Wikis and Facebook for FSA IT?

Here's a post at the Federal Computer Week discussing the possible use of Web 2.0 technologies by federal agencies. I note most of the examples cited seem to be on intranets, not accessible by the public. I think I don't like that, but am open to discussion.

It's true enough that the enthusiasm of a President and a Secretary can affect the bureaucracy, but in my experience unless the enthusiasm goes down the line, the effects die out. The cautionary lesson in this regard is the "tempos" on the Mall. When I first toured the Mall in 1965, there were these disgusting grey buildings, wood and metal, not stone, lining Constitution Avenue at the west end of the Mall. Turned out these were temporary buildings, or "tempos", occupied by the military. Oh, you say, being smart readers, they were erected in World War II as a stopgap before the Pentagon was finished.

Oh no, smart readers, you are wrong. They were erected in WWI, and were still there 50 years later. The military wasn't about to move out of them and away from their proximity to power. And no leader had the power to move the military bureaucrats. Finally, in his single greatest domestic achievement, President Nixon set his German on them (I think Erlichman, but it might have been Haldeman) and finally got them emptied and torn down. Constitution Gardens and the Vietnam Memorial occupy that area now.

The bottomline: unless the new administrator of FSA is a computer nerd, FSA won't be using Web 2.0 in the next 4 years.

[Updated--this piece in Government Executive is also relevant.]

Make Pay Limit Regs Tougher?

So says North Dakota's Agriculture Commissioner, according to this piece in Farm and Ranch, reporting on his comments on the interim rule submitted to FSA. Apparently there's no cotton grown in ND (see my previous post on the Cotton Council reaction to Vilsack). He even had some kind words for the FSA bureaucrats in DC!

Chris Clayton and Vilsack on Pay Limits

Chris Clayton at the DTN blog covers Secretary Vilsack's talk to the Cotton people. He seemed to indicate no change in pay limit regs for 2009. The cotton people will talk to their friends (Chambliss, R and Lincoln, D) to try to get a provision requiring USDA to revert to 2008 rules. That's the sort of lawmaking tailored to specific interests which gives Congress a bad name, but don't be surprised if it doesn't get added as a rider somewhere.

Interestingly, from a philosophical viewpoint (that is, in my humble opinion) farmers should not be changing their operations at all because of payment limitation rules. They should organize the way to be the most efficient operation possible, then the rules should apply. I know that's never going to happen, it's like saying someone shouldn't decide whether or not to buy versus renting a house based on the tax deductibility of the interest. Economists point to such changes and say the government is making the economy less efficient. And it is.

And All Our Employees Are Above Average--DOD

From Government Executive:

According to figures issued by the Pentagon on Wednesday, 98 percent of the more than 170,000 employees rated under the National Security Personnel System received performance-based payouts for 2009, meaning their supervisors graded their work as a 3 or better out of five possible points. The majority of those employees -- 55.4 percent -- earned a rating of 3, defining them as valued performers.

I'm overly cynical, since the best year I ever had, in terms of accomplishments, was the worst year according to my boss's evaluation. Designing a good pay system is hard, particularly when the bureaucracy being evaluated doesn't produce measurable outputs. Look at the pay system for investment bankers.

Claims by the Corn Growers--We're Crunchy

According to a piece via EWG:

"Specifically, corn has seen the following changes between 1987 and 2007, Dickey [President of National Corn Growers] noted.

1. Land use: The amount of land needed to produce one bushel has decreased 37 percent.

2. Soil loss: Manageable soil loss per bushel of corn has decreased by 69 percent.

3. Energy: The energy used to produce a bushel of corn has decreased by 37 percent.

4. Climate impact: Corn production has seen a 30 percent decrease in greenhouse gas emissions per bushel."

Fertilizer Use

So, when we say "fertilizer", which countries use the most?

The U.S. is obviously first, with Argentina and Brazil close and India and China far behind, right?

No--it's China, India, U.S. in that order. Source.

FSA Procedures

Are available on the Internet, and Chris Clayton reads the new handbook on Adjusted Gross Income and other payment limitation rules. I wonder a little bit--the lawyers would say the regulations in the Federal Register are legally binding, the handbooks aren't. ASCS and FSA always took the approach of making the handbooks more detailed and more explanatory than the regs. (The former FmHA, however, was operating as a financial institution, which meant their lawyers forced them to publish their "handbooks" as regulations. Such publication made it harder for the bureaucracy. The gain in public notice resulted in a loss of flexibility.) Now that the public can easily see the handbooks, indeed more easily see the handbooks than the regulations if it comes to that, I wonder what the long term consequences will be.

Smarter Bureaucrats?

That's one of 13 consequences of the current world recessionDan Drezner foresees. For his rationale, and the other 12 (including longer skirts), see here.

Prof. Mankiw Proves the Point

From his website:

Gross makes another, unrelated mistake. He suggests that, as a Harvard professor, I am an example of a person with a particularly stable income. (That is why, he intimates, I fail to appreciate the consumption decisions facing real people who face substantial uncertainty.) It is true that my university salary is reasonably secure, but more of my income comes from book royalties than salary, and that income is anything but stable. Any day now, someone could come along with a better textbook and put me out of business.

On this last point, of course, I am speaking hypothetically.

Perhaps Prof. Mankiw has something to fear from the open textbook effort described by Timothy Burke. (Although the wikibooks macroeconomics discussion page has not been updated since 2005.)
But maybe his textbook is more like the one Kevin Drum describes:

I only have one of my college textbooks still in my possession, but I just got it off the shelf to see if it had a price in it. It did: $17.25. That was in 1976, and adjusted for inflation it comes to $64 in today's dollars. So what does it currently cost on Amazon? Answer: $132. It is, as near as I can tell, the exact same book. Same binding, same number of pages, same charming lack of color. In fact, browsing through it, it looks as if it's being printed from the same plates as it was in 1976.

This, then, is obviously a book that ought to be cheaper today than it was three decades ago. The costs of production have long since been paid back, there's a ton of competition from the used book market since the book hasn't changed in 30 years, and I imagine that author royalties are the same as ever. For reference, a similar size commercial hardback would run about $40 these days.

Bottom line: I don't believe Prof. Mankiw's textbook sales are nearly as volatile as say: the income of a small dairy farmer, or even the average crop farmer, or a restaurant owner, or a construction worker, or a waitperson, or... Mankiw, like me, has a good income (mine not quite as good as his) from a nonprofit institution plus somewhat more changeable income from investments (his time, my savings) which puts us in another category than employees of profit-making enterprises now facing losses. Somehow it assuages the guilt if we pretend to be insecure.

Musicians as Bureaucrats: The Definition of "Now"

From a Washington Post article on assembling an orchestra to play Carnegie Hall through YouTube auditions:

Tilson Thomas observed that even experienced orchestra players can have trouble shifting from one ensemble to another. He recalled a Carnegie Hall tribute that he conducted shortly after Leonard Bernstein's death, with members of all the orchestras Bernstein had conducted: musicians from the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Philharmonic and other top-flight ensembles.

At the first downbeat, he said, they had trouble coming in together: "There were at least five discernible attacks, because people had such different assumptions about where 'now' is."

Can the universality of music, and of YouTube -- or a strong conductor -- trump 70 different national definitions of "now"? The answer to this question should, at the very least, make for an interestingly different kind of concert.

It's an unexpected example of the importance of shared definitions, and the problems of merging institutions. It also shows musicians being bureaucratic, which they are.