I'm not prepared to claim that Eric Crampton and Benno Blaschke are the nerdiest of all the nerds involved with New Zealand's zoning reforms, but they are the only ones who happily self-identified as such on the air with me.

Crampton is the chief economist and Blaschke a research fellow with the New Zealand Initiative, a Wellington-based think tank that is funded a bit like a Chamber of Commerce is in the United States: from dues payments from a wide variety of member businesses. I've described them as the American Enterprise Institute of New Zealand: both earnestly academic and ideologically aligned with the goal of freeing markets from overregulation.

This makes them representatives of an important constituency in most successful YIMBY reforms in  ...