Surprising Sentence: Cell Phones

"Today, almost three-quarters of the world's people carry a wireless phone"  from a Wall Street Journal piece via Ann Althouse. 

The focus of the piece is on the ability of social scientists to study data associated with cell phones and smart phones, etc. and draw conclusions on politics, mental health, physical health, and lots of other stuff.. As one says: "a gods-eye view".

Fed Salaries: Government Employee With Summer Cottage

A different perspective on federal salaries: in the 1930's my uncle was a researcher at Beltsville on animal nutrition. Had a nice house in the DC suburbs and a summer cottage near Annapolis while supporting wife and two young kids.  Today I doubt an ARS scientist could manage a cottage on a single salary. Most likely he'd be saving money for college tuition.  Of course, even back then a private feed company hired him away from USDA.

Human Ingenuity in Evading Rules

One of the constants in a bureaucrat's life is the fact the people with whom she deals will often spend a good deal of effort in evading the rules.  Whether it's taxpayers stretching the truth in preparing tax returns or seeking legal or semi-legal tax shelters, farmers reorganizing their farming enterprises to evade limitations on farm program payments, or disaster victims claiming losses which exist only in their mind, evading rules is ever-present.

Chris Blattman is a professor who runs experiments in Africa.  The gold standard of social science experiments is "randomization", dividing subjects into two matched groups and trying something on one group you don't use on the other.  He ran into the rule evasion phenomena in a recent experiment.  He ends the discussion:

"The researchee defeats the researcher. I wonder if they realized that they could completely insure one another and get the outcome they want. Would I be that surprised if one managed to track down my blog and saw the idea as it is? I’m now not so sure…

One True Sentence

From Kevin Drum:

The Great Collapse was a big enough, and unexpected enough, event that it should have changed your mind at least a little bit about something.

So what has it done to my mind?

• Less credibility for big shot managers.  When you read about Lehman Brothers going under, or Citigroup's troubles, their books were so screwed up they didn't know where they were. Outsiders checking their books would find a few billion more losses every day or so. 
• Alan Greenspan loses most of his reputation.
• Less credibility for economists, particularly Bush's.
• Diminished reputation for Barney Frank and other Dems who ignored warning signals. I'm not convinced by the right wing thesis that pushing home ownership was the original sin which caused the collapse, but the push to get low income people into home ownership created an atmosphere in which the con men who made liar's loans could flourish.

That's a few lessons; there may be more.

Supply Side Solutions to the Cost of Medical Care

I commented on this on Yglesias's blog in the past. Rather than focusing only on cutting demand, either by regulating what procedures and devices are approved (Obamacare) or by cutting the money available to spend on medical care (Ryancare), we need to seriously expand the supply of care, thereby cutting prices and hopefully costs..

We could do this by opening our gates to all medical professionals from other countries. Here's an interesting post on Chris Blattman's blog about the effects of such migration, including these sentences: "For decades, more nurses have left the Philippines to work abroad than leave any other country on earth. Yet in the Philippines today there are more Registered Nurses per capita than in the United Kingdom. This happened because so many Filipinos trained up as nurses to take advantage of opportunities abroad that this more than offset the departures."

We could do this by contracting with some universities to develop new schools of nursing and medicine.

We could do this by changing the laws so someone licensed as a nurse or doctor in one state could practice in any state.

We could  reduce certification requirements, offsetting the laxity with increased transparency. I'd rather be treated by a doctor with lesser qualifications but a long history of success than vice versa.

We could forgive a portion of student loan indebtedness for those medical students who go into primary care for x years.

We could allow nurses to do in medical clinics what we allow them to do in schools.

We could encourage medical tourism: people going to Mexico or India for operations (as the Amish do now).

Coates and a Hispanic Museum

Ta-Nahesi Coates has a post on the push for a Hispanic-American museum in DC, playing off a NYTimes report.  The comments are particularly good.  I revert to my suggestion that the USDA Administration building be converted into a museum.

Nagging: Redundancy or Consistency?

This study, according to Barking Up the Wrong Tree, shows that nagging works. When managers gave the same message over and over, the results improved.  But I'm tempted to disagree.  Back when I was a new manager and having my problems, as in cursing at an employee, my division director gave me a message.  He pointed to another manager in the division, a loud, boisterous man, WWII veteran whose ship had been sunk under him, who was an obvious male chauvinist. That made him seem to be an odd fit to supervise a female manager after a reorganization.  The director pointed out that the vet was consistent; he was always the same. Further he was fair, and the woman in question was assertive and wouldn't take any crap off him  The director said in his view consistency was the great managerial virtue.  Employees could adjust to any managerial style, so long as it was consistent.  Conversely, it was dangerous to be erratic, to be up and down, to jump from one great idea to another.

So it's possible the good results from repetitive messages was caused less by the repetition than by the consistency.

NRCS and Streamlining Delivery Initiative

NRCS has its Streamlining Delivery Initiative, which sounds a bit like their version of MIDAS.  Give credit to them:

• they have a nice graphic outlining what I would call the "enterprise architecture", or at least the flow of apps.
• they put up a wiki page on the initiative .  (I haven't quite figured out "wikiagro", whether it's an official NRCS wiki or not.

Not sure how this works with FSA's MIDAS.

How To Raise the Debt Limit

Seems to me it would be logical for the Republicans in the House to take Obama's proposed"fail-safe" and attach it to the increase of the debt limit.

Three Cups

I read Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea fairly early and was very impressed.  Now 60 Minutes and Jon Krakauer have debunked parts of the narrative.  Seems to me Dan Drezner has a good take on the whole thing.