Farm Bill Progress

Jim Wiesemeyer has an interview with the chairman of House Ag on the current status. This quote:

Biggest problem is the farm program payment cap issue: Peterson said he does not intend to offer changes to the limits on direct payments during upcoming 2007 farm bill deliberations. He had originally sought to have farm subsidies distributed to single attribution -- only to individual farmers instead of co-operatives. That language was defeated in Tuesday's markup by the General Commodities and Risk Management Subcommittee. But it is widely expected there will be a debate over payment limits during House floor debate on the farm bill. "I'm not doing anything on payment limits in the full committee," Peterson said. “Cotton, rice and peanuts will have to beg me to put it back in,” Peterson said.

I still think a compromise is to switch from a cap to a graduated scale of limitations. Just intuitively, the graduated scale seems fairer, so there's a chance you can sell it to more people than a cap.

How Do You Know When You've Lost It?

When your wife gives you a list to take to the store, and you forget to check the list.

Cheney, II

The Post continues its series on Cheney, today focusing on the debates over torture and cruel treatment of prisoners.

A couple second thoughts from yesterday. You can bypass bureaucracies effectively. The new book out on Nixon and Kissinger in China describes this well. They brutally cut out the State Department, humiliating Secretary of State Rogers. But it worked. My vague memory of reading Clark Clifford's memoirs has Truman cutting out the bureaucracy at one point, perhaps on the Marshall Plan.

The two examples show a key--if you're going to bypass the bureaucracy, you need to change the world in which they operate. Once we recognized China, once Marshall had made his speech, the bureaucracy had lost its veto power. Yes, bureaucrats could sabotage from within (as the remnants of the China Lobby tried to do with Nixon and his successors. But they don't have the leverage.

In the context of treatment of prisoners, Cheney tried to shift the parameters permanently, but the bureaucracy (and the structure of the U.S. government) ensured he couldn't do so. He would have been better off to claim a strictly temporary emergency power for the President--waterboard a handful, then declare the emergency over until the next time. The American people like to think of ourselves as holding to higher standards--we need our illusions.

Cheney and the Bureaucratic Dark Side

Post today has the first of four articles on VP Cheney's work while in office. What's interesting is that Dick (he's only 2 weeks older than I, but I'm much better preserved) has gone over to the dark side. Both he and Rumsfeld offered bureaucratic precepts before beginning service in the Bush administration. Cheney says perfectly good things like: "no surprises". Every player in the bureaucracy needs to know what's happening so they'll go along.

But the reality since 9/11 has been different. Cheney makes a practice of doing end runs around the bureaucratic machinery, predictably making the bureaucrats mad. He's become a bureaucratic Darth Vader. Or a leopard who hunts in the dark, leaving only the rags of its victims behind. It is a way to get results but it only works in the long run if you are either: (a) successful or (b) terrifying. Bush and Cheney succeeded in being terrifying until the lack of success became obvious. (Obvious to all but the most loyal and most blind.)

The article does elaborate on a bureaucratic tactic I don't remember seeing as well used--lack of feedback. Apparently Cheney will never offer suggestions or feedback. That tends to drive people up the wall. I well remember a boss who would reject a draft memo without being very clear on what was wrong. I used to call it: the "I'll know it when I see it" school of management.

Are Americans Really Know-it-alls?

A comment on a post: "I don't understand, but then again you americans think you know everything!" from a Canadian. It was a little misplaced, because I was almost in a state of wonderment that possibly the Canadian government administered their farm program(s) entirely through the Internet. Obviously I wasn't clear, but the commenter makes a very serious charge.

Of course, I often claim to know it all, that's an occupational hazard for a blogger. But do Americans think we know it all? Really? Remember Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady: "men are ...." ("A Hymn to Him) Just replace "men" with "americans" and that's probably fair, "we are a marvellous sex..", we only want others to be like us.

I have to plead guilty to the charge on behalf on 300 million + residents of the U.S. At this point, it's appropriate to refer to the post just below this one.

Incompetence and All Children Above Average

Garrison Keillor says in Lake Woebegone all children are above average. Two professors publish an article suggesting that incompetent people overestimate their abilities. To quote the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

There's problems with this. Teenagers are incompetent drivers, but think they're invincible. Most drivers of all ages think they're above average drivers, which is mathematically impossible. (I'd suggest the most realistic drivers are those between 50 and 65--after 65 you start to lose it but are in a state of denial :-( )

Praise for Bureaucrats?

Christopher Hayes in the Nation
praises bureaucrats (Hat tip I think to Kevin drum.) for standing up to the Bush administration on various fronts. While I'm all for bureaucrats, and all for standing up to the Bush administration, I suspect liberals should be moderate in their praise and expectations.

Comes the great day when the Democrats control the Presidency again (plus about 2-6 years) and the papers, or whatever media we have in that grand and glorious time, will be full of stories on bureaucrats standing up to the hare-brained dictats of know-nothing Dems. You can count on it.

IT Progress at the FBI (Rah)

The sound of one hand clapping as the FBI rolls out phase I of its modernization program. It doesn't indicate that it will help in the problem recently reported--the length of time it takes to do FBI checks on immigrants. Apparently it's now a semi-manual process, the FBI office in DC has to poll all its field offices to see if they have anything in their files on a specific applicant. It's not clear from the story where that process is in the program. Perhaps after they upgrade their PC's to Windows XP in 2010?

3 to 5 Hours on the Phone, Daily?

Michelle Slatalla in the NYTimes today reports:

"How many calls does the average college student get or receive, anyway?

Peggy Meszaros, a professor of human development at Virginia Tech who asked more than 600 students that question in 2005, said, “An average of 11 calls a day.”

Professor Meszaros said that women, who talked longer than men, reported speaking most frequently to immediate family members, during calls that lasted 16 to 30 minutes.

“They were on the phone for an average of between three hours and five and a half hours a day?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I’m guessing that it has ramped up more, too, because this study was done before texting was the fad.”"

I'm stunned, amazed, confused. I don't think I've ever had a day where I spent 5 hours talking with one other person (in series). So much for the idea that modern culture isolates individuals into social atoms.

Happy Birthday, Powerpoint

Via xx, here's an article in the Wall Street Journal on the 20th birthday of Powerpoint, the indispensable tool of bureaucrats these days. While interesting, it fails to give proper credit to the IBMers, led by Thomas J. Watson, who spread the gospel of graphics, along with their motto: "Think" around the world.

As I understand, Watson liked visual aids, so IBM got into it. It spread to DOD, where in the mid '60's I attended "charm school" (training for instructors), which included time on how to make your overhead projections. (Wikipedia has a different chronology, giving credit to the Army in WWII.)

As a bureaucrat, I first steered clear of overheads, until my boss (the one I called the "junior idiot", but not to his face) encouraged them. Part of the problem was the specialization of that era--to get overheads done you went to the graphics/forms shop. I didn't like the dependency. So when WordPerfect came out with a presentations package I got into it, because now I could control the process. ("If you want it done right, do it yourself".)

There was an advantage, especially important for a national bureaucracy faced with training people in 50 states and 2700+ county offices. You could create a graphics presentation and duplicate it for others to present. That's particularly important when the emphasis is on speed--if Congress passes a bill today and wants payments out in X weeks. In the old days, you'd present a spiel and state specialists would desperately (if they were conscientious) try simultaneously to take notes and plan their own presentations to county personnel beginning almost as soon as they got back to the state. It was a formula for misunderstanding, mistakes, and mispaid checks.

Gradually we moved to a pattern where (with the help of very capable county personnel (take a bow MK)) we'd be able to provide copies of the national materials ready for the state specialists. Ironically, we managed to centralize the training materials based on a decentralization of the process of developing them. Powerpoint (and, more importantly, word processing) spread skills and capability to more people, making them more productive. Apparently even school children use it these days. Which is just another instance of formerly advanced skills becoming the common property of the young.