welfare of Scott and his group.

As far as I can figure it, the distances are as set out below. You can see how achingly close the two groups were – from my reading a decent day’s marching was 12-15 miles, and in a good day with dogs pulling the sledges a party could cover as much as 30 miles. One degree of latitude is 69 miles.

Date	Cherry-Gerard location	Scott’s party location	Distance between
Feb 26	77D52′ (Hut Point)
March 3	79D29′ (One Ton Depot)
March 5	79D29′	Near 81D S	~ 105 miles
March 8	79D29′	80D45′ S	~ 87 miles
March 10	Left for Hut Point	80D31′ S	~ 71 miles

Scott, Wilson and Bowers died around 29 March 1912 at about 79D40 – around 11 miles from the supplies at One Ton camp, and only a few days good marching for healthy men from the safety of Hut Point.

On pre-flight security and which bits matter

So much for passenger safety announcements. Now for searching passengers.

The overall summary of what follows is that we seem to do a good job of searching folks – certainly far better than the much- and seemingly-justifiably-maligned TSA in the US. (See also this, rather damning recent report). But there could be more information made available about its effectiveness, and there must be real questions about whether most of what goes on is really worthwhile at all in terms of reducing the risk of air crashes.

The law

First, I find, it is always good to start with the law in our remarkably law-abiding democracy.

By a notice issued under Section 77B(1) of the Civil Aviation Act 1990, the Aviation Security Service (part of the Civil Aviation Authority) is required to screen all passengers and undertake searches of passengers where reasonable, “if necessary”, for planes that carry more than 90 people. There are also requirements on airport and airline operators to maintain security procedures under Part 108 of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) rules.

This law is required of New Zealand because it a contracting state of the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO – a part of the UN) and a signatory to Annex 17 of the Chicago Convention 1944, which requires contracting states to meet various security measures to protect the travelling public as well as flight crew and ground personnel.

The long list of no-nos

The list of things that the Aviation Security Service (AvSec) is required to search for under the screening notice (see pages 2-4) is long and divided into categories:

• Firearms, guns and weapons (including catapults, flare guns, and toy guns of all types)
• Pointed and edged weapons and sharp objects (including axes – don’t worry, there is already likely to be one on board for safety reasons if you need it – ice skates, pointy walking sticks, swords, and throwing stars)
• Blunt instruments (baseball bats, but also fishing rods and skateboards)
• Explosives and flammable substances (including explosives, grenades, mines, ammunition)
• Chemical and toxic substances (including batteries, pepper spray, anything that could spontaneously combust, radioactive material, poisons, or fire-extinguishers – don’t worry about that last one either, the crew have one).

For international flights, passengers are also searched to ensure they are not carrying more than the prescribed amounts of any liquids, aerosols and gels, and are doing so in the prescribed way (i.e., in a transparent bag with nothing else in it).

This search is required by another notice from 22 March 2007. “Liquids, aerosols and gels” includes, of course, water, but also shaving foam, soup, mascara, toothpaste, and hair gel. Interestingly, the order does not contain the 100 ml limit, nor the rule about putting things in a see-through bag – although it does require the screening to be “reasonable”.

This list applies from 1 August 2011 replacing a list from March 2011 which in turn replaced one from August 2002. Unfortunately I can’t find on the CAA website the previous directives, so I do not know how they have changed over time, but it looks like they are altered relatively seldom. I am not sure either why the restrictions on liquids, aerosols and gels are not included in this one notice (since they were put in place before this notice was re-issued, so it would seem tidier to have just one screening notice). However.

Lots of screening going on …

The numbers involved in all this screening and searching are pretty substantial:

According to AvSec’s 2010 Annual Report (the one to June 2011 does not appear to be online yet), in the year to June 2010, it screened:

• 4.5 million international passengers
• 5.7 million domestic passengers (the rest of the 9.5 million total domestic passengers were passengers on planes with fewer than 90 seats)
• 15 million pieces of hand-luggage, and 5.5 million pieces of hold luggage (meaning on average each screened passenger had 1.5 bits of hand-baggage and only 1/2 of a piece of checked luggage).

… and therefore a high cost

All of this work means substantial costs:

• AvSec employs 800 people. (Interesting 60% of them are men, and two-thirds are aged between 40 and 60. Perhaps ex-police or military folks?)
• It charges $10 per international passenger (down from $15 in 2010) and $4 per domestic passenger (down from $5), a charge that you pay as part of your ticket.*
• The total cost of screening was $70 million in 2010 year (note that that also includes air-side security – i.e., checking that crew and groundstaff meet security requirements).

And it holds passengers up a bit: for just over a minute internationally, and just under a minute domestically, they say. So if AvSec screens 10 million people a year, that is 10 million minutes a year (or approximately 19 person years) spent queueing, which is quite a lot of time, to say nothing of the hassles of getting undressed and dressed again, and taking one’s computer out of one’s bag.

The restrictions on liquids seem a particular source of difficulty. In one month (May 2010) AvSec intercepted 10,000 passengers (about 3% of international travellers) who were not meeting these rules and therefore, presumably, had had to have some of their prized liquid possessions confiscated, thrown away or consumed before their time.

And does it work

The interesting question, of course, is whether all this is worthwhile. Does it work, i.e., does it find anything and, more complicatedly, is the reduction in risk generated by this search work really worth the costs of achieving it – both the $70m costs to passengers of running AvSec, and the hassles for passengers of taking off clothes, unpacking bags and waiting in lines.

Unfortunately there is little information in AvSec’s Annual Report that would let you figure this out. There is nothing on how many prohibited items are found, nor on how many passengers are found carrying these things.

There are reported 21 instances where a restricted item was found after the screening point, i.e., where AvSec failed to find something that it should have. Unfortunately it is not explained how these were found, nor how many items in total were found at the screening point, so it isn’t possible to figure out how effective AvSec is. We don’t know how the process works that found the 21 items (how regular it is, how reliable it is as a measure of the effectiveness of the screening), so it is not possible to draw any real conclusions. That said, 21 items seems like bugger all in the context of 10 million screened passengers.**

We do know that, of the 21 items, 19 were “unauthorised and prohibited” whereas 2 are described as “unauthorised dangerous” items (page 50), although it isn’t clear what that means. And the service also reports a 1% failure rate of agents under what sounds like standardised testing to see if they find stuff. The CAA conducted 11 compliance audits in the 2010 year, including at least one on passenger and baggage screening performance. It seems odd that the CAA would do these audits – AvSec is part of the CAA, so it looks like the agency is auditing itself. But perhaps we can be reassured to know that the American TSA also conducted a review and pronounced itself satisfied that AvSec met its screening requirements.

AvSec reports 1 formal complaint for every 423k passengers, or around 25 “justified complaints” against officers in the course of the year, which doesn’t seem like very much, suggesting they acquit themselves well in interactions with individual passengers. AvSec also reports a curious 1.25 complaints from airlines (perhaps the quarter of a complaint was a barely decipherable mumble).

In summary, there are few obvious reported problems with the service. It clearly achieves its major goals. As the Service reports on page 51, in 2010 there were “No in-flight security incidents”, and “No airside security incidents”. It also says, more heroically, that there were “No dangerous goods introduced into aircraft”. I say that this is more heroic only because I can not see how AvSec would know what got on to aircraft.

A better approach

So as far as we can tell from the limited reporting, we don’t seem to be screening too little, i.e., there don’t appear to be big risks to the flying public from the current level of screening, and AvSec seem to do a potentially unpleasant job with a reasonable degree of applomb. The trickier question is whether the approach to screening could be changed or the level of screening reduced, and some of these substantial resources saved without an increase in danger to the travelling public.

Because there is one thing that stands out obviously from the long list of prohibited things that AvSec looks for. Strangely, AvSec is not being asked to screen for people who are likely to want to hijack or blow-up airplanes. Aside from the items that are dangerous to airplanes in themselves (like items that might self-combust), all the things that AvSec looks for require another ingredient to be dangerous, i.e., they require someone who wants to cause harm. And there is nothing in the screening approach that is intended to find these people. It is as is if the police were to hunt for burglars by searching everyone’s house for stolen items, or stopping every car to look through the boot, rather than focusing on more directly on finding those who steal.

AvSec seems to understand the importance of searching for potentially bad people. It talks about in its Annual Report (page 47) the importance of “reliable intelligence gathering and dissemination” to counter terrorist threats to aircraft, while also recognising that “the current threat to New Zealand aviation is relatively low”.

The consequences of our approach to airport security were obvious in 2007 with New Zealand’s second recorded hi-jacking, an incident where a woman endeavoured to hijack a flight from Blenheim to Christchurch with a knife without great success (the plane landed safely at its destination), but with injuries to the two pilots and a passenger who intervened. The hijacker was subsequently sentenced to nine years in prison  for her crimes. Because she was flying on such a small plane, neither she nor her bags would have been screened prior to boarding.

The hijacker is a great demonstration of my point because she was on bail for threatening to kill and possession of a weapon when she got on the plane. It turned out at the trial that she had a very long and tragic criminal history, with 27 previous convictions. We didn’t search everyone getting on board the flight from Blenheim to Christchurch, but could we not have at least searched her, given the history?

After a May 2009 review, the Minister of Transport (correctly in my view) decided not to change anything about domestic security screening following the incident, but instead to look at ways to isolate the cabin from the passengers in smaller planes. The costs (at around $160m) were said to be prohibitive to screen all passengers.

A better approach, I think, would be to alter the screening approach. Instead of stopping everyone and screening everyone, we should search only crazies and dangerous people. I suspect the reason that we do screen everyone for dangerous items is because it is easier than finding dangerous people, and it makes it look like we are doing something, even if it is unpleasant for the vast bulk of people who are not of any interest from an aviation security point of view. The “screen everyone” approach is what emerges as the definition of security when the problem is given to a bureaucracy that doesn’t want to be blamed if something goes wrong.***

Conclusions and stable doors

I have read with interest the security blogs of Bruce Schneir in the course of looking at this issue. He is a very firm critic of the American TSA and its approach to security, describing most of what they do as “security theatre” designed to make travellers feel more comfortable but not actually making them safer.

He is also very critical of the escalation of requirements over time, pointing out that changes in the security screening are mostly responses to particular terrorist plots. Liquids, aerosols and gels are restricted thanks to these guys. And, at least in America, thanks to this cat, you are required to take off your shoes (which thankfully isn’t required in New Zealand).

Mr Schneir says it well:

A short history of airport security: We screen for guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We confiscate box cutters and corkscrews, so they put explosives in their sneakers. We screen footwear, so they try to use liquids. We confiscate liquids, so they put PETN bombs in their underwear. We roll out full-body scanners, even though they wouldn’t have caught the Underwear Bomber, so they put a bomb in a printer cartridge. We ban printer cartridges over 16 ounces – the level of magical thinking here is amazing — and they’re going to do something else.

His point is that we are shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. In my view, New Zealand does not present sufficient risk to have a stable in the first place.

We also used to screen every bag for biosecurity risk items (mostly fruit) on passenger arrival. It is interesting to see, therefore, MAF recently moving towards the approach that Customs takes to looking for contraband, i.e., it will try to stop only passengers of interest and stop holding the rest of us up.

Perhaps this is a consequence of falling budgets. But at least it means I can hope that the CAA will learn from its fellow agencies, and either get rid of bag screening entirely for domestic flights, or move to a more sensible system based on individual customer risk rather than searching every bag.

 

* To me there are real questions about why passengers are paying for security requirements decided on by the CAA. If the government wants to scan passengers, it should pay for it from taxes and prioritise that spending against all its other priorities. Otherwise the temptation is to over-screen because the passengers who are paying for it are not in a position to disagree. But that is a post for another day.

** I note that the TSO says that “Since January 2010, advanced imaging technology [their x-ray scanners] has detected more than 300 dangerous or illegal items on passengers in U.S. airports nationwide.” In that time the TSA has scanned hundreds of million of travellers passengers. Which does rather suggest there isn’t much to find – calling into question the whole need for this security in the first place.

*** Interestingly, some also say that the “screen everyone” philosophy is actually harmful rather than wasteful – because x-ray scanning can cause cancer. Which is why some types of scanning have now been banned by the Europeans.

PS My favourite question about aviation security:

Q. Can I take my wedding cake on my flight?

A. You can take a wedding cake as long as it is solid, and does not have a liquid, cream or jam filling.

Pre-flight safety announcements and the value thereof

Just recently I had the pleasure to fly from Wellington to Christchurch and back, down on a jet and back on a propeller plane, both ways on Air New Zealand. Some remarkable differences:

• On the jet flight my carry-on bag and me were both x-rayed, and the safety announcements take more than three minutes. You can see the video here (which is excellent for an airline safety video, but still). For any of you who are aficionados of Air New Zealand’s safety videos, it was the All Blacks one.
• On the propeller plane, there was no search of me or my baggage at all, and – although it covered the same material – the safety announcement took less than thirty seconds. No All Blacks in sight.

And in neither case did anyone check my ID.

Which made me wonder about the legal basis and practical purpose of all this search and safety activity. Turns out this is quite a big topic, so best eaten in small bites.

It’s the law, kemosabe

In this first post, the law on safety announcements. Under section 28 of the Civil Aviation Act 1990, the Minister has the power to make rules about many things. Duly authorised, Ministers have made quite a lot of rules over time.

Amongst them is the foundation of what you get told every time you get on an commercial airplane. Under Part 91, Subsection C, Rule 91.211 the pilot of the plane needs to be sure that, unless they already know it all, “each passenger” has been briefed on:

• How and when to do up his/her seatbelt
• The rules on smoking
• Folding away his/her tray-table
• Where exits are and how to open them
• How to use the oxygen system (required for flights over 10,000 feet) and flotation equipment (required for flights over water)
• Emergency landing procedures, and
• The use of portable electronic devices.

The briefing has to include a lifejacket and oxygen mask demonstration (if these systems are required), and must instruct passengers that they are legally required to do as they are told by lighted signs and crew instructions. The plane operator is also required (Rule 91.213) to ensure that baggage is stowed under the seat in front of you, or in any overhead locker.

I understand that these rules are required by international law set by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, part of the UN. Only that could really explain why the passenger safety briefings seem to be so similar all over the world. Compare the NZ rules above with the seemingly identical US requirements.

Questioning authority

So there you are. It still leaves the question of why the briefing is so long on my jet flight, and short on the propeller plane. And I would be very interested to know whether passengers actually pay attention to any of this (they don’t seem to – in fact, it seems there is coolness is taking an attitude of studied indifference when the safety briefing is going on), whether passengers actually recall all the different things that they are told, and whether having a long safety video or a short safety announcement makes a difference.

These guys (and read the comments at the bottom too to see what your fellow passengers are going to be doing) reckon the most important things are having a plan to get out, moving quickly after the plane stops, and keeping calm. Seat position matters a little bit, depending on the type of crash. The same story here, and reassuringly, many injuries in plane emergencies are actually caused while using the escape slides rather than anything to do with the plane crashing.

Which raises the question of why they tell you all the other stuff in the safety announcement. And why it is all done in such a reassuring tone. Would it be more effective to have a statement from someone who has actually survived air crashes facing the camera and explaining the three things you should do right now to increase your chances of living?

From the other point of view, we could also ask why we have the safety announcements at all (compare the lack of announcements in trains, buses, when crossing the street or when you buy a bicycle with what happens each time you get on a plane, for example).

Stay alert

The American authorities say:

An alert, knowledgeable person has a much better chance of surviving any life- or injury-threatening situation that could occur during passenger-carrying operations in civil aviation.

Which is helpful to know, but hardly determinative. Presumably an alert, knowledgeable person has a better chance of surviving many situations, but that does not mean we put safety notices everywhere or run public advertising advising people what to do (with the notable exceptions, of course, of smoking, dangerous driving and to some extent, exercise).

Perhaps we are subjecting ourselves ninety thousand times a day (my lazyweb estimate of the total number of flights) to a set of messages that don’t really make much difference.

We might point out that:

• Plane travel is extremely safe. According to the genius of Wikipedia, that bolt-hole for all bloggers, it is more dangerous to motorcycle, or to bicycle, or to walk than to travel by plane. Per kilometre travelled, buses and trains are about 10 times more dangerous than planes, walking is about a thousand times more dangerous, and motorcycles are more than 2,000 times more dangerous than planes (although note the comment about the applicability of the statistic). It is estimated that twenty four thousand people each year die from being struck by lightning – compared with 757 in 2009 while flying.
• It also seems to be getting safer, with fewer fatalities over time despite, presumably, continally growing traffic.
• Plane crashes actually seem to be surprisingly survivable. The Telegraph article referred to above reports that:

A US government study found there were 568 plane crashes in the US between 1993 and 2000, involving a total of 53,487 passengers and crew. Of these, 51,207 – or over 90 per cent survived. Even on the 26 crashes deemed the worst, the study found that more than half the passengers and crew survived.

This safety and high level of survivability could of course be because of the ubiquitous, effective safety announcements. Who can say. Perhaps we humans need to run a few airlines with no safety announcements for a few billion kilometres and see if it makes a difference. I would be happy to fly on such a plane – we could let passengers choose in advance whether they want to have an announcement or not.

Technophobia, perhaps

I wonder if what we are really seeing here is just a luddite-level cultural hangover from the days when flying was novel, dangerous and unusual. So the safety announcements haven’t quite caught up with the fact that flying is now old-hat, safe and embarked upon by millions of people very single day without any significant thought or negative consequence.

Only techno-phobia in our technological age can explain, I think, the ban on using cellphones during flight. I am deeply sceptical that phones crash planes for two reasons:

• One, if phones were actually dangerous, airlines would do a whole lot more than just invite their passengers to turn phones off. They would confiscate them for the duration of the flight, search all passengers to ensure they were not being carried, and encourage passengers to dob each other in if they saw anyone with an operating device. Compare the treatment of firearms with that of iPhones.
• Two, and relatedly, we just haven’t seen a massive increase in plane crashes as mobile phones have become ubiquitous. If there is a problem with mobile phone interference, it isn’t showing up.

Of course, this is all terribly logical reasoning on my part. So is the other side of the equation: the consequences of a plane crash are horrendous, and no one really needs to use a phone on board a plane anyway, so asking people not to seems like good risk/reward calculus.

I note, that from Civil Aviation Authority Rule 91.7, the ban on the use of portable electronic devices does not apply to pacemakers or electric shavers. You can’t use your cellphone. So strike a blow for freedom and shave while flying, people!

PS Amongst other random things I learned in writing this, planes are specifically required to carry first-aid kits and fire-extinguishers (Rule 91.523(a)), an axe (91.523(b)) and portable battery-powered megaphones (91.523(c)). And for flights that go over 30,000 feet (all international flights to/from New Zealand and many domestic ones), airplanes are required to have at least 10% more oxygen masks than passengers.