Thank You, Joe Manchin

As pointed out here, Joe Manchin won reelection in an incredibly adverse position and time. And his reelection is now key to Democrats winning control of the Senate.

More on Vaccinating

I posted yesterday about a chance un the 1960's to lay the basis for an efficient way to vaccinate the public.

Today a Post article reinforces that--a quote:

Israel’s vaccine success is made possible by its small size (slighter larger than New Jersey) and the efficiencies of its nationalized health system, in which all 9 million citizens hold identity cards and register their electronic medical files with one of the country’s four national health maintenance organizations (HMOs).

Israel also maintains a national vaccination registry, first designed for childhood vaccinations, that will be used in the coming weeks to monitor immediate and long-term progress of the coronavirus vaccine program.

I suspect one of the arguments in the 1960's against a national identity system was the specter of the Holocaust; people being numbered, tattooed, and subject to totalitarian rule, at the whim of the state. 

While I continue to believe that efficiency would have been, and would be, enhanced by a national identity system, I have to concede the disadvantages which are real.  One worth mentioning here: the greater security provided by our dispersion of data--the eggs in one basket proverb--especially in light of the election and the Southwinds hackl 

 

If Only Back in the 1960's

 There was an aborted effort to establish a national identifier in the 1960's, using the Social Security number. IIRC it was some nerds/bureaucrats suggesting it, but it was quickly killed amidst a concern over privacy, not to mention the sign of the beast. 

Over the decades the U.S. has come up with jury-rigged substitutes, Real ID being the latest. In the last century we had a process for passing information on men who were ordered to provide child support between states.  But we don't have the sort of process which bureaucrats would like.  If we did, it would alleviate problems on updating voter rolls and on tracking coronavirus vaccinations. 

We'll continue with our jury-rigging process for the foreseeable future.

More on Gen Perna and Vaccine

 In addition to points in my previous post, a couple of other things occurred to me:

• doing a checklist, or rather a series of checklists, would have been good.  Even though the decision had been made to allow state and local governments to design the system to do the jabs and report the status, my guess is it would have been possible to specify different parts of the operation in detail.  For example, actually giving the vaccination could start with removing the vial from the deep freeze, warming it, etc. etc.  At some point a recording and reporting process would take place.
• one problem with using past processes for vaccinations is that this one has different parameters.  The flu vaccine is requested by the public so you have a sales effort. For covid the attempt is to ration the jabs.  For me, I'm about to hit my 80th birthday, but I've no underlying health condition.  When and how do I learn VA has reached me in the queue? Or do I just call around to pharmacies or Kaiser until someone tells me to come in.  I don't know. 
• I see a report that WV is doing well, perhaps because they gave the job to the National Guard.  I can see how that could fix the notification problem, and perhaps even the checklist point.

Black Farmers in the Biden Administration

 There's been a number of pieces relating to black farmers recently.  Some are keyed to the new administration and controversy over whether Vilsack is a good appointment. Several quote statements from different black farmer organizations.  There seems to be more these days than there were when the original Pigford suit was filed. 

I found this Politico piece interesting, especially including this paragraph:

Horne said her data shows there was a 57 percent decline in the number of Black farmers in North Carolina from 1954 to 1969, with the number dropping from 22,625 to 9,687. During the same period, farms operated by white farmers dropped from 201,819 to 106,275 — a 47 percent decline.

 It's the first time I've seen a direct comparison of this kind.  Maybe somewhere there's an economist who has gone a bit deeper into the statistics. What I'd particularly like to see is a breakdown by farm size.  I suspect the distribution of black farms was proportionally weighted towards smaller farmers, and I suspect the farms which survived were proportionally weighted towards the larger farmers.  If that was true, what should one conclude?  

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.