Past Olympics

Someone on twitter asked about our focus in the Olympics on gymnastics.  That caused me to recall Olga Korbut. In 1972 she turned us on to gymnastics.  At 4'11'', one inch taller than my sister, she was both a daring gymnast and charismatic.  Watch her ups and downs here.

Bob Somerby recalls the "greatest track meet" , not an Olympic event but a US-USSR standoff in 1962, which reminds me of how fierce the athletic rivalry was between the two powers in the 16 years before then, peaking in the Olympics.  In the 50's it seemed American supremacy was under challenge; if we weren't the best in everything, what were we?

Reading "Useful Delusions" and Trump as Fighting Hero

 Anne Applebaum has a piece on Mr. Lindell at the Atlantic, which happens to tie in with my reading of Vedantam's Useful Illusions.

Vedantam analyzes the possible usefulness of illusions using evolutionary arguments. Because you can find illusions throughout human history, there must be a evolutionary reason humans are prone to such illusions.  He argues it's useful to form social links, whether in religion or nationalism, whether in fraternities or tribal conflicts, etc.

So why "Trump as Hero"? Possibly part of the illusion surrounding the Trump phenomena is heroism.  Trump is, or presents himself, as the embattled warrior, fighting against all odds, against the media, the Democrats, the bad people in the world such as immigrants or China, sometimes victorious, sometimes just surviving to fight another day, surrounded by dragons but always stalwart, wielding his magic sword of bluster and venom.  And his supporters, what of them?  They're critical to his battle, whether through their cheers or donations, a part of the grand effort.  By identifying with his fight and following his efforts they participate in a narrative of our time, one which rises above the humdrum. 

A Different Perspective--Rebanks

 James Rebanks is a skilled writer whose book I enjoyed.  He's got a new book for sale, already released in the UK and now in the US on August 3.

I haven't read the new book, but anticipate I will, likely from the library. Civil Eats has an excerpt from it, describing his visit to Wendell Berry in Kentucky and to Iowa.

While he calls Iowa farmers the "best farmers that ever lived", he doesn't like our production agriculture, mourning the transition we've made over the last 60 years or so.

I agree with him there have been big tradeoffs, but I'm not as negative as he is about current agriculture.  I don't know how well his sheep farm could support his family without, I'm guessing, significant support from his writing.  

But he's worth reading. 

Missing Somethings in Schelling: Reston Verus Prince George

Thomas Schelling was a great economist, who won the Nobel.  One book had this: In 1969 and 1971, Schelling published widely cited articles dealing with racial dynamics and what he termed "a general theory of tipping."^[21] In these papers he showed that a preference that one's neighbors be of the same color, or even a preference for a mixture "up to some limit," could lead to total segregation,

I think generally it was taken as explaining why "block-busting" in the 60's led to a change from lily-white ownership to all-black ownership--whites had a preference for living among whites. But when you look at what he said, at least as summarized in Wikipedia, it's race-blind.  In other words, blacks could have a preference for living among blacks, which could also affect housing patterns.  That point was, I think, missed because we didn't have a real world example. 

One factor in the discussion is the starting point.  In the 1960's you had areas which were inhabited by one race. Another factor is whether you think it's a "preference", or whether it's an emergent property from network effects: you buy where a friend has bought first, "Networks" has become a new buzzword for analysis.  And these days we're more familiar with "chain" immigration, where a neighborhood in the US is peopled mostly by immigrants from one town in Mexico, or wherever. .  

I bought in Reston in the mid-70's, partly because it was founded from the beginning as equal opportunity housing.  I was part of an outflow of people from DC moving out to the suburbs.  As it turned out, despite Reston's open appeal, it didn't attract a lot of blacks--I don't think it's ever gotten much over 10 percent blacks--; most blacks moving from the District went to Prince George County, which is now majority black.  These patterns fit Schelling's analysis, but how much of the underlying cause is preference, and how much is network effects is still unknown. 

Seat Belts and Air Bags

 To me the argument for using seat belts in an air bag equipped car is the same as for using a face mask when vacinated. 

Carbon Credits and Bureaucracy

 A number of articles on the issue of carbon credits--Politico, Civil Eats Modern Farmer, and others.  Apparently the Biden administration is moving towards a system of establishing credits for farmers to capture carbon in the soil as part of the effort to minimize climate change.  There's questions about definitions, about recognizing existing practices which capture carbon, etc. etc.

What strikes me is the likely impact on the USDA bureaucracy.  I assume NRCS will be the lead agency in determining whether a given practice captures carbon, etc. and that data relating to credits will be tied into the GIS system.

I've not studied the issue, but I'm assuming the credits will have monetary value, small at first but increasing.  I assume there might be a tie to existing farm programs.  Consider the sod/swamp provisions which initiated in the 1985 farm bill with some programs over the years requiring compliance with the provisions as a condition of eligibility for payments.  It's easy enough to imagine a requirement for some minimum of carbon capture being added to sod/swamp. I'm not sure these days how the FSA-NRCS collaboration on sod/swamp is working, but carbon capture might put new strains on the relationship, as well as the joint management of GIS data.

During my time NRCS had programs with their responsibilities under sod/swamp because they weren't used to being the "bad guy", making decisions which hurt farmers.  The agency's culture was always being the good guy, teaching and helping farmers to do better.  Will NRCS be up for carbon capture decisions?

A final concern is fraud.  We like to believe producers are honest, and most are.  But some aren't, and it's easy enough to imagine a fraudulent collaboration between a farmer and a USDA employee.

[Updated to add a link.]

FSA and the Last Mile Problem

 Sec. Vilsack is announcing additional programs to aid producers impacted by the pandemic.

My impression of the various programs which have authorized spending in response to the pandemic and its effect is that several of them have had big problems in getting the money out the door.  Some of the programs have struggled to get the money out; others have perhaps been vulnerable to fraud.  

Those are impressions only.  Meanwhile I'm following the FSA employee group on Facebook. I likely suffer from the old-timer's presumption that the newcomers have it easier, but I try to resist that snap judgment.  On the one hand, I'm very impressed by the variety of programs, some directed to people FSA has long served, some directed to new groups, which the counties have had to deal with.  On the other hand I remember PIK in 1983 and particulary the disaster program in 1986 (IIRC) which hit in the midst of the System/36 automation. 

I hope someday somebody, GAO or Congress, does a high level review of the government's operations, their speed, efficiency, and weaknesses.  My expectation and hope is that FSA would do well in such a review, largely because of a long history in dealing with crash programs and, most importantly, the county offices deal directly with the people, a big contrast with most of the rest of government which has to try to operate through state and county government agencies, and/or NGOs.

The Limits of Small Farms

Civil Eats has this piece on Jesse Frost, who operates a .75 acre no-till farm in Kentucky.

It all sounds good, except when he says his operation grosses $70K, and apparently uses 2+ person-years of labor--i.e., one paid employee and Jesse full time, and some contribution from his wife. 

I can accept that his out-of-pocket expenses, assuming he owns the land outright with no mortgage,  are low.  But $70K divided by 2 is $35K each, which isn't much over the minimum wage progressives would like to see.  I can also accept that food costs for his wife and him would be relatively low, especially if they freeze and/or can a lot. But I'm not convinced that the cash returns are sufficient for a lifetime supporting a family through all the ups and downs.  It may well be enough with the wife's outside income, likely providing health insurance and covering SS. 

Migrating to Opportunity

 David Brooks has an column in today's NYTimes on the question: "How racist is America?" His answer seems to be--getting less so, when you look at long range changes.  I recommend it.

But he had an observation about how immigrants are doing better than you might expect, particularly if you focus on prejudice against foreigners.  He noted that immigrants move to places of opportunity.  The implication is it gives them an advantage over native-born, who tend to live where they grew up, or at least some natives are less mobile.  You can pick holes in such a generalization: for example the Amish are notably mobile, and people flocked to North Dakota during the oil boom. 

But I buy it. By moving from one country to another you break a lot of the habits and constraints you'd have if you remained.  That's true for the vast majority of movers.  But the majority of Americans aren't moving, even within the country.

I think it's true that our mobility has decreased over the years.  I think a minor factor is the end of the draft, which broke some of the ties men had.  (Though as a creature of habit myself I may be overestimating their role in life.)

More Metaphors--Wet Wood and Poison

 I posted earlier on nuclear reactions as a metaphor possibly explaining the rise in murders recently.  The key point is the reactivity--when the population becomes younger for whatever reason (baby boom, oldsters observing lockdowns, oldsters dying from covid) the interactions among people change a bit without the cushioning effect of the older.   A similar logic could apply to the pandemic--as more people are vaccinated, the reactivity goes down.

I came across a new metaphor today in a discussion of the effects of the vaccine.  The metaphor is wood, as in forest fires.  If the wood is very dry it catches fire easily, if there's been rain it doesn't. From that perspective the vaccine has the effect of dampening the wood.

A separate metaphor was poison--in a Post story explaining vaccination, the point is that the vaccine isn't binary, like shutting the door on the virus.  It's more like a poison.  So when the body is infected, the virus attacks and is multiplying, but then it starts to encounter the poison (as the immune system ramps up).  The virus starts to be poisoned, reducing its reproduction rate.  So testing may give a positive test during the time the virus is in its struggle with the immune system, as hopefully it's in its death throes.

China and Farmland

 Once again people are getting upset by the idea of citizens of a rising Asian power buying American farmland. See this and this.

As I blogged previously, this is an old story. Back in the 1970's Congress passed  AFIDA, but back then it wasn't China which was the perceived threat.  China was a poor backwards country struggling under communism.  Instead it was Japan, which was selling us cars, not electronics, and using a few of the dollars they got to buy real estate, some agricultural land, some urban properties including Rockefeller Center.

In the long run who owns what is determined by economics.  Japan's star has faded, China's risen.  In the next 30 years it may be India or Nigeria which has the money to buy some land.  

Nation Building--Napoleon, Ataturk, Kagame, Petraeus

 Reading "The Fourth Star" by David Cloud and Greg Jaffe, which deals with the interwining careers of Generals Casey, Abizaid, Chiarelli, and Petraeus, who all were associated with the Iraq war.  So far I'm up to roughly 2004, when Petraeus has left the 101st Airborne for the States, then returned to Iraq to train the new Iraqi army.  During the division's occupation of Mosul in the north of Iraq Petraeus was a forceful presence in nation-building, or at least patching together a semi-operational local government.  

We all know the results of our involvement there.  

I got to thinking about leaders who were successful in nation-building: Napoleon's imprint on France is present today, as is Ataturk's on Turkey. Kagame's rule of Rwanda has now lasted longer than either of the foregoing and looks to be as impactful.

As best I can tell, Petraeus has a comparable big personality and intelligence as the other three, so what accounts for his failure and the success of the other three?

The obvious thing is longevity, which points to a big weakness in American nation-building efforts: rotation.  As a democracy we don't feel able to tell our generals and our troops you're in for the duration. We rotate them out after a year or so.  I wonder what would have happened if the troops who had 3 to 5 tours of duty in Afghanistan or Iraq had instead spent 3 years (with R&R) in the same area. Perhaps more importantly, if our generals had spent that time.

I'm reminded of a lesson Bob Reynolds, who was then the deputy director of the Administrative Services Division, ASCS gave me when I screwed up. It was to the effect that people, employees, cared more about consistency than charm; you can figure out how to deal with someone who's the same asshole every day, but dealing with someone who's different every day is much more difficult.

I think that's true with nation building.  Petraeus may not have had the right ideas, but he was forceful.  Reminds me of old corncob pipe Dougie, our near-fascist general, Douglas MacArthur,  who lasted 6 years in a nation building exercise which was very successful, much as I hate to admit it.

Continuums

"most things that we think of as categorical are really continuous"

That's a line in this post, What Is a Woman? at Statistical Modeling.  A lot of what they post is over my head, but enough isn't to make for rewarding reading.  The phrase captures a belief I've had. It goes along with believing that most generalizations could be rephrased statistically, as in "Americans believe..." There's a statistical phrasing for "Americans"--is it "the average American", "the young American", "white Americans", "living Americans" etc. etc.  And what they believe can also be rephrased.

The Premonition I

 About a third of the way into Michael Lewis's "The Premonition", which so far describes the development of the pandemic plan in the Bush administration, through the linking of people from different government agencies and a high schooler's science project.

On page 78 he writes:

"Inside the United States government were all these little boxes.  The boxes had been created to address specific problems as they arose.  'How to ensure our food is safe to eat,' for instance, or how to avoid a run on banks'..."  He goes on to describe the people inside the boxes as knowledgeable and talented, developing a culture around the box, but frozen inside the box with little interest in other boxes.  

For me the "box" is a "silo", which includes the "stakeholders" in Congress and NGO's as well as the civil servatns, but the description otherwise rings true. 

Changes in Society--Religion

 As I've mentioned, my paternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister.  Recently I've been doing a little research using the newspapers.com archive of old newspapers. Before that I'd done a handful of searches in the NYTimes archive. 

There's a big contrast of course between newspapers in the 1890's through 1920's and now.  One hundred years makes a big difference. In terms of religion, the daily newspapers in Wilkes Barre and West Pittston paid a lot more attention to religious events than they do today. As you might expect the Times paid less attention than the smaller cities, but still there was considerable coverage, particularly on a controversy within the Presbyterian church over whether a minister was too liberal. There was also coverage in the PA cities of significant events: the dedicating of a church after its debt was paid off, an address by a minister returned from a visit to the "Holy Land", the departure of a minister for a church in Minneapolis.

These days I can't think of much in religious affairs which is covered in the media, except for religious leaders joining one side or another in political controversies, or splits over issues like the place of homosexuality in the church or the role of women priests.

Times have changed.

Surprising (to Me) Views on Heritability

 Below is the text of a recent tweet.  I found the data in the table surprising, since I had the impression that professors were generally disdainful of the possible influence of genes. I didn't dig into the details of the poll, so the sample might have been small and/or skewed, or maybe sociologists differ from professors in other fields.

I mean you can do the obvious, boring thing and check polls.
For example, this one from 2014, with 81.2% of sociologists granting some heritability to intellectual potentialhttps://t.co/kz0ESPest0 https://t.co/2NJQ7noBFV pic.twitter.com/xc2ahfvHWD

— Siberian Fox📎 (@SilverVVulpes) July 14, 2021

 

Pancho's Life

 In a NYTimes story on the use of a brain implant to convert thoughts into speech. 

Before his stroke, Pancho [who lost his speech because of a stroke after an accident] had attended school only up to sixth grade in his native Mexico. With remarkable determination, he has since earned a high school diploma, taken college classes, received a web developer certificate and begun studying French.

“I think the car wreck got me to be a better person, and smarter too,” he emailed.

Sometimes it seems we have too much choice, too many abilities, and being forced to concentrate can help.  Or maybe that's my Pollyanna streak.  

 

Is Email Effective?

 It turns out a researcher at Illinois State University did a survey in 2019 of Illinois FSA personnel (CED's, DD's, etc.) which concluded:

The USDA Farm Service Agency replaced paper mailings with GovDelivery electronic communication in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs. This case study presents evidence from one state indicating a perception among local FSA officials that GovDelivery does not allow them to effectively serve their constituents. A gap in reliable rural Internet service and low usage of smartphones in place of rural broadband may contribute to the extremely low open rates for GovDelivery email notifications. Findings suggest that electronic-only communication does not allow the agency to effectively engage with farm owners, operators, and managers.

Boerngen, Maria A. “Efficiencyfectiveness of Paperless Communication from the USDA Farm Service Agency.” Journal of ASFMRA, 2019, pp. 27–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26872597. Accessed 13 July 2021.

LBJ Was a Great If Flawed President

 Noah Smith discusses the "War on Poverty"

It's obvious to me that LBJ was the greatest domestic president of my lifetime, excluding FDR since I wasn't aware of him.  

I suspect future historians will decrease the weight they give to Vietnam so he'll rise in their assessment.

Racism and Sex

 The Times had a graphic 3 years ago showing the results of analyzing the earnings of black and white men and women.  The top graphic compared the results for lifetime earnings of men who grew up in the top 20 percent considering parental wealth and neighborhoods.  It showed that such black men were about half as likely to maintain their status.

"Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children."

What's strangely interesting is that black women maintain their status, doing as well as white women.  That simple fact undermines explanations on both the left and right:

• the right can't argue that blacks are less intelligent when black women do as well as white women
• the left can't argue that simple racism, prejudice against blacks, is the cause.

I hasten to add a couple points:

• black men have always been seen as more threatening than black women, so it makes sense that prejudice against them is stronger.  That's just one factor to consider.
• While the study matched the black and white samples on money and neighborhood, that doesn't mean they weren't comparing apples and oranges. Some things to consider--how many generations of wealth did the whites have behind them, as opposed to the blacks.  They might have compared nouveaux riche to established wealth. They also might have compared the children of black professionals who thrived in the old segregated society but who had to compete in the integrated society following the civil rights movement. 

Metaphor--Society, Nuclear Reactors, and Pandemic

 Long discussion in Post of the possible causes for increase in murders this year in America (not occurring elsewhere if article is right).

Thinking of a metaphor for human society--as a nuclear reactor, with police as the control rods absorbing or not the excess neutrons, thereby damping or permitting greater interactions. 

One might expand the applicability of the metaphor to the pandemic, with the control rods being the vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc. 

You'd have to expand the discussion to include the rates of the radioactivity of the alternative materials which could be used for a reactor.  (I'd assume that radium, for example, could explode given the right setup.)  

Back to homicide--it seems to me one effect of the pandemic likely has been to change the characteristics of the public, those who are active in exchanges with others.  During the past year the "public" has become younger and poorer as the old and the better-off have been much better able to reduce their time in public.  That might well mean that the remaining "public" is more reactive, somewhat as if the uranium was more highly enriched.  

More on Sin

 I just posted on the similarity I saw between the revivalist/evangelical spirit of the Great Awakenings and the "wokeism" of the current day. 

I ran across this statement in an interview with a black evangelical minister:

Green: One of the things that has really struck me in recent national conversations about race is that a lot of people—especially secular white people—seem to be struggling with something that I can’t help but identify as sin: this recognition that we live in a broken world, and that all of us, by nature, hurt others and do things that are wrong. This seems to be what all of the people who joined anti-racism book clubs are struggling with—the realization of their own sinfulness when it comes to race.

Now I'm struggling a bit: I can buy that people naturally do wrong, sin. I can buy that the "woke" movement is adopting the strategy of the great awakening: convicting people of their sinful nature and asking for reformation.  But I'm not convinced it's an effective strategy for changing society or an accurate description of how things go wrong.  Need more thinking on it. 

 

The Bureaucrat's Necessity: Forms in the UK

 I designed and redesigned a fair number of forms during my career. We had a Forms Management Branch in ASCS when I started.  The program specialist would take his problem to them and together they'd work together to get a master for the printer. 

Overtime I started to design forms in Wordperfect tables.  Got quite good at it, if I do say so. I think Forms eventually got most forms converted to Wordperfect. I haven't checked the online forms in years so I don't know whether they've now converted to PDF fill-ins or to HTML.  

Anyway, the UK also has forms.  This post says they're doing 6 percent a year (I hope that's not true, though if they have the sort of expansion of programs we've had in agriculture in recent years they might be expanding the number that fast).  They would like to have all HTML forms.  It's interesting to see how differently their government works than ours, as I believe I've noted before. 

Great Awakening and Wokeism

 "Great Awakenings" in American history are periods of religious revivals. Wikipedia says: "The Awakenings all resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of personal guilt, their sin, and the need of salvation by Christ."

There are some parallels between such awakenings and the current enthusiasm for woke.  

This was stimulated by Ross Douthat in the NYTimes who wrote:

What's really inflaming today's fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn't being offered on its own. Instead it's yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.

First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.

That's a similar strategy to the revivalist appeals prominent in the Great Awakenings--you convince the sinner of his depravity and the essential need for repentance as a prerequisite to God's grace.  A further step is to examine your actions every day to determine if you are following a righteous path--for predestinarians that's the way to feel some confidence that you're one of the "elect", that you're saved from hell.

FSA Employee Is Credited

Politico has a long piece on FSA loans to black farmers.  It's not full of praise, to say the least.  Not sure whether I'll come back to it, but it does end with this nice bit

What helped Cleaver was a woman in the FSA office who took the time to explain the processes.

“She was like an angel. I had been going through the loan officers and the HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities] that was here and they couldn't get anything done,” he said. “[She] held my hand and she told me everything step by step. She was patient, she was polite.”

I'm sorry Politico doesn't provide email addresses for its reporters so I could compliment Ximena Bustillo for including this.  I think in years of following reporting on FSA and race it's the first time I've seen a compliment published.

Collecting Statistics: Problems and Progress

GovExec had an article on the problems with data collection during the pandemic from the Covid Tracking Project.

Above and beyond any individual reporting practice, we believe that it was the lack of explanations from state governments and, most crucially, the CDC that led to misuse of data and wounded public trust. We tried our best to provide explanations where possible, and we saw transformation when we were able to get the message across to the public. Data users who were frustrated or even doubtful came to trust the numbers. Journalists reported more accurately. Hospitals could better anticipate surges.

If we could make just one change to the way state and federal COVID-19 data were reported, it would be to make an open acknowledgment of the limitations of public-health-data infrastructure whenever the data is presented. And if we could make one plea for what comes next, it’s that these systems receive the investment they deserve.

[Updated: Technology Review describes   a consortium to collect and standardize covid data into one database for research purposes. It sounds a bit klugey but that's the penalty for prioritizing privacy and silos over a rationalized centralized system. The question is whether we'll wake up and fund continuing efforts of this sort.}

Not Race, Sex, Class; I'm a Power Guy (Much Revised)

 I see a lot of posts on various sites about critical race theory (CRT).  I'd like to see someone first define it, then do a translation of the theory into "critical gender theory"; "critical class theory"; "critical caste theory"; "critical religion theory"; "critical color theory"; etc. etc.  My point here being I suspect when you try to apply CRT to many societies/cultures you'd find a lot of parallels: think India for caste, Northern Ireland and Israel for religion; many cultures for color, etc. etc.

Myself, I think I'm a power guy, by which I believe Lord Acton's observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely is key.  I'm not denying the power of the factors I've listed above, nor that of other factors I'm forgetting or don't know, but in life I think the key is who has the power and who doesn't.  "White privilege" is a way of saying whites have power even when they don't realize it, perhaps especially when we don't realize it.  But the same applies (sometimes, in some situations, but not all) to men, to the rich, to members of a majority religion, to members of a majority, period.  

That's what I believe, at least today.

[Among other factors, colorism, ageism, handedness, height, disability/ability, looks...]

[[Add colorism--see https://www.vulture.com/2021/06/john-m-chu-and-in-the-heights-cast-address-casting-colorism.html]]

[[[Add--lookism--see ]]]

[[[[Add "heightism" ]]]]

[[[[[Add "ableism" ]]]]]

Our Responsibility for America's Past?

 One of the complaints the right has against liberals and progressive is that we make them feel responsible for America's past. Since they weren't living then they had no participation in the misdeeds.  When the subject of reparations is raised, many point out their ancestors came to the country after the abolition of slavery. 

Two thoughts:

• the same conservatives are usually eager to affiliate themselves to the history of a glorious country.  I don't think you can pick and choose--if you love the country you have to take the whole thing; you can't have just the steak and ice cream without the vegetables.  (I realize that sentence isn't politically correct in these days of enlightened nutrition, but it makes the point, as well as comparing conservatives to children.😉)
• Carolyn Hax is the advice columnist for the Washington Post.  Her recurrent theme is you have to deal with your (spouse, significant other, relative, fried) as they are.  I think the same is true, in part, for your country. You didn't choose the country, someone choose it for you.  You can decide to leave and find one more to your liking--that's fine.  But if you remain you have to acknowledge the realities of the past.  (Hax often counsels against trying to change the person, or hoping for them to change. Obviously you can and should try to change what you don't like about America, but as with people you should be realistic.)

Bowling Alone and the Condo Collapse

 My knee-jerk reaction to the condo collapse in Florida was to think of my experience with my homeowners association, where this is also true.

As nearly everyone who has ever owned an apartment in a large building knows, however, rare is the condo owner who’s attuned to this duty, and rarer still is the one who attends association meetings, let alone serves on the board of directors.

 And I linked it to Putnam's "Bowling Alone" book, arguing for the decline of voluntary associations and the development of social capital.  But the Atlantic article piece from which the quote comes argues that states, particularly Florida, have been effective in regulating the operation of condominiums. 

So I don't know what's true.  Are homeowners associations and condo boards modern examples of building social capital, or are they due to have problems because modern America lacks social capital?

Maintenance Is Not Sexy

 I may have blogged this before, particularly in connection with maintenance of computer software, but it applies broadly, as witness the collapse of the Florida condominium.  It's a lot easier to get humans, particularly American humans, excited about doing something new, creating something, than in keeping things operating. 

How To Unite the Country: a Common Foe, Like the Pope

 The Post's Made by History series included this piece. Before the Revolution the anniversary of the discovery of the Guy Fawkes conspiracy as Pope's Day--many Protestants feared Catholicism and the Pope as tyranny. (Those who remember Rev. Ian Paisley in Northern Ireland know the modern day relics.) The prejudice was rooted in the religious wars of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. It was, according to the piece, one thing which crossed colonial lines and united Americans. 

But come the American Revolution, with the new common foe of Britain and the need to enlist American Catholics and try to appeal to the French Canadians to join the cause, George Washington banned the celebrations.  (It didn't eliminate anti-Catholic feeling; my mother was still very suspicious of the church.) 

The Federal Government and Racism in Housing.

I think one general pattern in the development of government is evolution from the bottom, consolidation from the top.  British history has the problem of over-mighty subjects I think they're called--nobles who have their own entourages wearing their own livery carrying weapons and posing a threat to the monarchy.  Gradually their power is whittled away and the state assumes a monopoly of violence.  In the South especially there's a pattern of private and quasi-public enforcement of laws and mores, which shows most clearly in lynchings and jury nullifications.  That's been changed.  In the North roads were often developed as private enterprises, eventually to be taken over by the state. 

I could go on, but let me get to the subject: the New Deal and the federal housing agencies are commonly blamed for establishing red lines and refusing to finance housing loans in areas of the city.  IMO it's true that's what they did, but it's not true it was dreamed up in the pointy heads of Washington bureaucrats and New Dealers.  I've held that opinion all along, but it doesn't fit with the  way I see the world operating.

Now my opinion, which was based only on feelings and not on facts, is reinforce by a scholarly article in the Journal of American History.  Unfortunately it's paywalled but it includes a discussion of the development of the real estate industry. I'll quote a paragraph:

" Fisher emphasized the importance of NAREB's Code of Ethics, first created in 1913. He summarized the code and the commonsense nature of advising clients and customers on matters of value. However, he failed to mention its soon-to-be-finalized Article 34, which became one of the organization's most controversial statements: “A Realtor should never be instrumental in introducing into a neighborhood a character of property or occupancy, members of any race or nationality, or any individuals whose presence will clearly be detrimental to property values in that neighborhood.” Thus racism was already well established in NAREB by the time that Ely and Fisher reached out."

"Ely" is Richard Ely, the founder of the American Economics Association, and Fisher is one of his students who worked for what became the National Association of Real Estate Boards, now the National Association of Realtors.

The article's theme can be summarized here:

?The Federal Home Loan Bank, the Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the Federal Housing Administration, and their restructuring of the real estate sector were outgrowths of the network of academics, private sector professionals, trade organizations, and lobbyists that Ely assembled in the 1920s. "

To paraphrase the now deceased Rumsfeld, "you write the laws with the society you've got".  The New Deal solidified and rationalized racism in housing, racism that pre-existed the New Deal.