Why Federal Employees Don't Feel Overpaid

From a Washington Post article on Great Falls, a wealthy suburb of DC which has evolved in the past 20+ years, much of its growth coming from government contractors and those who sell to the government.  A quote:

Even rank-and-file employees benefit. In a recent survey by the jobs Web site ClearanceJobs.com, contractors with security clearances earned an average salary of $98,221, or 18 percent more than those doing similar jobs in the government

 To expand this point, federal employees don't feel overpaid because they can see contractors and vendors earning better money.  And they can see people retiring, particularly from the military and DOD, and going into private enterprise making use of the knowledge and contacts they gained while in the government.

Now to some extent it's apples and oranges: postal workers and mid-level bureaucrats are unlikely to move to private enterprise.  And the bureaucrat who resents the hell out of a contractor/consultant who comes in as a savior, but with no knowledge of the agency's business, is unlikely to remember the contractor is taking on a lot of risk: today's contract feast is tomorrow's no-work famine.  But we're talking psychology here, we're talking people, not an accountant's audit.

[Updated: with this--"And in case you're keeping score at home, "Great" Falls was at the top of the list of "top-earning towns," which, you know, shocker, especially when you consider it's essentially a magnet for government welfare recipients, also known as "contractors," the end."

Signs of Age

It's hard to tell when you're getting old, at least until you find yourself creaking when you get out of bed. I think I've found another sign of age, problems in parking.  These days when I make a right or left turn to pull into a parking place I find I'm not doing it fast enough/sharp enough, meaning that the car ends up at least slightly catty-corner in the parking space.  I can't wait for cars which are smart enough to handle parking.

Community Solidarity and Regulations

The Forward has a piece on adherence to regulations.  In sum, a village in NY which is inhabited by Hasidic Jews has a long history of ignoring state and municipal fire codes. I think this is the way democratic politics works.  In cases where a geographic area is dominated by one group, the group runs things its way and ignores laws and regulations with which it disagrees.  Sometimes we recognize things legally, as in giving some sovereignty to Indian tribes.  Or we make exceptions for religions, as with making provisions for the Amish schools, conscientious objectors, and taxes.

I'd also link this phenomena to the Lord Acton adage: "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely."  I suspect the Hasidic Jews described in the Forward piece would argue that, because of the way the community operates, there's less likelihood of dangerous fires and less need for fire codes.  But in the absence of a significant group of voters willing to agitate for enforcement, the community will rock along unless and until there's a lethal fire.

The Advantages of Modern Life: Vaccines

That thought resulted from reading this part of a newsletter from ancestry.com:

This portion of an 1880 schedule from Cottonwood Township, Brown County, Minnesota, shows a devastating diphtheria outbreak that took the lives of multiple children in several of the households.

A look at nearby townships showed even more diphtheria deaths, and a quick internet search revealed that it had reached epidemic proportions around this time. If your ancestor’s family disappeared from the area around that time, this could be an explanation. You may find evidence of other events in mortality schedules. I wrote this article about a story I found in some Boston mortality schedules that led to details about a fire in a cotton factory.

And My Jaw Dropped

From a Matt Yglesias post:

"In response, Stoller gave me seven rather than ten “FDR, Lincoln, Grant, Washington, T. Roosevelt, Truman, LBJ" (The "Stoller" is a Matt Stoller, apparently a leftish type.)

What caused my jaw to drop:  Grant. Grant!!  For most of my life Ulysses S. Grant was ranked in the bottom of U.S. Presidents, with a reputation for ignoring corruption that was hard to shake.  I think only Harding and Buchanan were usually considered worse.  But his inclusion in a top-seven list, even if idiosyncratic, probably means that his support for Reconstruction is winning him support among some.

North America's Farms: Why Mexicans Emigrate

Canada, Mexico, and the US are trying to provide agricultural statistics across the 3 countries.  Here's a map showing the distribution of farms, with each blue dot equaling 200 farms. Because it's static, not interactive, the map isn't great, but it's still interesting.  Canada has an interesting distribution: no farms above the western Great Lakes, but many east of the Rockies and a surprising concentration north of NH and VT. Mexico has about twice as many farms as the US, so the southern part of the country is solid blue.

I'd also note the Amish concentration in Lancaster county, PA. The concentration of smaller farms shows up as an almost blue dot. 

SSA Bureaucrat

The Post had a laudatory article on a Social Security bureaucrat Thursday. It seems she figured out that not all diseases/disabilities are the same. By segregating  out and fast tracking those disabilities which are in some sense obvious (i.e., Lou Gehrig's disease--ALCS, etc.) she drastically improved the turnaround time for the claims.

This fits one of my mantras I developed over the years.  If you tried to design a software system which would handle all possible situations, you rapidly got yourself into the weeds, lost in a maze of conditions and with software which would be hard to test, hard to train on, and late to deliver.  The better strategy was trying to handle 80 percent of the cases with something simple and fast.  The big advantage was intangible: software developers felt lots better because they were accomplishing something to help the county offices, the users; the users felt better because they got something halfway timely which helped them.

Overlapping Missions? USGS and NRCS

Here's a study of nitrates in rivers in the Mississippi basin, showing no consistent decline over the last 28 years (1980-2008).  What struck me is, while reported via a USDA agency (extension.org), the study itself was done by USGS.  Turns out there's something called The Mississippi River Gulf of Mexico Watershed Nutrient Action Task Force.  I guess NRCS is a part of it--there's an Ann Mills on the task force, though because the URL behind her name is screwed up I wasn't able to check on her.  The Task Force has EPA, Corps of Engineers, Interior (USGS), Commerce (NOAA), USDA (NRCS and extension), and the National Tribal Water Council.  Quite a group of agencies.

Herr Roesler and the German Melting Pot

Here's his wikipedia bio, of Vietnamese ancestry, he's a German politician, currently a cabinet minister, which blew my mind when I saw his picture.

We don't think of Germany as being a melting pot; a Google search for the term doesn't yield much.  This after all is the land of ethnic purity, but no more it seems.

Chopsticks to China

Via Freakonomics, here's an article on an entrepreneur who's making and shipping chopsticks to China from Georgia--turns out we've got cheaper wood than they do.

I must say, when we spent our honeymoon in Britain many years ago, I was struck by the difference in traveling from London to York and from DC to New York.  Miles and miles of trees and unused land in the US; not so much in Britain.