I Learn English from an Economist

Is it: "get one's just desserts" or "get one's just deserts"? I learn, via Greg Mankiw.

It's humiliating, is what it is.

New Fangled Stuff Never Works

That was Cliff Stoll in 1995, as I paraphrase his deprecation of the Internet.  (Stoll won same fame by tracking some Internet hackers and writing a book about it.  Good book, bad prediction.)

Media Bias--Telling Us What We Want

Via Marginal Revolution, a study which seems to show that newspapers give their readers what they want, in the way of political bias--that is, there's a correlation between the political leanings of a paper's market and the political bias of the paper.

Fraud and Investigations

Got an email from a person who challenged me to investigate the fraud in the farm loan program.  It wasn't sent as a comment, so I won't be more specific, and indeed it was not specific in its allegations.  I would have hoped that any regular reader of the blog, all X of them, would have inferred I'm retired and just bloviating these days; any investigations, particularly of farm loans which is an area I never was directly involved with, are out of the question.


But for anyone who believes there's fraud and abuse going on, here's the OIG site for reporting.  Because the OIG types are bureaucrats, they'd love to have a nice juicy case of fraud to boast of investigating, so go ahead and make their day.

Are Farmers Wealthy Parasites?

That's a question raised by this excerpt from a farmgate post on ERS research:

" For more than 10 years the median income for farm household has surpassed that of the average US family by a margin of anywhere from 3 to 21%, and farm family wealth has been 4 to 5 times [emphasis added] that of the average US family...."

Of course, my mother would add that farmers are land rich and money poor.  And the rest of the story/sentence is:

"but economists say farm family budgets are either very solid or very weak and 5 to 8% of farm families have negative household income each year, and there is a larger percentage of farm families in the poverty level than the percentage of non farm households. In brief, farm income is highly variable from year to year."

So, the plight of the families at the bottom end of the range is a justification for programs which help the whole range?  Are the fulminations of the greens true--that the programs favor the big farmers and not the people who are really in need?  Maybe, but consider this:

"USDA’s examination of farm households discovered that large farms, which were defined as $100,000+ in sales, had higher instances of both wealth and poverty than farms as a whole and all US families as a whole. Those farms make up only 16% of all farms, but income poverty is 22% among persons living in those households, compared to 14% for all farm families and 12% for all US families.

That counters the stereotype of small poor farms.  All in all, data to support and challenge all preconceptions.

An "A" for Obama

For transparency, at least.  From the White House blog:

Today’s release is just one example of the many efforts that were recognized by a consortium of independent outside government reform groups that gave the Administration an A for its first-year actions making government open and transparent—and these actions have also been praised by other outside experts.  This Administration’s concrete commitments to openness include issuing the Open Government Directive, putting up more government information than ever before on data.gov and recovery.gov, reforming the government’s FOIA processes, providing on-line access to White House staff financial reports and salaries, issuing an executive order to fight unnecessary secrecy and speed declassification, reversing an executive order that previously limited access to presidential records, and webcasting White House meetings and conferences.

Photo Friday

Via Chris Blattman here's the site of a photographer who has a series on "bureaucratics"--nice pictures.

"Maintaining the Story" and Local Food

Here's a UWisconsin-Madison  release on the problems of interfacing (my term) farmers and customers of locally grown food. It's hyping a study they did.  They see rising demand but problems in meeting it.  One problem:

"One common concern cited in the report is maintaining the story behind locally grown food. People who buy local food are often willing to pay a premium for knowing where and how it was grown, a big part of the appeal of farmers' markets."

To me that almost sounds like a version of NAIS--associating a product with a story.  So if big retailers push big packers into animal identification, maybe locavore buyers push the locavore farmers into identification of produce?

NAIS Failure

From Chris Clayton  on the responsibility for the failure of NAIS:

...who at the top of the buying chain pushed back down and stated they would reward cattle feeders and ranchers for using USDA-approved ID systems? Who announced they would dock cattle that started arriving at the packer without approved-ID systems? Who defended the system at the animal ID meetings for packers? The packers complained about the idea of being responsible for essentially retiring tags when animals were slaughtered. The packers also let the livestock groups and USDA take the lead on NAIS and it has failed.

Animal ID would be a national system today if Tyson had simply decided six years ago that is the way it's going to be.

I think it's an overstatement, but points the way to the future. It's rather like when Wal-mart adopts green standards or goes organic--it has a big impact.  So too, if the big buyers push animal identification, their suppliers are going to comply.  But that's true only for the animals and the suppliers involved with the big buyers.  Meat packers would influence beef and pork, but not bison or ostrich.  And those small producers who don't sell to the big packers wouldn't feel the pressure.  So we would, and I expect we will, evolve to a two-level system.

The River of Riches

That's the title of a book I'm reading now. (It's not new, but Tyler Cowen plugged his new book, which isn't yet at the library).  It's by Joel Mokyr, and the subtitle is : Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.  It's interesting, although a bit overwhelming in the number and variety of innovations and inventions he describes.  I'm only up to the late 19th century but I'd recommend it for anyone interested in how and when society changes the way it produces goods.

But on to agriculture. The main chemical fertilizers are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash/potassium.  As Mokyr observes, there's a long history of creating such fertilizers, but the "father of fertilizer" was Justus von Liebig, (1803-1872). I don't know if you count the making of potash by burning trees, as did my great great grandfather who settled in Ontario county and cleared his land.  The potash was shipped east for soap, glass, and fertilizer. Late in the 19th century mines were developed.   Nitrogen came from mining Chile's guano deposits.  Also in the mid 19th century super-phosphate was developed (making a more soluble form by treating phosphate rock with sulfuric acid.

[Revised the title so it fits the first sentence of the post.]