Fourteen Differences Between Pigs and Dogs

Walt Jeffries has a long interesting post on the differences between pigs and dogs, the differences meaning dogs can go to war with us and pigs can't.

Why We're on the Right Path

I don't think much of Corey Robin; he's too liberal for my taste.

This morning's papers reported that Americans were pessimistic about the country, which isn't an opinion I share.

Why not?  Well, Prof. Robin nicely encapsulated my biggest reason in this post on his students.

Bottomline: I like the melting pot, the reunification of the human race.

[Update: Also see this assessment.]

Cells on the Modern Farm

Life on a Colorado Farm incidentally causes me to realize the benefits of cell phones on modern farms.  When you're farming thousands of acres (not that the writer and husband are), coordinating schedules, even the most chauvinistic--when are you stopping for supper, becomes a big issue, an issue solved by carrying your cell phone with you.

The Importance of Oyster Shell

Oyster shells are important.  Back on the farm we used to buy bags and put out a supply in a separate feeder for the hens.

Why?  See this Modern Farmer post.

[Updated: more on oysters]

The Last White House Garden?

Recently there's not been much publicity about the Obama White House Garden, which I've noted.  Apparently part of that is due to my lagging involvement in social media.  Turns out Obamafoodorama has moved to twitter, it seems. [Updated:  seems I saw that last year, but failed to follow Ms.Gehman Kohan on twitter.]

Anyhow, this week the final spring planting of the garden in Obama's terms of office took place, and the White House posted about it. Mrs. Obama can claim some credit for gains in health.

The really interesting question for a follower of politics and government is: what happens next spring?  Will Bill Clinton be out there planting, or Jane Sanders?  Somehow I don't see Trump's wife doing the planting, nor Mrs. Cruz.

The garden was a personal project of Michelle Obama, meaning it's doomed.  At best the new occupants of the White House will find the money in the budget to continue having the Park Service care for it.  But I remember that President Carter's solar panels were removed by the Reagans.  Each spouse has had her own personal projects, so my prediction is: no garden in 2017.

Mexico and Blacks: Demography

Booker T. Washington noted that the black population of the U.S. was close to that of Mexico.  This was in 1899, in an article in Atlantic Monthly.  Actually 8.8 million.

This aroused my curiosity since Mexican population is now almost 120 million, and black US population is nearly 40 million, so the rates of increase differ. The US demography post in wikipedia notes the US almost quadrupled its population since 1900, which puts the black increase in line with the overall increase.  The Mexican increase was over 8 times.

From wikipedia: "In 1900, the Mexican population was 13.6 million.^[4] During the period of economic prosperity that was dubbed by economists as the "Mexican Miracle", the government invested in efficient social programs that reduced the infant mortality rate and increased life expectancy. These measures jointly led to an intense demographic increase between 1930 and 1980."

Is that an explanation--Mexico improved its social programs more than the U.S. did over that period?  Or was the reproduction rate for the US lower because it was wealthier, even though we're talking about the poorer segment of the US population? 

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.