Words of the Day: Making Sausage

"In general, I feel that I’ve experienced a strong pattern in which uncovering new information about an organization or intervention (which I previously understood only at a superficial level) tends to lower rather than raise my confidence in it."

From a post at Givewell.org,written in reference to evaluating NGO desirability as objects of giving. I'm not whether I got there from Chris Blattman or Roving Bandit, but I think the statement applies broadly, specifically in the sayings about not looking too closely at how sausage is made.  As a general rule, we over-generalize, based on limited information and the reality is much more complicated than we think.

A Revolutionary Thanksgiving

Boston 1775 provides a dash of sour to go with the sweetness of our modern Thanksgiving: the sort of meals some of our soldiers enjoyed back in the Revolution.

Base Acres Versus Planted Acres

That's the dispute going on now, according to today's Farm Policy.  Base acres avoids problems with the WTO, planted acres reflect current operations, not something many years in the past.

Sounds like one option is going back to 1977 and the "normal crop acreage".  As someone said: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes".

How the Presidency Works, or Doesn't

Conor Friedersdorf has a post up, asking why President Obama would have said the healthcare.gov site would work.  Obama himself says: he's not stupid, he didn't know the problems.  Friedersdorf cites a NYTimes article showing that the developers were well aware of many problems in the months before October 1. He writes:

It does not seem credible that Obama was unaware that failure was likely. And if he really was unaware, the implications are extremely unflattering. Either he failed abjectly to ask the right questions of a staff that was also derelict in informing him, or else he asked the right questions and his staff misled him.  What the Times story confirms is that the launch of Healthcare.gov wasn't the sort of failure that reasonable actors could have failed to anticipate beforehand.

As it happens I'm reading (struggling through actually) a recent biography of John Kenneth Galbraith.  He was an adviser to JFK while serving as ambassador to India in 1961-2, had his own back channel to the President, and was audacious in his infighting (like stealing a highly classified copy of a report to which he'd been denied access off the desk of the NSC type, while the NSC guy's attention was on a phone call, then writing a preemptive counterblast for JFK). 

It's a dense and scholarly effort, which goes rather broadly into the infighting over whether and how strongly to intervene in Vietnam.  And based on the narrative, JFK's decisions were sometimes/often evaded and ignored by the NSC/State/DOD figures.  The bottomline: not only did the flow of decisions from the President to the bureaucracy get interrupted, the flow of information from the bureaucracy to the President was uneven and incomplete.  JFK was smart enough, probably having read Neustadt's book on Presidential Power, to have multiple sources; BHO may not have been that smart.

A Bubble--Yes

So says the economist in this agweb article.

Unlike the early 80's, the developing world is still growing and providing more demand.

$2.75 Corn? A Bubble?

Did we have a land bubble? Agweb has an article saying get ready for $2.75 corn.  I find by searching on this site I was forecasting a land bubble in 2007 and again in 2011.  Guess I got tired of being wrong and have kept quiet since.  A reminder if any were needed of how difficult it is to make economic predictions.

How Paperwork Grows--Good Intentions and Bad Architecture

Congress doesn't want federal money going to corporations involved with committing felonies or evading taxes.  That makes sense, doesn't it?

Well, notice CM-737 shows what happens down in the bureaucracy.  USDA comes up with a form which corporation officers have to sign every year, which places another burden on the county office clerk, and the corporation officers, recognizing that 100 percent of the corporations have to sign, but probably only 1 percent at maxium are actually involved in crime or tax evasion.

Now in a rational world, the bureaucracy which is nearest to the determinations of felony/tax evasion (presumably DOJ) would be responsible for flagging the corporation's records (i.d. tax ID) and all federal payments would bounce against a Do Not Pay database, which would include these flags.  But that would require a unitary federal bureaucracy, and the American people in their wisdom have decided to favor freedom over efficiency.  As long as we're willing to pay the price, we're democratic after all.

Ben Franklin on Lead

My father had to switch from chemical engineering to farming because of lead poisoning, so this letter by Ben Franklin, in a post at Boston 1775, is of particular interest.  The old bureaucrat was one of the smartest men ever.

The Difference a Year Makes: Corn Prices and Farm Bill

Corn prices look very different now than last year, so the provisions of the draft farm bills in House and Senate are attracting scrutiny, as in this Politico article.

The Greatest Generation: Stupid or Ill-informed?

The Edge of the American West doesn't frame it as I do in my title, but I think the post supports the frame--the issue is whether knowledge of geography and history are helpful.