Another French Revolution (for Bureaucrats)

Bureaucrats care deeply about titles, which is why this change in France is a revolution.  Where the U.S. has "Miss", "Mrs." and "Ms", the French have had only "mademoiselle" and "madame".  But no more.  As described by Dirk Beauregarde, instead of coming up with a third term as we did, French feminists have forced the bureaucracy to do away with "mademoiselle" and use only "madame".  And Sarkozy is a right winger.

What I'd Like to Know: Age Distribution of Small Farms

From Farm Policy, this quote got me wondering:

The FT article concluded by stating that, “Tom Sell, a farm industry lobbyist in Washington, says US farmers receive relatively less support than their peers in other countries. He adds that removing financial aid will hurt smaller, family farms and accelerate the move to industrialised [sic], large-scale farming.

This follows a discussion of how the biggest farms produce most of the crops.

But what I'd like to know, is how the age distribution of farmers relates to the size distribution of farms.  It's probably available in some ERS study, but I'm lazy today, having just returned from working in the garden for the first time.  Why would I like to know this?

My suspicion is there's two types of old farmers, those with children who are going to go into farming (like John Phipps) and those who aren't (like my dad).  The first category and the young farmers (not many of those) are forward-looking, wanting to expand, buying up land when they have the chance, looking at the future, etc. etc.  The second category is probably conservative, without the drive or incentive to take a lot of chances in order to expand.  My bet is there's a big difference in the size/intensity of the farming operations of the first category and the second. If my stereotypes have some truth to them, we might well be overestimating the importance of a safety net for the smaller farms. I'd also hazard the guess that the first category is more indebted than the second, so the second can coast to retirement by mortgaging or selling land.

I may well be wrong; it's always dangerous to traffic in stereotypes and examples which readily come to mind, but then life is dangerous.

Misleading With Statistics

Alex at Marginal Revolution posts a chart showing that the exhaustion of unemployment benefits tracked very closely with disability applications under Social Security.

Unfortunately, it's a tad misleading, so  commentor Rahul produced a graph less misleading because it uses the same scale and intervals for both measures..

Alex's point is still valid, but it's a damned sight less dramatic.

One of the 10 best books I ever read: "How to Lie with Statistics". which dates to the 1950's.

A 500K Mercedes?

Who knew, but this piece via University Diaries on the rich kids at GWU shows a fancy student car which retails for over $500,000.  


To the barricades.

The "Three Option" Program

From Farm Policy, Rep. Peterson predicts a 3 option program in the next farm bill:

“Rep. Peterson: Well, there will be. I think it’s going to be three options. I mean, I don’t see any other way to do this. There’s going to be the target price, kind of a cyclical component, there’s going to be some kind of shallow loss/catastrophic loss component, and there’s going to be a cotton program, the STAX program. And I don’t see any… I mean, rice and peanuts are the ones that are primarily interested in the target price. That brings them on board. And there might be some people out here that might use the target prices. The other commodity groups are more interested in the shallow loss/catastrophic loss.
“But we just don’t have the money to do a one-size-fits-all program anymore. And frankly, the crops are different. I mean, the rice market, they don’t have ethanol, so they’re struggling. They don’t have access to Japan and a lot of these big rice consuming countries. They don’t have access. Now peanuts, they’ve got their own problems. Cotton, you know, the WTO case. So to try to fix all of them and have a program that’s going to work for cotton or for corn and soybeans and wheat, I just don’t see it, so I think there will be three options.”

He also says:

 "You know, I don’t know why we couldn’t even handle disaster through crop insurance, and I’ve talked to the crop insurance people about that. It would be a fairly efficient, I think, way to do it. So I think that’s where we’re heading, barring some big collapse in prices. But if we get back to a deal where corn prices go back down again significantly, corn and soybeans, then that could change the whole picture of things, and it could happen.”

 When I joined ASCS in 1968 there were separate titles of the farm bill for wheat, for feed grains, for upland cotton, and for producer rice and farm rice.  Over the years the programs gradually became more similar to the point they could be covered in one title.  Now it looks as if the commodity differences are  rearing their heads again.  Makes for more complex administration.

Grapefruit and Locavores

My college roommate was from Hawaii, so he stayed with my family for the Christmas holiday.  His mother shipped a crate of citrus from Hawaii, meaning I learned for the first time how grapefruit should taste.  Locavores are right: fresh fruit direct to the table are the best.

Regardless, I've regularly had grapefruit halves for breakfast over the last 50 years. Why?  Grapefruit from the Safeway taste good enough; they satisfice even if they aren't the platonic ideal of grapefruit. And that's the crack in the locavore armor.  Many people develop a taste for tropical and subtropical fruit: your citrus, bananas, etc.  which most Americans cannot grow locally but which we learned to value.  That simple fact breaks the connection between place and product, so we're willing to accept the idea of fruits and vegetables being transported to the store from further and further away.  (See the history of United Fruit for how far back this goes.)

The economists would tell us it's a balance of the utility of the produce, mostly the taste, and the cost and they'd predict, rightly, that the ability to put good-enough tasting produce on the shelves of the supermarket only increases with time.

My proof: some of the best blueberries I've tasted in a good while just came from the Safeway, grown in Chile.

Gloomy Geezer

Not me, John Phipps:

Otherwise, it looks like producers as a group are bound and determined to see how fast and often we can shoot ourselves in the foot. We are re-enacting the Tragedy of the Commons even with full knowledge of how the story will turn out.

(On farmers misuse of new technology, like failing to plant the required refuges when using GM corn.)

How Government Really Works

Two articles in today's Post show how government really works:

• one covers the implementation of the rules of 28 states on health insurance covering contraception.  Turns out the states have loopholes and vague provisions, and provisions which aren't really enforced, which means the Catholic organizations who were/are yelling about the Obama administration's requirements were able to live with what really happened at the local level.
• the other covers the implementation of the law requiring reservists to get their job back when they return from active duty.  Turns out some reservists don't get their job back, and sometimes it's the federal government which fails to follow the law.

Some points:

•  the way our government is designed, the multiple layers (local, state, federal) mean "liberty" is protected. (I put "liberty" in quotes because I could as easily write "disorder".)
• some laws are more signal than reality.  That was a lesson from my sociology prof who cited the case of laws against prostitution. There's still prostitutes.  Or speeding, there's still speeding.  
• no one doubts President Obama wants veterans looked after, but it's a big government so gaps between executive intent and actual execution can be great.

Improving FSA Customer Service

One of the issues for any big bureaucracy is how do the bureaucrats at the center/top of the organization monitor the success their operatives have in dealing with their customers/clients.  In the case of FSA there used to be a number of ways the DC people, even those in the ivory tower as Chet Adell used to call the Administration Building, which used to house the Administrator and deputies, kept up with the field:

• first of all there was the feedback up the chain of command, from county through district director, state office and state director to area director
• second there was the feedback through the politicians--the county committee members, state committee members, etc.
• third the correspondence and phone calls directly from the farmers to DC, whether the Administrator, Congresspeople, or President

I think implementing web applications which provides direct service to customers creates a problem--how do you get feedback from the customers?  The established channels don't work (I don't see farmer Jones telling Ms. Smith in the local county office of a problem he had with the FSA website a week ago), and I don't have much faith in the ability of canned surveys to gather useful information. 

Would it work for the county offices to use the same applications as their customers could access online?

Vilsack on FSA/Crop Insurance

Secretary Vilsack tells House Appropriations he's not discussed any move to use FSA to service crop insurance policies