Business Opposes Free Flow of Information

The Post today has an article on business opposition to a proposal that the public be informed of where (what stores) meat was recalled from. USDA List Would Pinpoint Locations of Recalled Meat:

"The prospect of these names being made public led the National Meat Association , which represents meat processors and packers, to tell the agency in an open meeting in April that it should abandon the proposal.

'The publication of this information would be extremely advantageous to a firm's competitors. A competitor would have the ability to identify specific retail locations . . . and then offer their products as an immediate substitute . . .,' said Brett Schwemer , an attorney representing the NMA.

'We're opposed to it, and so is most every other trade association that has anything to do with food,' said Mark Dopp , senior vice president and general counsel for the American Meat Institute ,"

I shouldn't be amazed at this, but I am. I suppose the rationale for the opposition is that the retailers are innocent parties in any recall, so their business shouldn't be damaged because of a mistake by the meat packer/processor. But the general rule should be that information obtained by bureaucrats paid by the public should be available to the public and let the chips fall where they may (or where the free market may shift them).

Economics and Real Life

Today's Post had an interesting article on gift-giving, focusing on the conflict between economics (gifts don't make economic sense) and psychology--Searching for a Sense of Meaning in Gifts:

"At its core, gift-giving involves risk, said Mark Osteen, an English professor at Loyola College in Baltimore. There is a risk in giving the wrong gift -- besides the financial loss that Waldfogel identified; there is the psychological loss of having the recipient conclude the donor does not know her very well.

But the understandable desire in modern American society to minimize the risk in gift-giving is paradoxically what is causing a devaluation of the gift's intangible qualities, Osteen said. In the tension between what makes economic sense and what makes psychological sense, the economic argument is winning. This is why people tell loved ones what they want for gifts, why donors include receipts, and why so many people exchange gift cards. All are ways to minimize economic and psychological risk."

I think there's a general element in economics of ignoring complexity in order to model exchanges. If I get my ambition up, I'll blog on it.
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Housing Costs, Suburbia, and Murdered Cop

Fairfax County lost its first police officer to gunfire the other day. The tragedy has several aspects, handling youths with mental problems, the responsibility of friends and parents, the wisdom of gun control, etc. See these links for more details:
Fairfax Gunman's Home Yields More Weapons and Dedicated Detective Remembered Also for Deep Faith.

One aspect is the detective was commuting from Culpeper, VA, some 40 or so miles away. No doubt she and her husband thought that was a good place to rear their kids. But high housing costs in Fairfax also played a part. Public servants like the police and teachers can't afford the lifestyle they want here. What will happen over the next 20 years?

FEMA Bureaucrats

Stephen Barr in the Post covers the DHS awards ceremony in Honoring Those Who Went Above and Beyond During Katrina:

"Chertoff and Jackson honored more than 75 employees and employee teams at the secretary's second annual awards ceremony, held at Constitution Hall. Many awards ceremonies in Washington are perfunctory events, but not Chertoff's 2005 awards fete.

The department's gold medals went to employees who met the challenge of Katrina and are, Chertoff said, symbols of 'the thousands of employees who brought distinction to the department throughout the hurricane response effort.'"

USDA and Agitprop

George Buddy nudged my elbow when he saw this editorial (registration required)An Agriprop Guide to Cluck and Awe - New York Times:

"A furious collective heehaw is surely the only proper response to the news that ranking bureaucrats and other occasional speechmakers at the Department of Agriculture have been instructed to include 'talking points' of praise for President Bush's handling of the Iraq war in their routine rhetorical fodder."

It's based on an Al Kamen piece in the Post, quoting from a message by a USDA speechwriter to political appointees in USDA that also got sent to some career types. The message showed how to include talking points on Iraq into ag speeches. This is called "message discipline" which has evolved in the executive branch over the last few administrations. I'd expect the same sort of thing in a Democratic administration (except that Bill wasn't disciplined on anything). When Hillary wins, she'll crack the whip.

It's similar to the flap over denying contracts to those who don't support the administration, something that happens on both sides, but which is normally kept out of sight.

The Care and Feeding of Genius, II

This week's New Yorker has two articles that are relevant: One is on Ivan Lendl's golf-playing daughters. Just teenagers they're doing well and Lendl seems to follow the pattern of Earl Woods. He says that kid athletes need a parental push early, but the parent needs to step back at some point. (What's different in sports these days is the early specialization. When I grew up, the 3 or 4 letter athlete was common (football, basketball, baseball, and maybe track). These days teens specialize early. )

The other article is on an ex-Harvard undergrad who developed Facebook, sort of a MySpace site tweaked for college. The point here is the familiar story of the computer whiz who spends lots of time and effort developing an application (similar to Napster and innumerable other applications). It's a combination of talent, effort, and the environment.

Mr. Kennicott, Meet Mr. Cohen's E-Mailers

I posted the other day on Mr. Kennicott's article in the Post on hatred and bigotry. Today Richard Cohen follows up on his past columns (criticizing Stephen Colbert's humor and supporting Al Gore's speech on global warming), specifically on the nature of the e-mails he received in Digital Lynch Mob:

"The hatred is back. I know it's only words now appearing on my computer screen, but the words are so angry, so roiled with rage, that they are the functional equivalent of rocks once so furiously hurled during antiwar demonstrations."

I think the two should compare notes.

[I'll take this opportunity to update my post on Kennicott. I must admit I blogged on the article in the heat of the moment, a sure way to lead to distortion and misreading. Upon rereading the piece, Kennicott uses most of his piece talking about how art handles hatred, claiming that modern narrative art in whatever form doesn't present hatred as living emotion, but rather as something to be examined in the laboratory. I think that's mostly true--I guess it's another way of saying it's mostly "politically correct" or post modern. At the end he asks: "Could our political life benefit from allowing hatred to speak openly once again?" My point was that there's plenty of hatred spoken in our political life already. However, to give Mr. Kennicott the benefit of the doubt, he may have been asking: "if modern art put hatred front and center, as a reality, would it help political life?"

I think Cohen and I would say "no". Certainly there was enough anti-LBJ and anti-Nixon art in the late 60's and early 70's to go along with the hatred in the streets to undermine the thesis. I'd guess the problem is that neither narrative art (novels, plays, films) nor anyone else is self-reflective enough to handle hate in art in a modern setting. Miller may have said "attention must be paid" to a salesman, but no one writes with equivalent understanding of those who commit genocide. (There may be an exception for Palestinian terrorists; but even a movie like "Munich" doesn't portray a hater.)]

The Care and Feeding of Genius

The post on genius being the result of practice (and comment) the other day caused me to ponder the care and feeding of genius.

• First, of course, you need reasonable capabilities (although "idiot savants", also known as autistic geniuses seem to have a screw missing). But no nurture is going to make a sprinter out of a white guy (joking) or a center out of someone of average height.
  
• Second you need early stimulation and positive feedback. (See Tiger Woods at 2 or Mozart whenever.)
  
• Third, you need a network that will keep feeding the feedback. Yes, Earl Woods gave Tiger feedback, but he also got him publicity. The publicity probably kept Earl going.
  
• Fourth, the third requirement means you need a welcoming environment. I vaguely remember Stephen Jay Gould talking about the ecology of genius. Without researching it, the argument is that classical music, or baseball, or whatever field of endeavor is like an environment. In the early days there's lots of opportunity, but as time goes on some of the early movers take up niches that effectively exclude others. In classical music, there are very few composers writing works in the style of Bach or Mozart. There's no market for fugues and there's no room for originality.
  
• Fifth, I'd suggest that Isiah Berlin's distinction between fox and hedgehog comes into play. It's much easier for a hedgehog to be a genius. You find yourself a field with plenty of opportunity and get lost in a continuous feedback loop of work and reward and before you know you're Bill Gates, the richest man in the world. (Interesting piece in the current NY review of Books by Andrew Hacker on class in America--the Rockefellers and du Ponts on the Forbes 400 list in 1982 were replaced on the current list by technology and marketing tycoons.)
  
• Sixth--the bottom line is that you need luck, amazing amounts of luck for all the pieces to come together.
  

Personally, I'm a fox, curious about many things and not carrying through on anything (though the latter may be an effect of old age.)

My Favorite Conservative Commentator?

Ben Stein is in danger of becoming my favorite conservative commentator. I recommend his column from yesterday's Times--You're Rich? Terrific. Now Pay Up.

"Here we all are under the gorgeous crystal dome of prosperity, drinking, making money, eating swordfish, changing money at the temple, showing off ourselves to others, bragging — and all of it, every bit of it, is made possible by the men and women who wear the uniform.

Every bit of it is done under the protection of the Marines, the Army, the Navy, the Air Force and the Coast Guard, serving and offering up their lives for pennies. And we're also under the protection of the police and the firefighters and the F.B.I., who offer up their lives for nothing compared with what others make trading money on computer screens.

Something flashed into my mind — something that my late father used to say, quoting loosely from the economist Henry C. Simons, a founder of the Chicago School of economics: that it is 'unlovely' to see the extremes of wealth and nonwealth that are evident in contemporary America."

Acronyms--Key to Bureaucracy

Today's LA Times has an article on The Fine Art of Legislation Appellation on how Congressional aides manipulate titles of bills to come up with a fitting acronym, as in:

"What do you call a bill to sanitize Congress of the current lobbying scandal?

The CLEAN UP Act — the memorable shorthand by Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) for his Curtailing Lobbyist Effectiveness through Advance Notification, Updates and Posting Act.

'You'd be surprised at how much taxpayer time is spent in offices coming up with clever names for bills,' said Michael Franc, a former congressional staff member."

Bureaucrats have to do the same thing. I remember in 1981 dodging the logical acronym of "CRA" for the "conservation reserve acreage" in the new farm bill for fear of some wise guy in the press adding the "p" for "program" to it. Instead we went with the forced and awkward, "ACR" for acreage--conservation reserve". But easy as it is to laugh, names make a difference. Just ask innumerable Hollywood stars.