Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Kahneman and Dog Whistles

Finished reading Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow recently.  Also, there was discussion on blogs I follow about whether Gingrich was using  "dog-whistle" language in calling Obama a "food stamp president".

Kahneman's fast thinking is his System 1, which occurs unconsciously as we assess our environment on a second to second basis.  It is very capable, but sometimes faulty.  System 2 is essentially rational, conscious thought, which we hate to do and takes will power and energy.

An example is the famous optical illusions where two straight lines of equal length are displayed simultaneously, but one looks like this >----< and the other like this <----> .  When they're one above the other, the second looks shorter than the first.  That's the assessment of System 1.  Anyone who has encountered the illusion is capable of pulling from memory the fact that it is an illusion, and the lines are of equal length--that's System 2.

I'm thinking similar effects operate with political language.  Some language creates knee jerk reactions with the partisans, it's been devalued.  Things like "welfare queens", "socialist", "redneck", "Bible-thumper" all work that way.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Wash Day

Boston 1775 provides part of a poem on wash day in 18th century Boston:
It’s an evocative slice of life, showing a moment when laundry day meant all the women in a household were busy and little girls weren’t allowed jelly or butter, yet science was about to let people fly:

Syrian USDA Office to Close

Chris Clayton takes a sardonic approach to the pols, and NASCOE, resisting Vilsack's proposed closure of USDA offices.

See this for NASCOE's position,including a thrust at NRCS (all agencies in a county should be evaluated when talking office closures).

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Conflict in the New Farm Bill

One problem the food movement will face in the new farm bill is the choice between trying to expand the supply of good food (i.e., local and organic) and the present.  The more you do that, the lower the prices will be and the harder it will be for existing producers to continue with their current size and business model.  In other words, expand the supply and you encourage the growth of "corporate" and "industrial" organic/local agriculture.

Just a thought.

Friday, January 20, 2012

Mobile Offices for USDA?

Back in the mid-90's, when the Service Center project was under Greg Carnill, one of the proposals coming from RD was to have mobile offices.  That was seen as a way to reach out to underserved areas (I think especially heavily Latino areas and reservations where language might be a problem). I thought of that when I saw this piece on VA's mobile Vetcenters.

John W. Boyd's Loan Specialist

John Boyd is prominently associated with the Pigford lawsuit.  I just happened to notice there's a vacancy in Mecklenburg county for a supervisory farm loan specialist.  I also found it interesting that the town is Boydton.

Thursday, January 19, 2012

Lexis-Nexis Is a Government Innovation

Who would have thought it?  That was my reaction when I read this obit in the Post. Three paragraphs:
Mr. Rubin was a corporate lawyer in New York during the late 1960s when he was asked to give his advice on a new computerized legal research system.
The digital database had begun as a project to catalogue Ohio state laws using Air Force technology [emphasis added] that tracked intelligence reports. Mr. Rubin quickly saw the system’s commercial potential because of its ability to make millions of legal documents easily and quickly available to law firms.
The key was to ensure that the database was simple to use, Mr. Rubin said, because “lawyers can’t type, and only 15 percent can spell.”
 Of course, I enjoyed the last paragraph as well. 

The Era of Good Feelings on the Hill

In a previously unreported interview, there was evidence of an era of good feelings on Capitol Hill, or maybe not.  Maybe it's like the glimpse of that rare woodpecker in the LA/AR swamps, but at least it's something: a Republican legislator was complimentary of a Democrat:
Debbie [Sen. Stabenow] was an absolute pleasure to work with in attempting to put the hurry-up proposal together for the super committee that never came about, but Senator Stabenow, Chairwoman Stabenow was a pleasure to work with and she demonstrated an intense amount ofintensity over on the senate side to try and move things there, so that’s a positive force.
That's from an interview with Rep. Lucas, chair of House Ag.

Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Obama, Vilsack, and Kahneman

"Loss aversion" is part of  Daniel Kahneman's thought. As he writes in Thinking: Fast and Slow, the theory is that people mostly prefer choices which minimize the risk of loss as opposed to maximizing the chance of gain. And, more interestingly, we prefer a choice which offers the chance of avoiding a loss, even though it's not rational.

On page 305 he ties that into proposed reorganizations, arguing that any reorganization will cause someone to lose something and, given human preferences for loss aversion, they'll fight a lot harder to avoid the loss than people who may stand to gain by the reorganization will fight to implement it.

We can already see this with Obama's proposal on reorganizing commerce; there's lots of resistance to including the office of the US Trade Representative in the overall reorganization.

The same sort of logic applies to the closing of USDA offices; those adversely affected by the loss will fight hard.

But that leads to a mystery: why was Congress able to reorganize USDA in 1994 by combining part of FmHA with ASCS to make FSA?  Maybe part of it was in the splitting of FmHA--those parts which became Rural Development could see themselves as gaining by the reorganization.  The old Rural Electrification Administration had long been a target for reformers, but by merging it into RD the old name and the old reputation was lost, at least among those who had only a superficial acquaintance with USDA and the lobbyists behind it could see a gain.

Meanwhile the farm loan part of FmHA might not have had the greatest reputation in the government: GAO had had the loan programs on its list to give close scrutiny to.  And I remember my boss showing me a letter someone in Congress had sent to the old FmHA, criticizing their failure to implement some legislative provision in comparison with the speed with which ASCS had implemented other provisions.  That was, of course, unfair.  FmHA was bound by different constraints than ASCS, and had a different culture.  But still the contrast might have undermined support on the Hill for maintaining it as a separate agency. 

NY Times Undermines Security

That's what I took away from their article today on teenagers.  Apparently the true token of love today is information, specifically one's password.  All very touching, but surely the Times should point out the truth: you shouldn't have just one password, but multiple passwords.

[Update: see this Consumer Reports piece after Zappos.]