Interesting Paragraph--People and Institutions

A post on Roving Bandit, who's involved somehow (I forget how and am too lazy to check) with NGO's and development in east Africa:

We know the secret of development. It is good institutions. We have a reasonable idea what good institutions entail. The only problem is that we have very little idea about how good institutions are established in societies that currently have bad ones.

The bandit goes on to argue the simplest remedy is to have the inhabitants of societies with "bad institutions" emigrate to societies with "good" ones. It'd be easier to take 1 million Afghans from Asia and integrate them into the EU, Canada, and the US than it would be to develop good institutions for them in Afghanistan.

The argument appeals to me, but I'm not sure why.  I see a lot of cultural things persist and persist in our society and yet there's lots and lots of change between the original culture of immigrants and the culture they adopt in the U.S>

Violence in the Past

Am reading Edmund Morris' "Colonel Roosevelt", the last of his trilogy on the life of the second greatest Republican President. (His first volume led to his writing the controversial biography of Reagan, "Dutch".) It's a Christmas present, which I'm enjoying.  TR was a man of many parts.  Morris does a good job on him.

Friday I finished the section on TR's run for President in 1912 on the ticket of the Progressive Party, against Wilson, Taft, and Debs.  As Morris observes, he was still the youngest of the four. John Schrank tried to assassinate him just before a campaign speech. Luckily, the bullet was slowed by passing through 100 pages of speech (the 50 page text was folded in half) and off his eyeglass case before entering his body.  TR knows it didn't enter the lung, so he carries on, speaking for 90 minutes before going to the hospital for treatment.  Quite a character, notably described as wanting to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral.

Seems to me  the common threads in our history of assassinations and attempted assassinations (Jackson, Lincoln,Garfield, McKinley,TR, FDR, Truman, JFK, MLK, RFK, [Updated--Wallace ], Ford, Reagan, Clinton, Giffords are:

• lack of rationality as compared to the attempted terrorist acts. Only Lincoln and Truman were a group effort and only those cases were "rational" in some sense. The loners like Hinckley, Ray, Oswald, and Schrank all were operating in another world.
• the targets were all foci of great emotion, a lot of it negative. Even President Ford was not only president but controversial after his pardon of Nixon. 

So to me the bottom line is: crazy loners don't kill nobodies.

The Decline of the WASP Establishment

Charles Blow has a piece on religion and representation in Congress in the Times today. I'm mainly interested in the graphic accompanying the piece showing changes in representation from 1961-2 to now. Catholic, "Other Protestant" and Jewish have all risen (maybe 50 percent or more based on eyeballing), while Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist have all fallen at roughly the same rate.  Baptists and Lutherans remained relatively steady. In other words, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th ranking denominations in 1961 fell drastically.

I'm Scientifically Illiterate

This Extension post says college students lack scientific literacy. When I dig into it, I discover I don't answer a key question on the carbon cycle correctly: From whence do plants obtain their mass? 

The answer seems to be from the carbon dioxide in the air.  (Although I'd suspect many plants obtain much of their mass from the water in the ground, being constituted mostly of water, but the question, and my initial answer, ignores the issue of water.)

French Bureaucrats

Dirk Beauregarde posts on a hard-working French bureaucrat; she worked so hard she wrote a book at work about how hard she was (not) working:

'This is a world where everyone justifies his or her existance with an official paper, a rubber stamp and where bosses, to justify their positions, hold runds of endless meetings – if you want to feel important or be seen to be working, hold a meeting and then get your underlings to write a report on it in time for the next meeting. It’s a world I know well, but I woldn’t totally agree with Ms Boullet’s analysis. For all those people who are doing nothing, there are just as mant running around like headless chickens trying to meet impossible deadlines. [I like Dirk's eye for society, but he does nothing to uphold the high standards of spelling incorporated in the Bloggers' Code.]"

The Pervasiveness of Social Norms

At Barking Up the Wrong Tree, a post on a study showing that blind people "see" race.

The Interactive Constitution

Via Ezra Klein, here's a section by section presentation of the Constitution, with an accompanying exegesis, all done interactively.

The Nosy Book

First heard the term "nosy book" in a chat last week.  Seems to be a name for a local directory, including names, addresses, phone numbers, and occupations, athough there's not many Google hits for it.  In the old days privacy wasn't primary.

My Metrics

For Jan.4 2010 to Jan. 4, 2011:

Visits   5,603 (down  about 35 percent) from 4025 visitors and 7690 page views in the prior year.
Average time on site just under a minute and 70 percent new visitors

It's odd that Belize shows up in the countries list, and Australia had a longer time on site than other countries.

Keywords include "what do bureaucrats do", "John Berge", "faceless bureaucrat", "mere surmise, sir", "USDA" and "MIDAS".



It looks as if I'm more boring the older I get (I may have lots of company in that). To the extent people are interested, it's more in USDA/FSA bureaucracy and organic/food movement stuff than anything else. Maybe I need to look to Facebook and Twitter?

Ruin in Detroit

Via Marginal Revolution, a photo slideshow on the ruins in Detroit. What's most distressing is the library.