Housing Segregation: Is Government Tail or Dog?

TaNehisi Coates has popularized some academic research showing how geographically segregated America is.  Sometimes the assertion is that white-dominated government programs have enforced and propagated segregated housing. 

The assertion is true.  But it's also incomplete.

Emily Badger in the Post reports on"...new research,[studying]  how the arrival of blacks in 10 northern cities at the time influenced white behavior. Over the course of the first three decades after the turn of the century, coinciding with the start of the Great Migration of blacks out of the South, this pattern accelerated: As blacks arrived in northern neighborhoods, more whites left. By the 1920s, there were more than three white departures for every black arrival."

These patterns mostly preceded formal and legal patterns (restrictive covenants, redlining).

The Post article doesn't mention it, but there's also the phenomena of chain migration leading to ethnic neighborhoods.  We can see that in American history as Irish, Italians, East European Jews,  Germans, each settled in distinct neighborhoods.  I suspect that's the result of mixed forces: the comfort and familiarity of living close to others from the same country, sometimes the same town and the economics of buying and selling--the newcomer is willing to pay higher prices (usually in the form of crowding) for housing than other potential buyers, so you get a force which leads to segregation.  (See Schelling and his general theory of tipping.) 

What the economist doesn't throw into the mix, at least as I remember the essay which is 45 years old now, is the emotions generated by attachments to home and fear of the "other".  Nor does he address the effects of a general level of bias.   

So, in my mind, we have a vicious circle which can start relatively innocently, is propelled by economic logic, and becomes intermixed with emotion and bias, leading finally to the erection of legal and formal barriers.  We saw the extreme case of that in South Africa in the days of apartheid, and in Nazi Germany.

So my answer to the question asked in the title: government is often, at least in the US, more the tail than the dog.  

The next question is: can you make government the dog and reverse the vicious circle? That's what we've been trying, fitfully, off and on since the New Deal.

Bureaucratuc Conflict in Acreage Reporting

Just read a report of research on the effectiveness of resolving civil wars by joining the opposing armies into a unified command.  (I forget where--Crooked Timber perhaps.)  The bottomline was that incorporating two armies into one didn't work to create peace.  If the underlying conditions were right, there might not be failure of peace to hold, but it wasn't a magic bullet.

So too in bureaucracy, maybe.  Different bureaucracies have different cultures and norms, and different interests.  The idea of helping farmers to file one acreage report to serve both crop insurance and farm programs is nice, but it doesn't resolve the underlying tensions.  Take this from a recent NASCOE post:

NASCOE provided DAFP leaders several of the documents that some of the Approved Insurance Providers have mailed producers soliciting them to not report to FSA but to them instead. This has been troubling to county office field level personnel and NASCOE membership. ACRSI was designed to be able to transfer common data between RMA and FSA. The two pilots have reinforced that FSA is good at taking comprehensive acreage reports. Regardless of what some of these AIP documents are saying, producers should have every confidence that FSA stands prepared to continue to accept the producer supplied aerial photos and complete the producer’s comprehensive acreage report.

Presumably crop insurance agents get paid for taking acreage reports just as FSA positions depend on taking acreage reports.  So each bureaucracy has a rational motive to try to monopolize acreage reports. In addition, the bureaucracy which deals with the farmer face-to-face will reap some benefits; whether in supplemental information or simply loyalty, the benefits are real.

These are interesting times.

World Hunger at an End?

The title cheats, because Bloomberg is just saying the world may have too much food, as reported by the World Health Organization in a study:

 "The main takeaway? Excess weight has become a far bigger global health problem than weighing too little. While low body weight is still a substantial health risk for parts of Africa and South Asia, being too heavy is a much more common hazard around the globe."

To someone who remembers famines in India and China, this is incredible (something I seem to be writing more every year).

Directives--the Past Repeats Itself

From a NASCOE report of meetings with DC officials:

" Chris gave an update on his initiative to review, consolidate and update directives. The goals of the initiative are to update handbooks and to limit actual policy to notices and handbooks. He is updated every two weeks as to the status of the review. He has also started a process where each amendment or notice is tracked through the clearance process to identify where any potential delay may occur. This should result in reduced time for directives to make it through clearance."

45 years ago ASCS had similar problems with directives:

• too many directives and the relationship among them was not clear to the field
• policy direction outside of the directives system
• slow clearance processes in DC.

EU Goes Back to SUpply Management

Via Chris Clayton at DTN,on the problems of dairy in the EU

A key to the EU aid package involved reestablishing some form of supply management for Europe's dairy farmers. The call to regulate milk production comes just one year after the EU abolished 30 years of dairy production quotas. The lift of the quota, coupled with a lack of increased market access, translated into a glut of milk on the market now across Europe. The new aid package calls for reducing milk production on a voluntary basis for up to six months with a possibility of extending those voluntary measures later.

Hijacking in the Past

Vox has a discussion of the airliner hijackings we used to have in the US (and elsewhere).

I remember the time, didn't remember we reached 130 in 1968-72, but a lot.  It's part of the fact that that period was also more violent: deaths due to terrorism were higher before 9/11 than after.  The discussion touches on the idea that publicity spurred the hijackings, making them in some respects similar to today's mass shootings.  You get a nut who wants attention, in 1970 he hijacked a plane, in 2016 he shoots a few people.

Creating a Context for Facts

The older I get the more I believe that humans create a context, stories, in which the "facts" they perceive make sense.  A neat demonstration of this truth is found in this video at Kottke
in which six photographers were given a person as a subject (short session), but each was given a different description/story about the person.  The results of their sessions show how the story influenced the pictures.

The Golden Rule (for Livestock Producers"

" breed the best of the best (that you have) and eat the rest."

Wisdom from Walter Jeffries.

Japan Agriculture and Cuba Agriculture

A fast check of the CIA factbook shows me that Cuba and Japan have roughly equivalent amounts of arable land.  Cuba is a third the size of Japan, but have about a third of the land arable, while Japan has about 10 percent.  John Phipps points to a piece on Cuba here, which includes the statement that Cuba imports 70 to 80 percent of its food. Meanwhile, Modern Farmer has a piece on Japanese agriculture after the Fukushima tsunami.

Though reforms instituted in the aftermath of World War II had drastically improved the California-size country’s self-sufficiency, the ensuing decades saw farmers abandoning the profession in droves. In 1965, 73 percent of the calories consumed in Japan were being produced there, compared with only 39 percent by 2010. During that same period, the area of land being cultivated had shrunk from 15 million to 11 million acres. The average age of a Japanese farmer climbed from 59 to 66 between 1995 and 2011.[emphasis added]

According to the CIA factbook, Cuba's population is 11 million, Japan's 126 million. Bottom line: Japanese agriculture is several times more productive than Cuba's.

Purchase One of Each

"I am a good deal in want of a House Joiner & Bricklayer, (who really understand their profession) & you would do me a favor by purchasing one of each, for me."

Via John Fea  a letter from George Washington in 1784.

A reminder that buying and selling people isn't unique to today's sports world, it also went on centuries ago.  And at least from the language, we can't tell whether George was after a slave or an indentured servant.