Errors in Acreage

Delta Farm Press reports USDA screwed up. Agweb provides some detail:

After the Oct. 10 reports were issued, FSA analysts noted a discrepancy between the raw data on its mainframe and the data it had provided to NASS on a system known internally as a “data mart.” The data mart correlates and organizes the raw data for presentation to FSA county staff, NASS and other users in a more concise and accessible format.

USDA analysts have confirmed that data mart information used in previous reports was consistent with the information in the FSA mainframe database. Database management experts will review the discrepancies in the October data, focusing on how the two systems interact and how the mainframe data are transmitted and translated into the format used in the data mart.

Interesting that the first report seemed to blame NASS, the second makes it seem like a screwup in FSA.

Only the Sharpest Become Economists

Or those damn older sisters:

Steven Levitt at Freakonomics:

That ["rogue" = bad] is not what my sister Linda told me when she gave me the moniker the “rogue economist.” She told me being a rogue is a good thing, and I believed her; just like when I was five and she convinced me that, since a penny is bigger in size than a dime, it is worth more. I happily traded all my dimes for all her pennies, cutting my net worth at the time roughly in half.

USDA, EEO, and GIS

I blogged earlier about the problems USDA has in trying to get a reliable and effective reporting system for civil rights cases and issues (in the context of a critical GAO report).

This page of a new manual for USDA agencies on GIS (geo-spatial information) systems shows what the problems are in a different context: three different agencies (NRCS, FSA, RD), three different approaches to GIS data. (Almost 11 years since I retired and 16 years since InfoShare, I can only laugh. Matter of fact, it looks as if the entire manual is, from the right viewpoint, great comic material for a computer head. ) More seriously, I can only guess at the problems the authors of this manual had, so a tip of the hat to them.

Clinton Is Out of Touch

When he became President, he admitted he didn't e-mail. It's not clear he's learned since. Certainly he doesn't keep up with grain prices on the Internet. See this bit from treehugger:

Speaking to a struggling food economy where grain prices have doubled and some food items in Haiti and Ethiopia are five hundred times greater than normal, Clinton said,

Food is not a commodity like others. We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves.

Clue: corn was down to $3.80 the last I checked. (The link is to a UK scientist who in March predicted: "price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations."

Nuanced Bureaucracy, Found in Social Security Administration

One of the legacies of the old days of bureaucracy is the binary evaluation: an application or whatever has to be evaluated. So every application goes through the same process, resulting in a yes or no decision. With the advent of software algorithms, it's quite possible for a bureaucracy to become more nuanced, to use different systems for different folks.

As an example, SSA is using a new approach to disability applications: claim you have ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease), if the diagnosis is confirmed you get your approval. Claim you have lower back pain, and it takes a good while. Of course, our legislators don't necessarily keep up with advances--there's still a mandatory 5-month waiting period for all claims.

Our Neighbors Care

Shankar Vedantam is back in the Post, reporting on an ingenious experiment based on the little-known fact that voting records are public (i.e., whether or not you voted is public). Academic researchers found people who knew whether their neighbors voted last time and who were warned their behavior in a current election would be publicized, increased their participation by 27 percent.

Some questions are unanswered: the base participation rate was about 30 percent voting (municipal type election, not national), so the increase was presumably to 40 percent. What would be interesting, in the light of the "Bowling Alone" thesis (Americans no longer join organizations, etc.) would be to identify differences among neighborhoods, perhaps as a measure of social cohesion.

McKibben Versus GMU Economist

As a lead-in to a debate between Bill McKibben, a guru of local food, and a George Mason U economist (who seem to range between moderate conservative and very much so), Russell Roberts (actually I like Marginal Revolution), is interviewed by a Vermont paper.

Race and USDA, an example of Mismanagement

From the GAO report which I noted earlier includes this:

In 2004, to overcome these conditions [customers identified by observation], ASCR published a notice in the Federal Register seeking public comment on its plan to collect additional data on race, ethnicity, gender, national origin, and age. While ASCR
received some public comments, it did not follow through and obtain
OMB’s approval to collect the data. In a January 2008 briefing document,
an ASCR work group stated that ASCR does not have the staff or financial
resources to proceed with this project. ASCR officials said, after meeting
with GAO in May 2008, they convened an interagency work group to
develop a revised notice to be published in the Federal Register. As of
August 2008, the draft notice is under review within USDA, according to
ASCR officials.

This seems inexcusable mismanagement--4 years go by without someone pushing the issue? In an office of over 100 people you don't have one or two to devote to it? No action by the head of the office, nor by the Secretary?

In partial defense of the bureaucracy, (to change my viewpoint quickly), USDA is a collection of independent agencies with tight ties to people in Congress, interest groups, and local communities, so imposing a system from the South Building, which is what GAO is asking for, would be a daunting job for the best of bureaucrats.

The NY Times 27 Years Ago, and Agriculture Now

Here's an agriculture story from 1981, hat tip to Info Farm, the National Agricultural Library's blog, for alerting me to the NYTimes categorization of stories from its archive since 1981. It's a downbeat article, seeing the end of the green revolution:

"agricultural economists who specialize in world food production,[say] there will be no dramatic leaps in food yields. Meanwhile, the rate at which more food is produced actually has been declining - while the world's population is increasing by 70 million people each year. Worldwide, the margin between these two factors is discouragingly narrow. In Africa it has already disappeared and the increase in the amount of food grown each year, despite the gains from the green revolution, is less than the annual population increase."

It's because I remember such stories (and even worse ones from the 1950's) that I appreciate the accomplishments of industrial agriculture, which was able, over the next quarter century, to improve the average diets of the world's populace even though the population increased by 2 billion.

Counting Chickens

I shouldn't be superstitious, but I am, so I approach this Politico article with a poor attitude, as it looks forward to an Obama administration and doubts the feasibility of promises of open government. The article reflects the youth of the writer, in that there's no mention of Jimmy Carter and his pledges, some of which he carried out, few of which did much to improve government. For example, a law (the "Sunshine Act", maybe) required meetings of federal bodies, like the board of the Commodity Credit Corporation, be publicized in advance. That might have had a small impact on the decline of the CCC board process. (The CCC used to be a big part of the USDA mechanism, but it's now degenerated--I don't see any Federal Register notice of CCC meetings.)

(Whoops--I blamed Jimmy Carter for it, but the Sunshine Act was actually passed in 1976, probably part of the good government reaction to Nixon's abuses.)