Pancho's Life

 In a NYTimes story on the use of a brain implant to convert thoughts into speech. 

Before his stroke, Pancho [who lost his speech because of a stroke after an accident] had attended school only up to sixth grade in his native Mexico. With remarkable determination, he has since earned a high school diploma, taken college classes, received a web developer certificate and begun studying French.

“I think the car wreck got me to be a better person, and smarter too,” he emailed.

Sometimes it seems we have too much choice, too many abilities, and being forced to concentrate can help.  Or maybe that's my Pollyanna streak.  

 

Is Email Effective?

 It turns out a researcher at Illinois State University did a survey in 2019 of Illinois FSA personnel (CED's, DD's, etc.) which concluded:

The USDA Farm Service Agency replaced paper mailings with GovDelivery electronic communication in order to increase efficiency and reduce costs. This case study presents evidence from one state indicating a perception among local FSA officials that GovDelivery does not allow them to effectively serve their constituents. A gap in reliable rural Internet service and low usage of smartphones in place of rural broadband may contribute to the extremely low open rates for GovDelivery email notifications. Findings suggest that electronic-only communication does not allow the agency to effectively engage with farm owners, operators, and managers.

Boerngen, Maria A. “Efficiencyfectiveness of Paperless Communication from the USDA Farm Service Agency.” Journal of ASFMRA, 2019, pp. 27–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26872597. Accessed 13 July 2021.

LBJ Was a Great If Flawed President

 Noah Smith discusses the "War on Poverty"

It's obvious to me that LBJ was the greatest domestic president of my lifetime, excluding FDR since I wasn't aware of him.  

I suspect future historians will decrease the weight they give to Vietnam so he'll rise in their assessment.

Racism and Sex

 The Times had a graphic 3 years ago showing the results of analyzing the earnings of black and white men and women.  The top graphic compared the results for lifetime earnings of men who grew up in the top 20 percent considering parental wealth and neighborhoods.  It showed that such black men were about half as likely to maintain their status.

"Black boys raised in America, even in the wealthiest families and living in some of the most well-to-do neighborhoods, still earn less in adulthood than white boys with similar backgrounds, according to a sweeping new study that traced the lives of millions of children."

What's strangely interesting is that black women maintain their status, doing as well as white women.  That simple fact undermines explanations on both the left and right:

• the right can't argue that blacks are less intelligent when black women do as well as white women
• the left can't argue that simple racism, prejudice against blacks, is the cause.

I hasten to add a couple points:

• black men have always been seen as more threatening than black women, so it makes sense that prejudice against them is stronger.  That's just one factor to consider.
• While the study matched the black and white samples on money and neighborhood, that doesn't mean they weren't comparing apples and oranges. Some things to consider--how many generations of wealth did the whites have behind them, as opposed to the blacks.  They might have compared nouveaux riche to established wealth. They also might have compared the children of black professionals who thrived in the old segregated society but who had to compete in the integrated society following the civil rights movement. 

Metaphor--Society, Nuclear Reactors, and Pandemic

 Long discussion in Post of the possible causes for increase in murders this year in America (not occurring elsewhere if article is right).

Thinking of a metaphor for human society--as a nuclear reactor, with police as the control rods absorbing or not the excess neutrons, thereby damping or permitting greater interactions. 

One might expand the applicability of the metaphor to the pandemic, with the control rods being the vaccines, masks, lockdowns, etc. 

You'd have to expand the discussion to include the rates of the radioactivity of the alternative materials which could be used for a reactor.  (I'd assume that radium, for example, could explode given the right setup.)  

Back to homicide--it seems to me one effect of the pandemic likely has been to change the characteristics of the public, those who are active in exchanges with others.  During the past year the "public" has become younger and poorer as the old and the better-off have been much better able to reduce their time in public.  That might well mean that the remaining "public" is more reactive, somewhat as if the uranium was more highly enriched.  

More on Sin

 I just posted on the similarity I saw between the revivalist/evangelical spirit of the Great Awakenings and the "wokeism" of the current day. 

I ran across this statement in an interview with a black evangelical minister:

Green: One of the things that has really struck me in recent national conversations about race is that a lot of people—especially secular white people—seem to be struggling with something that I can’t help but identify as sin: this recognition that we live in a broken world, and that all of us, by nature, hurt others and do things that are wrong. This seems to be what all of the people who joined anti-racism book clubs are struggling with—the realization of their own sinfulness when it comes to race.

Now I'm struggling a bit: I can buy that people naturally do wrong, sin. I can buy that the "woke" movement is adopting the strategy of the great awakening: convicting people of their sinful nature and asking for reformation.  But I'm not convinced it's an effective strategy for changing society or an accurate description of how things go wrong.  Need more thinking on it. 

 

The Bureaucrat's Necessity: Forms in the UK

 I designed and redesigned a fair number of forms during my career. We had a Forms Management Branch in ASCS when I started.  The program specialist would take his problem to them and together they'd work together to get a master for the printer. 

Overtime I started to design forms in Wordperfect tables.  Got quite good at it, if I do say so. I think Forms eventually got most forms converted to Wordperfect. I haven't checked the online forms in years so I don't know whether they've now converted to PDF fill-ins or to HTML.  

Anyway, the UK also has forms.  This post says they're doing 6 percent a year (I hope that's not true, though if they have the sort of expansion of programs we've had in agriculture in recent years they might be expanding the number that fast).  They would like to have all HTML forms.  It's interesting to see how differently their government works than ours, as I believe I've noted before. 

Great Awakening and Wokeism

 "Great Awakenings" in American history are periods of religious revivals. Wikipedia says: "The Awakenings all resulted from powerful preaching that gave listeners a sense of personal guilt, their sin, and the need of salvation by Christ."

There are some parallels between such awakenings and the current enthusiasm for woke.  

This was stimulated by Ross Douthat in the NYTimes who wrote:

What's really inflaming today's fights, though, is that the structural-racist diagnosis isn't being offered on its own. Instead it's yoked to two sweeping theories about how to fight the problem it describes.

First, there is a novel theory of moral education, according to which the best way to deal with systemic inequality is to confront its white beneficiaries with their privileges and encourage them to wrestle with their sins.

That's a similar strategy to the revivalist appeals prominent in the Great Awakenings--you convince the sinner of his depravity and the essential need for repentance as a prerequisite to God's grace.  A further step is to examine your actions every day to determine if you are following a righteous path--for predestinarians that's the way to feel some confidence that you're one of the "elect", that you're saved from hell.

FSA Employee Is Credited

Politico has a long piece on FSA loans to black farmers.  It's not full of praise, to say the least.  Not sure whether I'll come back to it, but it does end with this nice bit

What helped Cleaver was a woman in the FSA office who took the time to explain the processes.

“She was like an angel. I had been going through the loan officers and the HBCU [historically Black colleges and universities] that was here and they couldn't get anything done,” he said. “[She] held my hand and she told me everything step by step. She was patient, she was polite.”

I'm sorry Politico doesn't provide email addresses for its reporters so I could compliment Ximena Bustillo for including this.  I think in years of following reporting on FSA and race it's the first time I've seen a compliment published.

Collecting Statistics: Problems and Progress

GovExec had an article on the problems with data collection during the pandemic from the Covid Tracking Project.

Above and beyond any individual reporting practice, we believe that it was the lack of explanations from state governments and, most crucially, the CDC that led to misuse of data and wounded public trust. We tried our best to provide explanations where possible, and we saw transformation when we were able to get the message across to the public. Data users who were frustrated or even doubtful came to trust the numbers. Journalists reported more accurately. Hospitals could better anticipate surges.

If we could make just one change to the way state and federal COVID-19 data were reported, it would be to make an open acknowledgment of the limitations of public-health-data infrastructure whenever the data is presented. And if we could make one plea for what comes next, it’s that these systems receive the investment they deserve.

[Updated: Technology Review describes   a consortium to collect and standardize covid data into one database for research purposes. It sounds a bit klugey but that's the penalty for prioritizing privacy and silos over a rationalized centralized system. The question is whether we'll wake up and fund continuing efforts of this sort.}