USDA Flinches

It didn't take long for the Administration to back off the plan to close FSA offices. See this from House Ag Committe: News from the House Committee on Agriculture: "Goodlatte Supports Delay of FSA Office Closures "

Bureaucrats Resist Change--Wash Post

This is very predictable:

"Farmers are famously resistant to change, and that goes for a recently announced
U.S. Department of Agriculture plan to close as many as 713 of the 2,351
county offices of the Farm Service Agency. "

It's an interesting case study in what some would call pork barrel politics. Some past efforts at closing and rationalizing offices have been successful, some have failed. (One of my former bosses came to DC when the plan was to consolidate state offices in the Northeast. Why do Rhode Island and Delaware need a State office to oversee a couple county offices?) As USDA moves more operations to the Internet and the number of farmers dwindles, the infrastructure needs to adjust accordingly. But from the point of view of the small country towns, the county seats, they both need the good paying federal jobs and whatever traffic the office generates by drawing farmers to the town. See the NASCOE site for a sense of what it looks like from the other side.

This irreconciliable conflict between two goods is one reason I took early retirement.

Assessing the Significance of Attack Data in Iraq--Contrarian

Seems like I'm due to challenge conventional wisdom (warning--this is off the cuff and not based on research):

The media reports that the military reports the average number of attacks per month in Iraq has steadily increased over the years since the end of significant military operations announced by our leader.

But this may not be significant, at least not as significant as it sounds. Counting and reporting is one of the things bureaucracy does. You need a flow of information up the channels to allow decision makers to make good decisions. So the data sounds useful. But changes in the data can reflect a change in reality or a change in the reporting mechanism.

In the early days of the war, DOD did no body counts; that was too much like Nam. My impression is that Rummy and Myers ran away from statistics as fast as possible. But as time has gone on, everyone searches for data, so the attack figure is one that has come to the forefront. My guess is that the military has become more and more concerned about the accuracy of such figures. They're probably also responding to continuous pressure from the media for such information. As the military changes and learns, it inevitably changes the data reported.

Take an example: someone in the lead vehicle in a convoy hears a couple bullets fly over head. That's all, nothing more. I don't know whether that counts as an "attack" today, but I'll bet it didn't count as an attack in July 2003. As a bureaucracy, the military has probably issued instructions on what counts as an attack and probably has a form, hopefully on-line, for reporting details. I don't know when they did that, but my experience is that you refine the instructions. (Did the bullets injure anyone? Was it Iraqi or U.S? Did they cause any property damage?) As time passes, there's also less downside to reporting attacks. Everything gets easier with experience, including reporting. There could also be some perverse incentives at work--don't report attacks, it looks as if the unit is in a quiet area so they may get moved to a hotter area. Report attacks and you may attract more resources. (There was a review of a book over the weekend, possibly in NYTimes--some ex-soldier reporting that his captain ordered an artillery barrage because the captain of a nearby unit had ordered one. ) That's the sort of thinking that leads to inflation of medals.

All this is, I suspect, documented in assessments of our experience in Vietnam. Iraq may not be Vietnam, but some of the dynamics of a (military) bureaucracy never change.

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.