19th Century Americana

This is a website reviewed in one of my historical journals. If you're interested in what children read in the 19th century and/or in Americana I strongly suggest it.

I came across one 1851 letter from a girl in Virginia reporting the arrival of a new piano (the latest thing in midcentury American) saying--well if the Union dissolves at least we have our piano. Or this excerpt from The Behaviour Book, by Eliza Leslie (1853):

" If the servants are coloured men, refrain from all conversation in their presence that may grate harshly on their feelings, by reminding them of their unfortunate African blood. Do not talk of them as 'negroes,' * or 'darkies.' Avoid all discussions of abolition, (either for or against,) when coloured people are by. Also, quote none of their laughable sayings While they are present.

When the domestics are Irish, and you have occasion to reprove them for their negligence, forgetfulness, or blunders, do so without any reference to their country. If you find one who is disrespectful or insolent, or who persists in asserting a falsehood, it is safest to make no reply yourself, but to have the matter represented to the proprietor of the house; desiring that another waiter may be allotted to you."

Extremists and Moderates

Watched "The Weather Underground" documentary last night with rather mixed feelings. On the one hand, sharing the scorn for the "old farts" (see interview with Ayers and Dohrn) that they get from today's students, on the other hand trying to remember how I felt about them back in the day.

An interesting question: do political movements generate extremists naturally, as part of the socio-physics of the movement (rather like any avalanche will scatter boulders at the fringe of the fall while the fine dirt is at the base) or do extremists generate movements--those bold and brazen souls who challenge the establishment and bell the cat encourage the timid mice to think new thoughts and venture away from their hole? Or is "or" a false dichotomy? I suspect the latter, though it's certainly reassuring to visualize extremists as the foam on the waves. [ed--anyone tired of metaphors yet--enough already.]

Bruno Mangum

Eugene Volokh speculates that Senator Byrd and Justice Stevens might be the oldest fulltime employees of the federal government. However USDA's own Bruno Mangum is older. (I remember being introduced to Bruno in 1969 during a training visit in North Carolina. At that time he was an oldtime employee. Since then, I've completed my career and retired and he's still going.

Decline of the Fuji

I remember my sister recommending the Fuji apple to me, probably in the 1980's. They became my favorite apple--crisp and sweet. I bought them at Safeway. For some years they were packaged almost like eggs, coming on cardboard trays. Then they started coming in bulk, just like other apples, Red Delicious and such. But they were still good. I was willing to pay the premium price the store charged. Apples are seasonal, of course, and I remember seeing New Zealand Fuji's imported during the spring and summer to match the Washington Fujis available in the fall and winter. I wrote "match", but they didn't really match them. The imported apples weren't quite as good as the U.S. ones, but since all spring and summer apples are either imported or come from cold storage they still usually were better than other apples available at the same time.

But recently I've grown more dissatisfied with Fuji's. They're smaller and less reliably sweet and crisp. I'd guess what's happened is, as apple growers switched to Fuji's, the quality control has suffered. After all, this is a classic case of what economists call "free riding". Once the Fuji reputation is good enough to justify a price premium, there's every incentive for growers to cut corners on the quality. Plant poorer trees, ship a higher percentage of the apples from a tree. (Not every apple on a tree is of the same quality.)

It's another example of the problems with an unregulated free market. And it's an example of why I'm testing different apples from the store again.

Change Is Bad; Staying Where the Heart Is

Today's NYTimes mag has an interesting last page article by a teacher in a Tamaqua, PA, community college. (That's a forbidding area that I've traversed for almost 40 years via I-81 to and from DC. The area's not fit for farming, all the vegetation is long dead and compressed as coal.)

Coal Miner's Granddaughter:

"The fact is that I come from a long line of people who pick up and leave when things stop working out. My grandfather migrated from Poland to Hazelton, Pa., to mine coal, and when the mines closed, my father hitchhiked two hours south to Bethlehem to roll steel, and when the furnaces shut down, my brother moved to Nigeria, where he drills for oil. It seems natural, American really, to move on. Aren't most of us descended from people who did just that?

I ask the class to write what they hope to learn from me on index cards I give out, and they hand the cards to me as they file out. How to write a bid proposal. How to create a technical manual. No one, it seems, wants to learn how to escape."

Bureaucrat to Honor

STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT in today's NYTimes Magazine describe a bureaucrat to honor in Filling in the Tax Gap:

"an I.R.S. research officer in Washington named John Szilagyi had seen enough random audits to know that some taxpayers were incorrectly claiming dependents for the sake of an exemption. Sometimes it was a genuine mistake (a divorced wife and husband making duplicate claims on their children), and sometimes the claims were comically fraudulent (Szilagyi recalls at least one dependent's name listed as Fluffy, who was quite obviously a pet rather than a child).

Szilagyi decided that the most efficient way to clean up this mess was to simply require taxpayers to list their children's Social Security numbers. 'Initially, there was a lot of resistance to the idea,' says Szilagyi, now 66 and retired to Florida. 'The answer I got was that it was too much like '1984.'' The idea never made its way out of the agency.

A few years later, however, with Congress clamoring for more tax revenue, Szilagyi's idea was dug up, rushed forward and put into law for tax year 1986. When the returns started coming in the following April, Szilagyi recalls, he and his bosses were shocked: seven million dependents had suddenly vanished from the tax rolls, some incalculable combination of real pets and phantom children. Szilagyi's clever twist generated nearly $3 billion in revenues in a single year."

Obeying Rules--A Bureaucrat's View

Glenn Reynolds takes the position that providing "amnesty" for illegal immigrants is destructive to legal immigrants:

Reynolds:� Laws are for suckers? - Glenn Reynolds - MSNBC.com: "My question is, if the fact that lots of people break a law is a reason to get rid of it, why don't we get rid of the Drug War next? That would be OK with me. But it doesn't seem to be the way they think in Washington.

The problem with the current system -- and with the amnesty proposal -- is that it makes people who obey the law feel like suckers. That's a very destructive thing, socially. "

As a bureaucrat, I have to sympathize. I certainly feel mad as hell when I read of the rich evading taxes.

When Did Immigration Turn Bad?

Opponents of immigration reform seem to take the position that immigration is bad. That raises the question, when did it go bad? Was it 1970? Or 1912? Or 1848? Or 1630? Or maybe 11,000BC?

OrinKerr.com and Class Discrimination

Orin Kerr has set up shop separately from Volokh Conspiracy and posts here

"It’s always hard to second-guess a state sentencing decision based only on press reports. You don’t know the details of the sentencing scheme, or the details of the factual findings. But I wonder what sentence this defendant would have received if she had been an African-American male who had dropped out of high school?

UPDATE: Brooks Holland weighs in with a very helpful comment here."

The comments suggest that the defendant (a college grad white millionaire's daughter) profited from having a good lawyer and access to therapeutic programs but not from a racial bias in the system.

A thought on blogs and Orin's move: Bloggers want an audience. One way to get one is as a cooperative enterprise. But there's always the free rider problem--some in the cooperative are going to be more productive and more attractive than others, so there's often an incentive for people to split off and go on their own. Eugene Volokh has seen that happen with Tyler Cowan and now Orin (others I think, but I don't remember their names).

"Low-Skilled/Unskilled Immigrants"

The debate over immigration is heating up. People, mostly on the restrictive side, often refer to "low-skilled or unskilled immigrants". We need to be careful of context--there's two societies involved: the U.S. and the country of origin; so comparisons and social ladders in one society don't match up with those in another.

My impression is that the vast majority of immigrants of working age have to come up with a fair amount of money in their native country in order to get into the U.S. Indeed, illegal immigrants probably have to pay more than legal immigrants. (A "coyote" on the Mexican border costs more than an airline ticket from whereever.) That assumed fact leads me to believe that the future immigrants, while in their country of origin, had skills. They weren't the "lowest of the low" there. They may be doing jobs "Americans won't do" here, but that reflects the differences in the two societies and is not a basis for looking down on them. [ed.--do I heard a comment that of course we don't look down on people? Remember the Bible's beam and mote in the eye.]