Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth

Via Tyler Cowen, German plutocrats look unkindly on poor old Bill Gates and his crusade to have billionaires give away half their income.

From the interview:

In this case, 40 superwealthy people want to decide what their money will be used for. That runs counter to the democratically legitimate state. In the end the billionaires are indulging in hobbies that might be in the common good, but are very personal.
SPIEGEL: Do the donations also have to do with the fact that the idea of state and society is such different one in the United States?

Krämer: Yes, one cannot forget that the US has a desolate social system and that alone is reason enough that donations are already a part of everyday life there. But it would have been a greater deed on the part of Mr. Gates or Mr. Buffet if they had given the money to small communities in the US so that they can fulfil public duties.

Animal Welfare

The Times had an article (8/12) on animal welfare, focused on the agreement in Ohio between the Humane Society and the farmers.

Robin Hanson has a post  which includes a long quote on a survey of philosophers.  This sentence is striking:

Fully 81% of female philosophers born in 1960 or later said it was morally bad to regularly eat the meat of mammals.

 As John Phipps has said, I think the trend is slowly to define eating mammals as bad, just as it's now been defined that eating white bread is bad and whole wheat is good.

Limits on the Size of Farms?

Agweb has an interesting discussion of the size of farms. The argument is that one person can manage up to 10 employees, which is about enough to handle 10,000 acres.  (I'm assuming we're talking grain or cotton crops here as I imagine produce or livestock would have a different scale.)  Any more and you're talking a real organization, where the top person is managing managers. 

I guess one could grant the title "family farm" to such farms--after all back in the 1870 census my great grandfather had a hired hand living in household and he only had 300+ acres.  But that's stretching it--I'm too lazy today to see what ERS says about farms where most of the labor is hired.

Congressionally Required Reports

Somewhere back in the dark ages there was some agreement between the executive branch and Congress on Congressionally required reports.  I forget whether it was USDA and the Ag committees, or the President and Congress.

This Project on Government Oversight post describes a bill in Congress to put all such reports online.

I'd love to see a study of these reports.  I suspect in many cases they are a sop thrown to assuage someone's pet concerns.  A Congressperson has a bee in their bonnet, or some interest group is pestering them, so instead of enacting some legislation everyone agrees on requiring the bureaucracy to submit a report.  By the time the report is completed and submitted, the bee is dead, the pesterers are disbanded or moved to something else, so the report gathers dust, unread, but having served its function in the great and glorious American political system. The only cost was the waste of a bureaucrat's time, and we all know that's not important.

Sometimes, and more perniciously, the requirement is for a periodic report.  I say more perniciously because it eats up time every year.  At least it does if the bureaucrats honor the requirement.  That doesn't always happen, because like kids suspecting a "beware the dog" sign is a bluff, bureaucrats may decide to do their business, guessing Congress will never notice the omitted report.

Some Congressionally-required reports are worthwhile--like the State Department's reports on terrorist states but I doubt the need for most.

Open Government at Agriculture

USDA ranks towards the bottom, meeting only 6 of 10 criteria.

I'm Wrong About Google Searching

One thing I realized this week--I've been wrong about using Google to search. 

Background:  I've been impatient with bureaucracies, particularly governmental, which design their own search facilities.  I think I've said on this blog a time or two that people should just use Google. 

Why am I wrong?  Well, Google at the base is using links to prioritize its results.  So, if we're talking about a collection of documents, say Federal Register documents or FSA handbooks, which don't have internal links, it would seem Google would do a lousy job of searching them.

Now I've made that admission, I'm done admitting errors for the year.

A Cry from the Heart

Musings from a Stonehead has his problems with computer systems, and ends with this:

What is it about businesses and their computer systems that imposes this sort of daft, pedantic and rigid approach to solving fairly minor problems that a half-intelligent human used to be able to solve in a few minutes?

His problems in part trace to a non-standard address and in part to a system which assumed its customers would not take the initiative.  In other words, the system designers made assumptions about names and processes which were wrong.  And the human operators are thinking in terms of those processes.   It's the sort of thing a government bureaucracy would have done, except this is a big bank.  (Doesn't Dilbert work in the private sector?)

The Problems of a Bureaucracy-MMS

The Times of Aug 8 has a long piece on the Minerals Management Service, focused mostly on its long-time head of the Gulf Coast office, Mr. Oynes.  Implicit in the piece are some of the problems of any large bureaucracy.  The local operatives, in this case the MMS people in the Gulf, are a long ways from DC policymakers and very close geographically to the people they deal with every day.  That's not a fatal flaw, but it is a problem.  Proximity breeds connection (interesting piece of research: we mostly date the people we know, and we marry the people we date).

One of the usual tactics of the budget cutters, whether in any administration or in Congress, is to make cuts on travel.  That's all very well, but one of the key methods of keeping policymakers and policy executors on the same page, or at least adjacent pages, is to have them meet in person.  Failure to meet aggravates the human tendency to think that out of sight is out of mind, that the big shots have forgotten the people in the weeds, or conversely actually to forget what it's like to serve in the field, what the day-to-day problems are, and to ignore proposals for change coming up from the field.

All this is aggravated in the sort of regulatory environment the MMS faced with the oil industry.

Contra Food Movement

Via John Phipps, here's an interesting article at Utne Reader:

Culinary Luddism has come to involve more than just taste, however; it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade—and it is here that I begin to back off. The reason is not far to seek: because I am a historian.
As a historian I cannot accept the account of the past implied by this movement: the sunny, rural days of yore contrasted with the gray industrial present. It gains credence not from scholarship but from evocative dichotomies: fresh and natural versus processed and preserved; local versus global; slow versus fast; artisanal and traditional versus urban and industrial; healthful versus contaminated. History shows, I believe, that the Luddites have things back to front.

That Special Disaster Program

I suppose the funding for Rahm's special disaster program he promised Sen. Lincoln would come from Commodity Credit corporation through Section 32 funds.  Here's a Congressional Research Service report on the authority.  I don't remember FSA's using this for direct disaster payments to farmers, but it's possible.