Intermediaries to the Government

One of the growth industries over my life time has been in this area, organizations which mediate in some way between the citizen and the government.

The example I remember most vividly was the CED in Sherman county, KS telling me he wanted to put a consulting firm out of business; the firm was advising farmers on payment limitation issues.  Then there was our visit to Fresno county, CA (BTW the biggest ag county in the country) where one operation had a full-time employee just working as a liaison to the ASCS, FmHA, and SCS offices, plus Bureau of Reclamation.  (Irrigation was a big issue, because the federal rules limited the acreage to 960 acres, so navigating between payment limitation and irrigation was complex.)

I thought of those experiences when I saw this,a Vox piece on a firm mediating between students or their parents and the Education Department (charging $80 to fill out an application which is online).

As for lobbyists, whom we more normally think of when discussing intermediaries, today's Times has a piece on the lobbyist firm Patton, Boggs, which is merging with an international law firm.  Someone quoted in the article said that when the firm was founded in the 1960's, there were about 15 decision makers in government to influence, now there's 15,000.   And yesterday Elon Musk, who has a rocket firm, accused his competitor of hiring a former Air Force official as part of a deal to get a sole-source contract for rockets for the military. 

A conservative like George Will would say this is a reflection of the bad trend to more government; government has its hands in too much and citizens can't deal.  As a liberal I resist that idea.  I'm more comfortable with the idea that big mouths and scam artists fool the naive citizen and con them out of their money.  However, it's an issue--I really should give it more thought, but maybe in my next reincarnation.

The Data Act

Vox has a long very good post on how the Data Act got passed. Should be enlightening for people with textbook images of government.  I'm still uncertain of its impact on FSA.

Worms Are Weevils

So says the House appropriations committee: ",,,deem the pink bollworm to be a boll weevil for the purpose of boll weevil eradication program loans."  (page 22)

(A lawyer would probably respond that it's easier to do a "deem" than to amend the law on boll weevil eradication to include pink bollworms.  There's also the nagging little fact that the House appropriations committee isn't supposed to (according to all the Poli Sci 101 manuals) actually legislate--that's the role of House Ag. But if no one notices or no one complains, it's all good, innit.)

The Burden of College Loans (Circa 18th Century)

College loans change the course of one's life.  For proof, just read this post at Boston 1775 about the course of true love in the midst of college debts in the 1720's.  This is the first of a series of posts Mr. Bell is putting up on the love life of Priscilla Thomas.

Geithner and Bureacracy and Puritanism

Haven't read Timothy Geithner's new book yet.  Some of the reviews bring up the criticism that Geithner and the administration should have done more for homeowners who were under water.

Not being an economist I don't know what I'm talking about (:-) but I've two reactions:

• as a bureaucrat I suspect part of the problem was/would have been bureaucratic.  Treasury had never, to my knowledge, dealt with homeowners before, or probably not even with the owners of home mortgages.  So any program to help homeowners would have been plowing new ground, meaning you'd have to setup your program infrastructure as well as implement the program.  By comparison, Congress can come up with new agricultural programs in the farm bill, knowing bureaucracies exist which are capable of reaching farmers and implementing them. Even back in 1933 the AAA was built on the infrastructure of the extension service.  Lacking the infrastructure also means there's no network in place to provide information and lobby the bigshots for action.
• as a liberal I should support helping homeowners, but in the case of the underwater people my inherited puritanism shows its teeth.  You really mean that somebody who signed a liar's loan, and/or tapped his home equity for other expenses should be helped?? No way, no how.  (Don't ask me how I reconcile that reaction with acceding to the bailout of Wall Street bankers.  OK, Wall Street seemed a necessary evil, particularly when the money market funds started to break the buck.)

Sustainability and Markets: Pet Peeve Again

One of my biggest problems with the studies from Rodale et. al. comparing the productivity of organic farming versus production ag relates to markets.  Typically the studies compare a corn-only  cropping series, a corn-soybeans rotation cropping series, and something like corn-alfalfa-wheat-soybeans cropping series, and finds that the corn productivity is roughly equal.   My peeve is the studies ignore the question of marketing; they assume that everything grown can be marketed.  Back in the old days of horse-drawn ag, you could rotate oats and hay crops with your corn and find a market for any fodder not consumed on the farm.  These days, not so.  California can grown alfalfa to be exported to China, but Iowa not so much.

A little bit of market recognition is the theme of this piece in the NYT, though I suspect the author (Mr. Barber, the chef and foodie) is drastically oversimplifying. (Yes. mustard makes a good rotation crop for the soil, and can be cooked/prepared for human consumption. But being able to provide mustard greens to chefs and CSA's over an extended period is probably not realistic.  If you're planting greens in the garden, you know you want succession planting to extend the season, which is doable in small plots but possibly not on the scale of a farm.)  Despite my doubts, it is a good step towards greater realism on the food movement, at least that part of the movement which reads the Times.

The MCP on Abramson's Pay

It occurs to me that a bureaucrat, even a female bureaucrat, might look askance at the controversy over Ms. Abramson's pay at the NYTimes.  (I'm referring to allegations that she was paid less than her male predecessor, though the Times claims her total package was more.)

In the bureaucracy, when someone moves up to replace the boss, you don't normally start equal with the departing boss.  For example, an instance where a co-worker was promoted to be my boss: her salary was totally independent of the departing boss.  The slot was classified as GS-14, so her pay would have been the lowest step in the GS-14 scale that gave her a raise.  For example, if the old boss was a GS-14, step 8, making $70,000, and the co-worker was a GS-13, step 3, making $55,000, she would become a GS-14 step 2, making $56,000 (all figures are b.s.), allowing her to get step increases over the years that would take her up to GS-14, step 10 making $75,000 (more allowing for inflation adjustments).

I guess maybe that's the difference with pay in the private sector--when you hire a boss it's a new negotiation and a new market; with bureaucrats the pay is the intersection of the personal history and the job's classification. 

[Update--corrected spelling of name]

Priorities for a Self-Driving Car

Sounds like Google has its priorities right--they demoed their self-driving cars again.

"Acknowledging that freeway driving is a positive step toward safer driving, Christopher Urmson, a former Carnegie Mellon University computer scientist who now heads the project, was clear in saying it would not have impact equivalent to a robot car that could safely move the elderly from one location to another."

No accidents in 700,000 miles of driving sounds good to me.  I used to think of myself as a good, slightly above average and somewhat more cautious driver than the average but I've had three accidents in my life. Haven't driven near 700,000 miles, maybe 250,000?

Reinventing Government--How Soon We Forget

Remember Al Gore?  And his reinventing government?  Apparently neither GAO nor USDA do.

A quote from a new GAO report:

In fiscal year 2012, USDA policy on supervisory ratios did not align with Office of Personnel Management (OPM) guidance that states that an analytical approach can help agencies achieve the right balance of supervisory and nonsupervisory positions to support their missions. Instead, USDA's policy stated that all its agencies, regardless of their missions, should aim for a target ratio of one supervisor for at least nine employees (1:9). USDA officials were not able to provide a documented basis for this target ratio. In addition, USDA did not ensure that the service center agencies calculated their supervisory ratios the same way. As a result, USDA did not receive comparable information on supervisory ratios.

 Now I firmly believe that Al's National Performance Review  included an initiative to reduce the number of supervisors (though I don't see it highlighted in the linked document).  I remember because in ASCS what happened was that work units were renamed without much real change in function.  I also remember because my branch ended up growing to 14 or so people, more than I could effectively manage, particularly given my weakness for taking on additional projects.  (Though I can't really blame Al for that growth.)

I haven't read the report, just the summary, but IMHO a fixed supervisor/employee ratio makes no sense.

Maps Today and Yesteryear

I remember my college history 101 course.  Part of the exercises was taking mimeographed maps and drawing the outlines of the various historical entities (like the boundaries of the Roman empire).

Compare that with today--take for example this Vox set of 40 maps which explain the Middle East.  The Internet and the computer make graphics so much better, and more available than we had 50 years ago.  And that's totally ignoring GIS.

Economists say our productivity is no longer increasing as fast as it once did.  I suspect the problem may be their statistics aren't up to the task of measuring the modern economy.