My Fantasy Life

As befits a bureaucrat, my fantasy life is dull, dull, dull. One of the livelier parts is imagining returning to college (mostly to get free access to some interesting journal articles that aren't publicly available. Never have, never will.

But I might just follow Professor DeLong and his class on American economic history. Here's his lecture notes for the first class. One interesting point--he cites corn as having a 40 to 1 yield ratio, compared to wheat's 5 to 1. (At least back in 1800 or so.) Sounds questionable to me, but I never had to deal with either.

French Bread

Dirk Beauregard tells us lots about the current state of French bread, bakeries, and its price (rising).

The View from Europe

This is late, but here's an excerpt from a post on the blog of the EU's secretary of agriculture (that's how I interpret her role). It relates to a visit in February that she made to DC. (Her blog is interesting--she responds to the questions/comments of some of the farmers who write in.)

"I’ve just come back from almost three days in a freezing cold Washington DC.
It was an extremely educational visit – hopefully for my hosts as much as for me.
But it was also a reality check.
We have talked at length in Brussels about the importance of farm subsidy reform in the US for the future prospects of the Doha trade round.
We have looked to the new US Farm Bill proposals to give a clear signal that reform is on the horizon.
My discussions in Washington showed that the Farm Bill will be written very much with domestic concerns in mind.
DOHA does not seem to be high on the agenda in farm bill discussions.
This is a very different approach to ours, where we reform first and then look to lock these reforms into a WTO agreement.
I was also struck by the fact that many of the forces that today shape European agriculture policy – consumer interest, environmental considerations, budgetary pressure, development policy - seems strangely absent from the American debate. It’s farming interest – and increasingly also energy (biofuels) that is shaping policy. Could you imagine that in Europe?
I like the straight talking you hear on Capitol Hill. But it brings home to me clearly how different the political process in Washington is to that I know so well in Brussels.
Of course there were bright spots.
Crucially, my visit was an important exercise in confidence-building.
Deal-making is so much easier if the people facing each other across the table know and like one another.

"One Stop Shopping"

I remember, vaguely, when the Farm and Home Center was built on Upper front Street in Broome County. This piece discusses the closing of the FSA office (no mention of the NRCS office's fate). The statistics are interesting--farms and acreage up, but program participation down. I suspect that's common throughout the area. The urbanites are buying land in the sticks for their hobby farms (lots and lots of vineyards around the Finger Lakes, there was one--Taylor--in 1959). "Hobby" is a bit pejorative, but it's the closest term I've run into.

European Subsidy Payments

Our friends in the EU (both "Old Europe" and "New Europe") have the same controversies over payments to corporations and large payments as we do. See here for their equivalent of the EWG payment database. ($20,000 per acre payment!!) One of the problems of going to a historical basis for payments is the development of discrepancies between acreages. (There's always a trade-off.)

French Education

I've noted Dirk Beauregard's blog before. This post describes the day before the French schools reopen.

Challenging Everyone in School

Patrick Welsh is a teacher of English in the Alexandria (or is it Arlington) high school who writes periodic pieces on the state of the public schools. He had one yesterday, discussing the problems kids have who are caught between the very gifted and the ones being targeted to meet the Virgina Standards of Learning (No Child Left Behind), as in:

"...TAG as in Talented and Gifted. And who is and who isn't -- or at least who's designated such and who isn't -- has been one of the most contentious issues in Alexandria since the school system raised the bar for the TAG program two years ago. The new rules have cut out about two-thirds of the students who once qualified: At George Mason, the size of the fourth-grade program went from 17 to six last year."

He closes thus:

"Shep Walker, a T.C. graduate about to enter the College of William and Mary, says the problem is that "gifted-and-talented programs get filled with white kids who have pushy parents, leaving a lot of black and Hispanic kids out in the cold and creating de facto segregation in the classes."

In its defense, Alexandria's school administration was probably trying to fix that situation. But the solution isn't to mark fewer students as gifted and talented. It's to challenge all our kids, all the time."

While that's a laudable sentiment, I don't think it works in the real world or the real classroom. I think the reality is that any teacher faced with 25 students, or even any manager faced with 12 employees, is going to find that teaching (managing) some of them is more rewarding than the others. (I think the reward is a matter of personalities hitting it off, not necessarily of bias.) So some are going to think Mr. Welsh is a great teacher, some are going to say he's okay.

A great school system will manage to provide everyone with great teaching once or twice in their 12 years of schooling, as different teachers connect with different students. For the rest, we'll muddle through.

The Housing Bubble and Immigration

The popping of speculative bubbles needs nothing but a surplus of irrational exuberance, but there may be an interesting cross-over effect with immigration. The NY Times today talks about a national decline in the price of the average house. The Post today discusses declines in the DC area. Interestingly, Manassas Park, which I just highlighted as having turned majority minority with an impact on its politicians, is expected to have the steepest drop in home values in the area.

I don't think it's accidental. Politicians and government leaders tighten the screws on immigration, making it harder to get in. That cuts the demand for both temporary and permanent housing for the immigrants. (Which has often been met by group housing, which is a centuries-old pattern--look at Jacob Riis at the turn of the 1900's and his book "How the Other Half Lives".) And, we know in a free market, a cut in demand will cause a cut in price.

Tacos

Kevin Drum has had several posts on tacos--which have attracted lots of comments. His commenter has dug up a 1952 NYTimes article describing them, but Mexican food (or the American simulation thereof) didn't become popular until the 1970's.

McDonalds

McDonalds now sells more in Europe than in the U.S., per this NY Times article on how they're adapting to European tastes and upscaling. And I remember in the 1950's when they opened in the Binghamton area.