Gee I Wish I Had Known This Back at USDA

The "Overcoming Bias" blog has lots of good stuff, rather academic though. Today they have two posts on "planning". Or rather, the planning fallacy, because "The planning fallacy is that people think they can plan, ha ha."

Or: "When people are asked for a "realistic" scenario, they envision everything going exactly as planned, with no unexpected delays or unforeseen catastrophes - the same vision as their "best case".

Reality, it turns out, usually delivers results somewhat worse than the "worst case".

The advice is: when in the midst of a project, ask your experts for how long it took other similar projects to complete. If I'd done that, I would have skipped involvement in several failed projects, mostly attempting to cross bureaucratic lines (or merge "stovepipes").

EU Set-Aside

In a blast from the past, this agweb article referred to a proposal to reduce the EU set-aside from 10 percent to 0. This was new to me--I thought the EU and the US had done away with production adjustment. On doing a very little research it looks as if it was a cross between the US "Conservation reserve Program" and the annual set-aside programs we had at times in the 1970's-1990's. Like CRP in that the 10 percent level was "permanent" (as of 1999) and not changeable from year to year. Except now it's proposed to be changed. $8 wheat futures will do that to you.

A-10 and Tactical Air Redux--UAV Responsibility

The services are fighting over unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and whether the Air Force should be responsible for them, according to this interesting piece in Government Executive. It carries echoes of past battles over military aviation (should the Marines have their own air force, should the Navy, etc.), tactical aviation, the continuation of the A-10, etc. etc.

A footnote in an era when good government types are blasting earmarks--Sen Shelby, whose state has a big Army UAV post, is fighting to protect it by inserting language in the appropriations bill. Is this a negative earmark? (Doesn't "earmark" originally go back to notching the ears of cattle to assert ownership? )

Another Locavore Experiment

Here is a piece in New York about a guy in Brooklyn who tried to raise enough food for a month on 800 square feet. Here's one of the concluding paragraphs:

In three weeks of eating nothing but Farm-fresh food, I lost 29 pounds, down from my pre-Farm weight of 234. Abs: That’s the upside of only two meals a day. The downside is the expense. Not counting my own labor, which was unending, I spent about $11,000 to produce what, all told, is barely enough to feed one grown man for a month. But I did learn something about food: Unless you really know what you’re doing, raising it is miserable, soul-crushing work. Eating food fresh from the farm, on the other hand, is delightful.

I roared at some of his misadventures (the idea that a hen finds eggs delicious struck home) and agree with his conclusions. (Although even when you know what you're doing, some of farming is miserable, soul-crushing work. Of course, that's also true of teaching, and writing, and bureaucracy.)

Coordination of Bureaucracies

The LA Times has a story on modern day coordination of military arms. (See my piece on WWII.) Basically it's a technological solution--a kit that enables remote replication of a computer monitor (think of the Slingbox which allows similar functionality for TV). Apparently the voice communications linkage was pre-existing, what the hero of the piece did was push engineers to replicate monitors of Predator operators--essentially allow one to look over their shoulder.

I've not tried it out, but apparently Microsoft has similar capability in PC's running XP or Vista. Seems like a security risk, but the coordination is worthwhile.

Johanns and Pigford

From a piece in The Hill

Johanns on Tuesday told reporters that members of Congress were “justifiably” upset about an e-mail that called on Farm Service Agency (FSA) employees to lobby against the language. He said such lobbying would violate USDA rules prohibiting grassroots lobbying by employees.

“I must admit, it’s painful for me that we have an e-mail out there that advocated a given position,” Johanns said Tuesday. “That really upset Congress, and I don’t want that to jeopardize what has been a very positive view of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and what we can offer in the policy debate.”

Local Food and a Carbon Tax

I just thought--logically the "local food" people should support a carbon tax. If transporting food the estimated 1,000 to 1,500 miles to the place of consumption is wasteful (i.e., adversely impacts the environment), then a carbon tax would encourage producing food locally.

Closing With the Enemy, Coordinating with Your Friends

This is an interesting book I read over the last couple weeks. It's a study of the lessons the American Army learned as they fought across France into Germany.

The author takes a very different approach to the US and Germany military than does James Q. Wilson, whose book "Bureaucracy" is good. Wilson sees the Germans as emphasizing small group cohesion, flexibility, etc. while the U.S. was more bureaucratic, top down. This book almost reverses it--seeing the U.S. as being willing to learn from the bottom up and not top down.

Be that as it may, foremost among the lessons learned were a set of lessons on coordination, whether between tactical air and infantry, tanks and infantry, engineers and infantry (in river crossing and assaulting fortification), etc. Because my own bureaucratic career was plagued by problems of coordinating different branches of the agency, and different organizations within USDA, this experience from a completely different world is interesting.

Part of the lesson is simplifying communication. If tanks and infantry use different radios (reminiscent of the different radios used by NYC police and fire), stick a handset on the back of the tank and have an infantryman ride there. Use light planes and forward air controllers to coordinate tactical air and infantry. (The idea of a dedicated liaison, like the FAC, is something I would like to try in my next reincarnation as a USDA bureaucrat.) Another part is proper allocation of resources--attacking in a way that maximizes the artillery available to the combat commander, for example.

Bottom line: bureaucracy is bureaucracy, because people are people, whether they wear camouflage or white collars.

The Economics of Farming, Revisited

Extension people discuss wheat prices here.

The "target price" for wheat has been $4 since the 1981 farm bill (I think--too lazy to check). That's a quarter of a century. Cash wheat prices are about 50 percent above that price, probably a historic level. It's another reminder of the effect of having a free market system, with many sellers and few buyers, and inelastic demand and supply curves. You can have gluts, you can have scarcity, you can have periods when wheat farmers mint money, or not.

The ups and downs used to be more drastic, with more severe impact on the national economy. Now wheat is just another commodity, of relatively little economic significance to the overall picture.

But: "give us our daily bread".

Some Unneeded Publicity--Payment Limits

Ronald Reagan once used a "welfare queen" (someone who had exploited the system to live high on the hog) to attack welfare. The same seems to be happening with payment limitations. See this link on Maurice Wilder, the reigning king of farm program payments:

"Yes, our pal Maurice certainly gets around. While he isn’t busy farming farm programs for oodles of cash, he’s pumping oodles of Nebraska’s precious groundwater. Or, to be precise, somebody else is pumping it for him:

A man who owns 125 Nebraska irrigation wells has never drilled a single one. Maurice Wilder, 66, of Clearwater, Fla., primarily develops retirement communities, recreational vehicle parks and office buildings in Florida and Texas. And he's never lived here.

As noted above, The King of Farm Programs doesn’t confine himself to farming, either. Check out the following data on our little buddy:

• Total holdings nationwide estimated at $500 million in 2005.
• Owns 10 office buildings in the Tampa Bay, Fla., area with more than 1 million square feet of space.
• Has 4,500 mobile home lots and 12,500 recreational vehicle lots in Florida and Texas.
• Commercial and residential land holdings.
• Owns 200,000 acres of farmland and ranch land in eight states. That's roughly 312 square miles, or nearly the size of Douglas County."