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Payment Limitation in Georgia

Cox and the Atlanta Journal Constitution have another article on payment limitation .
I had to register to see this article, but not the earlier article.

It's a complex story, with USDA's Inspector General, FSA's county, state, and DC offices, the Senator who leads the Ag Committee, and Justice all playing a role. The bottom line is:

• if there were no payment limitation rules, McNair would be farming the same crops on the same acreage but without the superstructure of paperwork and fake accounting. ("Fake" is pejorative, I know.)
• if his neighbors thought he were cheating on his income taxes they wouldn't be as likely to condone the schemes. But since it's FSA bureaucrats depriving hard working farmers of money, McNair will be at least tolerated by the community.
  
• because McNair and his fellow farmers (on the county committee) are pillars of the community, they pack a lot of political clout. So Congress isn't really serious about enforcing payment limitations (ask Senator Grassley). Can you imagine how dispirited Jim Baxa might feel about the task? (Full disclosure--I used to be his wife's boss.)
  

I hadn't thought about it before, the issue of whether IRS auditors and USDA bureaucrats should coordinate is interesting.

And to be fair to Sen. Chambliss, Clinton's first Secretary of Agriculture had his chief of staff convicted of an offense because of mishandling of payment limitation cases.

Payment Limitations and College Students

Cox News service has a good article on payment limitations in farm programs. A couple of notes--they could have added Queen Elizabeth to the Crown Prince of Lichtenstein in the summary of the background of changes in the mid 80's and it's unclear how much money is "actually left on the table". Ag committees argue that it's effective; cynics disagree.

Foley Hypocrisy

Always love a good serving of hypocrisy but this is overdoing it. Curses on all concerned in this mess.

Farmers and the Future

The Times has an article today on the Kansas farmer who owns the geographic center of the U.S. and his concerns over whether his son will leave the farm. It's nicely written, but with the standard themes. Lebanon, KS has lost 25 percent of its population (now 278 est) in the last 15 years. (Median resident age: 52.4 years; median household income: $23,056 ; median house value: $10,100. )

He farms 3,000 acres, which probably means that there used to be 15-20 families, each with a quarter section, farming where he is now.

Clinton Failed and I Failed

Clinton said he failed to get bin Laden and I failed in the project to get USDA agencies to share data. Here's an excerpt from an article on crop insurance fraud:

In 2003, government investigators found that the Risk Management Agency of the USDA had incomplete information on ownership of 21,000 of the nation's largest farms, so it lost a valuable tool to determine whether farmers falsified production figures to file unwarranted claims.

"It's really a shell game ... to show a loss that probably didn't occur," Bertoni said.

Another branch of the USDA had the ownership information but didn't provide it to the RMA. Up to $74 million in possible false claims resulted.

The difference between Bill and I is that I never headed the project. Well, there are other differences.

What Does The Future Hold?

The Times has an analysis of the new legislation on terrorism which includes these thoughts:

How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.

If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.

The last paragraph is what I'm inclined to think.

Why Catholics in the FBI?

Reading Mr. Wright's "Looming Tower" on the rise of al-Qaeda. It's good. One interesting side note is John O'Neill, the retired FBI agent who died on 9/11 who was quite a character. Wright mentions that Italians and Irish predominated in the ranks of the FBI. I wonder why and when? Was it from the beginning or was it after J. Edgar?

Perhaps it was a generational thing: the sons of policemen who went to college wanted to follow in the steps of their fathers and do law enforcement. Perhaps it was a prejudice thing in that early graduates of Catholic law schools (Fordham, Notre Dame?) found it easier to get admitted to the FBI than to existing WASP law firms?

Why Is a Fighter Pilot Like a Farmer?

This piece in the Times on how the fighter community beat Rummy to get more F-22's (at $350mill a crack) prompts me to compare pilots and farmers:

• Both are robed in the rags of former romantic glory: fighter pilots as the gallant solo aces of one on one combat; farmers as the gallant son of the soil fighting nature.
• Both have strong, bipartisan lobbies on the Hill
  
• Both get taxpayer money for programs of dubious value (a jet designed to outclass the Soviet jets; direct subsidy programs that do little for conservation or production adjustment)
• Both are wedded to past methods that are fast losing potency (I predict the manned fighter jet will be successfully challenged by pilotless drones; individual farmers are being replaced by contract farmers (as in poultry and hogs).
  

Republican Management--An Oxymoron?

Perhaps the most significant long term aspect of the uproar over the National Intelligence Estimate is buried at the end of the Karen DeYoung/Walter Pincus piece in the Post, after noting the NIE was transmitted to the Senate and House committees in April:

In the House, "there was a bit of a snafu with this particular document," said a spokesman for Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the intelligence committee chairman. "We had a massive computer failure on our classified side." The first that the committee knew of its existence was late last week, when "it was requested specifically by a member. That was when it was found and scanned into our system."

Whether the document was ignored or disappeared into cyberspace, however, it seemed to have made little impact on Capitol Hill at the time. No one in either chamber, on either side of the aisle, requested a briefing or any further information on its conclusions until now, the sources said.

If the Republican administration can't communicate with the Republican-led House, what hope is there for the CIA and FBI to communicate with each other? The failure must be both systemic and political.

• Systemic because even the USPS offers "return receipt requested" service. Any electronic transmission system should have the same sort of safeguard to ensure that recipients have received the transmission.
  
• Political because surely any new/updated NIE on the war on terror should have been discussed between the Congressional staffers and Negroponte's office, who should have been waiting for the report to arrive and raising flags when it didn't.

This is just an instance of the broader failure of Congress to carry out its oversight responsibilities. Can you imagine a similar lapse during a shooting war like WWII? (Whoops, we are in a shooting war.) But the Republicans can't take all the blame. If the incumbent Democrats were really out for blood they would have been on this earlier. Perhaps the answer is that incumbent House Democrats feel safe this year, thanks both to custom tailored districts and the political climate.

A final nod to a Republican--the NIE has revived the Rumsfeld question of a couple years ago--are we capturing and killing more terrorists than we are creating. It was the key question when he wrote it and it's key now.

Why I Drink

From a paper trying to prove that male drinkers make more money than nondrinkers, via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:

"Whether abstainers choose not to be as social or whether organizers of social occasions involving drinking exclude abstainers is unclear. Abstainers may prefer to interact with other abstainers or less social people. Alternately, abstainers might not be invited to social gatherings, work-related or otherwise, because drinkers consider abstainers dull."

The argument is that drinking benefits one's social network and the paper is one of two that show a correlation, at least for male drinking. A separate stereotype says females tend to be more social than men, perhaps meaning men rely more on crutches. For me at least that's true--I use(d) drink as a social lubricant, depressing my sense of social unease while participating in a social ritual. So drink is both an indicator of my social participation and a facilitator of it.

I wonder though whether this is as true today as it used to be. My impression is that drinking, at least liquor, is down. Certainly the bars at the Kennedy Center don't seem to be doing the business they used to. Maybe someone should do a study of coffee drinking?

As Close as I'll Come to Making the Front Page of NYTimes

That's today's article on "generator men" in Baghdad:

"In offices across Iraq, a ritual plays out every morning during the hottest months. Haggard employees drag themselves into the room, mumble a pleasantry or two and slump into their chairs, moaning about what a bad night’s sleep they had: the power went out, the backup generator was broken, the heat was unbearable, the baby would not stop crying, mosquitoes were everywhere.

Inevitably, these grievances, like hornets, will gather in a single cloud of fury and swoop down on one target: the generator man, probably the most vilified figure in Iraqi society after Saddam Hussein."

I was a "generator man" in the Army. We had power (a pun).

Who's a Farmer? Whitman College?

The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin reports on a violation of payment limitation rules by Whitman College, which owns 15 farms. CRP payments are limited to $50K, so Whitman leased out land on a 70/30 lease:

Under the arrangement, Tom Peterson Farms would claim 30 percent of the CRP contract, while Whitman would receive 70 percent. The result was annual payments of $20,854.20 and $48,659.80, respectively.

But in addition to those payments, Whitman Farm Committee representative Fred Kimball reportedly negotiated that Peterson pay Whitman a cash lease of about $10,000 for Peterson's part of the acreage.

The $10K off the books evaded the payment limitation regs.

Bolivar County

I visited Bolivar County, Mississippi a time or two as part of an aborted "Info Share" project (trying to get different agencies of USDA to work together). It's Delta country, cotton country, poor country. According to this story in the LA Times on the retiring county librarian it's also 40 percent illiterate.

Risk Management Deja Vu

A couple of different pieces on Risk Management (Federal Crop Insurance Corporation) that brought a smile to my face:

From an interview by Jim Wiesemeyer of the head of RMA:

Where is RMA at regarding reconciling reporting dates between FSA and Federal Crop Insurance?

Gould: "We've already made some progress on that front. That came from one of our informal listening sessions with groups of agents. I started taking a look at it and about half of the dates already were similar, which was a little different than I was aware of being a farmer from the Midwest. Also, on another 25 percent of the dates, either RMA or FSA were willing or able to change. That only leaves 25 percent, and that will take more time."

[Why the smile--this was a big issue 10 and more years ago. Progress takes time.]

A February article on Agweb discussed several items on crop insurance, including trying to get yields right and find abuses, including use of a spot check list (farmers who got crop insurance indemnities multiple years in a row). [Why the smile--one of my first jobs on the program side was to run a similar function for ASCS disaster payments, way back in 1979. Takes a while for ideas to migrate from one agency to another, or for the wheel to be reinvented.]

Cheating and Politics

Academia is acknowledged to be dominated by liberals, particularly the humanities and social sciences, less so the business and engineering fields. Comes now a study that reports:

The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Following business students, 54 percent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 percent of physical science students, 49 percent of medical and health-care students, 45 percent of law students, 43 percent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students.

I hesitate to draw any inferences from the data, but you are welcome to.

Bush Gets One Right

"And, finally, we're going to have to treat people with dignity in this country. Ours is a nation of immigrants, and when Congress gets down to a comprehensive bill, I would just remind them, it's virtually impossible to try to find 11 million folks who have been here, working hard -- and, in some cases, raising families -- and kick them out. It's just not going to work. But granting automatic citizenship won't work either. To me, that would just provide an additional incentive for people to try to sneak in, and so therefore there is a rational way forward."

It's All the Learning Curve

"They gathered data on Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel from 2000 to 2005 and found that for terrorists, just like for regular workers, experience and education improve productivity. Suicide bombers who are older — in their late 20’s and early 30’s — and better educated are less likely to be caught on their missions and are more likely to kill large numbers of people at bigger, more difficult targets than younger and more poorly educated bombers."

Can You Spell "Turkey Farm"?

In bureaucratese, "turkey farm" refers to assignments (or units) to which the least able (or those affiliated to the opposite party) are relegated. I thought of it in connection with these interesting Iraq pieces:

From the Post, Anne Scott Tyson: "The conflict in the Anbar camp, while extreme, is not an isolated phenomenon in Iraq, U.S. officers say. It highlights two clashing approaches to the war: the heavy focus of many regular U.S. military units on sweeping combat operations; and the more fine-grained, patient work Special Forces teams put into building rapport with local leaders, security forces and the people -- work that experts consider vital in a counterinsurgency." [Tyson comes down on the Special forces side, but shows they reinforce the tribal status quo.]

Seth Moulton, an ex-Marine with 2 Iraq tours in the Times op-ed page says: "Green Berets in 12-man teams have already replaced entire battalions of conventional forces in some Iraqi cities."

"Yet despite the success of advisers, [emphasis added] the Army and Marine Corps still have a habit of sending their least capable troops to fill these positions." (Moulton praises advisers and disses the regular units.]

What I take away from these pieces is a renewed faith in the persistence of the military mind-set. Much as I've said about FBI agents, the military is macho, gung-ho. But it's also political, so it doesn't want flack from politicos. Consequently, most of the best and brightest head off to combat units, which is prerequisite to higher command. That means they look down on advisers, giving them less support. It also means they huddle in base camps, well protected against insurgents, but possibly less effective in winning the war. (I say "possibly" because I'm not convinced anyone really knows much about insurgencies.

Humans in Crisis

Slate runs this piece:

In his New York Times column yesterday (TimesSelect subscription required), Frank Rich discussed a photograph taken by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker on Sept. 11, 2001, showing a group of young people chatting on the Brooklyn waterfront, apparently indifferent to the scene of destruction across the river. Slate has reproduced the photograph below, which the Times did not print with the column.

Shankar Vedantam in the Post discusses research on how people react in crisis:

"Human beings in New York, Sri Lanka and Rhode Island all do the same thing in such situations. They turn to each other. They talk. They hang around, trying to arrive at a shared understanding of what is happening."

His discussion is in terms of how we can be slow to react to alarms--we have to understand whether this is a fire drill or a real fire, etc. etc.

I'd suggest Vedantam's article explains the photo--the people are looking at each other as the towers burn in the background, but they're trying to understand, not discussing last night's bar scene.

Kevin Drum, Blair, and Gore

Kevin Drum today says that Blair's support for the war helped persuade him, as it did me. And he argues that, particularly in foreign policy, that sort of thinking is rational. I agree. Then he posts Gore's speech 5 months after 9/11. Which is interesting.

9/11

It's obligatory to write something on 9/11.

Cats and Dogs

I'm struck by the personality differences between cats and dogs. Imagine a puppy dog who energetically runs around, exploring every nook and cranny, rushing back to you with some interesting stick, running off to search out more. Then imagine a cat, sitting by your side, content to let the world come to her, sure that there's nothing in the world worthy of any exertion, snootily amused at the energy of the dog. Let dog come too near cat, and whap, blood runs from nose.

Of course, cats can be curious and dogs somnolent, but today I prefer my image.

Slow Blogging Til the Weekend

After today, I'll be away until the weekend.

The Rat Race and Productivity Measurement

From today's Post by Shankar Vedantam:

"For years, economists have taught their students a simple maxim: As employers hunt for workers, they want to get the best talent at the lowest price.

According to this theory, whether employees want to work long hours or short hours, employers have an incentive to accommodate them, because asking people to do something they don't want to do raises the price of labor -- workers demand more compensation.

On this Labor Day, consider a paradox: Millions of Americans say they feel overworked and stressed out. Many say they want to work fewer hours and find a better balance between responsibilities at home and work. Given that people have been saying this for quite a while, employers should have figured out by now that they can save money by being more flexible in workplace arrangements."

The piece goes on to cite some research showing that the output of law associates can't be measured, so they get rated based on hours worked. Which leads to the rate race as described by many lawyer-writers. I'm struck me two ways:

• First, I always like cases proving economists wrong.
• Second, Jame Q. Wilson says one of the reasons for bureaucracy is that output can't be measured (if it could, it could be quantified and monetized and marketized and privatized). So it's nice to see private enterprises sharing the characteristic.
  

More Christian than American?

I was catching up with my reading of the Cliopatria blog and found a discussion of Pew's research on the feelings of European Muslims, including this quote:

"French Muslims may feel more French than British Muslims feel British, but the question of how minorities feel about their citizenship and nationality has, in the past, produced highly deceptive results. Those who claim to be true French may have more to say about how integrated French Muslims really are."

I started to wonder. Suppose Pew asked Americans if they considered themselves more Christian or more American, more Jewish or more American, etc.? From my reading, and understanding of my preacher forebears, anyone devoutly religious would have to say: "I'm more Christian than American"; or whatever religion. Certainly anyone who believes in the hereafter would have to. Wouldn't they?

Accelerated Counter-Cyclical Payments

Whoops, I screwed up. My previous post on this issue tacitly assumed that USDA was accelerating the 2006 counter-cyclical payments for cotton, sorghum, and peanuts. In fact, according to a notice issued today and available here, it's the 2005 payments. Makes a bit more sense--roughly speaking this is the final third of the payments. While the official average price data isn't available yet, the data is clear and USDA is safe to issue the payments.

Incidently, this is a case where the Bush administration effectively moves expenditures forward from one fiscal year (2007) to the previous one (2006). There was discussion on the Washington Monthly site over HHS shifting money from FY 2006 to FY 2007 to decrease the size of the deficit before Kevin Drum here concluded that Congress mandated the shift in the Deficit Reduction Act. Ironically, I'm too lazy to check this rainy afternoon but I believe this provision in the Deficit Reduction Act had the effect of moving CCC payments back from FY 2006 to FY2007. So, Johanns has undone the effect of Congress acts:

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here are 700 million dollars and three shells. Watch very carefully, very very carefully and tell me which shell hides the money--are the millions of dollars here or are they there?

Dependency Ratios Revisited

From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:

"Here is a basic argument and model that the youth dependency ratio can matter.

I can see three possible mechanisms. 1) Fewer babies mean that more women work. 2) Fewer babies mean that each baby gets more parental investment; in the long run those people are smarter. 3) Fewer babies raises the savings rate."

He goes on to argue that none of them explain Ireland, at least not very much. I'm still musing over the way economists think, compared to me. But today the Times had an interesting article on manufacturing in India, including the suggestion that manufacturers, because they can look ahead and see China will soon have a high dependency ratio while India will have a low one, are deciding to invest in manufacturing plants in India.

USDA Does It Again (Updated)

As reported on AgWeb - Your Spot for Futures Trading, Commodities Info, Ag News, Successful Farming Tips & More, and many more media outlets serving agriculture:

"Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced during a visit to South Dakota $780 million in assistance to help farmers and ranchers manage drought and weather related production challenges. "

Sounds good, doesn't it? But the reality is less impressive, particularly in South Dakota. Upland cotton, peanuts, and grain sorghum aren't really big crops in that state, and the bulk of the $780 mill is in accelerated counter-cyclical payments for those crops. There's no explanation of why the crops were selected, but perhaps because the economists were reasonably comfortable that the payments would be earned. (The computation of the payment rate typically requires collecting national weighted average market prices for a year. So when I worked cotton payments weren't made until February of the next year.) [Updated note: According to this,
the 2002 Act changed the schedule, partial payments are made in October, then February, then after the end of the marketing year. There's nothing I've seen to specify whether USDA is just moving the October payment up by a month or more.] If I'm right, there's no intrinsic relationship between the drought and the payments, except the fact this is a year divisible by 2.

According to this site, the severest drought is in Wyoming, western South Dakota and western Nebraska, which are wheat areas, and in Texas and Oklahoma which do grow sorghum and cotton. It would be interesting to know if there was any consideration of advancing the payments just to producers in the disaster-affected counties. It would be do-able, if legal.

It's also interesting to note that Johanns has just cost the taxpayers X million dollars. Moving up the payments means the Treasury Department has to borrow the money earlier than it would have, and 5 percent interest on $700 mill starts to add up. (Relax, it's not "real money" according to Senator Dirksen's definition.)

Suicide as Signaling Device

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution refers to this old Slate story:

Attempting suicide can be a rational choice, but only if there is a high likelihood it will cause the attempter's life to significantly improve.Marcotte couldn't test the relative "life improvement" of successful suicides—since they were, of course, dead—but he could study those who had failed at suicide to determine if their lives improved after the attempt. The results are surprising. Marcotte's study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—"hard-suicide" attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)

A commenter links to this piece on a possible evolutionary link for depression. See Hagen

It seems to me possible that there's a correlation to the evolutionary explanation for such things as peacock tails and conspicuous displays, known I think as "handicapping". The idea is that animals do things that make no apparent sense except to send the signal that they are fit. The bigger the horns, the more striking the tail, the higher the jump, the more dangerous the exploit--each one is a social signal showing more evolutionary fitness.

Depression and suicide attempts might work similarly--the more you invest in showing your unhappiness, the more convincing the signal, and the greater the chance for reaction.

Why Move to DC?

A commenter on my housing post asked:

Does the higher cost of housing in WDC discourage qualified civil servants from taking a transfer to WDC? Why transfer to WDC, fight traffic and parking spaces, while you could receive a comparable income from staying in fly over country. Both jobs provide the ability to do the people's work!

Good question for which I've some answers (using "DC" loosely to mean the general area): Why transfer to DC--

1. Because you're an arrogant SOB who thinks you can compete in the biggest frog pond. Why did Alex Rodriguez move from Texas to the Yankees? Not only can you rise to the top in an agency, but you can switch agencies (though not the way Jimmy Carter envisioned when he pushed the Senior Executive Service).
   
2. Because you can change the whole country from a post in DC. (Early in my first job I instructed the whole bureaucracy to change the way they referred to county offices--instead of "ASCS county offices" it was to be "county ASCS offices". Now that is power!!)
3. Because you can look the bastards who are screwing you straight in the eye, rather than having to imagine what they look like.
4. Because DC really is a great place to live, simply for the opportunities. Opportunities for the single person to indulge in culture, opportunities for children to get into something they love (whether ballet, swimming, science, whatever).
   
5. Because in DC you have the wind behind you, rather than blowing in your face. (To see what I mean, read the book, "Denison, Iowa," to get a sense of what it's like to live where the wind is against you.)
6. Because you can work the system--sacrifice now to get a house, then retire to a low cost region where your dollars buy much more. (I remember a guy from SCS who was transferred to Ft. Collins in 1991. He was having big problems with the move, simply because there wasn't a mansion in Ft. Collins big enough to absorb the proceeds from his DC house. Ft. Collins is highly rated for livability.)
7. Because you're a romantic fool from the sticks who loves to see the Washington Monument every work day and to rub elbows with people from all over the world.
8. Because it's an endless comedy show, watching the politicians come and go, posture and preen, but rarely come clean.
9. Because no situation is perfect and people can adapt to most anything, even a 2 hour commute one-way. Like Gilbert's book, Stumbling on Happiness, says, it's hard to estimate the future because you forget the dailyness of life.
   
10. It feels so good when you leave.
    

Housing Crisis and SRO's

Michael Grunwald had an article on the incredible cost of housing in the DC area yesterday. Today he hosted a discussion on it. He talked about government housing aid, zoning restrictions, and similar subjects. Some comments:

• In the late 60's I was renting an efficiency in downtown DC--somewhere around $110 a month. I started off working for the government at $5K, so I was spending maybe 25 percent of my salary for housing. I ended buying in Reston for $55K at about the peak of the housing boom in the 70's. These may be wrong, but my impression is that starting salary for the Feds is around $30-35K (6 times mine), my townhouse is about 6 times more valuable, and rental rates may be a bit higher than 6 times $110.
• I remember Reston was originally planned (in '64 or '65)to have lots of multifamily housing, but they ended up changing to have more single family houses and fewer townhouses, condos and apartments. Responding to the market they said.
• The free market creates its own solution to housing problems--in some areas, including mine, immigrants are buying houses based on having multiple people rooming there. It may or may not be legal, but it works. It also represents another advantage of immigrants over natives in the competition for opportunity. Immigrant males are more willing to live crowded than are natives.
• One positive sign of the change is there's less competition for parking spaces. :-) The new immigrants don't have money for cars; they ride bikes or buses or carpool.

Dependency Ratios for Countries and Corporations

The always interesting Malcolm Gladwell has a new article in The New Yorker: Fact, concerning dependency ratios (the ratio of workers to dependent children, aged, and disabled). A quote:

"But, as the Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning suggest in their study of the “Celtic Tiger,” of greater importance may have been a singular demographic fact. In 1979, restrictions on contraception that had been in place since Ireland’s founding were lifted, and the birth rate began to fall. In 1970, the average Irishwoman had 3.9 children. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, that number was less than two. As a result, when the Irish children born in the nineteen-sixties hit the workforce, there weren’t a lot of children in the generation just behind them."

Gladwell argues that dependency ratios explain why Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt, why GM and Ford are headed there and why Ireland is booming. It further explains [much of] the differential between development rates in Asia, where birth rates in China and elsewhere have declined sharply, and those in Africa, where rates are still high.

I found it, as is often the case with Gladwell, a bit stretched but provocative. He rides the idea too far, particularly when he ignores any discussion of why differences in birth rates, as between China and the Congo say. Was it the case that the communist state of China provided cradle to grave security, hence was able to enforce its one-baby policy while the Congo essentially has a kleptocratic state providing no security and therefore the greatest of encouragements to have many children? But how about Taiwan or South Korea?

But to push the idea farther--how about classes--should we take more seriously than we do the differences in birth rates between classes in the U.S.?

Threats to Privacy

Via George Buddy, see this for the ACLU take on future pizza ordering. As a long-time ACLU member (though I hasten to add I don't carry the card) I'm going to take this much too seriously and quibble with it.

• I doubt there'll be a national ID number. Surely we'll have the sense to realize that we already have world identifiers (at least everyone with an e-mail account does).
• No one would verify the information--by then the information would be accurate enough that verification wouldn't be cost-effective in this scenario. (I realize the verification is a means to emphasize how much info the pizza parlor has access to.)
• There's no economic rationale for the parlor to link to some of the records shown; the customer is only going to get aggravated by it and a business wants to please its customer. Cui bono? That's always a good question, particularly when there's a cost to doing something. 10 years from now the cost of transfering data will be negligible, but there's still a major cost in establishing means to move data between bureaucracies (like an insurance company and a pizza parlor).

All of which is not to say that we shouldn't worry. It is rational to worry about things that don't make sense, like the Bush administration. Generally I think people like the ACLU and EPIC worry about the wrong things. I was particularly impressed by David Brin's book, Transparent Society, a few years back. To oversimplify, I'd allow public bureaucracies to maintain lots of data, provided they included their own data in the database and made it generally available as well as giving people access to their own data with a detailed audit trail.

But that's another day.

Kudos for Fred Kaplan

Ran across this prescient post on Slate from March 2003--read the whole thing.

How the Bush administration is botching the Iraq crisis. By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine: "It is becoming increasingly and distressingly clear that, however justified the coming war with Iraq may be, the Bush administration is in no shape—diplomatically, politically, or intellectually—to wage it or at least to settle its aftermath."

Reforming Bureaucracy--Empowering Operatives

Last night Lehrer Newshour had another in its series of interviews with people on immigration. The interviewee was an immigration lawyer. She mentioned a case where the waiting for legal immigration (from the Philippines?) would take 12 years, during which no visitor visa would be allowed. She mentioned another case of a high school student who would be sent back because she had no adult advocate here (parents split, father brought her here, then split, etc.) which even Immigration agreed was deserving.

That leads to a thought. With computers and databases, it's easy enough to track histories. So we could empower "operatives" (James Q. Wilson's term for the front-line bureaucrat) to make decisions and track how good or bad they are. For example, in the case of immigration, allow each frontline worker to let in two people a year under a special program. Track the history of the people let in and tie it back to the worker. So if Joan Doe lets in someone who runs afoul of the law, that should impact her ability to make future decisions, her promotability, her pay, etc. Contrarily, let in someone who becomes a good U.S. citizen and you get rewarded.

We could apply the same principle in other bureaucracies.

Caps Lock

Eugene Volokh here supports the campaign to remove the Caps Lock key. From the comments it seems that lawyers still use all caps (and in some cases monospaced fonts). But then, don't the Brits still wear wigs?

More on FBI Computers

George Buddy of Buddy's Bemusings alerts me to this article by Jonathan Alter in Newsweek critical of the FBI's computer efforts, which raises some additional thoughts:

• No good liberal is surprised that a government contractor is in it for the money. When I was a government bureaucrat I always thought I could do a better job than the contractors, but then I always was a know-it-all. One of the problems with contractors is that they are basically used-car salesmen, by which I mean that they're con-men and women. More seriously, there's the same imbalance of information as the economist Akerlof famously identified with used cars and won the Nobel Prize for. The seller (the contractor) knows more about its capabilities and software than does the buyer (the government).
  
• Having said all that, I don't buy the Alter's idea that the FBI's system is so simple that 12 contractors could have done it. It may look simple to us outsiders, but not to insiders.
  
• But given the environment, Freeh should have hired a contractor to devote 12 man-years to the job of building a kernel system, that could have expanded and evolved as the FBI started to learn the capabilities of PC's and the Internet and the process of developing software and as software has changed over the last 15 years. Trying to do a big system all at once was asking for trouble. (NASA got us to the moon, but on an evolutionary path of development.)

I give Alter credit for citing Harshaw's rule one (without the credit): "If you’ve read even one of the 500,000 articles in the popular press about software development, it’s obvious that the first try never works."

Most Ridiculous Bureaucrat Award

Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout: "The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive."

Perverts, Liars, Christians and Bush

An interesting collection of articles in the Times and Post today:

• The Times' Eichenwald explores the online world of pedophilia here--From Their Own Online World, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach. He documents the extent to which pedophiles construct their own world, in which children come on to them and pedophilia is a civil rights cause.
  
• The Times also carries this story about a painting of Jesus in a West Virginia school, raising church-state issues. (The painting is the version I remember from the 40's, a very handsome man with long hair with eyes uplifted. At that time, Jesus was the only long-haired person. I'm certainly no expert, but he doesn't look Jewish at all to me.) It includes a quote that the U.S. was a Christian country, founded on Christian principles.
• Turning to the Post, Shankar Vedantam in his science column reports on research showing how much people cheat, and the excuses they give themselves as justification.
• And finally, in the funniest article, the Bush administration has decided that the number of U.S. missiles in 1969 is classified.
  

Why link them together, other than to create a striking header? Because they all show instances of what I might call "housekeeping"--the very human and birdlike quality of straightening out one's environment to make it more to your liking. The pedophiles aren't any less human than the rest of us; they're just more obvious about it.

Discussion of FBI and Computers

Here's a link to the Post on-line discussion of today's article on FBI and computers. My comment is "Reston, VA", but all the comments were on target. Unfortunately it's not a sexy subject, bureaucratic systems seldom are.

FBI and Computers

I blogged on this back when the FBI project was scrapped. (See here , here, and here--matter of fact, it may be my favorite subject.) Today the Post reviews the fiasco here--The FBI's Upgrade That Wasn't placing some of the blame on the contractor who failed to hold the FBI's feet to the fire. But I liked this quote:

"The setup was so cumbersome that many agents stopped using it, preferring to rely on paper and secretaries. Technologically, the FBI was trapped in the 1980s, if not earlier.

'Getting information into or out of the system is a challenge,' said Greg Gandolfo, who spent most of his 18-year FBI career investigating financial crimes and public corruption cases in Chicago, Little Rock and Los Angeles. 'It's not like 'Here it is, click' and it's in there. It takes a whole series of steps and screens to go through.'

Gandolfo, who now heads a unit at FBI headquarters that fields computer complaints, said the biggest drawback is the amount of time it takes to handle paperwork and input data. 'From the case agent's point of view, you want to be freed up to do the casework, to do the investigations, to do the intelligence,' he said."

It's the old problem. People will bypass your system unless it accomplishes something useful for them. That means you either have to design it well, or have a system that has the users by the short and curlies (i.e., if you don't use the system, you can't get paid).

Governmental Inefficiency at the FBI

The Post starts a series on the FBI in today's world with a look at the training program for new agents at Quantico here--Old-School Academy in Post-9/11 World:

"An obsolete computer system is also a problem for new-agents-in-training, or 'NATS,' as they are called at Quantico.

'That is one of the big frustrations here,' said Supervisory Special Agent Karen E. Gardner, chief of investigative training at Quantico. 'If the American people expect us to connect the dots, we've got to train to do it. We don't have the computer networks here to do that.'

FBI officials said the bureau plans to build a multimillion-dollar state-of-the-art intelligence center at Quantico equipped with secure classrooms and classified computers. But it won't be ready for eight years."

FDR's War Department built the entire Pentagon in a shorter time, 16 months to be exact. I guess that's the difference between the "greatest generation" and the Bush(-league) generation.

Maids for Frosh? THIAH (To Hell in a Handbasket)

From a Post story today on new dorms for college students, being built privately:

Way-Out-of-the-Norm Dorm: "GWU's new freshman dorm has a maid service to clean the bathrooms and vacuum the rooms -- no more sticky beer patches on the floor."

I knew the world was going to hell in a handbasket when the Army contracted out KP duty (everyone under 50 will have no idea what it is). But this is the icing on the cake.

Native Americans, Immigrants, and the Religious Right

The Times had a piece today, How to Make Sure Children Are Scientifically Illiterate,
with links to the recent international survey of how many people believed in evolution (US just above Turkey at the bottom of the scale) and taking off from the recent Kansas school board voting:

"A key concern should not be whether Dr. Abrams’s religious views have a place in the classroom, but rather how someone whose religious views require a denial of essentially all modern scientific knowledge can be chairman of a state school board."

While my knee jerk reaction is to agree, sometimes old age causes my knee not to jerk. Today I'm wondering: liberals usually favor Native Americans and immigration (also a big story today) and oppose the religious right, as in this piece today. But when you think about it, I suspect many immigrants (particularly the non-college educated) and many Native Americans share with the religious right a disbelief in evolution. But we forget that.

Afghan Road Rage

The Post yesterday had another interesting memo from the front. This time it was from the command sergeant major in Afghanistan, counselling his troops on the best approach to the Afghan populace. Unfortunately, they haven't yet put the image of the memo on their web site, just an
introduction to it: "Indeed, U.S. troops have earned a reputation as 'negligent, offensive, rude, callous, occupiers, hostile, disrespectful . . . you get the point.' That description is found in the memo below by a senior sergeant in Afghanistan, signaling that the Army is thinking seriously about how to operate differently -- and more effectively -- in its counterinsurgency efforts."

It struck my eye for two reasons. It reaffirms what I knew from Nam--you put guns in the hands of big young males and they will try to prove Lord Acton's maxim: "power corrupts...." But it also proves the hold of the past--it's typed in monospaced type (i.e. pica or elite). The bureaucracy has problems believing that proportional spacing upper and lower case is the most readable font.

Staging Photography

Dr. Bernstein at The Volokh Conspiracy has commented extensively on evidence of staging and faking photographs from Lebanon. I commented, and will expand here. (I should look up Susan Sontag's book on the subject, but I'm too lazy.) There's are multiple continuums of photography, with many distinctions, some of which get overlooked in the current discussion:

• at one extreme is the "snapshot", interpreted literally. The photographer is an observer with a fast trigger finger (like Col. Van Loan(?sp) shooting the Vietcong prisoner in Vietnam during Tet 68). Security camera footage and "candid camera" shots also qualify.
  
• the planned "snapshot", where the subject matter is predictable but the photographer is still an observer. Think of the famous photo of Clinton and Lewinsky in the receiving line or JFKjr under JFK's desk--the photographers knew they might get a picture from the situation and did.
• this grades over into "photo-ops" and ceremonies, where the subject plans an event to provide the predictable pictures.
  
• there's also the photographer-posed events, like wedding ceremonies, handshakes, etc. The NYTimes had a photo in connection with the completion of digging a section of tunnel for the water system. A worker had one foot on the rail. While it seemed real, I suspect it was posed, because it was too good a picture to be caught naturally.
  
• a new variation is the "realness" of the event. A wedding or a bill signing is a real event, usually but not necessarily. Realness also ties to "uniqueness"--presumably you can only get a picture once.
  
• finally there's the photographer created events, like much art.

For Lebanon, perhaps there's less toleration of "posing", if any occured, because of the importance of the subject (as compared to the tunnel digging). There's an implicit contract between photographer/media and reader/viewer--what you provide is warranted to be a true reflection of reality in all important aspects. But there's also a contract between photographer and subject--you can take the picture if it's in my best interests. Sometimes the contracts are irreconcilable.

Bureaucrats and Info Sharing

Today's NYTimes has an op-ed piece, All Terrorism Is Local, Too , by an Interpol official complaining that:

"ALTHOUGH last week’s disruption of a terrorist plot to blow up commercial airliners over the Atlantic was a great success, it nonetheless exposed a dangerous gap in global security efforts. The problem is that governments and security services in countries that arrest terrorists and announce their triumphs to the press often fail to alert national and local police forces around the world or share with them information that is crucial to protecting their citizens."

Nothing new here. It's the way people work and it's why "information sharing" is the name of a mirage.

Anti-Modern Elements Unite

Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy: has a post " on the religious right in Israel reaching out to Hamas:

[According to Rabbi Jakobovits], '[t]he Islamic world has deep concerns about the penetration of liberal, secular values and lifestyles into the Middle East. A major factor in the conflict between radical Islam and the Western world is Islam's opposition to secular lifestyle and ideology.

'The haredi community understands their sensitivities and mentality and feels threatened by the same phenomena. The haredi community could play a key role in dialogue between the West and Islam because we live in two worlds, one deeply religious and the other liberal and pluralistic. We understand that the secular mind is different from the religious mind."

Some of the religious right in this country also have deep concerns about the penetration of liberal, secular values and lifestyles in the U.S. (See this post in the Times about the push to change "dry laws".) I think it's fair to say that generally the left doesn't have such concerns, except to the extent that "liberal, secular values" overlap "free market, capitalist values"--i.e., some on the left are generally anti-Walmart, so might support the retention of dry laws.

Victory, Defeat, Lottery Wins and Stumbling on Happiness

Tom Friedman in the Times today makes a valuable point, The Morning After the Morning After: which he phrases like this:

"With every war there are two days to keep in mind when the guns fall silent: the morning after, and the morning after the morning after. America, Israel and all those who want to see Lebanon’s democracy revived need to keep their eyes focused on the morning after the morning after."

His point is that, while there will be claims of victory by Hezbollah on the morning after, the real issue is what happens after that. This ties into Dr. Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness". He says we overrate the importance of key events in the future--how happy or sad we will be when our team wins, our candidate loses, or whatever. What really happens is that the event bobs briefly above the waves, but then sinks to its proper level among all the day-to-day events of living. We were all sad (not true, but that's the historical myth) when JFK was shot. We were all ashamed when the last helicopter lifted from South Vietnam. We were all elated when Armstrong took one small step. But none of those events, in themselves, contributes to our current glee or tears. We deal with the effects of them, but they're in some perspective now.

The same will apply if we "cut and run" from Iraq. Certainly Bucheney is right to say it would be hailed as a victory for al-Qaeda, just as he's been hailing it as a victory for freedom for these many years. When Reagan cut and ran from Lebanon, it was a victory for Hezbollah. But you can win victories and lose the war. You can win a war and lose a peace. You can gain hegemony for a time and fall into decrepitude.

Of course it's better to win victories. But in the long haul what counts is the day-to-day effects, the work, the intelligence, and the morality with which one strives.