People Leave the Country: 1920's {corrected]

I knew the 1920's were not good for US farmers, but I was totally floored by the economic history piece on 1920's which included this graph: 20 million people left the farm in the 1920's.

[Correction: Note the different scales on the left (population) and right (employment), so the decline in population is about 1.5 million, not 20 million. I thank the author, Gene Smiley, for pointing out my mistake.}

Job Openings: French Hermits

Dirk Beauregarde reports the French church has openings for hermits.

Civil Servants: Pay and Expectations

The Post reported this morning on an investigation in DC of people who drew unemployment insurance while employed by the District.  Apparently particularly for intermittent employees, the pattern was when they got paid by the District they failed to report the fact back to the unemployment people.

My immediate response was drastic, jail 'em.  Maybe that's because I think highly of public service, so feel let down when civil servants screw up. Then I thought: if civil servants should be models, isn't that a basis for paying them more? (Think of the public school teacher in a small town in the old days.) But then the prestige of the job is additional compensation.

Bottom line: I'm confused and don't know what I think.

Blast from the Past

Hat tip Grist: Bloomberg reports on the big planting plans for 2012, including this quote

“There is unlikely to be any ground that won’t be planted this year,” said Todd Wachtel, a 40 year-old who farms about 5,700 acres in Altamont, Illinois, and plans to expand his corn fields by 21 percent when seeding begins in early April. “Farmers know that they have to plant more when prices are high because they may not last.”

Of course, if every farmer plants more when the prices are high she guarantees the prices will fall.  It's called the law of supply and demand. Farm programs used to have a supply management feature, which enabled farmers to act as a cartel.  Without government intervention, there's no way for an individual farmer to have the market power to adjust supply.  The only alternative to such intervention is for the industry to restructure itself with vertical integration, meaning a handful of companies acquire power over the supply chain and thereby can informally coordinate supply and prices.   That's what's happened in the US to poultry, eggs, and hogs, and most recently with tobacco.

If corn prices are going to drop in 2012, what happens to the cash rent leases and the mortgaged land sales?  The only thing keeping us from repeating the crash of the early 80's is the fact farmers aren't nearly as indebted now as then.

How Far to an FSA Office?

Via Farm Policy, Senator Grassley has written USDA about the possible closures of FSA offices in Iowa.  He goes so far as to challenge the 20 mile distance, pointing out that a couple of the offices are actually at least 23 miles away from another FSA office by road.  

In a way this sort of letter is the obverse of earmarks; it's the elected representative using his local knowledge, or rather channeling the local knowledge of his constituents, to affect the decision-making of a bureaucracy.  I think we'd all agree this is useful, even though some of us may oppose earmarks.

On a lighter note, I was remembering Roy "T" Cozart, an official in ASCS in the 1970's/80's.  He was, I believe, CED of Deaf Smith County, Texas (pronounced "deef" and named after the scout first into the Alamo after the killing stopped).  Maybe it was that county, maybe another, but he delighted in mockery and one thing he'd mock was Easterners and the way he'd mock was to describe how long it would take to drive his county, hours and hours at least as I remember it.

Maybe he was pulling my leg, because with the magic of Wikipedia I can find that Deaf Smith county is just about 1500 square miles, meaning it's a rectangle roughly 30 by 50 miles.  In the Texas panhandle it wouldn't have taken long to drive, so maybe Roy was reminiscing about his days as district director in middle Texas. For comparison, Linn County in Iowa is about 750 square miles.

Sen. Grassley's constituents face a round trip drive of 25 miles to the FSA office, maybe 35-40 minutes assuming Iowa roads are straight.  In Texas one assumes the distance would be double or triple that.  And if you want to talk about Montana: the counties mostly range from 2000 to 5000 square miles.

What's my point? The distance parameter is arbitrary.  No corporation, no Walmart or Subway, would allocate their stores the way the US government allocates its offices.

Charles Murray, the Two Tribes, and Social Class

David Brooks in the Times blogged on Mr. Murray's new book, suggesting that the white upper and lower classes have diverged greatly in mode of life and social mores since the 50's. Specifically, the top 20 percent or so don't divorce, while the bottom don't marry or they divorce.  And so on.

Here's a 1957 short film, not a documentary, on social class in America, part I and part 2.  (Hat tip to someone, maybe Tyler Cowen.)  What is interesting is the assumptions the creators make, which are apparent in retrospect.  The discussion of class is a bit more open than I'd expect today, though that might be because it's apparently a sociologist behind the film. ("Ascribed status" and achieved status, mobility.)

There are 3 kids, upper, middle, and lower class. All 3 kids are boys, their class is defined in terms of the occupations and backgrounds of their fathers, and they all come from unbroken homes.  All 3 graduate from a public school, though one goes on to the Ivy League, and graduation is an achievement for the lower class boy.  All 3 fathers wear suits for the high school graduation.

The upper class boy graduates and works for his father's factory, the lower class is a gas station attendant training to be a mechanic  The middle class boy follows his dream of art to NYC and an ad agency--horizontal mobility leads to upward mobility. The city is seen as the route for upward mobility because standards are different.

Seems to me that the social structure was more stovepiped in the 50's; each town had its own lower, middle, and upper class.  Since then the big banks have absorbed the local banks, the big real estate companies have absorbed the locals, the restaurant chains have ousted the local diners, the local auto mechanic is a dying breed, etc.

So parts of the film seem to support the Murray thesis while others don't.

Congratulations to NRCS

NRCS has made their soil survey info available on mobile devices.  What's not clear to me is whether they're using the GPS info available in some such devices to automatically pull up the soil profile you're standing on.  I suspect they aren't, but it's the obvious next step.

How People Get Smarter Over Time

From Ajah Shah's blog, a post on changes in the computer world:

In the 1980s, software came with fat manuals. Users actually sat down in training classes. A remarkable feature of the new world is how the manuals and training are gone. Software is incredibly capable but there are no manuals. Google maps or Amazon or Apple Mail are very powerful programs, but the fundamental assumption is that a reasonable person can just start tinkering with them and learn more as he goes.

The modern office worker gets no formal training in software all his life. The modern knowledge worker learns major tools (e.g. a programming language) and often puts in enormous effort for these. But for the rest, the ordinary flow of day to day life, where new software systems come up all the time, is done without formal training.

 One of the puzzles of life is the Flynn effect, which says every generation is smarter than the previous one.  Personally I think we drastically underestimate the effect of the learning which floats in the environment, which Mr. Shah's observation implies.

SSA a Model for Online Operations at FSA

Social Security Administration wanted to have 44 percent of retirees sign up for SS payments online.  That was their announced goal:

The actual percentage who filed online was 41 percent, states the SSA Performance & Accountability Report for Fiscal Year 2011.

I applaud SSA for setting the goal and announcing it, even more for the followup report.  If and when USDA aims to have farmers to do more stuff online with FSA, I'd like to see USDA specify what the goals are and what the results are.

7000 Pounds of Milk

Post has an article on a Virginia farmer selling Holstein bulls to Russia. Two paragraphs:

Russian farmers are trying to improve dairy herds that produce an average 7,000 pounds of milk per cow each year, said Valery Osipenko, who co-owns Vistar Farms of Mechanicsville, which sold the bulls to Russian farmers for an undisclosed amount. Top-quality American Holsteins produce an average of more than 20,000 pounds of milk per year.

Instead of raising dairy cattle for milk and beef cattle for meat, Soviet collective farms had “dual-use” cattle, which would be milked for a while, then killed for meat, Osipenko said. Those one-size-fits-all cattle may have embodied an egalitarian ideal, but both milk and meat were mediocre, said Osipenko, a native of Ukraine who recalled his mother boiling beef for hours in a fruitless attempt to tenderize it.

Random thoughts: back in the 50's, we were averaging something over 10,000 lbs, maybe more, so Russia is really backwards.

Of course, back in the 1700's dual purpose cattle were the rule in America.  I wonder about the evolution of the industry.  In the 50's we had "registered" Holsteins, tracking the ancestry of our cows.  Used artificial insemination and choose the bull based on the production records of his progeny.  Now Darwin writes about how humans have changed domestic breeds by their selection, but I don't recall he used cows as an example.  I'm vaguely aware Washington and Jefferson imported animals based on their qualities: is it possible sheep can be "dual-purpose" (wool versus mutton)?

If we assume that US dairymen were, in the 19th century, trying to improve the productivity of their herds, then maybe it's also reasonable to assume the same was true in Russia.  So what might have happened? Perhaps the Russian Revolution and the arrival of collective farms meant the freezing of the drive to improve productivity?  Meaning for 70 years the Russian dairy industry was frozen?

Still surprising to me that they haven't progressed faster in the 20+ years since the collapse of the Soviet Union.