It's the Simple Things That Count: Like Concrete

  Charles Kenny writes:

Starting in 2000, a program in Mexico's Coahuila state called "Piso Firme" (Firm Floor) offered up to $150 per home in mixed concrete, delivered directly to families who used it to cover their dirt floors. Scholar Paul Gertler evaluated the impact: Kids in houses that moved from all-dirt to all-concrete floors saw parasitic infestation rates drop 78 percent; the number of children who had diarrhea in any given month dropped by half; anemia fell more than four-fifths; and scores on cognitive tests went up by more than a third. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, mothers in newly cemented houses reported less depression and greater life satisfaction.)

 Concrete also works for highways, which improves economies in the third world.

Farmers Market as Intermediary

Jane Black writes in Wednesday's Post about a farmers market which serves as an intermediary between local farmers and their customers.  Organized as a co-op, it sells the farmer's produce for a 10 percent cut of the proceeds, thereby saving the farmers from having to sell and enabling them to continue producing.  It sounds good.  It sounds like the Reston farmers market at the corner of Rte 7 and Baron Cameron back in the 70's, 80's, and 90's.  That was run by a hippie who settled down and made his living by serving as a middleman between farmers and customers.  He got into trouble with the zoning people by going too far a field for some of his products, but it worked for a long while.

Selling cooperatives go way back.  They work, for a while, I think, but eventually something changes.  The person who drove the enterprise gets old or tired, or both; free market forces drive expansion and conversion into something like Whole Foods, or the clientele ages, changes, or moves. 

French Brides Wear Bespoke Dresses

That's one fact in Dirk Beauregarde's piece on French weddings. Been a while since I married my wife, but my impression is that many if not most US brides wear off-the-rack.

That Christmas Tree Tax

Steve Sexton at Freakonomics has a post defending the "Christmas tree tax" of last year.  Needless to say I agree with him.

The Omni-presence of Internal Politics

Read a biography of Gen. O. P. Smith, the commander of the First Marine Division in Korea. Also read the biography of Steve Jobs.  In both cases, as pointed out in the case of Jobs by this Govloop post, 
organizational politics played a big role in the subject's life. In any bureaucracy, military, civilian, private enterprise, what we call "politics" is always present.

The Founding Flip-Flopper

Flip-flopping has a long, if not honored, history.  The blog Boston 1775 moves south to Philadelphia to take note of a Revolutionary era flip-flopper in three posts. New Year's Day 1777, New Year's Day 1778 and the justification from later in 1778, after the Brits had left Philadelphia. 

The last shows that the Reverend Witherspoon had a wicked sense of humor, and provides a justification which our modern day politicians could use as a pattern: "I was neither pro-[insert word of your choice, war, individual mandate, conservative, whatever] nor anti-[insert the opposite word], I was a politician.

Incidentally, I note that the verse from 1777 calls upon God, while the verse from 1778 calls upon the classical gods of Greece and Rome. Probably not significant.

"Liberating Strife"

I rarely thank politicians, particularly Republican politicians.  However Mr. Romney is celebrating American patriotic music, as discussed in this NYTimes piece today, and his interest triggered my interest.

And Mr. Romney does not just recite the lyrics — he annotates them, offering his interpretation of the meaning. “Most of the time when we sing a song, we don’t think much about the words,” he said. “But I’ve begun looking at these words and thinking about them.”
“O beautiful for heroes proved in liberating strife,” he said, is a reference to the country’s soldiers. (“Any veterans in this room here today?” he asked. “Thank you for your service.”)

The complete verse reads:

O beautiful for heroes prov'd

In liberating strife,

Who more than self their country lov'd,

And mercy more than life

For those interested, Katherine Lee Bates wrote the poem in 1895. From her background and the timing, I assume the verse praises the Union soldiers of the Civil War.  I suspect Mr. Romney wants it to cover the veterans of more recent wars, but that's a stretch. Indeed, Mr. Romney might want to soft-pedal his affection for the song, at least that verse, when he campaigns in South Carolina

Sssh, the Secret of Farming

As it says here, for many years farmers lived on their depreciation.  What that means is that as long as you have some cash flow and low debt, you can survive.  That's how my father did it.

NY Times and Agriculture on 12/31/2011

The Times has two stories on agriculture today: one on the growth of big organic farms outside the country, drawing down water supplies and exporting organic produce to the US; the other on the conversion of non-ag land to farmland in Iowa, and the expiration of CRP contracts.

The organic piece gets lots of exposure: comments and the top emailed piece. As the article points out, we Americans want our cheap organic tomatoes in December, and Mexico, Argentina, and Chile, and the nations in between, are willing to supply them.  The growth of exports helps those nations, which isn't something the comments note, although the article does mention it.

The Iowa piece reminds me of the 70's, when Earl Butz supposedly promoted fence row to fence row planting.  If the farmer is able to buy the land, he can tear out the fence rows, gaining some acreage and improving the efficiency with which he can farm.  Again, it's the workings of the free market in agriculture.

Petty Bureaucracy in the Private Sector: B&B Complaints

James Fallows had a bad experience with a B&B (owner forgot his reservation) and petty bureaucrats prevented him from publishing his review because he didn't actually stay at the B&B.  Read the whole thing here.  In the old days, this was a Catch-22.