Letters to the Editor II

I blogged yesterday about letters to the editor and rules. I received a prompt (and polite) response from Prof. Boudreaux (the politeness surprised because I was just a little snarky). I'm not convinced by his reasoning, but he didn't give me permission to quote so I'll go on to the broader issue.

The Post sports pages now carry material from blogs. I've never looked at the sports blogs, but it appears they're rapidly blurring the line between print and electronic media. In this respect, sports is well ahead of the news desk. I suggest the Post look into a similar process on the news side--certainly there has to be material worthy of being raised to the prominence of the print pages.

Such an advance still doesn't answer the bottomline question--where do you write? The odds against getting a letter published are very high, but the reward in circulation is great. It's a trade off--a 100 percent chance of publishing where almost no one reads or a .0001 percent chance of publishing where 1000000 people read (made up figures).

Of course, if the Post would merely kick rejected letters to a web site, the problem might be alleviated.

GMU Economist Flouts Post Rules??

Just started to send a letter to the editor of the Washington Post on the Fairfax education article, but then I read their rules:

Letters must be fewer than 250 words long and exclusive to The Washington Post; they may not have been submitted or posted to, or published by any other media or web outlet. They must include the writer's home address, e-mail address, and home and business telephone numbers. Anonymous letters will not be considered, nor does The Post permit the use of pseudonyms.

Just after seeing that, I read this post at Cafe Hayek, written by the head of the George Mason University Department of Economics:

"Here's a letter that I sent yesterday to the Washington Post in response to this report on Congress's refusal to renew the President's fast-track authority to negotiate trade agreements.

Dear Editor:It is unfortunate that Congress refuses to renew the President's fast-track trade authority ("End Nears for Era of Presidential Trade Authority," June 30)..." (I've truncated the letter).

So we have these options:

• Professor Boudreaux doesn't read the Post rules.
• He reads them but doesn't follow them. Or rather, because the Post doesn't say: "don't send us anything you use on a web site" he figures it's up to the Post to enforce their rules.
• He has talked to the Post and found out that the rules don't really apply to him or they don't apply to blog posts, or they don't apply as long as you write the letter before you post to the blog.

Anyhow, since I've already posted on the education article, and because my Presbyterian minister forebears are looking over my shoulder, the Post editor is getting one less letter. :-( However, I may ask the omsbudman for clarification.

Bad News in Fairfax County

A Post article reports on high school graduation rates. Almost 20 percent of Fairfax county teenagers do not graduate from high school. Actually, that statement is wrong, if I read correctly. 20 percent of Fairfax county freshmen do not graduate from high school, so those youngsters who were outside of the system entirely do not count. (And I mean that in about three different ways: not considered in the calculate, may be mathematically illiterate, and are excluded from our concern as a society.)

According to published data, 91 percent of Fairfax residents over 25 have high school degrees (or GED's). So Fairfax is importing more educated people and exporting less educated people. Whether this is a reflection of the statistical principle of "regression to the mean" or of class differences, I don't like it.

Flash--Scientists Discover Original Sin

From the Telegraph:

Whether lying about raiding the biscuit tin or denying they broke a toy, all children try to mislead their parents at some time. Yet it now appears that babies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.

Behavioural experts have found that infants begin to lie from as young as six months. Simple fibs help to train them for more complex deceptions in later life.

Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old.

World Hunger--Good News/Bad News

I haven't seen any media mention of this Economic Research Study of what, in the old days, we used to call "world hunger", but is now called "food security assessment". Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the old days and the old term.

Briefly, they project over the next 10 years, although world population will grow substantially, the number of hungry people won't grow (at least within the margin of error of the study). Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for the bulk of the problem.

Where the Bureaucracy Meets the Citizen

In my former agency, we had a long-running discussion over our responsibility to the people we served; a discussion that was never resolved in my time there.

One side said: "farmers" are mature, rational people, well able to calculate what's best for themselves. Our job is only to make information on alternatives available to them. Their job is to make the best decision. If they fail to meet deadlines or understand the rules, that's too bad. But we should not spend taxpayer money to spoon feed every farmer, to walk him or her through the ropes and make sure they sign up for the right program. If our bureaucrats make mistakes, fine, but we should only offer redress for mistakes of commission, not failure to nurse people along.

The other side said: Congress creates confusing programs and never worries about how program operations relate to farmer's schedules for planning their operations and planting their farms. We county-level bureaucrats are dealing with our friends and neighbors, people we go to church with and whose children attend school with ours. We need to do everything we can to help these people understand the programs and sign up for the best option available. And if we fail to do so, we should recognize it's not the farmer's fault if they don't ask the right questions, it's our fault.

While I'm exaggerating the clarity of the two sides for effect, the different perspectives were real. I remember one county director in Kansas who took it as a personal affront when a former ASCS employee set up a consulting firm to aid farmers in complying with (or evading, depending on one's perspective) payment limitation rules. The differences were sometimes based on political perspectives--some Republicans leaned more towards the first, some Democrats more towards the second. But sometimes it was just the individual case where someone was particularly inept.

I suspect this tension is common throughout bureaucracies. Consider the IRS. This story
examines their program for free electronic filing of tax returns. Should our tax laws and tax procedures be so simple that H&R Block goes out of business? How far should the IRS go in explaining and coaching taxpayers? Or should they contract out, in effect, to private purveyors of tax preparation software and CPA's?

Will the U.S. Become Majority Minority?

No.

Yes, I know that California and Texas have already become majority-minority, with Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Native Americans outnumbering the rest, but I doubt it will happen to the U.S., ever. Why? Let me go back in history. [yes, oldtimer, and let us sleep]

In the 1950's the WASP (white anglo-saxon protestant) dominance of America was slipping. A Catholic would even become President in 1960). To some that was as big an issue then as majority-minority is now. But now? We are all WASP's now. The issue of which people running for President are Catholics, which have a non-anglo-saxon background, is a non-issue, raised only occasionally as a space filler. Yes, I may be overstating my point, but the tone of the society is WASP. For all the jeremiads from the peanut gallery about the degradation of American culture, the differences between 1950 and 2005 are dwarfed by the continuity. We've evolved, but are still culturally American. For a comparison, Casey Stengel's NY Yankees and Joe Torre's NY Yankees are different, but are still the Yankees.

I predict the same is going to happen by 2050. We'll have some new divisions, but they won't be on the current lines. And the dominant culture will remain the dominant culture.

Outstanding Protection of SSN Data

From an FSA notice,explaining that travel documents show the Social Security number, which needs to be hidden:

The recommended method, provided by the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) to hide
SSN’s, is to manually mark-out SSN’s on travel documents.
Notes: OCFO currently has no plans to modify the NFC OnLine Travel System to hide SSN’s
when travel documents are printed. Marking-out SSN’s is the only solution currently
recommended by OCFO, at this time, to protect an individual’s SSN.
An ink pen is more effective in hiding SSN’s than a felt-tipped pen.

I'm glad to see the USDA taking the protection of privacy so seriously.

Fallows, Chinese Peasants, Lowell Girls, and FSA Clerks

Sometimes I go off the deep end. Did that the other night, listening to James Fallows (renowned draft dodger [tongue in cheek] from the Nam era and now writer for the Atlantic) talk about his travels in China. (Here's a link to the Atlantic, but subscription is required.) He was describing a common practice: peasant girls from the country come to the city in their late teens, go to work in factories working long hours, living in factory dormitories, eating factory food. They end up saving enough money to go back home and move to a higher social class. (In the old days, they'd be earning a dowry--I'm not sure that's a Chinese concept though.)

As he talked, I remembered the "Lowell girls". The early New England spinning and weaving industry was typified by Lowell, MA, a factory town where country girls came to live under the eye of the management, working long hours, etc., etc. As we would say in Vietnam, "same, same". (The Wikipedia article is a little more anti than one recent scholarly article might suggest.)

Of course, the choice is between marrying young, which assumes you have available young men with available land, or delaying marriage and childbearing. In 1815 Massachusetts the land was taken, single men were moving west and leaving women behind. (Men being more mobile than women in general.) Women could go into teaching (as the public school system was taking off), or into the newly developed factories.

The issue of what do to with women (sounds more chauvinistic than I mean to) is common in rural societies. Some kill them (either in the womb or in the cradle) or, as the Chinese, prohibit them from being born at all (1 child per couple). In America, we've hired them as teachers, nurses, telephone operators, secretaries, and servants. In a minor way, the New Deal helped in rural America by opening up offices to run the farm programs. The paperwork needed women to handle it, so I'd expect you'd find a majority of women in the clerical ranks of the AAA/PMA/CSS/ASCS/FSA over the years. Just one way to keep them, if not on the farm, at least in the rural towns.

The Enemy of the Good--Health care and NASA

The attempt to do things perfectly is often an enemy to the good. This Government Executive piece outlines a familiar story: do you use a military standard software system that's centrally designed and inflexible, or do you use a locally developed system that works better, at least for some. This is in the area of military healthcare. An easy response is that it's such a vital area that things need to be exactly right, hence the need for a centrally planned and managed system.

A counter to that is a piece in the PC Magazine, including this discussion on NASA and even DOD:

The space agency itself has released at least 20 open-source applications under the NASA Open Source Agreement, including Livingstone2, a reusable artificial-intelligence software system that lets a spacecraft operate with minimal human oversight even if its hardware fails.

As the first federal agency to commit an open-source policy to paper, the Department of Defense has continued to encourage open-source deployments.

"Open-source software . . . connects and enables our command and control system to work effectively," said Brigadier General Nickolas Justice at an open-source technology conference in Arlington, Virginia. "When we rolled into Baghdad, we did it using open source."

More recent uses include the Navy's DDG 1000 Zumwalt class destroyer, built primarily on Red Hat Linux, and the Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration, which allows quick handling of huge volumes of geospatial data. Such initiatives could streamline federal agencies and offer a new transparency to government.

So it's good to use open source in destroyers, but not in health care. (I recognize the difference between "open source", where the source code is public and available for people to change and improve, and "locally developed", where the source code is probably not public and almost certainly was not managed in a way that invites public comment and change. But, the psychology is similar--do you, the manager, want total control or do you want to steadily improve the software your users employ?