No One Understands Farm Commodities Markets

That's the news on the Times today. For some time now, the cash prices for corn and wheat and the closing price of a futures contract have differed greatly, when they should be the same, assuming the markets are operating correctly.

I don't know if there's a term like schadenfreude (sp?) for my feelings: amusement that reality is more complex than the mighty hidden hand of the economics profession.

I Quibble with Charlie Peters--Passport Flap

I've been reading Washington Monthly since it started, meaning I've been reading Charlie Peters, the founding editor. But today I disagree with him on the passport flap at State. Any long-time reader will not be surprised to see that I think the State passport system should send out an email anytime someone accesses a file. (If Abebooks can email me anytime some vendor offers a book I want, or Amazon do something similar, surely it's "technically feasible" (to use one of my favorite terms) to do so.

And the Saddest Words: About a Dozen Were Farmers

A phrase that can be taken many ways, from the Militant, on Pigford:

"Black farmers continue to face racial discrimination in loans and other services at offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). That was the view of many attending the 10th annual meeting of the Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFAA), held here February 15-17.

Farmers, faculty and researchers from historically Black agricultural colleges, environmental advocates, and officials of the USDA’s civil rights office were among the more than 60 participants. About a dozen were farmers."

Outsourcing Testing?

According to this piece, FSA let a $1.8 million contract for 2 years which is being satisfied by six staff members in the Kansas City area. Let's see--1.8 divided by 2 = $900,000, divided by six = $150,000 per person.

What's it for? "The work for the farm agency in Kansas City, Mo., will include stress testing of applications, Web and software development, application support and project management."

Something funny going on:

• back in the good old days, FSA did its software development in Kansas City and its testing, both using government employees. Then the IT types got moved into USDA IT (OCIO). I assumed IT was still doing the software testing.
• the contract seems to show some of the testing is being outsourced. I guess $150,000 is reasonable (subtract 33 percent for contractor overhead and another 30 percent of the remainder for fringe benefits and you're probably down to what a government employee would cost--maybe. We the taxpayer would be paying $50K for the right to fire the employee quickly (as in the recent flap over passport file access) and maybe for some expertise that's hard to develop in-house.) (I may be wrongly assuming the bulk of the contract is testing.)
  
• but the odd thing is that FSA is doing the contracting--seems as if it should be IT, just to make for cleaner responsibilities and reporting.

Oh, the mysteries.

Immigrants and the Economy

This is how the Post leads a story this morning:

"A vibrant Latino subculture built in Prince William County over more than a decade is starting to come undone in a matter of months.

With Latinos fleeing the combined effects of the construction downturn, the mortgage crisis and new local laws aimed at catching illegal immigrants, Latino shops are on the brink of bankruptcy, church groups are hemorrhaging members, neighborhoods are dotted with for-sale signs, and once-busy strip malls have been transformed into ghost towns.

County officials who have campaigned for months to drive out illegal immigrants say they would be unhappy to see businesses suffer or legal immigrants forced out in the process."

In other words, we don't want illegal immigrants but we do want their money. Amazing.

Putnam and Immigration

Robert Putnam, of "Bowling Alone" fame, ponders immigration in this interview. Here's a quote:

"In the successful cases [of societies integrating immigrants] – like the United States, like Canada, and to some extent Australia – the first step is that the immigrant groups often form organizations on their own: the sons of Ireland or the sons of Norway. Now those may look initially to the receiving society like, “Oh, they don’t want to join us, they want to have their own separate group.”

But what’s going on is that these people are in a new place and they’re trying to find some group with which they have something in common and can begin to form friendships –any of us would do that in a new setting. Those organizations historically prove to be steps toward becoming involved in America."

One thing he misses, I think, is the way we (the natives/earlier immigrants) and they (the later immigrants) start the process. It's true now, and I'm pretty sure it's been true since the beginning, that people in the "old country" were identified more by the sections/provinces they came from. The Irish and the Scots and the Scots-Irish all had county, clan, or religious affiliation. The "Germans" were Hessians, Bavarians, Saxons, or whatever. Once they arrive here, their national identity becomes the major factor, the regionalisms are subordinated. So too today, natives of Indian states become at least "Indians", if not South Asians (along with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Ceylonese) or even "Asians", as in an "Asian-American society.

This leads naturally to a blending of identities--when I was growing up you had the WASP's, the Irish and Italian Catholics, and the Eastern European Catholics. Now we're mostly just "whites".

Locavores Take a Hit

From Brownfield Network:

The biggest and most successful tomato grower in the northeastern United States has decided not to plant tomatoes this year because he’s afraid there won’t be enough labor available to plant and harvest his crop. Keith Eckle told Brownfield, because Congress hasn’t reformed current immigration law, he simply can’t risk planting a crop that could end up rotting in the fields.

"Our investment in those tomatoes is about $1.5 million," Eckle explained. "We cannot afford to plant that crop, put that much money out, and not know that we can harvest that crop."

Instead, Eckle will plant grain corn on his acres that normally go to tomatoes, pumpkins and sweet corn. But because produce is of such greater value, even with high commodity prices, Eckle said he’ll probably only make a third of the profit he enjoys in a typical year.

Later he points out that he's within 6 hours of the whole Northeast (located in PA, apparently--article doesn't specify).

To me the logic of the local food/slow food movement is that each region becomes more self-sufficient (that's their logic, not something I endorse). But this shows the interdependencies which exist--you can have local tomatoes only if you're willing to import foreign labor. Or you can keep out foreign labor but only if you're willing to import foreign tomatoes. (As Robert Heinlein wrote, there's no such thing as a free lunch.) Note we aren't talking "organic" here--the devotees of that cause can scare up enough young native idealists to do that labor.

More on Privacy

MSNBC's Red Tape says looking at other's data goes on all the time while Government Executive finds someone to comment more generally on privacy and the problems in government agencies.

Meanwhile, innovators are ripping away the mask of privacy from government employees--the NYTimes reports on a website where you can post evaluations of police officers you encounter. (The president of the California police association isn't happy.) It's not unlike the site for rating your professor, which is now matched by a site for professors to respond, or your neighbor.

Soon everyone will rate everyone.

Where Are the Fashion Police?

Watched the movie "Election" the other night, then the director's commentary. (I liked the movie, not great, but good.) Mathew Broderick ("Wargames") is playing a high school social studies teacher, who ends up trying to manipulate the election for president of the student body to prevent Reese Witherspoon from winning. (To any right-thinking Republican, Reese is a clone of Hillary Clinton. To any Dem, she's Karl Rove in drag.)

Anyhow, what offends me and raises my dander is how the director mocked the Broderick character's short sleeve dress shirts. It was terrible. You'd think it was a crime against fashion to wear such shirts. I wore these shirts for all of my government career, at least during the hot months.

The director should know that fine stores such as Hechts or Sears would refuse to sell such shirts if they constituted a crime against fashion. You don't see them selling pot or crack, do you?

Perspectives

Shankar Vedantam in today's Post has an article on the different perspectives blacks and whites bring to race in the U.S.--whites assume a perspective of comparing the present to the past, and seeing how far we've come; blacks assume a perspective of comparing the ideal future to the present, and seeing how far we have to go. Research shows if your question sets the perspective for the respondent and doesn't let them assume the two groups tend to give similar assessments.