Some Sympathy for Gen. Perna

 General Perna is the chief operating officer for Warp Speed, which is now taking some flak for the seemingly slow progress of vaccinating for covid-19.

I never had to deal with his problem, but I have been involved in rolling out programs affecting thousands of counties and a million or so people on a crash basis. The difference between his problems and mine were great:

• the visibility to modern media.  ASCS/FSA programs were visible to local newspapers, but weren't followed nationally or internationally.
• an organizational structure which reached to the end user, the farmer, and one which had long experience in crash programs, dating back to 1933 when it was first set up.
• a program which usually was similar to previous programs--I can't judge how closely the covid-19 program matches the influenza program but it seems quite different.

Just from my back seat position of almost total ignorance, there's some things which didn't happen which should have:

• a tick-tock time schedule. Perna's already apologized for screwing this up. My impression is that there weren't sit-down meetings thrashing through every minute step, which could then be documented in a schedule to establish a base of understanding.
• implementation training. Because a vaccine is just a "jab" in the arm which everyone knows how to give, and because the implementers of the Warp Speed hadn't done this before, it was easy to assume (I assume) that no training was necessary. The reality is that training sessions get everyone on the same page, allow for the identification of areas where silos create problems, and permit exchange of ideas.
• as a former directives person, I suspect whatever directives were issued weren't really in a system.  Part of the problem seems to be lack of delineated authority, but it's also the human tendency to resist systems--to believe that a memo (or these days an email, etc.) handles the immediate problem, without realizing the proliferation of unsystematic directions can worsen problems.

I suspect, given the overall directive of relying on state and local governments to distribute and vaccinate, leaders assumed that those governments had systems in place.  Ass u me.  

I want see to the after-action reports and analyses of the effort to see how wrong this post is.

I also want to restate my sympathy for Perna (unusual for me to feel for a general): doing something new under scrutiny and a time line is a formula for bad public relations.

On Signaling Theory

 Google "signaling theory" and you get links for its use in economics and sociology with this brief explanation:

Signaling theory is useful for describing behavior when two parties (individuals or organizations) have access to different information. Typically, one party, the sender, must choose whether and how to communicate (or signal) that information, and the other party, the receiver, must choose how to interpret the signal.

I see it used fairly often on the Marginal Revolution blog, which raised my curiosity and triggered a line of thought.  One of its uses relates to higher education; the idea being that education is important for the signal it gives to potential employers and others, not so much for the actual learning which may or may not have happened, but for the fact the person got into a college and got through the college, something of a rite of passage.

Some of the people with whom I worked in ASCS/FSA hadn't gone to college, and I've often thought about what differentiated them from the people who did have college.  I don't think it was intelligence so much as self-confidence.  By graduating from college a person learns about herself, signals to herself that she can surmount some obstacles of a certain difficulty.  That signaling is in addition to the signals sent to others.  I suspect it can enable a feedback cycle.  My co-workers who hadn't gone to college hadn't learned that about themselves,  and didn't get the feedback from others.  

Similar psychology works in other fields--my being drafted and spending 1 year, 11 months and 11 days in the USArmy showed me I could do things I hadn't been confident of before.  

I'd encapsulate this as developing a sense of "mastery" in a field, which perhaps is the reverse side of the coin of "impostor syndrome". 

Why Was I Wrong on Trump's Power Over Agencies?

After Trump had been elected president, I remember pontificating to a cousin and his family about the way the deep state would limit Trump's impact, except I was talking in terms of the "iron triangle".   That was conventional wisdom back in the 1960's--the idea being that a combination of the bureaucrats in an agency, the members of Congress on the committees overseeing the agency, and the interest groups lobbying the members and the agency formed a powerful "iron triangle".

With that understanding I've been surprised by the Trump administration's ability to overturn a lot of regulations in a number of different agencies.  So what happened?

A number of things have changed over the last 60 years:

• There's a lot more regulation and regulatory agencies, for one thing, and agencies which existed in the 1960's have been given more regulatory responsibilities.  EPA and OSHA are just two of the new agencies, and FSA/NRCS are an example of the added regulatory authority. I think there's a lot more generalized hostility to regulation now than there used to be, partly because of this expansion.  
• In the 1960's the discussion was more about the ICC or CAB, two agencies which were eliminated in the Carter/Reagan deregulation effort.  In those cases there had been "regulatory capture"; the agencies served the interests of the regulated, less the general public.
• In the 1960's there was a general faith in government, which carried over to endorse the validity of agency regulation. That was one aspect of LBJ's Great Society.  But while the faith was sufficient to create the agencies, it didn't result in forming interest groups which could effectively power the agencies as envisaged in the "iron triangle" theory.
• In the 1960's committee chairmen were powerful, Congressional leadership not so much.  That meant the chairmen could get their way reasonably often, despite the opposition of the President.  With the Gingrich revolution the chairs have diminished power.

Merry Christmas

 I wish everyone a Merry Christmas or Happy Holidays, as they may prefer. 

The Importance of Local Government

 Somewhere in this blog I've mentioned the differences in local government between New York and Virginia.  In New York, outside the cities, the counties are divided into towns for purposes of local road maintenance, tax collection, etc. and into central school districts for schools.  My father was on the Chenango Forks Central School board for a number of years. (You can find a sample of what goes on in a town government in this recent supervisor's email.) 

In Virginia the county handles the schools and other local functions, In NY Broome County has 16 towns, 7 villages, and one city--Binghamton. 

I was struck in reading the Gordon-Reed/Onof book on Thomas Jefferson by a discussion of his letter on local government. In 1816 he was pushing to subdivide Virginia counties into smaller units, specifically in this instance "wards" which would handle local public schools (which Virginia didn't have).  There's a reference to using the areas which were the basis for the militia (I'm guessing companies). He observes that the New England town meetings shook the ground beneath his feet and caused his embargo to fail.

He didn't persuade Virginia to adopt wards/towns. As I've done before, I wonder the effect of this difference in organization.

Robert Putnam in "Bowling Alone" argues for the importance of nongovernmental social organizations as schools for democracy.  If he's right, surely the local government units are as important, if not more so.

A Third CFAP?

 Joe Glauber, former chief economist for USDA, tweets here:

The US farm sector just reported its 4th highest net farm income since 1970 (adjusting for inflation). So why more aid when there are millions out of work? 👇👇👇 https://t.co/HZuW99hyFy

— JoeGlauber--IFPRI (@JoeGlauber1) December 22, 2020

responding to this:

Congress should not give #farmers, who already have numerous safety net programs, more aid. @JoeGlauber1, @dwschanz, and Vince Smith argue congress should aid Americans facing #hunger instead in @thehill. #COVID19 https://t.co/1Ti3ogwWlp

— Philip H🌐xie (@phoxie58) December 22, 2020

Which in turn links to this AEI post.

Over at the Facebook group for FSA employees there was surprise and some consternation at the prospect of doing another round of payments. 

NASCOE has a summary here.

Sometimes I Underestimate the Military

I wasn't impressed by the military during the time I was in the Army; something which is likely reflected at times in my posts here.  But via Lawyers, Guns and Money I was directed to this article on Army anti-drone efforts, which seems impressive. 

The Meanings of Slavery

 I'm not sure what "slavery" meant in the18th and early 19th century.  One meaning obviously was chattel slavery, where a person was enslaved, could be sold, and the status was inherited based on one parent's status.

But what was the "slavery" which the American rebels feared at the hands of the British?  What was the opposite of the , "land of the free" in the Star Spangled Banner--was that also slavery?

One thing that's true--for centuries in many different places the losers in a war might be subject to slavery, or worse.   The New England settlers sold some of their Indian captives into slavery in the Caribbean. Oliver Cromwell sold Irish captives into the Caribbean (though I don't believe their status was inheritable).  Some Native American tribes imposed "slavery" on their war captives, although it seems there was a lot of variety in the patterns. I was surprised to learn that some Pacific Northwest tribes indeed had chattel slavery.  

I've not seen any discussion of whether the rebels really feared being sent into slavery if they lost the war, or whether the use of "slavery" was similar to the current use of "slavery" in connection with socialism by libertarians.

Autonomous Trucks

 Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to a report of Walmarts self-driving trucks, with no safety drivers. 

Tecnology Review and Food

Since I don't get the hard copy version of Technology Review, I'm not sure whether it's one issue, but this is the notation they attach to the beginning of a number of posts on their website:

"This story is one of a series about how hidden innovations produce the foods we eat at the prices we pay."

The big story seems to be: How to train a weeding machine. Does the work of 30 people. It broadens into a discussion of the problems of digitizing vegetable production, starting with Landsat back in 1972 (I remember ASCS had a guy in Houston working on Landsat for a while--big dreams back then.) 

There's also  one on GMO maize in Kenya A comment here--the farmer notes in passing:

"But I still have more crops than some of my neighbors, who sometimes recycle seeds and don’t have very much at all."

That one sentence seems to me to encapsulate the challenges for the small farm/food movement people.  It points to an evolution over decades which will lead to modernized production ag growing the bulk of our calories, with smaller operations producing for the niches.