On Violence and Wealth

Got involved in a comment thread at Ta-Nehesi Coates' blog yesterday, particularly with a commenter who argued wealth was the key factor in whether a neighborhood was violent or not.  Since the thread has dwindled to an end, I thought I'd post a thought experiment here:

Consider all the professional athletes in the US, many are in the top 1 percent of income, most of the rest would be in the top 5 percent.  The athletes come from varied backgrounds, but few come from parents who themselves were in the top 5 percent.  I'd love to see a sociologist determine the violent crime rate among such athletes with the crime rate in enclaves of the 5 percent, and the average background of the athletes (say 30th percentile?).  I suspect, but don't know, that the rate of the athletes would be closer to the 5 percent rate than to  the rate of the 30th percentile, which would be the influence of wealth, but there would still be a significant difference, which would be the influence of culture/society and other factors.

Drought Speculations

A couple weeks ago I started but did not finish apost on the possibility of a drought in the Midwest--then it was a topic restricted to the ag media.  Today the drought has reached the top of the news pages and news broadcasts.  Two things will be happening in parallel: the drought will progress and Congress will be working, or not working, on the new farm bill.  Presumably there will a temptation to patch holes in the 2012 safety net with provisions of the bill, perhaps the adverse impact on pork, beef, and chicken producers. The extent to which crop insurance can handle the impacts on crop producers will also be interesting.  My impression is they did well with the drought last year which occurred in Texas.  We shall see. (I guess that's a last sentence I can use on most of my posts.)

Contrasting Views of Each Other

Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy does a poll asking readers of one persuasion (conservative, liberal) how honest people of the other persuasion are. The results surprised me a bit: almost equal pluralities of each persuasion thought the other side was roughly as honest as they were.  The remainder was split between thinking their opponents were "somewhat less honest"  or "generally much less honest". 

Big Organic and Dairy

NYTimes has two pieces today:  an article on how big food has taken over many organic food operations, along with a claim they've used their influence on USDA's organic standards board to approve ingredients which shouldn't be included in "organic food"; and a Mark Bittman diatribe against milk.  Yes, I realize my bias is showing in calling it a "diatribe", but Mr. Bittman's bias is also showing: he blames milk for years of his own health problems, which makes a strong case that nobody should drink milk.

They're currently 2nd and 3rd most popular NYTimes articles today.

A 2012 Disaster Program?

Chris Clayton notes the SURE program expired with the 2011 crop year, so those corn and soybean farmers in the Midwest who are watching their crops shrivel in the drought and heat must only rely on crop insurance, right?  (Clayton notes the current Senate farm bill wouldn't cover such disasters, even if it did apply to 2012 crops, which it doesn't.)

I'd say: possibly not. Clayton mentions the ad hoc disaster program in 2010 the Obama administration delivered for Sen. Lincoln when they were trying to win her vote and help her in the fall election.  That's a precedent.  There's also the precedent of retroactive disaster programs, which I remember but can't recall the years of, which can possibly be tied to emergency appropriations acts, which evade the current emphasis on paying for legislation under "pay-go".

Weather Forecasts for the Sun

Seemingly we've progressed to the point where we're doing weather forecasts for the sun, at least that's how I read this MSNBC report.

Payment LImitation and OIG: a Puzzle

OIG tried to do an audit of FSA's administration of the payment limitation  rules in the 2008 farm bill, notably the "attribution" of payments made to legal entities to the natural-born persons who comprise the entity.  Ferd Hoefner at Sustainable Agriculture notes the report, and comments.  The gist is summed up in his title: "Commodity Payment Limitations, Weak System, Weak Report."

I may comment more later, or I may lose interest, but I am puzzled by one aspect of the report.

OIG says they couldn't audit because of problems with the system, specifically including this point:

"Specifically, we learned that joint ventures without permanent identification numbers were not recorded in FSA’s entity database,..."

As they recognize in a footnote, FSA doesn't make payments to such joint ventures, payments are made to the members. That should mean the payments are automatically attributed to members. To me that says it doesn't constitute a weakness in the system and shouldn't be considered a problem in auditing.

FSA's response doesn't point this out.

If I follow correctly, Environmental Working Group has been "attributing" payments for some time now, using the same data as OIG refused to tackle. 

The Importance of Place

Charles Kenny writes for Businessweek on the importance of place: Indian workers making Big Mac earn much less (one seventh) than US workers, even when specified in terms of Big Macs--in other words, how many Big Macs can a McDonald's employee buy with her hourly wage.  From the piece:

Why do people in the U.S. earn so much more doing the exact same jobs as people in India? One reason is infrastructure: physical infrastructure such as (comparatively) good road and electricity networks, alongside economic infrastructure including a (somewhat) robust banking system. Institutions such as a (passable) set of commercial laws and (not completely capricious) regulatory regimes are another factor. The higher quality of these public goods allows the same amount of effort by the same quality employee to create considerably more value in the U.S. than in India.

 As your typical government-loving liberal, I hasten to point out the factors Kenny refers to are based on government.

The Conservative America

Thomas Fleming has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (hat tip Ann Althouse), discussing the colonies at the time of independence.  The closest he comes to mentioning slavery is this: " In some parts of the South, 10% owned 75% of the wealth."

It's amazing how easy it is to exclude people.  For example, Mr. Fleming above excluded the slaves.  But I myself did not remember to include Native Americans.  Were they "Americans" included in the Declaration? Are they "Americans" today?  Certainly their status is more complicated than most other citizens of the country.  When Jackson sent the Cherokees and Creeks on the Trail of Tears from Georgia to Oklahoma was he in effect taking away their citizenship in the U.S.?

A Safe Prediction

"
The Bottom Line
Unless Mitt Romney personally beats back an alien invasion — and maybe not even then — Mr. Obama will win the District of Columbia’s three electoral votes."

From Fivethirtyeight

(I voted for McGovern in the District in the year the Republicans came closest to winning.)