The Emperor's Robes - The Observations of Alex Davis

From 1 July the government has banned retailers from supplying single use plastic bags. The ban was beaten to the punch by several major retailers who had already committed to eliminating the use of this environmental menace. The problem? The ban on bags is anti-science. The science, for those prepared to examine the issues objectively, is clear: not only is the problem of plastic bags (and the next target, straws) not as big stated, it doesn’t deal with the real issues and the alternatives are worse than the original problem. It all began with a laudable goal: to reduce the volume of plastic ending up in the oceans. Plastic bags we were told were ending up in the sea in vast quantities and killing all manner of marine wildlife. Let’s start with the science on the problem. It’s incontrovertible that too much plastic ends up in the oceans. However, the vast majority of this plastic has nothing to do with bags (or straws). Instead approximately three quarters comes from ...

This article was originally published in Stuff. You can find it here:   The recent controversy surrounding Don Brash's banning by Massey University has opened the lid on deep bias within universities, both in New Zealand and offshore.  As any number of graduation speeches formulaically tell you the purpose of a university education is to “open minds”, “search for truth” and inspire students to think broadly and freely. In the “knowledge economy” we turn to academia for what we assume is scientifically rigorous, evidentially based, objective and unbiased knowledge about the world and how to solve its many and varied problems. Except of course that’s not actually the case. Six decades of research from the United States clearly demonstrate that universities and academics are frequently heavily biased and skew overwhelmingly to the political left. In the 1955 (ironically out of concern that right wing McCarthyism was negatively impacting academic freedom) Paul L...

You can read this article as it was originally published in the New Zealand Herald here There is no evidence available to suggest the addition, or presence, of women on a company board causes a change in company performance In the past five years a drumbeat has echoed through business, a mantra if you like, that companies perform better when women sit at the board table. It intuitively appeals to our sense of fairmindedness and equality. It has become accepted wisdom, organisations as august as McKinsey, Harvard and, locally, the Institute of Directors have led the charge in promoting gender diversity. Unfortunately, it's also incorrect. There is no empirical evidence that supports this thesis at all. In 2015 two separate meta studies of board gender diversity were published*. Together they synthesised more than 140 separate studies with a combined sample of more than 90,000 firms from more than 30 countries. They found that: "The relationship between board gender...