Localvores

A flurry of books and articles on eating locally. Barbara Kinsolving's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle"(book and website); Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker, this CNN piece,
McKibben's book: "Deep Economy".

Each to his own taste. I agree that locally grown food tastes good--that's why my wife and I garden. But "industrial agriculture" as John Phipps calls it is the reason we haven't had the famines in the world that we used to. So if you have the money and want to buy a McMansion, or a second house in the town where your child goes to college, fine. If you want to buy "fair trade" coffee, fine. If you want to spend time and money getting locally grown produce from community supported farmers, even finer. But don't think you're saving the world.

Immigrants Working Harder

I posted a couple days ago about an article on a California farmer moving his vegetable operation to Mexico. Freakonomics picked up on the bit about Mexicans working harder in California and had about 40 comments on the idea.

I was waiting for my wife to buy basmati rice at a local Indian grocery. Indians and Koreans and Chinese immigrants often get into small business--food, dry cleaning, etc. If the family works 16 hours a day, they can make it. Then I remembered the "consensus" school of American history from the early 1960's. The idea, pushed by Louis Hartz and others, was that emigrants to America left behind much of the class structure of Europe--the lower classes didn't migrate, no money; and the upper classes didn't migrate, they had it too good. So America was populated by the middle class, and hence never had the class war to the extent Europe did. (Oversimplification.)

How does that relate to farm workers from south of the border? Well, when one emigrates north, one leaves behind a lot, family, friends, social structures. One of the less obvious things you leave behind is the whole entertainment industry. Entertainers don't move, they have it good enough where they are (much like the European upper classes). And you need a critical mass of people to support native entertainment industry. So I'd venture that the entertainment industry for any group of immigrants is smaller and less active than in their home country. So immigrants work harder in part because they have fewer entertainment outlets for their time and energy.

"A Naive Country Boy"?--Me? No, Marion Barry

Effie Barry, Marion Barry's third wife, died of leukemia yesterday. The Post had some interesting pieces on her (she memorably maintained her poise during Marion's drug bust trial).

This is towards the end of the interview piece, talking about Marion, the divorce (after he got out of prison) and his remarriage:
"The reality is that the two of you will always be connected because you are parents of this one child. . . . You try to develop a positive dialogue; and I must say it was certainly a challenge because his wife, Cora, had, at one time, been one of my best friends. . . . I will always respect him as a man of great intelligence. . . . I will always have a great deal of concern . . . for him. Because underneath it he is this very naive country boy. . . .

I can see it. It was and is part of his con, the "bama" who's still on the side of the underdog, who's fighting the good fight and putting it over on the "man". Another James Curley (famous Boston pol/mayor/convict/Irishman). But you can't use it in a con unless it rings true as well.

British Bureaucrats Screw Up Farm Payments

To the best of my knowledge, FSA has done better than the Brits:

The handling of a £1.5bn computerised farm payments scheme by two senior civil servants is condemned by MPs today as "a masterclass in bad decision-making" which could land taxpayers with a £500m extra bill. A highly critical report from the Commons public accounts committee accuses Sir Brian Bender, then permanent secretary at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, of being "largely responsible" for the fiasco, which left tens of thousands of farmers without any cash from the European Union.

Some interesting points that pop up as sidenotes--apparently the EU has a small payment cutoff--like $100 or so, which the Brits didn't use, giving them lots of small claims to pay. And the EU is able to fine the British over their failures of administration. The British fired some of the people responsible, but had to pay compensation for not fully following the rules (sounds familiar). And most familiar of all--a top guy is criticized for not having the nerve to stand up to the leaders and give them the bad news.

Bremer the Bureaucrat

L. Paul Bremer has an op-ed in today's NY Times outlining the bureaucratic process by which the Iraqi Army was disbanded (countering the report in the Draper book on Bush that Bush's policy was to keep the Army going). It's full of clearances, reviews, revisions--makes me nostalgic for the USDA bureaucracy.

The problem is perhaps bifocal--it's easy for the essence of the matter to get lost in the minutia of the process, so Bush's bureaucrats may not have realized what they were doing, and Bush may have been ignorant. On the other hand, you have to pay attention to the details and process. If I understand, a big problem with recalling the army was the process. Everyone had deserted, so there was no skeleton to use to recall the troops, or at least it wasn't readily identifiable to the US (whose intelligence about the state of Iraq was a little short). So, because it would be hard to recall and because the Shia, whom Bush's father had screwed, wanted the disbanding, Bremer went along.

Farming and Immigrants

The Times has an article a a California farmer moving to Mexico because of problems getting sufficient labor. He's a big operator, lots of acres, lots of employees. This may be the odd case, or it may be part of a trend. I suppose there's not much difference in travel cost or time between shipping lettuce from California or Arizona and Mexico, particularly with the border becoming more open to trucking.

A couple things struck me--instead of paying $9 an hour he's now paying $12 a day. He claims to be following the same sanitary procedures as he would in the States, and I suspect it's to his self-interest to do so. The other thing--his workers don't work as productively (i.e., hard). I find that interesting. I think it's part of the advantage of emigrating, at least for work. You leave lots of distractions behind and you've put yourself at risk, so you work harder.

Tim Harford--We Need More Girls in the World

From Slate, on research:

Boys pollute the educational system, it seems, for a number of unmysterious reasons: They wear down teachers, disrupt classes, and ruin the atmosphere for everyone. And more boys are worse than fewer boys, not because they egg each other on but simply because more of them can cause more trouble in total.

It is all rather troubling, especially for the parents of little angels like my daughters. Evidently, it is impossible to satisfy the—apparently justified—parental demand to educate girls in single-sex schools and boys in mixed classes. (Not for the first time in my life, I conclude that the world doesn't have enough girls in it.)

Farm Bill in the Senate: Pay Limit and Disaster

From Jim Wiesemeyer via Agweb:

Where the House offered producers a one-shot option of a revenue-triggered disaster payment plan, the Senate may make the plan cover all farmers (replacing counter-cyclical payments) and will tighten up the payment limitation language in the House bill.

Milk and the Times

A NYTimes article says there's a worldwide shortage of milk (they start with New Zealand, which is a big exporter). Rising standards of living mean more demand for milk, rising prices of feed grains because of ethanol mean tighter supply. And of course milk supply is relatively inflexible--you can get a little bump by feeding a bit more and not culling your herd as tightly (at least you could in the old days), but basically you need to raise more calves to heifers, to cows.

Although the sort of dairy farming I grew up with is now gone, it's nice to hear some good news for the industry.

[Update--Marginal Revolution has an interesting discussion in comments. Although no farmers that I saw.]

Pigford Perspectives IV (Earmarks)

There's been lots of flak about Congressional earmarks over the last few years--the Dems beat the Reps over the head about the "bridge to nowhere" ($150 million in Alaska) as a symbol of their apostasy from their small government, tight budget principles. Now that the Dems are in the majority, they're catching grief as they struggle to reduce and/or put light on the process.

What's this have to do with Pigford? Maybe nothing. But I've often puzzled: blacks often charge discrimination and bias in contexts where the whites profess innocence: ("yes, racial hate is terrible, but that's not me...etc. etc.) If this were just an occasional event one might say simply that the whites are lying. But it happens often enough that maybe one should take the claims seriously and see if something else is going on, at least in part.

Back to earmarks: can the residents of New York or New Jersey, who pay much more in federal taxes than they get back, fairly charge Sen. Robert Byrd (D, WV) or Sen. Stevens (R, AK) with bias and discrimination against them? If they did, the Senators would rouse themselves to say, we're just looking after the home folks.

When you look around the "earmarking" phenomena is quite prevalent. "Legacy admissions" to colleges (children of alumni) are one form; giving preferences to one's family and friends (MCI used to run an advertising campaign called "Friends and family") is another. It just seems natural when we have goodies to give out we start first with those we know and love, then switch to a more arbitrary standard (i.e., merit; first come, first served) to distribute the rest.

So I wonder--is some of Pigford, the symptoms of disparate conditions between black and white farmers, the result more of "looking after the home folks" than bias? The Farmer's Home office (now FSA) had so much loan money to allocate. It wouldn't surprise me if they looked out first for old classmates, fellow church members, etc. The result would be much the same for blacks as straight discrimination, and no doubt would feel to blacks as racial bias. Trying to figure out when it's bias and when it's "good ole boy" network would be frustrating.