Bernard's Top 10: Could Airbnb accommodate all the new tourists and collect bed taxes?; China's new baby boom; Watch out for driverless trucks; 'Let's just give away money'; John Oliver on MUDs; Clarke and Dawe on the Budget

Here's my Top 10 items from around the Internet over the last week or so. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz. 

See all previous Top 10s here.

My must read is #7 on the idea for a Universal Basic Income.

1. Where did they all go?  - Benje Patterson over at Infometrics has written a very useful piece on the ability of Peer to Peer accommodation providers such as Airbnb and Bookabach to cater for all the extra tourists arriving. He wonders where we put all the extra tourists over the summer.

He also makes the good point that we haven't built many new hotel rooms lately, yet we've been able to handle the big surge of the last year. He suggests at least some of the still-rising demand can be met by supply from peer to peer providers.

Even if one out of every twenty-five (4%) of these unoccupied dwellings were made available to P2P providers for an average of 20 nights per month this summer then private homes could have catered for all growth in guest nights in New Zealand without putting any pressure on commercial accommodation.

Furthermore, the resource is often in plentiful supply in key visitor markets, with Infometrics’ estimates showing on average 17% of Queenstown homes were classified as unoccupied during 2015. Other places, such as Far North, Thames-Coromandel, and Marlborough had unoccupied housing rates of 13%, 37%, and 11% respectively. These figures compare to the national average of 6.1%

These are extreme examples, but help to illustrate the potential scale of the unoccupied housing resource out there that P2P accommodation providers can tap into. And all of this is before we even begin to think about homeowners who would be willing to rent out a spare room within a house.

 2. Maybe Airbnb could collect bed taxes - Patterson also looks at the potential for Airbnb and Councils to start charging/collecting bed taxes as a way to get around the argument against P2P providers.

Many councils are worried about the impact on their bottom line of encouraging private accommodation. Councils can partly offset visitor pressure on local infrastructure by appropriately setting rates for commercial accommodation providers, but moves to do so in the private accommodation space have previously been unsuccessful (eg. Thames-Coromandel’s mooted bach tax).

However, this problem need not be a stumbling block. Internationally, AirBnB already collects bed taxes in some jurisdictions. If councils called a truce, and jointly lobbied government to pass a law allowing for a small bed tax to help fund local visitor infrastructure, then even this long-standing issue could be overcome.

3. A Chinese baby boom - There was some conjecture after China dropped its one-child policy that it would spark a baby boom. Many economists doubted this given many developing economies 'naturally' see their birth rates fall as they get richer and more developed (see Taiwan, Japan and Korea).

Caixin reports, however, that there does appear to be a boom going on. That could help our infant formula producers.

Doctors estimate that more than 400,000 babies will be born in the capital this year – about twice as many as in any of the past five years – and Shanghai is also seeing a rise in the number of newborns, a trend that comes after the government eased its one-child policy.

Doctors speaking at a meeting hosted by the non-profit Beijing Medical Association on April 9 also said the number of pregnant women registered at community hospitals in Beijing reached more than 38,000 in March – the highest monthly figure since the city started requiring expecting mothers to register at the facilities in 2014.

4. The Flint story - Many of us look at America's political situation and shake our heads at the madness (as in angry rather than insane) of the voters and wonder why. 

This piece from Mother Jones on the lead pollution of the public water supplies in Flint, Michigan helps explain why poor people in particular are desperate as well as angry.

Flint's water crisis has become a symbol that resonates across America—but a symbol of what? Of working­-class decline? Disregard for a majority-black population? Bloated government? The push to cut and privatize public services? Even as Flint became front-page news and federal water safety protocols were exposed to be laughable, the Obama administration proposed slashing a quarter of a billion dollars from the Environmental Protection Agency's testing budget to help meet spending cuts imposed by Congress. Experts warn there are many other cities—Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Newark, New Jersey, for instance—with water that is as bad or worse.

Is Flint an outlier or a harbinger of a Mad Max future of crumbling roads, joblessness, and poisoned water? One thing is for sure: The rage felt by the residents of Flint is little different from the rage felt in other quarters of America—the feeling that you're losing ground, that the deck is stacked against you and the people on top don't give a damn.

5. 'It's going to automate millions of jobs' - This TechCrunch piece on the future of driverless trucks is an eye-opener. I'm a cyclist so I'm not particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of trucks without drivers rumbling past me. 

It will however cut costs and prices, which means lower inflation and interest rates. Perhaps all the soon-to-be-unemployed truck drivers should buy property now to make money off the tax-free capital gains to come from falling interest rates...I'm joking...sort of.

A convoy of self-driving trucks recently drove across Europe and arrived at the Port of Rotterdam. No technology will automate away more jobs — or drive more economic efficiency — than the driverless truck.

Shipping a full truckload from L.A. to New York costs around $4,500 today, with labor representing 75 percent of that cost. But those labor savings aren’t the only gains to be had from the adoption of driverless trucks.

Where drivers are restricted by law from driving more than 11 hours per day without taking an 8-hour break, a driverless truck can drive nearly 24 hours per day. That means the technology would effectively double the output of the U.S. transportation network at 25 percent of the cost.

6. Labour shortages? - The same TechCrunch piece came up with this amazing stat that I hadn't seen before. The average age of American truck drivers is 55 and it's rising every year. Hopefully it's lower here.

Even putting aside the direct safety risks, truck driving is a grueling job that young people don’t really want to do. The average age of a commercial driver is 55 (and rising every year), with projected driver shortages that will create yet more incentive to adopt driverlesstechnology in the years to come.

While the efficiency gains are real — too real to pass up — the technology will have tremendous adverse effects as well. There are currently more than 1.6 million Americans working as truck drivers, making it the most common job in 29 states.

The loss of jobs representing 1 percent of the U.S. workforce will be a devastating blow to the economy. And the adverse consequences won’t end there. Gas stations, highway diners, rest stops, motels and other businesses catering to drivers will struggle to survive without them.

7. What would happen if we just gave people money? - Andrew Flowers has a good long look at the Universal Basic Income idea in this 538.com piece ahead of the June 5 referendum in Switzerland.

The entirety of the Swiss government opposes the referendum, citing potential effects on people’s willingness to work and the huge fiscal costs as reasons to vote “no.” Even Straub and his fellow supporters don’t expect it to pass. But he’s excited by the enthusiasm, and media attention, he’s seen for the idea in the past few years. Just getting on the ballot “was a moment of hope, for me and for a lot of other people,” he said. “It was a moment of departure.”

He’s right that interest in basic income is spreading across the world. Finland and the Netherlands are developing plans to study the idea. Canada will likely see an experiment in Ontario, if not on a national level. In France, several members of Parliament have supported running an experiment, and the finance minister is open to it. And in January, Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator announced that the San Francisco-based startup fund was organizing a basic income study in the U.S.

8. People didn't actually stop working much - One of the big fears around the UBI is that people would stop working. It turns out that didn't happen so much in the limited trials over the last 30 or 40 years, and it's clear from our own version of the UBI (for those over 65) that it's not stopping an increasing number from carrying on working.

It’s not clear exactly what work effects would materialize under a basic income scheme. However, over the last 50 years there have been numerous attempts to study this question. Between 1968 and 1980, the U.S. ran four major negative income tax experiments in which families were assigned into treatment and control groups, given cash and tracked over several years. The experiments were located all over: in New Jersey and Pennsylvania; Iowa and North Carolina; Gary, Indiana; and, the largest, in Seattle and Denver.

“We learned an enormous amount from those experiments,” said Karl Widerquist, a Georgetown University-Qatar professor who has studied the NIT experiments extensively. But the results “were a political failure.” The core question unanswered by either side: What is an acceptable decline in work? Unsurprisingly, work effort did decline. Some NIT recipients cut back their hours, but the declines were modest: no more than 5 to 7 percent among primary earners, and a bit more for secondary earners.

9. Totally John Oliver on American 'Special Districts', which people here might know of as Municipal Utility Districts (MUDs). He's not positive.

10. Totally Clarke and Dawe on the Australian Budget on May 3. It's a horse race to the election.