Open Government and Political Violence

Lots of discussion in the wake of the Arizona shooting. What I've not seen is a whole lot of facts about political violence.  The closest I've seen is an assertion that threats against the President have increased since Obama assumed office.  Maybe the Obama administration should apply a little open government: put a running total of threats and assaults against the President, justices, Congresspeople, and federal employees on its data.gov.  It'd take a while to build up a baseline, but it'd give a reasonable basis for some discussions.

Budgetary Incoherence on the Right

Reihan Salam at The Agenda comments on a piece elsewhere:

." But I did appreciate the opening section on how to rethink support for farmers:

Canada has experimented with a program that provides government matching funds for farmers' deposits into savings accounts that help them buffer their incomes against the ups and downs of farm prices. Such a program in the U.S. could achieve the objective of helping family farmers survive while enabling policy makers to withdraw billions of subsidies to big agriculture.
These changes, plus closing the U.S. Agriculture Department's Foreign Agricultural Service, would save about $19.5 billion. Not a bad start."

This seems incoherent to me.  The farm programs these days aren't the $19 billion people were using in the early 2000's, but more like $12 billion. And if you're matching farmers' deposits (like a 401 K setup), you can't claim to cut all that money.  And the FAS is not a high dollar service.  (Probably around $200 million.) Maybe they got confused between FSA and FAS?  As I say: incoherence on the right.  (Not that the left is always right when they're discussing agriculture.)

Was Al Gore Wrong in Reinventing Government?

One of the theories of the 1990's was "flatter is better".  Reduce the number of supervisors and creativity will blossom and efficiency with flourish and good things will result.  Al Gore adopted that theory as part of his "Reinventing Government" (it may have been part of "business process reengineering" as well, but I'm too lazy to check).  So agencies were supposed to reorganize to cut management layers.  My understanding of FSA's efforts was that it was mostly a paper exercise; first-level supervisors lost their personnel responsibilities but retained their day-to-day operational responsibilities; units formerly called "sections" became "work groups", branches became "sections", etc. 

Of course, over the past 15 years, that particular reform may have gone by the wayside.  Certainly the proliferation of titles at the upper levels of FSA and USDA seems to have continued.

Anyhow, Steven Kelman was involved with Gore, mostly on procurement reform as I remember.  But now he's got a post in Federal Computer Week in which he seems to say Gore may have been wrong: "There was a period, especially in the 1990s, when the conventional wisdom was that first-line supervisors accomplished little. By contrast, Gittell’s finding is that those supervisors help broker communication across group boundaries."

The Melting Pot and Tossed Salad

When I was young, the "melting pot" was the dominant metaphor for America vis a vis immigration.  Of course, that was during the period between 1923 or so and 1965 when immigration was basically restricted to Western Europe.  (Mexicans were "wetbacks" or migrant workers, not immigrants we recognized.)  The idea I took away was like melting your crayons all together, which I'd done once or twice. 

In college a young government professor named Theodore Lowi, who later became prominent in the political science field, suggested maybe the better metaphor was "tossed salad".  Rather than the different nationalitiies all melting together and forming a new American nationality, each one would maintain some of their identity.  That would logically lead to the "diversity" argument; the theory that America prospers by recognizing and maintaining differences.

The above is just background.  In recent years I've grown interested in genealogy.  Some of my paternal ancestors came to America in the 1720's or so; others came in the 1820's.  What seems to be the case is they were almost entirely Scots-Irish, Covenanters. The exception is a Quaker lineage.  And, through geographic  concentration and cultural networks (the Presbyterian church), my ancestors seem to have kept together, marrying within the general Scots-Irish community, for about 200 years of life in America. Even in my father's generation his brother continued the pattern.

Because my mother's ancestors were Germans emigrating in the last half of the 19th century the picture is not as distinct, but my maternal grandparents married within the German community.

So, at least based on my limited sample, it's true enough the "melting pot" metaphor is misleading.  Yes, we eventually melt together but it takes a long time.  And even the melting of Scots-Irish and German is not the merging of polar opposites.  Lutherans and Calvinists have different theologies, but they aren't polar opposites.

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.