A Quiet Suburban Morning

Coming back from Starbucks and the garden: a beautiful early fall day, temp in the 60's, clear blue sky, sun dappling the woods.

(An aside--is it just me or is the "dappling effect" more pronounced in the fall. I'd speculate that the trees grow to intercept the maximum sunlight, which means during the summer. As the sun gets lower in the sky in the autumn, its rays come in at a greater angle, thus finding gaps in the leaf coverage that weren't present when the rays were coming more perpendicular. (That's me, always wanting to have an answer and show it off.))

Suddenly an animal dashed across Glade Drive, coming from the condo cluster on the right to the houses on the left. About halfway across the street, I identified it: a fox. A skinny fox, running faster and more intelligently than the squirrels who often cross the roads, sometimes only partway.

The fox ran to the edge of the backyard of the house on the corner--it backs to a patch of woods running up to the community swimming pool and which separates my townhouse cluster from the streets of houses. For some reason the house's owners have a faux outhouse standing at the edge of the lawn, yuppie humor I guess. The outhouse was in the sun and the fox settled there.

And the fox scratched. And scratched. And scratched.

I must have stood watching for 5 minutes as the fox tried to conquer his fleas. I guess his paws were ineffective weapons against his enemies.

The Human Animal, as Seen by Today's Times

From Joseph Nocera on how even Nobel-winning economists aren't rational investors:

Having watched the way investors have behaved since the Crash of ‘87, I’ve come to believe that most human beings are simply not hard-wired to be good investors.

On changes at Macy's (dropping coupons and upscaling lines):

But the changes amounted to “too much, too fast,” Mr. Lundgren acknowledged in an interview. It turns out that men, in particular, are creatures of shopping habit. They want to go to the local department store and find the Dockers where they have always been. [Duh]

From a front pager on what happens to small trusts when the original people are not around and big banks and law firms take over:

With no family members to encourage gifts to the original donor’s favorite causes, the banks and lawyers have wide latitude to change the way the trusts operate and to decide which charities will receive grants.

Banks can reduce gifts and increase the foundation’s assets, thus increasing their fees. At the same time, banks and lawyers stand to gain personal influence and prestige by selecting new charities.

Happiness and Homemaking

David Leonhardt in the Times reports on studies of happiness:

Over the same span, women have replaced housework with paid work — and, as a result, are spending almost as much time doing things they don’t enjoy as in the past. Forty years ago, a typical woman spent about 23 hours a week in an activity considered unpleasant, or 40 more minutes than a typical man. Today, with men working less, the gap is 90 minutes.

These trends are reminiscent of the idea of “the second shift,” the name of a 1989 book by the sociologist Arlie Hochschild, arguing that modern women effectively had to hold down two jobs. The first shift was at the office, and the second at home.

But researchers who have looked at time-use data say the second-shift theory misses an important detail. Women are not actually working more than they were 30 or 40 years ago. They are instead doing different kinds of work. They’re spending more time on paid work and less on cleaning and cooking.

This fits with several other posts. We've turned to fast food and eating out, not because people schemed to force feed us with bad food, but because it was fast, convenient, and saved time for doing other things that "we" (i.e, women) wanted to do. It doesn't hurt that sugary and fat food tastes good and the typical fast food meal tastes better than much of the home-cooked food of the 1940's and 50's. After all, specialization means that someone can learn to do things well. And in our market economy if one can earn money and buy a million-dollar house by selling food through franchises, there's nothing wrong with that. (There is, but that's another subject.)

The Future of Rural America

I've posted recently on the process by which rural America loses population--young people migrate elsewhere for more opportunity, so few babies are born, and older people die. Here's a study that claims that the migration is two-way--the young and educated leave, the poor and less educated migrate in, attracted by the lower cost of living (all those homes built for many big families depress the housing market).

[Updated--see here for a discussion of "rural".]

Direct Payments in Jeopardy?

This piece from Uof Ill extension discusses the possibility that the direct payments program will be changed/cut/redirected. Two big factors: you can't defend the payments with farm income so high; WTO calls the payments fine.

How Soon We Forget (Under the Power of Political Prejudices)

Scott at Powerline commenting on the Dems debate:

"Senator Clinton recalled that President Bush's desire to avoid "eliminating the debt" (I think she meant deficit) "was one of the excuses he gave when he voted for [sic] those horrible tax cuts in 2001."The absence of any reference to the toll of 9/11 is striking, as well as the animus against reduction in income tax rates."

I think if he would check in early 2001, when Bush pushed his first round of tax cuts (before
9/11:

• First, there was no deficit. There was a surplus.
  
• Second, surpluses were projected that caused people like Greenspan and the Treasury to worry there might not be enough debt to fulfill the functions of the Treasury market. That's one reason they dropped the 30-year Treasury bond auctions(which I had bought earlier).

As a matter of fact, with a little googling, I came up with this piece from May 3, 2001:

"This is why the Treasury Department under the Bush administration will have to make some important decisions about the future of the Treasury market by November. In that period -- which includes the three quarterly Treasury auctions in May, August and November -- the Treasury is going to have to give a clear indication of what it wants to do with the government bond market. It can let this market fade away in the most organized and least disruptive way possible. Or it can do its best to keep the market alive.

Because of large budget surpluses, the government is expected to have no real need to borrow in a few years. And if the government ceases to issue bonds and notes, the Treasury market would lose its role as a benchmark for interest rates, a haven for worried investors and a tool in many of Wall Street's regular financial transactions."

Now Hilary may well be wrong that Bush ever connected his 2001 tax cut to the need for debt. But she was right about the rest. And Powerline's memory is demonstrably vague (as we all are when we don't like the facts).

Google Maps, and Local Farms

Here's a neat add-on to Google Maps--local content: in this case, a map of farms around Boston.

Class Society

In the Post today, Montgomery County awakes to the fact that the median new house costs $1.13 million. (Poor Fairfax county is cheap, only $965 K.) And on the op-ed page there's Harold Meyerson writing about haves and have-nots.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I think the society is more divided between the "haves" and the "pigs".

Why Can't We Get a Budget?

Congress is in the process of passing another "stop-gap" budget measure. Back in the day, when I started work for the Feds, our Fiscal Year was July 1 to June 30. But Congress started having problems meeting it. So sometime, maybe late 70's, the powers-that-be came up with the idea of switching the FY start to Oct 1. That would surely give enough time for a reasoned and considered budget process.

Fat chance.

North Dakota FSA

Here's a story on crop insurance, based on an interview with a brother of a state FSA specialist. Now I understand why the specialist was assertive in meetings--he had the experience of fighting for attention in a large family!