The Role of Intermediaries

 Started reading Sarah Chayes, "Thieves of State, Why Corruption Threatens Global Security". Early on she generalizes between Eastern Europe after the fall of the Soviet Union and Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban: naive Westerners come into the society, knowing and understanding little, find a "native" who's willing to explain and help and, often, are deluded by the intermediary.  That was her path. She entered Afghanistan in 2001.

Her description ties into an interest of mine I've had for a long time: the role of intermediaries/interpreters.  In American history we start with Squanto (as I first learned, though now scholars write "Tisquantum"). There's a long line of such liaisons, as time goes on often what used to be called "half-breeds", not sure what the correct term is now.  Even before Squanto there was "La Malinche", who was the interpreter, etc. for Cortes in his conquest of Mexico. Sacagawea was another interpreter.  

I suppose the media now serves in a similar role of interpreter/story teller and is similarly distrusted. 

But it's wrong to see it as wily natives scamming naive Americans; it's also the case that wily Americans scam the naive natives.  

Buying Out Coal Miners as We Did Tobacco Producers

 Took me a while but after seeing Alec Tabarrok suggest buying coal mines and discussion on twitter of paying coal miners, I realized there's precedent--we bought out tobacco farmers, or rather their tobacco quotas, back when the FSA tobacco program was eliminated. 

See this ERS page.

Politics and Vaccines

This twitter thread notes the outstanding performance of Puerto Rico in getting their people vaccinated--better performance than any state. It attributes their high rate to the fact their parties all support vaccination--there's no Dem-Rep split.

Zoom and HOAs

 The pandemic has been a shock to many systems, institutions, and habits; some good and some bad.  I think one good one is reducing the friction in social participation.

[For example, take a home owners association (HOA). After I moved to Reston I was automatically a member of the Pinecrest HOA.  As such for some years I participated in the annual meetings, but my enthusiasm waned as my guilt about letting others shoulder the responsibilities for the cluster increased.  So I don't think I've been in an annual meeting this century, much less the monthly board meetings.

But with the advent of covid the board meetings converted to Zoom.  That by itself wasn't sufficient to get me to log in, but a renovation of a sidewalk by our house raised an issue sufficient to get me over the hurdle, to learn Zoom well enough to [what's the term for attending a Zoom meeting?]. I noted this week there were 11 attending, 4 board members and 6 residents, plus the maintenance rep.  

I don't know that I will continue my attendance, but I think Zoom and the stimulus of the pandemic likely has permanently increased the interest and attendance at the meetings.  It makes sense: you no longer have to venture out of the house and join strangers, make small talk, etc.  Instead you just fire up the laptop or cellphone while sitting in your easy chair, and you have easy control over the degree to which you participate.  It's great for introverts, who must be a sizeable part of the population. 

The Worst of Times?

 Lots of attention being devoted to the state of our democracy and the nation  Poor, declining and heading to possible civil war seem to be common analyses.

I'm reading the new Jonathan Alter bio of Jimmy Carter, who cites the opinion of a British visitor in 1971.   At that time, with the Vietnam war going and racial problems stark and the boomer generation not trusting anyone over 30, the outlook seemed grim.  I remember it well. 

On Being Moral When All About

Thinking about judging people in the past for their action or inaction on moral issues, such as slavery, somehow I got to Rudyard Kipling's poem "If", which is about maintaining one's independence of others and circumstances.

The bottomline is that change and independence is hard to do.  Hard individually--think of everyone who tries to lose weight and fails, who tries to break a drug addiction and fails, who tries to stop smoking and fails.  Hard as a society--both liberals and conservatives can and do point to social problems they'd like to change, whether crime, divorce, homelessness, inequality; problems they have tried to and failed to solve. 

Discrimination in Lending Markets

 NYTimes reports on the Paycheck Protection Program, which it seems black business owners were more likely to get loans from online lenders than local banks. Although there's been publicity and concern about artificial intelligence algorithms being biased, apparently in these cases they may be less biased than the banks.  (The bias in algorithms would result from training the AI app using data which was produced by biased non-AI systems, like training an app to assess beauty by using pictures of whites.)

While the report described by the Times is on black businesses, it easily relates to black farmers, including som issues which I may have touched on in the past. Back in the dark ages of the New Deal the precursors of the Farmers Home Administration were authorized to fill a financing gap, to provide loans to farmers who were credit-worthy but had been unable to get loans from local banks. Even before then the Farm Credit system was set up in the Wilson administration for the same purpose. 

The Congressional Research Service has an overview of the farm credit situation.

The Downside of Government Programs

 As a liberal and retired bureaucrat I support government programs.  

But I need to recognize their downside, which relates to the "last mile". When a government sets up a program, it needs to make a connection with the customer/client/citizen who will benefit or whose conduct will be regulated. I've written before about our problems with making that connection.  But I've been writing from a government-centric viewpoint, saying that for example the Treasury has a hard time getting funds to support renters and prevent evictions out.

What about the perspecitve from the "man on the street", as we used to say? There's many problems--off the top of my head some are:

• the person may be "off the grid":''
• without a mailing address (i.e., homeless or on a reservation, etc).
• not have a landline or cellphone
• not have electricity
• the person may be on the grid, but not on the "social-government" grid:
• not interested in the world, not following news, etc.
• not receive information shared by friends or relatives
• the person may be in a position to receive information but:
• doesn't have the initiative, the time, the energy, the ability to research and make a connection 
• is reliant on a caregiver or guardian who's not conscientious
• is suspicious and must be educated and/or sold on the program.

Bottom line--how much effort do we expect government or NGO's acting for the government to expend in order to overcome the hurdles. My impression in the old days of ASCS, SCS, and FmHA was the different agencies had different expectations in dealing with their farmers.  

Even in the best scenario it's likely some people will fall through the cracks, meaning a government program always increases inequality between groups.

[Update: this isn't a government program but the principle is the same--as the article describes, most people are not aware of this alternative abortion option.]

"Gifted Students" and Rural Schools

 New York City is going to phase out its schools for gifted and talented students.  That stimulates discussion on social media, discussion which is largely among the educated classes who might lean Democratic.

It strikes me as an instance where the elite discussion unconsciously disses rural areas. In such areas the schools are smaller and the opportunity to do enhance instruction for gifted and talented students is constrained.  So to rural ears the discussion seems tone-deaf and irrelevant.

Vaccine Mandates

 I gather from this post in the FSA Facebook Group that the issue of complying with the federal vaccine mandate is controversial. I ran across a post somewhere today which indicated the actual process of implementing the mandate was going to take a while.  

I wonder whether with the delta surge declining will the administration actually go through with it.  It sounds as if even when implemented there would be a drawn-out process for penalizing anyone who didn't get vaccinated, so it may become a dead letter. We'll see.  In the meantime there's a lot of angst out there, and it may be creating conflict in small offices where there's strongly held divergent opinions.   

We who support the Biden's position need to remember the human costs of how it's implemented.