Marketing Quotas and Catch Shares

A Grist piece reports on a consensus on to manage fisheries, which strikes me as very similar to the marketing quotas which used to apply to tobacco and peanut production:

What comes out on top, though? It comes down to effectively implementing caps on catch levels using two key tools: reducing the Total Allowable Catch and putting in place catch shares. (You can look at their table where a solution was identified in at least five of the ten fisheries, and was usually ranked an “essential” part of the solution.) This is strong stuff!

Somehow the logic is the same. You have a common resource: in the case of fish it's the stock which reproduces and grows without human input; in the case of tobacco and peanuts, it was the market, which although it was developed by humans, in the short term it's outside human control Then you have a set of players: for fish, the fishermen; for tobacco and peanuts, the growers. And you have a free-rider problem: if fishermen don't coordinate their efforts they destroy the fishery; if the growers don't coordinate they destroy the market price.

The Housing Market Does Not Make Sense

Looked on Zillow for current house prices in my housing cluster (5 models, about a 20 percent spread among prices when new in early 70's). Today the range is from $130K to $318K. Presumably some of the range is foreclosure discounts and condition variations, but that's an unreal spread.

USDA Tomatoes

Give props to the people at the USDA Garden. Not only have they continued gardening through the year (something I was secretly dubious about, but was wrong) but they've updated their harvest summary. The last I checked, that's better than the White House has done. They've gotten 12 tomatoes so far (Aug. 10). I think my wife has done better, although deer and possible 2 legged bandits have decreased the harvest. I congratulate them for their cucumber harvest; we've had little or no luck with them so have given up on trying. But USDA has bunches.

Obamafoodorama posts about the late blight, claiming it hasn't hit the White House garden. But I'm still waiting for evidence the White House planted tomatoes.

You Didn't Know Me

Michael Daconta used to work for DHS. He discusses 6 hot technology trends, pouring some cooling water upon them ("fads"). However, I have to challenge this one:

3. Agile development is a programmer’s fantasy and a manager’s nightmare. In my more than 20 years of software development experience, I have never met a government program manager who is available on a daily or even weekly basis to help design an application on the fly....

Mr. Daconta, you never met me. Of course the problem is I was a frustrated programmer at heart, so the time I was spending giving input on the program was mostly time I should have been spending elsewhere, like developing my employees.

On Understanding America

Understanding America is big paperback, edited b y Peter H. Schuck and James Q. Wilson, containing a series of essays by scholars--sort of a de Tocqueville for 2008. I'm about 150 pages in, having covered things like "the political system", "bureaucracy" "federalism" the legal and economic systems, and "political culture". A couple things:

A quote: "(On some estimates, as much as half of the measured difference in per capita income between America and the typical western European country would disappear if output were redefined to include meal preparation and similar work done at home.)" What I think this says is Americans eat out a lot more than Europeans. Because home cooking doesn't show in GDP calculations, the picture is skewed. Seems amazing to me.

The other item, also from Benjamin Friedman's chapter on economics, is just prolonged laughter at his description of the advantages of our economic system. He obviously was writing in 2007 or so and I just finished reading Fool's Gold, on the crash.

Problem With the USDA Blog

I noted the new USDA blog. It's always nice to see my former co-workers moving ahead into the sunlit upland meadows of Web 2.0. But a warning--there seems to be a glitch. If you comment on a post, as I did, and check the box to be informed of subsequent comments, as I did, you will receive the unmoderated comments, as I do, which include a bunch of spam mentioning viagra, etc.

There's no email address for the blog to notify them of this problem. One place where transparency is not a priority in the Obama administration. :-(

Prediction--Landesman Out in One Year

The NYTimes had an interview article on the new head of the National Endowment for the Arts, Mr. Landesman. Based on the contents, I confidently predict he'll be out in a year. He already shows a tin ear for politics and political realities--he's going to be a loose cannon.

A Dose of Reality

Nothing like disease to modify one's views. Dan Barber, an entrepreneurial restaurant owner and organic farmer near NYC, has a piece in today's Times. "Late blight" has hit tomatoes hard, apparently especially, heirloom varieties. So he writes this:

"The food community has a role to play, too — by taking another look at plant-breeding programs, another major fixture of our nation’s land-grant universities, and their efforts to develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables. To many advocates of sustainability, science, when it’s applied to agriculture, is considered suspect, a violation of the slow food aesthetic. It’s a nostalgia I’m guilty of promoting as a chef when I celebrate only heirloom tomatoes on my menus. These venerable tomato varieties are indeed important to preserve, and they’re often more flavorful than conventional varieties. But in our feverish pursuit of what’s old, we can marginalize the development of what could be new."

Mr. Barber even cites the extension people at Cornell

Break Up the Nationals

The Washington Nationals baseball team has been mocked for most of the year, but today they won their eighth straight. Who knows, perhaps President Obama will be able to invite them to the White House before his term is up?

NAIS and Food Facility Listings

In my comments on National Animal Identification System I suggested APHIS might ask FSA to do as they used to do with the food and facility listings maintained in case of nuclear disaster. Little did I realize that 20 years after the end of the cold war, we're still maintaining the data. But now FSA is moving to the GIS system. See this FSA notice. I applaud the move, though I've a qualm or two about the need for the data.