Mormonism, Progressivism, and Utopianism

Via Marginal Revolution, I came to this plan to build "New Vista" developments in Vermont for millions of residents, based apparently on ideas of Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism. The son of the industrial diamond maker has the money behind the plan and is busily buying up Vermont land and making enemies of some of the locals.

The plan reminds me of a scheme I ran across when reading in Country Life literature; it probably was a proposal at one of the Country Life conferences in the 1920's.  It too was a plan for a very organized town which incorporated all the necessities: agriculture, commerce, transportation, community services, etc.   Never went anywhere much, although perhaps you can see some of the same ideas in the New Deal, in the "green" towns, like Greenbelt, MD and the Resettlement Administration's projects.

And of course pieces of this pop up everywhere in American history, from the town settlements of the early New England Puritans to the utopian schemes of New Harmony and others. More recently we see the seasteading movement of the libertarians.

Trump and Lawsuits

I'd like to know how many lawsuits Trump or his enterprises have filed, how many have been filed against them, and the won-settled-lost figures for each category

When I wrote the above sentence, I was suffering a loss of faith in the Internet: I should have known better.

"An exclusive USA TODAY analysis of legal filings across the United States finds that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee and his businesses have been involved in at least 3,500 legal actions in federal and state courts during the past three decades. They range from skirmishes with casino patrons to million-dollar real estate suits to personal defamation lawsuits.

Read the whole thing.

Bureaucrats: Bulwark of the Constitution?

That's the position the prominent law professor Eric Posner seems to take in his op-ed for the Times:

"Mr. Trump’s biggest obstacle to vast power is not the separation of powers but the millions of federal employees who are supposed to work for him. Most of these employees have a strong sense of professionalism and are dedicated to the mission of their agency. They don’t take kindly to arbitrary orders from above. As President Harry Truman said ahead of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s presidency: “He’ll sit here, and he’ll say, ‘Do this! Do that!’ And nothing will happen.”

To make things happen, Mr. Trump will need to get loyalists into leadership positions of the agencies, but to do so, he will need the cooperation of the Senate (or he will need to aggressively exploit his recess appointment powers). Moreover, the small number of politically appointed leaders enjoy only limited control of the mass of civil servants. These employees can drag their feet, leak to the press, threaten to resign and employ other tactics to undermine Mr. Trump’s initiatives if they object to them. They’re also hard to fire, thanks to Civil Service protections."

I don't think the Founding Fathers saw this role for bureaucrats, but I think Prof. Posner is right, particularly in the Federal context.  In other countries with more centralized bureaucracies, maybe a politician can topple the bureaucratic bulwark, but in the U.S.  not so.   I'd quibble a bit about the "professionalism": conflicting alliances with Congress and private interests may be as important..

When politicians, like the Republicans now, go after bureaucrats in the VA or IRS, they should remember there's a reason we have civil service rules. 

A Small Defense of Trump

I pride myself on being able to focus on nuts and bolts of implementation.  With that in mind, I'll offer a small defense of Donald Trump. The story briefly: he holds a fundraiser for vets early in the year, claims to have raised $6 million, of which $1 million came from him.  The media, notably the Post, pressed him on who and when, and yesterday he announced the details.  It turns out he didn't write his check until last week.  The mean-minded, which often includes me, take that as a sign he wouldn't have given without the media attention.

That's surely one story which fits the known facts.  But there's an alternative version of  what might have happened. Trump does the fundraiser without really planning the details of implementation. He does intend to make the donation.  What I haven't seen yet is the details of the handling of the money, whether donors wrote checks to the recipients or whether the money was routed through a checking account.  It's also not clear who determined the recipients--Trump, his aides, or the donors.  Once the media got on his case, Trump's people slapped together what was revealed at the news conference.

Bottomline: While I won't convict Trump of lying about the donations, I will say there's a strong case he and his people were inefficient bureaucrats, proving they fail at implementation.

For the bad case see TPM

Muhammad Ali RIP

Sometime I'll write about my memories of him, but today RIP.

Too Good Not to Steal

Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns, & MOney writes"

"You lose a war against the United States, we sell you fighter planes.  You fight a war alongside the United States, we sell you fighter planes.  You beat the United States in a war, we sell you fighter planes:"

 The best bit is the title of the post. 

One Hundred Years of Change

Slate has this post relaying a study on superstitions prevalent in the early 1900's.  While their discussion is interesting,  I'm more struck by the what they show about the changes in society.  The average American these days has no contact with horses, breadshelves, buckskin, babies dying, hoes or rakes. etc.

Ingenuity on the Phishing Front

Just got this email.  You have to applaud the ingenuity of the phishers.

Wells Fargo Online Banking,

Your account was recently accessed from a location we're
not familiar with. Please review the activity details below
and specify if that was you or not:

Location: Germany
Time: Yesterday at 5:52 AM EDT
Location estimated based on IP=87.118.101.175

If anything looks unfamiliar, Wells Fargo will help you secure
your account to prevent people in the future from
accessing your account without permission.
Wells Fargo Online Banking
 

Bureaucracy at Jutland

Brad DeLong blogs often about the day-to-day events of various wars.  Recently he's been posting on the battle of Jutland, the biggest naval battle of WWI and the subject of controversy ever since.

On the British side part of the issue has been the relationship between Admiral Jellicoe, the overall commander of the British forces, and Admiral Beatty, the commander of the most important subordinate force. The first was cautious, the second not.  The first was older, the second a young whipper-snapper.  Beatty had the battle cruisers, fast and hard-hitting, but vulnerable, ultimately their trade-offs between striking power and armor were judged to be bad choices

The Brits had superior numbers, the Germans had better ships.  The Brits had controlled the seas for centuries, the Germans were the upstarts. The battle itself was inconclusive--the Brits suffered more losses, but maintained control of the seas.  Both sides arguably had chances to do better, possibly even to win a decisive victory. Between the personalities, the So there's a lot of room for historians to come up with different narratives

Excerpts from tooday's post, which in turn is excerpts from a book:

"As discussed in Chapter 4, Evan-Thomas had not been favoured with a copy of BCFOs [Beatty's orders]. Had he been, he would have found informative Beatty’s ‘Instructions for Concentrating Battle Cruisers when Spread, and Forming Order of Battle’, for while these injunctions were framed with individual battlecruisers, rather than a squadron of battleships, in mind, the impression they impart of the thrust of BCF lore is unmistakable:

A sudden alteration of course by the ship sighting the enemy is seen by those on either side of her far more rapidly than any signal could be sent, and, being an almost certain indication of an enemy having been sighted it should be acted upon immediately. All ships that may be required to support must proceed to do so until they know definitely that they will not be required. The immediate sequel to concentrating is forming Order of Battle and engaging the enemy. In future this will be done so far as possible without signal, and each Captain is to use his discretion in handling his ship as he considers that the Admiral would wish.... Each detached ship should, at her discretion, close and engage the enemy without waiting for further orders.... Ships must never suppose that the absence of a signal implies that any given action is not sanctioned by the Flagship; on the contrary it usually denotes that the Admiral relies on each ship to take whatever action may be necessary without waiting to be told.... The sole object of these instructions is to enable ships to understand beforehand the principles of rapid co-operation, so that the enemy may be brought to action at the earliest possible moment without any ship needing or wishing to wait for detailed orders from the Admiral.

To point out again that Evan-Thomas’s ignorance of BCFOs was not mainly his fault is to emphasize again the divergence between the tactical regimes of the Battle Fleet and the BCF, and more specifically, between the habits of thought expected of their respective junior flag-officers. But if one ferrets around in the ‘70 closely printed pages’ of GFBOs, one finds, amongst the ‘mass of detail which should have been common knowledge’, ‘initiative’ injunctions which, while designed to preserve the unity of a deployed battle-line, are at least partly transferable in sense to Barham’s dilemma at 2.32...."

 My point is simply that you find bureaucracy everywhere, and knowledge of and compliance with instructions is important.

Convenience, Waste, and Nutrition

Cornell gets credit/blame for initiating the rise of sliced apples, which has increased sales of apples, in this study.

That's just the tip of the iceberg.  In our local Safeway, the amount of cooler space devoted to packaged salad green mixes has exploded, as has the number which my wife has bought in the last year.  And what I thought was a temporary display of guacamole and other dips keyed to the Super Bowl stationed just inside the doors has mutated into a permanent display of packages of things like fresh pineapple chunks, etc.

In some ways the trend is good.  I assume there's less waste of food; even ugly apples can yield good slices. I don't see people being as picky over the box of salad greens as they are over a head of lettuce. And possibly the location of waste in the food chain shifts, more at the processing plant, less at the store.  It's convenient--the labor of cutting up a pineapple or making guacamole is centralized and more efficient than the ordinary househusband doing it.  It saves shopping time--by standardizing (the academic "in" term is "commoditizing" the shopper needs only to grab a box.

In other ways the trend is bad.It increases the amount of packaging material which needs to be disposed of.  It encourages consumption, leading to obesity.  Tradeoffs everywhere.