Impact of High Costs

I'll bypass the links and just comment on a series of recent articles, all discussing the impact of higher food costs.

• Pizza parlors are having trouble. Flour and cheese costs are up, as is fuel for delivery. And what's worse, they have few means to fight back, compared to...
• Fast food places, which are going to "value" menus, like McD's "dollar" menu.
• Sit down restaurants are fighting back by exploring ways to serve less food, but make it look bigger. Presentation, presentation... They can't have food costs of more than 30 percent and still make a profit.
• School lunch programs are cutting corners wherever they can, including being less tolerant of nutritious but less popular choices.

And of course, as I seem to remember in the 70's, we now have truckers striking, because they're severely hurt by higher fuel costs.

Old Codgers and Bad Memories:G. Will and Me

George Will (who's, if I remember correctly, just a tad younger than I) displays a bad memory in his piece on Obama. He ends with this paragraph, after noting that Obama apologized in Munice, IN:

"In 1929 and 1937, Robert and Helen Lynd published two seminal books of American sociology. They were sympathetic studies of a medium-size manufacturing city they called "Middletown," coping -- reasonably successfully, optimistically and harmoniously -- with life's vicissitudes. "Middletown" was in fact Muncie, Ind".

Well, not quite. From Wikipedia:

"The Lynds did not study the African-American population of Middletown. They justified this because this group only composed 5 percent of the total population. However, modern critics argue that this was a racial oversight conditioned by the era in which the study took place. A similar argument applies to the fact that they didn't study Jews who lived in the city.

Although the Lynds attempted to avoid ideology, theory, or political statements, the focus of their initial study can be construed as an endorsement (however faint) of Progressive Era politics. Also, the study is sometimes accused of being elitist and old-fashioned, as it seems to bemoan the rise of "popular culture" such as films and the fall of farm culture.

Because the study took an anthropological/scientific approach to Middletown society, and because at the time it was the first large-scale attempt to describe a modern town in this manner, some critics claimed that it was inherently condescending and degrading to the town's citizens. First, by treating humans as objects of study, they argued that it was immoral and degrading. Seccondly, they argues the study implied that its denizens were no more advanced than a primitive tribe. The study's approach to religion was specially singled out on this count. For example, in the introduction to the first edition of Middletown in Transition, the Lynds recounted an incident where town leaders placed a copy of the first book in the cornerstone of a building. Several pastors from the town's more fundamentalist congregations angrily argued that the book deserved to be burned rather than praised because of how it described (and, from their perspective, insulted) the town's religious activities.

The second study, in contrast to the first, is extremely political in tone and openly critical of American culture in general. Also, the Lynds made predictions (i.e., on the possibility of a future American dictatorship) that never came to pass.

Furthermore, the second study is accused of "begging the question." Despite its title, there really was no real "conflict" within Middletown during the Great Depression. However, in reading the language of the authors, it becomes increasingly clear that they believed that there should have been class conflict. This is expressed in the frustration employed by the authors - they apparently hoped and expected that such a conflict would break out, and began the study with this preconception. However, this preconception was incorrect.

I think the lesson is it's very easy to come across as elitist when you take an analytic approach to someone/something. The Lynds did this, Obama did this, and so does George Will. Why Will? Because the Middletown books depict a city governed by the old WASP elite, all male, all white, all comfortable--all harmonious because the others were on the outside. It's Reagan's America (Will and Reagan both hail from small city Illinois). Mr. Wills has fond and pleasant memories of this America, so he think's the Lynd's description must also have been rosy. Am I being condescending to him? Yes, of course, perhaps somewhat mitigated by our shared age, race, and sex.

Food Prices and Free Trade

The locavore movement should endorse tariffs--they keep out competing cheaper produce from outside (as in the criticism of NAFTA--Mexican corn farmers are suffering from US corn and FL tomato growers worried about Mexican tomatoes). Now, via Farm Policy, comes a report that many nations are reducing agricultural tariffs as a measure to fight the rise in food costs.

It's all sort of reminiscent of the 70's. Speaking of which, Tom Philpott is reading Dan Morgan's Merchants of Grain, which was written in 1979, providing an excerpt mentioning the buying of American farmland by foreign investors, the expansion of irrigation, and the conversion of old soil bank land back to crops.

Of course, one remembers the 1980's as well, when a conservative Republican President did the biggest land diversion program ever (in 1983).

The Last Farm Bill?

Keith Good posts a Dan Morgan article on the farm, discussing the misfit between the current economic outlook for farmers and the programs of the past. He passes along this speculation:

The impasse has led some to suggest the unthinkable: This could be the last farm bill of its kind, and perhaps even the last farm bill.

That possibility was advanced privately last week by several serious policy analysts and former senior government officials attending Informa Economics, Inc.’s annual conference on food and agriculture policy in Arlington, Va.

Imagine, they suggested, that the current high prices are not just a blip but a permanent new condition, much like high oil prices. In that case, the commodity title of the farm bill will look increasingly irrelevant. Government price guarantees will no longer be operative at their current levels, and the billions of dollars in direct payments to farmers will become politically unsupportable.

I'm not convinced by the premise. Sure, the rapid rise of people from poverty to middle class tastes in Asia and elsewhere creates more markets for more food and more meat. The growing acceptance of global warming and the promotion of biofuel creates new markets for stuff that grows. The growth of locavore and slow food and organic creates new niches to absorb the products of the land.

But, it will take a while, but this too is a bubble like others we've seen. $20 wheat is growing to seriously focus the minds of growers everywhere. $20 wheat will pay for equipment and fertilizer and buying up land and putting under management that can grow. (Note: "$20 wheat" is just a symbol of the prices.) U.S. farmers need to make hay while the sun shines, because the one thing that's sure is that rain will follow sun.

STill More on Census Handhelds

From this post on NextGov comes a little further insight on the Census problems. Allen Holmes suggests conflicting goals: a more accurate count versus saving money. But there's also mention of a GPS enabled handheld, to more accurately map household addresses. (Seems as if a two device application, one GPS device and one handheld would have been simpler. But what do I know?)

I'd guess a problem for Census is the decennial aspect--if you have to work on developing IT systems every year you're going to get more skilled than if you do two or three over the course of a career in Census.

Lessons from a Past War--Korea

I've been reading David Halberstam's last book, The Coldest Winter,
a history of the Korean War. It's good, as one would expect of the author. (Since my early memories include following the course of the war, it's an exercise in nostalgia for me as well. I'm not learning much new about the political side from the American side (the UN is totally ignored) but the Chinese/Korean/Soviet side is newish to me.)

I just finished the account of the Wake Island meeting between Truman and Gen. MacArthur. MacArthur's at the peak of his glory, having pushed through the Inchon landing which created the most dramatic reversal in American military fortunes I can think of. (The North Koreans had succeeded in capturing 90 percent or so of South Korea, with the big issue whether we could hold onto the Pusan perimeter. Within 45 days of the Inchon landing, MacArthur's troops had crossed the 38th parallel and were close to conquering all of North Korea.) According to MacArthur, the meeting went very fast, no one raised big issues (how far north Mac should go, the likelihood of the Chinese intervening, etc.).

A couple things stand out to me:

1. I've been in meetings like that. Bureaucrats, like people, don't like conflict, so meetings of bureaucrats from different bureaucracies (at Wake, there were Truman and his civilians, the Joint Chiefs representing the military, and MacArthur representing himself) sometimes dissolve into conflict, but often skate over thin ice to get to the end of the meeting.
   
2. The psychology reminds me of our psychology around January 2002. We'd sent our Marines to Afghanistan and for a little while it seemed that our worst fears (following the Soviets and the British) were going to be realized. Then, all of sudden the bombing took effect, the Northern Alliance went forward, and the Taliban collapsed. So Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had the prestige and moral authority to do what they wanted. MacArthur did what he wanted, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and an eventual stalemate.
   

Census Screwups--Further Thought

From a Government Executive article on the failure of Census project to use handheld computers for 2010 census.

"[the contractor rep] ascribed the program's problems to continuously changing requirements on the part of the Census Bureau, which delivered 400 new or refined requirements to Harris in January, two-thirds of the way through the development process. "We were informed that there was concern that the requirements given to us for nonresponse follow-up may not be complete," she said. "We have designed what the Census Bureau asked for, but what they have asked for may not be what they need."

Census Director Steven Murdock admitted that the bureau could have done more to ensure that the contract was executed on time. "Clearly, we didn't do everything we should," he said. He admitted that the bureau didn't scope the requirements for the project fully or effectively communicate with the contractor as much as necessary.

The decision to return to paper was driven largely by the bureau's comfort with the old way of doing things. "Census Bureau officials are more comfortable addressing any such challenges through the paper process, with which they are more familiar," Janey said.

Murdock said reverting to paper would provide more flexibility and minimize risk, and he cited the bureau's knowledge and experience with the paper-based system as a justification for the decision.

The changing user requirements is a familiar cause of problems (how many times I heard that from our IT type--you can't change these requirements!). Bad requirements means they didn't have the right people involved in specifying them and hadn't trained them in what's involved in IT. Which probably relates to the culture problems in the last two paragraphs. A familiar story, as with the FBI.

What I don't understand is two things:

• Lehrer News Hour had a piece on the professional shoppers for Commerce (checking prices of products for computing cost of living index). The woman was merrily punching away on her laptop computer entering the data. So obviously Commerce has experience with hand-held applications that work on a distributed basis.
  
• Given my faith in the 80/20 rule (80 percent of your work comes from 20 percent of the cases)--has census and the contractor ever considered a rather simple handheld application that would do most of the cases, with a fall-back to paper for the complex ones? Eat the elephant one bite at a time??
  

More on Gov Credit Cards

Here's an article on Steve Kelman, the architect of government procurement reform. And an opposing view from the Project on Government Oversight.

Al Gore's Dubious Legacy--Gov Credit Cards

The Government Executive and other mags have articles on the GAO analysis of government misuse of credit cards. I briefly saw Sen Coleman (R-MN) on TV being interviewed. He noted that the cards do save money over purchase orders etc. That was the idea back in the 1990's when procurement reform was a big part of "reinventing government".

Problem is, while the savings in paperwork and flexibility were real, none of the sponsors of the idea (including Mr. Gore) had read the Federalist papers, or were asleep in class when their profs discussed how one needed checks and balances in government. At least when I was there, I saw no sign of any oversight, either by the supervisor or a central office, no summary reports, no flags raised for purchases at questionable vendors, nothing.

I don't really hold Gore responsible for the problems; politicians don't get down into the nitty gritty. But it's cautionary for people proposing other reforms of the bureaucracy.

Higher Food Prices: Helps or Hurts Organic Ag?

Tom Philpott opts for the "hurts" side in this post. Some interesting comments.