The National Grange--a Remembrance

Extension.org's RSS feed the last couple days has been focused on cooperatives, including this piece on early cooperatives.  The first national one was the Grange,or The National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry.  Turns out it was triggered top down: the first organizational meeting was in USDA offices  in DC.

The Grange was still biggish where I grew up, biggish because the community was so small as to be almost non-existent. In my early years there were the Methodist church and the Grange hall (a barn which had been converted and improved over the years). Some people were active in the church, at least when they weren't turned off by the minister the bishop had assigned.  Some people were active in the Grange, and not the church.  Some, like my mother, were active in both, and got very aggravated when there were conflicts between the two.  In my early years the Grange hall had the facilities for dances and community suppers. But when the church members dug out and finished a basement under the church for meeting rooms, the monopoly on eating facilities was broken. Dancing, of course, was still verboten for Methodists.

When it was created, and during my mother's early years, the Grange could be the center of social life, at least nondenominational social life. Its organization had roles for men and women, more egalitarian than many of the churches of the time. Economically it could join with other organizations to form buying and marketing co-operatives, like the Northeast's Grange League Federation (Dairymen's League and Farm Bureau Federation) in which my father was active.  Politically it was one of the big three ag groups, behind the Farm Bureau (which my home county claims to have started), and jousting with the National Farmer's Union.

Lifetime habits and organizational inertia kept the Grange going into the mid-20th century, but then it faded as the car, radio, and TV offered more entertainment possibilities. It's still around, as a visit to the website shows, but not any more in my locality of birth.

Sad Sentence of the Day: the Replaceable Kevin Drum

From a post on the advance of computer intelligence in replacing people, Kevin writes:

In the meantime, I just hope that Mother Jones doesn't figure out that they could almost certainly find some extremely bright, knowledgable, plugged-in Indian blogger who would work much harder than me and for a quarter of my salary.There probably aren't a ton of Indians who could replace me, but there don't need to be tons. There only needs to be one.
[Emphasis added]

Surprising Sentence: Our Growing Obesity

From a Patch post on the Fairfax police aviation unit:

"Kaminski said the helicopters do have some restrictions they can fly in. Severe inclement weather can ground the helicopters he said and in some cases with larger patients, the unit may not be able to transport them. [emphasis added]

When the System Is Poorly Designed

When an IT system is well designed, the user wants to use it because it makes her job easier or better--any data to be entered is new and unique, and needed to produce the output.. At the next level down, the system is so designed the user has  to use it to accomplish the job, hopefully without frustrating the user too much.  At a lower level, the user can defy management and dodge the system.  Perhaps the worst system is one where data-entry is after the fact.  Those thoughts were inspired by this Government Executive article on an Army mental health record system.  Because the medicos aren't entering data upfront, the paper records are to be shipped off and scanned. 

Changes to Farm Programs

Chris Clayton at DTN reports on suggested changes or possible changes in both direct payments and the SURE and ACRE programs from an Ohio State professor:

Zulauf said perhaps direct payments could be reformed in that farmers would receive them only if they have a loss. Going a step further, Zulauf said perhaps a loss should be required for receiving any farm safety net program. Such an idea could save $1 billion to $2.5 billion a year, he said, though Zulauf noted he doesn't have a way to fully model out that figure. Nonetheless, "This is not a small item."

Programs Which Soar in Cost: Crop Insurance

A difference between farm programs (i.e., direct payments or counter-cyclical) and crop insurance is significant for budget purposes. Typically the basis for payment for the farm programs is set by law, and won't change until the next farm bill. For crop insurance, if I understand correctly, the basis for payment is updated each year.  So when commodity prices soar, the cost of crop insurance to the taxpayer will also rise.

When you look at other government insurance programs, like social security or unemployment insurance, the basis for payment also rises as the insuree's salary rises.  The difference here is commodity prices can rise abruptly, as in the last year, while salaries don't rise abruptly across the board.

Why So Many Different Government Programs--Tom Davis

From a Government Executive piece on a hearing of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Tom Davis, who for a short while represented me in the House testified:

But the committee's former chairman added Congress itself deserves much of the blame for redundant programs. He noted that the need for a particular service often arises out of jurisdictional greed.
For example, if a member of the Education and Workforce Committee wants to enact a job training program, he or she will write the legislation to ensure it falls under an agency in that committee's purview, Davis said. The same philosophy could then hold true for members of Veterans Affairs and Financial Services committees, who establish similar programs under the jurisdiction of their own panels.
"Under this arrangement, they are all funded differently, measured differently and administered differently," Davis said. "Common sense suggests they should be combined to take advantage of economies of scale, or even just to make it easier for citizens to know these programs exist. We can blame the bureaucracy, but in many ways Congress created the many-headed monster we bemoan in an attempt to protect its jurisdictional prerogatives."

See my earlier post.

E. Klein Funny Sentence

In the first paragraph of a post explaining why he won't see The Adjustment Bureau:
"But I can't believe in guys in suits with the ability to plan things."

The whole piece is worth reading, although it's mostly focused on Congress and the President, not the bureaucracy.

Why So Many Different Government Programs?

GAO has a report out this week outlining duplication in programs among different government agencies.  They find lots of duplication.  I seem to remember similar concerns back in the Nixon and Reagan administrations; one of the reasons for replacing programs with block grants, which Reagan tried to do, was to eliminate such duplication. 

Why do we have such duplication?  There's no doubt good and necessary reasons for the programs, but I'd suggest one reason is human ego.  Consider a politician, a Congressperson politician. Consider an activist.  Now imagine a " need" for government action, and ask the activist to work for such action and the politician to pass a law implementing such action.  I put "need" in quotes to recognize the word is just a placeholder for different categorizations according to the political philosophy of the onlooker.

The activist and politician face an immediate strategic choice:

• do they identify the existing government program and agency which is most closely related to the "need" and try to modify and enhance the program and agency accordingly?
• do they create a new program to be assigned to an existing agency?
• do they create a new agency to handle the new program?

Now consider the incentives they face. If they go with the new program, they can design from scratch, without having to research what lessons may have been learned by the existing bureaucrats running the existing program. Research takes time and energy; any self-respecting "need" requires immediate action.  Furthermore, there are likely other politicians, activists, and bureaucrats already associated with the existing programs who may not like the idea of "Johnny-come-latelies" trying to modify something they're proud of.  And remember money.  More money will be required for the additional government action.

All things considered, it will be easier for the activist and the politician to go with a separate program, preferably labeled in honor of the pol.  Politicians don't campaign on improving existing programs; they campaign on creating new ones or shutting old ones down. That's the way our government works.

US as Scapegoat

We seem to be fulfilling our destiny: every nation has a destiny and ours is to become a scapegoat whenever dueling parties within a country (i.e., Muslim pols and secular pols) amp up the heat.  That's my takeaway from this study.  Remembering the  politics of what we used to call the "Third World", I can well believe it.  Nehru and Sukarno, the leaders of the third world, used to beat up on the U.S. regularly.