User Interface at Fault--Bureaucrat Screws Up

They don't cite the name of the designer, but the conclusion of the panel in FL is that faulty design of the ballot is the reason for a 13 percent difference in votes between the Senate race and the House race. It shows the importance of forms, whether on paper or on the web, as a means of communication between people.

Pet peeve--all of the (mostly liberal) concern about the lack of an audit trail and the possible hacking of touch screen voting systems. Audit trails are good, but the energy is misplaced. As best I can recall the mechanical lever action voting machines never had an audit trail and presumably could have been hacked (sticking something into the gears to interrupt the counting of votes for a candidate). But we never worried.

How Important Are Farmers?

John Phipps has an interesting post on the importance of farmers in the economy. Based on Commerce Dept figures many "agricultural" counties get 3 to 10 times more income from transfer payments such as Social Security and TANF than they do from farming.

Our Health Care System at Work

Further experience with our health care system. My provider is Kaiser, which has its own doctors and labs in the DC area. But when someone covered by the plan travels outside of the area and has emergency surgery, you get into the complications of our marvelous system.

First of all, Kaiser doesn't take the step of assigning an event code when you call in to talk to them about the emergency surgery. Apparently the call is recorded, but there's no automated link to the bill paying process.

Because fee for service is competitive and individual, Kaiser gets bills for the surgery from:

1. emergency room physician
2. lab
3. pathologist
4. anesthesia
5. surgeon
6. hospital.
   

Each bill is individually prepared by someone in the relevant office and coded and routed to the appropriate Kaiser facility, or not. So far we've had bills go to Kaiser California rather than Kaiser MD, bills miscoded (according to Kaiser), bills with the wrong tax ID number on them (according to Kaiser), bills that have been delayed in the mail. Each bill seems to be considered individually by Kaiser (they do have a database that the administrative service specialist can check) and I'm informed individually of the payment or nonpayment (through a very poorly designed form). Whoever is considering them in Kaiser does not have an overview of what actually transpired on the ground but is either trying to interpret the fragments or, probably more likely, is mechanically following some rules. It's now been over 4 months and everyone has not yet been paid.

Because there are multiple parties involved (biller, multiple Kaiser offices, me), each of us thinks the problem is with the other. Each automatically believes that we've done our bit, now it's time for X to finish the job. That's part of the "faceless" part of faceless bureaucrats.

It's no wonder that we spend so much on health care.

Starbucks

The NY Times cites a memo from Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, in this times article
but you can see the whole thing on starbucksgossip.com. (Although I drink the coffee every day, I've never bought their shares.)

It's interesting, not only the use of a blog within a corporation, but also the problems within a bureaucracy. What is the mission of Starbucks--provide great coffee at cheap prices or provide a great experience? He doesn't say, but some of the savings from the decisions made by his bureaucrats, to switch to flavor locked packaging for example, probably also enable them to be more environmentally conscious. How does a bureaucracy make the tradeoffs? His point is that he and his bureaucracy made decisions with tradeoffs of which they were not aware.

Richard Lehman, CIA's Great Bureaucrat

The Times posts the obit for Richard Lehman:

Mr. Lehman created the President’s Intelligence Check List (referred to as the “pickle”) in 1961, after President Kennedy complained of being overwhelmed by intelligence memorandums, many duplicating material while sometimes leaving out vital information.

“Kennedy’s enthusiastic response to the PICL ensured that it became an agency institution,” Richard Kovar, a C.I.A. analyst, wrote in 2000, in an introduction to an interview he conducted with Mr. Lehman for “Studies in Intelligence,” the C.I.A.’s quarterly in-house journal. “For many years thereafter, Lehman played a key role in supervising the agency’s current intelligence support for the White House, including briefings of presidential candidates.”

One of the jobs of bureaucratic innovators is to create the forms and formats through which people can communicate. Presumably Truman and Ike had had regular briefings on intelligence material, but the process of daily briefings using a prescribed format took a while to evolve. How many mistakes were made when decisions were made based on misunderstanding of the data, or the data never reached the President?

Moving to today's world, did Bush and Cheney know about the rules for National Intelligence Estimates--did Tenet ever have a training session with them or did everyone just assume that everyone knew the rules? (I suspect the latter.)

Ted Williams, Bureaucracy, and Habitat for Humanity

The NY Times has an article describing the difficulties that Habitat for Humanity is having in constructing housing in LA/MS after Katrina. The problem is that each local affiliate does their thing, and is geared to build 12-15 houses a year. So their bureaucracy/organization isn't set up to build hundreds of houses in one locality in a year.

Reminds me of Ted Williams. When opposing teams started using the "shift" on him (moving the shortstop behind second base and leaving big holes on the left side of the diamond, he famously refused to choke up and dump hits to left. He may just have been stubborn, or he may have figured that trying to do something differently than that which brought him success was a sure way to fail.

Space and Bureaucracy--Bull in the Bullpen?

DC has a new, young whippersnapper of a mayor--Adam Fenty. In his quest for excellence he went off to NYC and listened to Mr. Bloomberg, saw his "bullpen" office, and is reproducing it in DC. See this Post article by David Nakamura, who does a good job in considering the pros and cons.

The intangibles of space and schedule impact the work. I remember working in an office where we all arrived at the same time (before Flexitour, etc.) and all were coffee drinkers. So we (5 of us) had a natural staff meeting around the coffee pot to exchange information and get on a common footing. It made the office work.

Bloomberg seems to have done well in NYC. But he's older and has much more administrative experience than Fenty, who's only run his council member office. My guess is that the bullpen won't work as well for Fenty, who's going to have to learn on the job. It is, however, a valuable symbol for him. He wants a rep as the shaker and mover and this will help.

Jane Galt and Behaviorial Economics

Jane Galt's Asymmetrical Information gets attention from Greg Mankiw and Tyler Cowen for this post, which says:

The post below also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:

1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.

I'm out of my depth, but I put together a thought from Dawkins in the Blind Watchmaker with economics. That is, it doesn't matter whether most people are stupid (in an economic, utility-seeking sense) or not for economic theory to work. If the mass of people act randomly irrationally, and a minority read the Consumer Reports and act rationally, the end result will be the same (but slower) as if everyone read the CR. (Dawkins said it didn't matter whether creatures had eyes or not, just so long as there was some variation in receptivity to light. The minority that had the better sensitivity would, through selection, lead to better eyes.)

1950's Nostalgia--Bill Bryson

I've mentioned the latest Bill Bryson book in the context of disputing Michael Pollan. I happened on this British site (ah, the wonders of the Internet), which includes some 50's images, plus (under the label "Image of 1950's Bounty", the picture of the food for a year for a family of 4 I referred to.

I have to say those chickens look scrawny. Note they're whole chickens. Rather than outsourcing the cutup process to immigrants at Tysons plants, mother does it herself as part of her hours at the stove and sink.

Electricity

Two contrasting articles today:

In the Washington Post:

"...today the state uses less energy per capita than any other state in the country, defying the international image of American energy gluttony. Since 1974, California has held its per capita energy consumption essentially constant, while energy use per person for the United States overall has jumped 50 percent.California has managed that feat through a mixture of mandates, regulations and high prices. The state has been able to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, keep utility companies happy and maintain economic growth."

In the NYTimes:

"...residents in this part of Illinois are seeing some of the biggest rate spikes in the country — in some cases, increases of 100 percent to 200 percent.

The higher rates are touching off a fresh round of national debate over unleashing competitive forces on traditionally regulated electricity markets. Opening up the markets was supposed to lead to savings for consumers. But that did not turn out as regulators predicted. The anticipated competition among energy suppliers never fully emerged as natural gas prices more than doubled in the last decade."

I'm not sure what to make of all this. My February bill was the highest it's been (because of cold) and I don't feature doubling it (according to the articles, VA has a rate half of California's). On the other hand, that much of an increase would lead me to more conservation, which would be good for everyone.

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