David Brooks of the Short Memory

From the transcript of Friday's Shields/Brooks discussion on the Newshour, in regards to the SuperCommittee:

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I mean, I'm hearing the exact same thing. [failure]
I think the tragedy of it is, if it was ever going to work, it was going to work under these circumstances. The rules were rigged to make a deal as possible as -- as possible as possible, which is to say there was going to be a clean vote on the House. They were going to meet in private. They had this sword of Damocles hanging over them. And they still couldn't reach a deal.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And still didn't...
DAVID BROOKS: And still -- and so it's a history of really 10 or 15 years of potential moments where we could have -- somebody could have made a deal with doing some spending cuts, some tax increases, jam it all together in whatever form you want to do.[emphasis added] And every think tank has their own version.

Mr. Brooks appears to have forgotten the budget was balanced for FY 2001.

Organic Versus Pasture-Raised

Grist has an interesting article from a small poultry outfit on the trade-offs between raising organic poultry/eggs and raising free range poultry.  It triggered some nostalgia.  One factor the author doesn't mention which we faced in the 1950's and he doesn't face today is big variation in prices.  In the 1950's the poultry industry was still in the process of consolidation and vertical integration, operating under the influence of the forces of specialization and economies of scale (see preceding post).  That meant egg prices could go from  $.30 a dozen to $.70 a dozen in the space of a year or 18 months (figures based on memory).

Today, after all the "sturm und drang" of the "creative destruction", something beloved of economists and hated by those who are destroyed, I'm assuming prices of eggs and chicken are much less variable. That difference in variability is probably one reason we found it necessary to have both poultry and dairy, while the author can focus only on poultry.

Local Food, Economics, and Evolution

Freakonomics has a post with this theme:

But implicit in the argument that local farming is better for the environment than industrial agriculture is an assumption that a “relocalized” food system can be just as efficient as today’s modern farming. That assumption is simply wrong. Today’s high crop yields and low costs reflect gains from specialization and trade, as well as scale and scope economies that would be forsaken under the food system that locavores endorse.

Part of the argument is "comparative advantage" and specialization: Iowa gets higher corn yields than Mississippi, Idaho gets higher potato yields than Florida, etc.  Part of the argument is "economies of scale".

Makes sense to me, though it's quite possible over the long long term that arguments from evolution will trump the arguments from economies: remember the dinosaurs.

Draft Proposal Farm Bill

Via Des Moines Register here's the current draft proposal.

Blue State, Not So Blue Air

Treehugger has a list of the 20 dirtiest cities (dirtiest air, that is). When you look at it, note that seven of the worst 10 cities are in California.  Except for Houston, Phoenix, and Salt Lake City, the other cities are mostly in blue states.  This might be a clue for the reason why conservatives and liberals talk past each other on environmental issues: they look out the window and they see a different reality.

The Poor Goats

Buried in this Politico piece on the passage of the ag (plus others) appropriations bill is a sentence: "Mohair subsidies would be ended."  First VP Gore goes after them in the 1990's, and now the program is ended again.  I wonder if there's any record for the number of times a program has been ended, and then revived?

Powerpoint: Gee We Knew That in 1991

Megan McArdle rants about the misuse of Powerpoint, including reading the slides and having the font too small to read.  My reaction: My boss, SP, and employees knew better than that 20 years ago.

No Super Committee Resolution and the Farm Bill

If the super committee fails to reach agreement, that kills the 2012 farm bill for this year.  Presumably the Ag committees and the ag lobbies will use the holidays to consider what they put together in a rush, and early next year we'll start to see legislation drafted.  In other words, we'll be back to the regular order of things.  The 64 dollar question is what sort of funding baseline they'll work with. Will they have the dollars they propose to the super committee, more or less?

The other question of importance is what will the farm economy be doing next spring and summer?  Recently corn and wheat prices have slid (see this Des Moines Register piece for corn.) Problem is that Ukraine and other grain producers have had good years.  (Back in the day, Ukraine used to be the breadbasket of Europe.  Just maybe modern farming methods and rational organization has finally arrived there so they can resume their place?)

I don't know enough to guess what will happen if prices have retreated significantly, but I would assume that it would change the bargaining and perhaps the framework of the programs in the farm bill.

As I've written, I now realize there's a window of opportunity for FSA/RMA to install MIDAS and ACRSI before being hit with the new farm bill.  But if the super committee fails, there may be an extended period of uncertainty over the future 2013 and on, meaning the bureaucrats have a compressed lead-time to get things in place. 

So if I'm an FSA bureaucrat do I pray for the success of the super committee, knowing it might well mean program changes which eviscerate much of the agency, or do I pray for failure, guessing it might make next fall torture?

Politico on the Farm Bill

As a change of pace, I take advantage of Politico's unusual attention to farm bill issues to link to their report

Pareto and Sports: the 80/20 Thing

Ever since I learned it, I've loved the Pareto principle, the 80/20 thing.  I particularly applied it to software, most notably back in the day when we were trying to automate deficiency payments. I think I can claim credit, or blame, for splitting payments into two categories: special and regular.  The regular ones we'd try to run as a batch, the special we'd struggle with as best we could.

Now people have discovered the 80/20 rule works for sports, specifically in things like tennis the best 20 percent of the players win 80 percent of the prizes.  See this Technology Review piece