Unemployed Wizards

Speaker A: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Sara Nonu and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing unemployed wizards.

Speaker B: 00:00:25

e wizard of New Zealand since: 1998

Speaker C: 00:01:52

The promotional landscape in Ōtatahi, Christchurch, is changing, with new and different promotional programs that will increasingly reflect our diverse communities and showcase a vibrant, diverse modern city that is attractive to residents, domestic and international visitors, new businesses and skilled migrant workers. So no wizards, basically. Yeah, that was perfect.

Speaker B: 00:02:14

xactly. Well, he allegedly in: 2016

Speaker A: 00:02:58

This feels like we've strayed into an episode of Flight of the Conch or something.

Speaker B: 00:03:02

So just the theory of why we don't need wizards or might need wizards is specifically the fact. Now, if he'd been employed by a corporation, no problem. Right. It's like, well, is he adding value? Is he adding more than eight thousand pounds worth of value with his spells? They could make that decision. Yeah. The problem with it we've got here is that in a market economy. Yeah. The first assumption that you have is that a pound that you, a person living in New Zealand spends. Yeah. Should probably say dollar. Yeah. A dollar that you spend is the best possible use of that dollar. Assuming that there isn't some sort of market failure. Right. So assuming that markets are efficient, then you having a dollar is going to be that dollar is going to find its way to a more better use of that dollar as far as your happiness is concerned than if the government spends it for you. That's the theory. So you've got various different types of market failure, things like, you know, you've got to have lots of buyers and sellers. So if you have big like natural monopolies like, you know, electricity companies or something, you've got to regulate those because you can't have hundreds and hundreds of electricity companies or railway companies. You assume that consumers have perfect information. So that's a problem in things like education and health care, for example, where it's very hard to tell how good, you know, hospital is or, you know, and that the products aren't really homogenous in a hospital. So there's, you know, that there's argument. Those sorts of things tend to be arguments about whether that's a market failure. And if so, what should be done? The other key thing is that there's no externalities, right? So an externality is where someone is producing something which is valuable or potentially harmful, but there's no market for that thing. So pollution is the classic example. If I'm polluting a river, if no one really owns that river or if it's, you know, owned in such a way that I don't really, I can't, I can't stop your pollution coming into my bit of the river. I can't charge you for polluting my river. Or alternatively, I can't pay you to stop doing it because there's just no way of turning that into a marketable commodity, right? So that is the issue here that I think they would make the argument that he's not producing a positive enough externality to justify the use of 8,000 pounds worth of so 16,000 Kiwi dollars of a year

Speaker A: 00:05:36

of of wizarding outcomes. I just want to interject here. Yeah, I just and this reminds me of when I was at school is as I developed a theory, which which was the the McGruer theory. Yeah, let's go back to that. The more exotic, vibrant and exciting the cover of a book, the more boring the subject contained within. Other people sometimes say don't judge a book by its cover, right?

Speaker B: 00:06:10

You're saying you can, but it's the inverse, it's inverse in proportion.

Speaker A: 00:06:13

Right, true. Yeah. So I thought we were gonna be talking about wizards, right? And I know, and I

Speaker B: 00:06:19

thought you were gonna say that because this guy dresses like a wizard, he's probably really boring.

Speaker A: 00:06:24

I thought you were going in that direction. No, I thought we'd be talking about wizards, which I think is really interesting and quite fun. We're gonna get on to wizards, but I thought I'd better cover off the argument from... You started talking about basic economics. And I know really what we're talking about, as we always do, we're really talking about something else. And really what we're talking about is superfluosity. Well, I will, I'll get to this. Can I just talk about what he does as a wizard? Okay, so we're back onto the wizard. Right, you've got me again. Sarah,

Speaker C: 00:06:52

is there anything you want to come in with? Just wanted to ask, how many years was it that he was the wizard for? 23 years. 23, okay. He must have been... He amounts to some third of a million Kiwi dollars. Right, so I have heard of the wizard in Christchurch, because obviously I'm the token New Zealander in the room. But that would not be a drawcard for me to ever go to wizards. Wizards were cool. Because also, I don't even know how you would find the wizard. Oh, he'd find you. He's a wizard. That's creepy. And I don't like that. I'm going to avoid that wizard.

Speaker B: 00:07:28

Hold on, tell me more about Christchurch then. How is it perceived in New Zealand? Is it seen

Speaker C: 00:07:33

as a bit of a boring town or something? No, I don't think so. I mean, they've really pushed since the earthquakes, the rebuild and trying to get like more of a tourist population going down there. As well as jobs, they're trying to grow their economy. What do Aucklanders think

Speaker A: 00:07:47

of Christchurchians? I bet they think they're really rural, backwater type people. Well,

Speaker C: 00:07:53

I think it's more like what Christchurch people think of Aucklanders, because no one really likes

Speaker A: 00:07:57

Aucklanders. Really? They're so brash. They're called jeffers. What is it? Okay, why? Don't.

Speaker C: 00:08:03

Just, but it's derogatory. Yeah, that's basically it. I mean, most of my family's from, well actually, I didn't grow up in Auckland, but all my family's from Auckland, so I shouldn't say too much. But I'm still just really interested at why there was a wizard for over 20 years in Christchurch. And like, as Nick's been saying, like, what is it that he's actually producing? How do you measure that value? Because it's not like he's getting paid by the public for anything,

Speaker B: 00:08:29

is he? Unless he's getting paid to get rid of the fog. Yeah, good. Very. That's, I think, the pertinent question. Did we have some insight on what he was doing? Well, acts of wizardry. Is that job description? Looking for a wizard? Acts of wizardry. Let's just, let's turn to no less an authority than Aleister Crowley himself, the great beast, the master of early 20th century English magic with a K, who said that magic is the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. So let's assume that this wizard is doing something along those lines. He's causing changes to occur to the world. Now, I see this is, now this is whether or not, it comes back to the ex-Nancy's question, because a wizard might, for example, be capable of casting a spell that gave you the ability to get a pay rise. He might cast a spell and you would get a pay rise. Now, that might be some sort of rent-seeking behavior. It might be that he's inducing the company to give you more money than you deserve or something. But he might do it by making you better at your job. Wizard might cast a spell which makes you better at your job. You have become more valuable all of a sudden. It's quite right that you, the wizard, be compensated for that. And if they were providing those kinds of services, you would expect there to be some market rate for wizarding along those lines. But if you look at the kinds of things that the Wizard of New Zealand was doing, I think they're more in the line of, you know, positive externality. So I think he's presumably, we know he can change the weather because he made some fog disappear. And one assumes that, I don't know, perhaps he's casting spells that promote happiness or harmony, I would imagine. Or perhaps he's warding off evil spirits or something. But no doubt he's hard at work on another plane, another realm that we see little of. Frankly, I'm surprised he didn't get paid more. I'm surprised he just didn't cast a spell to keep his job. I think there's a question there, but perhaps that's unethical in the wizarding world. I don't know. I don't know the wizarding rules. But I want to say that I think, you know, you know I'm a hardcore economist. I'm as hardcore as they come. And I was extremely, what's the word I'm looking for? Proprietary integrity, which are the watchwords of the civil service. We're all geared around that. This is the public's money we're dealing with. It's not ours. We shouldn't be wasting it on stuff like wizards. But I think there is more value in things like wizards than a kind of strict accounting method would suggest. Like if you, even if you were to go out and measure his outcomes to go and say, okay, well, let's see exactly, work out exactly, you know, would this fog have cleared eventually? Almost certainly not. It might have stayed there for 20 years and the airport would have to close if it weren't for wizarding intervention. But the point is that, you know, there's that. Let's measure his outcomes. But even apart from that, even if he wasn't doing anything, isn't it just nice that there's a wizard? That the people in New Zealand have a wizard on the payroll. And it's only 8,000

Speaker A: 00:11:39

quid a year. What are you moaning about? But also when you start thinking about other stuff as well, I presume he was paid by the municipality, is that correct? Yeah, I think that's right. And I mean, okay, you might as well say, and okay, it's not paid by the municipality and it's probably an independent body in itself, but the church, you know, the Christian church in New Zealand, which is probably Church of England, I'm guessing, sort of, you know, that sort of, yeah, is that about right? Do you know? Okay, Sarah doesn't know. I went to a Catholic high school.

Speaker C: 00:12:05

Right, okay. And I'm not Catholic, I'm something else. I think they would probably call it Anglican.

Speaker A: 00:12:09

Anglican, there you go. My mum is Anglican. Right, there you go. But you could argue, hey, this organisation is wasting its time on what frankly are kind of wizards really, let's be honest. Well, this is getting a bit controversial, isn't it? And you know, what are they really doing? They're doing these prayers and stuff that they go to some guy in the sky with the beard and it all helps. So, I mean, just as a point of comparison, because when you start, we talked about cults before, now wizardry is obviously way beyond a cult, it's not that, but. It's practically a science. Yeah, it's, let's just try and be fair in here, just do some comparisons. You could see, you know, all that money they've probably wasted on gardeners or something, I don't know.

Speaker B: 00:12:46

But I think that's a great example, because I'm a big old atheist. And yeah, I love the fact that the Church of England is there. I think it's great. And I would, and I would, happily, I don't know how publicly funded it is, if at all. I know, obviously, they make quite a lot of money from just holdings of land and stuff. I genuinely don't know. But I would be happy for it to be publicly funded. I like the idea of just having it there, of having these churches you can wander into, you know, having, as you say, sort of wizards or priests or whatever they're called, casting spells, is a great thing. It's just very cool. And I feel like there's an existence value to having weird things that is, you know, the alternative viewpoint is always what I consider that I would call the sort of land of hospitals, which is whenever the government spends money on a new building or something fun, someone goes, Oh, yeah, you could you could buy a new hospital with that. And I'm like, these people won't be happy until Britain is just one big, bloody hospital. Yeah, you know, it's like, does everything have to be a hospital? Can we not spend money on things that are just a bit frivolous? And I sort of think, you know, most half of the things we have been left by former generations, including cool stuff, like the space program, would probably come out negative on the whole, you know, well, how much value has this produced? But I just think it's a huge amount of value in having it there.

Speaker A: 00:14:17

Yeah, it's a bit like, I guess, another way of putting it is, would you rather live in a world where there was no wizard in Christchurch? Or would you want to live in a world where for eight grand a year of New Zealand dollars, you've got a wizard? Any sane person would say I want

Speaker B: 00:14:32

Well, Sarah, you're from there. I mean, do you do you prefer New Zealand with or without wizards?

Speaker A: 00:14:41

But this is going to tie into self perception as well.

Speaker C: 00:14:44

Yeah. I mean, I would like the idea of wizards. I mean, I would prefer it if they were real, but I think it would be like, it's not it's not harmful. Like, it's fine. I was just thinking about it, though. Like, essentially, what he is is a mascot, right? Like, he is something that provides some kind of he might not provide any monetary value in terms of what he's bringing in. But he's providing some kind of social emotional value. You know, I'm sure the kids would have loved to have seen the wizard. Harry Potter fans are most probably geek out about him. So there is some like, role that a mascot has. Anyway, you think about all our sports teams, companies, they all have some kind of like, mascot thing that represents them and their values. So having having a wizard represent Christchurch, I don't know if I'd say represents New Zealand,

Speaker B: 00:15:27

but it's not a bad, bad shout. Well, I mean, New Zealand isn't has become the, you know, it's very strongly associated with wizards, of course, as a result of the Lord of the Rings. So why not keep it up? You know, but well, exactly. But I mean, I so I think this is this question of, you know, this quote by Voltaire, which I really like, which is the superflu shows très nécessaire. There's the superfluous, a very necessary thing. And I think that this, I just like, as you say, it's like, well, which world would you rather live in the land of hospitals or a land of wizards? And I think there's no doubt about it. Having pointless luxuries is really nice. I think it's well worth the cost in many, on many occasions. He's like, why do we want-

Speaker A: 00:16:15

Isn't it the definition of civilisation and progress?

Speaker B: 00:16:18

Right, why do we want the houses of public? It's like, so one of my former bosses, for example, he was really hardcore about public money. He was like a crusader. So he wants to abolish the House of Commons. Yeah, get rid of that, turn it into a hotel and just get a new build office somewhere in Swindon, and then they can just go there. And I was like, I feel like we're missing something. If we were to do that, there's something about that kind of the history, the culture, all of these things which are intangible. And unfortunately, there really is no really good, I mean, ideally, the way that you'd measure it is you'd almost, you'd sort of have a whip around. There are ways of doing it, but you'd say how much, how much everyone do you want to pay towards the upkeep of the House of Commons? And the assumption is that, you know, in a democracy, if people felt strongly about it, there would be a political party would emerge where they said, right, we're going to move to Swindon, and everyone would vote for them, because they consider it such a waste of money. Royal family are like our wizards, right? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I mean, you know, again, do you want to live in a world with the wizards and the kings and the queens, or a world of roundabouts in Swindon and hospitals? Yeah. It's, you know... Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's one way in which superfluous things can be valuable. They can be valuable because this nebulous concept of existence value is actually much more important than we give it credit.

Speaker A: 00:17:37

But there's an irony, actually, that, well, I was gonna say there's an irony in this, but it's an irony that is contained in that quote by Voltaire, which is, you know, the superfluous stuff is, is very necessary. Just the fact that it doesn't, that you don't need it, it's not necessary, makes, means you definitely do need it. Yeah, I'm just sort of...

Speaker B: 00:17:58

The same way about, in a very much more mundane way about things like traveling first class on the train, which is, you know, it's a technically a cost. It's probably, you know, in some way, I don't really need to travel first class on the train. It's, you know, instead of 40 quid, it costs 80 quid. But it is so worth it, because you think, you know what, I'm going first class and got this to myself. And it's like, you know, it is, as you say, the fact you don't need to be doing it is half the fun. But there is another reason why superfluous things are useful. And

Speaker A: 00:18:32

this is the whole sort of... Good, I need some ammunition with this for my wife, because she

Speaker B: 00:18:36

keeps telling me how useless I am. Ah, this might work. Okay, but it's the Titanic lifeboat situation. Okay. And it comes down to the fact that we cannot foresee the future. Okay, boils down to this. But there are physical limits on the speed with the speed with which you can produce stuff and to change what you're doing. Those two things put together mean that there's value in just having a contingency having things you don't think you'll need. It's good to have things around that you don't think you'll need because you don't know when you might need them. This is insurance. Well, insurance is one way of almost compensating for the fact you didn't have them when you needed them. But it's really, it's more this idea of reserves of sort of contingency planning of saying, there's a big risk if we go over. Take PPE in the NHS. You know, before the pandemic, it's the same thing, like we didn't have enough, we could have stockpiled it and had a warehouse full of it. And, you know, we didn't because it was outside our forecasts. And we should have said, well, you know what, there's more uncertainty about the future than we think there is. And we need to factor that in by having more stuff than we think we're going to need. You can't do everything just in time. It's just not possible. So I can see this is the beginning of a campaign.

Speaker A: 00:19:56

More wizards in case one day. Yeah, into the municipality of Christchurch. But what if the

Speaker B: 00:20:01

Dark Lord Sauron emerges, you know, from his slumber with an army of Balrogs. And go and

Speaker A: 00:20:09

join the army. But actually, this is not a million miles away from, is it the, I forget whose argument of the existence of God it is. It was the mathematician bloke. Which is, look, you might as well believe in God. Oh, Pascal's wave show. There you go. Because, you know, what if you do get to heaven? And it's, well, sorry, you die. And it turns out there is a God. And well, look, you're buggered if you've not been believing in it. So you might as well believe in

Speaker B: 00:20:33

it. It's not a million miles away from that. You can be more rigorous, because you don't want to just say, well, let's just buy the maximum possible amount of stuff that we would need. Because that really would be a waste. Because, you know, they deteriorate. Stocks generally deteriorate. But you want more than you think you'll need, I think, is as far as I'll go. While saying that you could be scientific about it. But you shouldn't be just getting stuff based on your central estimate and what you expect to need. You always should have more than that. You know, at the minimum, you should have what you expect to need. And you should almost always have more. And so, you know, you've got, I mentioned lifeboats on Titanic, would have been handy to have a few more. Military, but they didn't plan on a whole ship going down. Thought we might need them for various reasons, but not the idea of it sinking was not planned for. Military reserves. We've got military reservists. So we've got more people to call on than we think we need. Even in a battle, you have reserves so that you can deploy them for reasons that you don't now know, but you will find out at some point. Tins in your cupboard. We covered preppers, didn't we? And of course, wizards. So, you know, the problem with wizards is you can't, there's a bit of a wizard paradox, really, which is you cannot just summon a wizard up on demand unless you are a wizard. So you have to have one to begin with. And so if Christchurch suddenly found itself in need of magic, wizarding, it's buggered. You know, this guy spent 23 years becoming an absolute ace wizard. And they're going to find suddenly that they'll need him back

Speaker A: 00:22:15

and he'll have gone. Yeah, exactly. Unless in Christchurch's most, even though he's no longer employed, doesn't mean he stops being a wizard. Right. So a true wizard, I'm sure at the moment of, you know, a bit like in Lord of the Rings when they really need Gandalf. He arrives on the seventh

Speaker B: 00:22:34

day at that moment to save the day. And he will be born aloft on the shoulders of Christchurchians. And yeah, no doubt. Yeah. They'll rue the day, I tell you. Yeah. I think we need to stop there.

Speaker A: 00:22:51

Sarah, anything to say at all? No. No, I don't think so. Yeah. More wizards. Just why not more

Speaker B: 00:22:59

wizards? Yeah. I think we need to stop there. Do you have, yeah, I know you obviously you've got this exciting indigenous ancestry. What's the religion like there? Do they have something like

Speaker C: 00:23:09

wizards? No. Oh. No, but there are stories that like talk about like magic and stuff. Like I remember being younger and my cousin would tell me stories from Samoa that always had some kind of element of magic or some something. But I don't know anything more than that. Are there any

Speaker B: 00:23:31

practitioners of the old religion anymore? I don't know. Okay. Well, like a lot of, yeah, I'm not sure. Displaced by those damn wizards. Yeah. Wizards coming in. It's wizard colonialization.

Speaker A: 00:23:47

Yeah. That's what it is. Yeah. I'm going to take back my earlier assertion about something being colourful actually being boring. Because I really enjoyed that actually. Especially when we really got into the depth of superfluousness. And yeah, I think that was quite, I think it was fun.

Speaker B: 00:24:09

Good. All right. Let's hope the listeners do too. Let's hope so. Thanks as always for listening. If

Speaker A: 00:24:15

you've any thoughts or suggestions for topics, you can email us at podcast.alephinsights.com. We'd love to hear from you. If you've enjoyed the podcast, don't, well, what should people do,

Speaker B: 00:24:25

Nick? Well, they should, even though it's, they don't need to, they should like and subscribe.

Speaker A: 00:24:32

They should indeed. Thank you. We'll stop there. Thanks very much. I'm Fraser McGruer. We've been here with Nick Hare and Sara Nonu of Aleph Insights. Until next time. Goodbye.