Ferrets and Turtles

The New York Times has an interesting article on a bureaucracy--the Medicaid bureaucracy,
here.

I've a post in draft on Gary Becker's use of "a culture of dependency" in reference to New Orleans residents. To me, the term doesn't ring true, perhaps because I associate it with Reagan's welfare queen anecdote, which implies an active, manipulative role; people as "terrible two's". I think it's more accurate to say that many people are turtles, not good at all at manipulating their surroundings but pretty good at enduring. (Am I saying many people are Russian peasants, renowned for their endurance--perhaps.) Others are ferrets. And most of us age into turtledom.

Anyhow, many of the Medicaid patients described are turtles.

Football Bureaucray--The Tuck Rule

Piece in the WPost yesterday on the "tuck" rule. (Skins thought that Jake Plummer had fumbled into his own end zone last Sunday, but it was ruled a forward pass, hence the discussion.)

The way the rule reads now is roughly this: Once the quarterback starts his arm forward in a pass, it's an attempt to pass until he tucks the ball back to his body or starts a football move.) In the Denver game, Plummer started to pass, rather obviously changed his mind and pulled the ball down, but lost it in the process. The problem is the "obviously changed his mind"--that requires the officials to read the quarterback's mind to tell his intention. That's difficult for a bureaucrat. So the NFL doesn't want to change the rule, because what they have is based on visible moves, no mind reading required.

That's what bureaucrats like--objective evidence.

Inertia, or the Safety of the Known

Yesterday Gallup reported on CNN that, based on a poll of people who applied for relief after Katrina, of those who stayed until the hurricane hit, 45 percent (roughly, I'm going on memory) thought they could ride the storm out where only 25 percent lacked transportation and/or money to leave.

Class and America--Research Topic in the Stadia

In a WPost discussion of how the St. Louis Cardinals revamped Busch Stadium for baseball (as a lesson for DC to do a similar upgrade of RFK stadium) there was a brief mention of the need for luxury boxes. Such status symbols seem to be ubiquitous these days; almost as much as the proliferation of ways to recognize different levels of giving to colleges and cultural organizations.

It strikes me as a fertile area for some sociologist/economist to work: consider the transition from free to paid attendance, from one-class to multi-class tickets at sporting events and theater events, from "contributor" to differentiated giver. My impression is that everyone attending baseball games in the 40's wore suits and hats and paid the same prices. Today I don't know how much differentiation there is in seating, but a lot. (Of course, the attendees may all wear casual clothes these days.) I'm assuming the same forces are at work in all areas. There may be a relationship with the differentiation of culture, a subject Tyler Cowan has written on.

Black Removal (Home and Land Ownership)

Yesterday the media was reporting the return of residents to New Orleans Lower Ninth Ward to see what was left of their homes. This factoid was buried in the report: although 33 percent of the residents are below the poverty line, over 60 percent own their own homes. If memory serves, that is well above the national average for blacks, which is somewhere between 40 and 50 percent.
Let me jump into speculation. The high ownership rate is a function of the stability of the black population--people born in New Orleans stay in New Orleans. Over the generations, the working, saving blacks have built up their home ownership. Homes were cheap enough and wages high enough to make it possible for people to beome new owners. Conditions were stable enough so that existing owners didn't lost their homes.

That process may have been similar to the process in certain other cities, notably Washington, DC in mid-century. It is also similar to the progress in black land ownership in the 60 years after the Civil War. Blacks worked their way from ex-slave, to share cropper to tenant to landowner by hard work, thrift, and endurance. Land was cheap enough to make it possible.

What has happened: changes make it harder for existing owners to remain and for new people to buy.

1 In DC in the 1950's, urban renewal came along and removed many landowners. Rising housing prices, particularly recently, make it difficult for poor homeowners to stay. Unless you're in the meritocracy, there's little way to earn enough for families to buy new homes.

2 In rural America, the boom and bust of agriculture and the advent of mechanization, which lessened the advantage of large families, has meant black landowners leave for cities and the north.

3 In New Orleans, the odds are against the black homeowners being able to resume their life.

Schelling and Communication Problems

One of Nobel winner Thomas Schelling's concerns has been coordination between cooperating or competing parties. For example, if you agree to meet a party in New York City at a certain time, but forgot to specify a place, where would you go? It's a fascinating area. But Barbara Tuchman's histories remind us of the truth that software developers and parents also know--even when you're able to pass messages to the other, you may not communicate. Here's an excerpt from Joel on Software:

"Custom development is that murky world where a customer tells you what to build, and you say, 'are you sure?' and they say yes, and you make an absolutely beautiful spec, and say, 'is this what you want?' and they say yes, and you make them sign the spec in indelible ink, nay, blood, and they do, and then you build that thing they signed off on, promptly, precisely and exactly, and they see it and they are horrified and shocked, and you spend the rest of the week reading up on whether your E&O insurance is going to cover the legal fees for the lawsuit you've gotten yourself into or merely the settlement cost. Or, if you're really lucky, the customer will smile wanly and put your code in a drawer and never use it again and never call you back."

This, writ large, is the problem the FBI and many other organizations, public and private, have had in developing software.

High Housing, Low Service

We went to the movies today ("A History of Violence") in Reston Town Center. Walking back, passed a pizza place with a sign on the window--what I caught was that it's apologizing that lack of staff may result in long waits. On the radio this morning, someone in Montgomery County was pushing a proposal to require developers to include low-cost housing in their developments. "Low cost" in this case means something buyable on an income of $50-100K!!

As the spread between the top 1 percent (i.e., everyone we see on the TV) and the bottom 50 percent widens, we can expect poorer service, whether it's in restaurants or schools.

Luddites or Conservative

Daniel Drezner did not get tenure. Among the comments on his post was this:

danieldrezner.com :: Daniel W. Drezner :: So Friday was a pretty bad day....: "Of course, its hard not to consider the blog. Even at my top-ranked and technologically progressive university, I find that the tenured faculty members in our political science dept. have a very conservative view towards new technological approaches. None ofthem use Powerpoint, listen/assign podcasts, have/read blogs, etc. And suggestions to start a departmental blog or regular podcasts of visiting speakers has been met with a genuine lack of enthusiasm."

It's hard to stay open to new things. I like to think I do, but I find myself skipping the reviews of "graphic novels" in the Post Book Review. I can't take upscale, pretentious comic books seriously; I can't take the comic books I read back in the 1950's seriously.

LaVar, the Unbureaucrat

The Washington Redskins don't have a quarterback controversy; Mark Brunell has resolved that for now. They do have a linebacker controversy. Their best athlete and highest paid defensive player, LaVar Arrington, hasn't been playing much, although he's recovered from last year's injuries.

Why? He's not bureaucratic. The defensive coaches have a highly structured defensive "scheme "(this is the only time Americans use the word in the same way the Brits do). Apparently Arrington has difficulty following the plan during the game, as well as trouble putting his heart into it in practice.

Football is a bureaucratic game--the play book is the set of instructions, the choreography for the performance. The best I can tell, there are tradeoffs among aggressiveness, free lancing, team spirit, and following the plan. Much the same in bureaucracies.

Power Line's Delusions

The folks at Power Line fall victim to an age-old myth, the distrust of the metropolis, of the ruses and schemes of those evil people at the center who entrap the poor unwary hick from the country's heart. In a discussion of the Miers nomination, and why Bush might have appointed her:

"I think that Bush is acutely aware that the Souter nomination was his father's worst and most avoidable mistake. I think that, as was widely reported, he liked John Roberts and was impressed by him during their relatively brief interview. But what grounds, really, does Bush have to trust Roberts? How does he know he won't 'grow in office'? It seems pretty obvious to me that Bush selected Miers to make damn sure that at least one of his nominees won't drift to the left. He knows Miers well enough to know that she won't be seduced by Washington Post editorials and Georgetown dinner parties, as a number of Republican appointees have been. He doesn't think Roberts will be seduced, either, but he can't know for sure. Isn't it obvious that the reason Bush chose Miers instead of a better known, objectively better qualified nominee, is that he wanted to be absolutely sure of appointing a staunch and unwavering conservative?"

Roberts was a DC lawyer and a DC justice, so if he hasn't already been seduced by the Washington Post, he should be safe. David Souter is renowned for being only slightly more sociable than Ted Kacynski, which suggests it's not DC wine and water that's seductive, it's legal ideas presented in briefs and arguments by competent lawyers.