Katznelson Is Successful and Wrong (in Part)

Ira Katznelson has succeeded in convincing the conventional wisdom that FDR worked with Southern racists to limit the scope of New Deal legislation so that blacks were not aided.  While that's a smal part of his most recent book, "Fear Itself" , it seems to be the meme which has most resonated with liberals.

Given the scope of the New Deal, you'd have to examine many legislative histories to confirm or dispute the general thesis.  I don't know the truth of others, but I do not believe it is an accurate description of the reasons for circumscribing the coverage of Social Security in the original act.  Katznelson.  I've noted this before in a Post Wonkblog discussion of the book, by point to:

an interesting counterpoint by Larry DeWitt, a public historian with the Social Security Administration. Here's the abstract:

The author concludes that the racial-bias thesis is both conceptually flawed and unsupported by the existing empirical evidence. The exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from the early program was due to considerations of administrative feasibility involving tax-collection procedures. The author finds no evidence of any other policy motive involving racial bias.

I'd add to DeWitt's work by pointing to the expansion of SS coverage to farmers. (See this IRS publication.)  It's personal to me, because I remember my parents becoming eligible in 1950 (from an SSA history):

The amendments of 1950 brought 9 million workers into covered employment (Christgau 1960), including regularly employed farm and domestic workers and, with some exceptions, self-employed persons. These new workers would generally not have much in the way of covered earnings from 1937 to 1950. Except for those just beginning their careers, newly covered workers would thus receive low retirement benefits. A "new start" formula was instituted that allowed the computation of benefits on the basis of average monthly wages after 1950 (if that yielded higher benefits). Similar to the 1939 amendments, this policy reflected a choice by policymakers to award adequate retirement benefits to persons who may have worked (and paid taxes) in covered employment for only a short period of time.

 I'm reminded of this point because among the family papers I just inherited was correspondence concerning the difficulty of establishing my father's birth date (in 1889) to become eligible for SS. The bottom line was that SSA had become a functioning bureaucracy which was capable of handling the extra covered workers, and IRS was capable of writing IRS pub 51.  And the resistance of the farm lobbies, like the American Farm Bureau, had been overcome.  (See this NYTimes article on the differing attitudes of Farm Bureau and National Grange.) This expansion was passed enough though Southern Democrats retained their power in Congress.

While the evidence is clear to me, I'm not holding my breath as I wait for academic historians to recognize this error.

Roger the Dodger as a Republican Indicator

Via Marginal Revolution, Wonkblog has the results of a survey of Republicans and Democrats, which includes their favorite athletes. 

I was struck by the second favorite athlete of male Republicans: Roger Staubach.  I attended most all of the home football games of my university, and my junior year we played Navy at home. (We had delusions of grandeur then, with a quarterback who went on briefly to start for the NY Giants plus the first soccer-style place kicker.)  

Wikipedia says, after a short stint in relief against the Minnesota of Carl Eller:

"A week later, against Cornell, with the offense misfiring, Hall of Fame Coach Wayne Hardin decided to put Staubach into the game to see if he could spark the team's offense. He led Navy to six touchdowns, throwing for 99 yards and two touchdowns while running for 88 yards and another score as Navy won 41–0.^[3]"

 It's an indicator of the age of Republican men that Roger is second most popular.

Trump and Agriculture

Politico has a piece on the A-Team Trump has assembled to advise him on agricultural policy.

I wonder why he has the support of so many agricultural leaders when his economic team and foreign policy team are so weak? 

I suspect a mixture of these things are operating:

• Trump couldn't care less about agriculture, so there's little need for the team and Trump to agree on issues.  Trump can rubber stamp almost anything they come up with. In contrast Trump has positions on foreign affairs and economics which turn off a lot of the "establishment".
• rural areas are strongly pro-Trump, so the ag team represents catering to their interests.  The picture's not so clear when it comes to other areas
• academics are less important to the ag establishment than they are in the other areas.  Like economics, the ag team doesn't seem to have many academics.
• ag leaders on the team are either less interested in free trade and immigration than those not on the team, or they figure they might be stuck with Trump as president and it's worth it to gain positions where they can affect policy (because they know a Trump presidency isn't going to pay much attention to agriculture.
• Something completely different.  :-)

Location, Location, Data Center Location

Reston happens to be very well located for Internet purposes, as shown by this business expansion plan.

It was near enough the Pentagon to be an early presence in the DARPAnet, and things just went on from there. 

Olympic History: Amateurs and Professionals

Back in my youth the Olympics were the realm of amateurs, and a lot of energy was devoted to policing the line between amateurs and professionals. I guess amateurism was the last refuge of the WASP hierarchical society; sports was limited those who had the money and the leisure to train for events and participate in meets.  My impression is the horse events, like dressage and jumping, are the remaining holdouts, but maybe I'm missing the sports without sufficient appeal to pull in a paying audience.

Speaking of audiences, in my youth track and field was the fourth big participation sport, with horse racing and boxing the big audience sports.  (Early TV had the Friday night fights; yes, a professional fight every Friday night, to go along with the bigger events like the Carmen Basilio-Sugar Ray Robinson fights.)  The interest in track and field has dwindled, and the shrinking interest is shown in the meager coverage it gets outside of the Olympics.

Meanwhile the big three of basketball, baseball and football have gained prominence.  One benefit to those sports, as opposed to track and field or boxing or horse racing, is statistics.  Particularly these days you can lose yourself in the statistical analysis of players and games.   Track and field events don't have that complexity; the only thing they have is ever more refined measurement of results. 

Olympic Memories: Bikila

As a confirmed liberal, you know I enjoyed the victory of Abebe Bikila, the first sub-Saharan African to win a gold medal in the (1960) Olympics, running the marathon bare-footed.  Little did we know that not only was this a symbol of the decolonization of Africa, but also of the coming dominance of East Africans generally in distance events. 

Olympic Memories: Korbut

Olga Korbut defined charisma.  She seemed to come from nowhere in the 1972 Olympics, tiny and fearless. In my memory she was the first Iron Curtain athlete to win a following in the West, because her personality forced its way past our political prejudices.

WSJ Is Unfair to Dairy

Disregard the article (which is about attempts to regulate methane from cattle) and focus on the picture.(Article may be behind a pay wall.)  It's one cow, grazing, but what's unfair about it is how dirty the cow is. I can't figure it out. Our cows would look like that only sometimes, after a long winter when they've been in the barn all the time, except on good days when they might be let out for an hour or so while we cleaned the gutters.  The cows would have been lying down, and come into contact with manure from the gutters, perhaps getting their tails wet, and slapping the manure around.

The landscape seems to me to be a fall one, not spring, although the article is on California, with which I'm not familiar.

It's also odd that the cow is alone, though that's probably an artifact of picture selection--a single cow being more photogenic than a herd.

Berries and Cherries

Who knew that South Korea is importing loads of US blueberries and cherries, even more since the recent trade pact?  That's part of this article on Trump's effect on South Korea.

What was striking to me was how cheap the cherries were.  The article doesn't specify the size, but $8 isn't that much more than I'd expect to pay for cherries in my local Safeway.

Eat Cheese, Support Your Local Dairy

Wall Street Journal reports on the plight of dairy farmers--cheese stocks have soared as the dollar has strengthened. Commodity prices go up and down; the job of farmers is to ride the waves.