The Reverse of the "Perfect Storm" and Immigration

A year ago I would have predicted immigration would be a major issue in the 2008 elections. Instead, to my surprise, it's not. The Republicans have chosen as their candidate the man most friendly, or least adverse, to immigration (speaking loosely). What we may have this year is something that reaffirms the idea that God looks out for idiots and the United States: first, the housing bubble has popped, meaning construction is down, reducing an attraction for immigrants, legal and illegal. Second, the housing bubble has popped, meaning local governments will be strapped for money and won't want to fund anti-illegal immigrant drives and business people may start to miss the market immigrants provided. Third, it's probably in everyone's interest (Obama, Clinton, McCain) to soft peddle immigration as an issue--none of them can win on it.

Bottom line, we may have a breathing space this year and next during which people of good will may be able to find a compromise.


Or maybe I'm as wrong now as I was a year ago--seeing as Prince William County just raided their reserve fund to set up an anti-illegal immigration program.
theadverse neighborhoods may miss their absence, creating a countervailing influence to the

Farm Bill Status

Still up in the air--these links provide updates: Keith Good at Farm Policy and
Congressional Quarterly here.

The issue is how much more money to spend over "baseline" (i.e, what would be spent assuming extension of current provisions) and, under the pay-as-you-go rules the Dems reinstated, how to find the money for the increase (i.e., what games to play and what taxes to raise).

Immigration and Langley Park

The Post had an interesting article on Latino immigration to Langley Park, MD. (Not Takoma Park, the lefty granola crunching Berkeley east, but Langley. ) It's an interesting contrast to my area of Reston, and to Manassas Park where my mother-in-law lives. Housing prices appear to have followed a similar trajectory, but so far they haven't fallen as far as in VA.

One issue that came up in comments on my letter to the Post--"tipping points". The economist Thomas Schelling won a Nobel, partially for his analysis of how a neighborhood can change from white to black (the issue in 1970) simply because of a small, but wide-spread preference for neighbors similar to yourself. Reading between the lines, rental units will tip much faster and easier than owned units, which makes sense. People like me, who resist change in their personal lives, don't have to be that tolerant or liberal; they just have to be sticks-in-the-mud to slow the tipping process, or even make it stop.

Arthur Schlesinger and Journal

Just completed reading Arthur Schlesinger's Journals, 1952-2000. I'd recommend the book for anyone who lived through the period with an interest in politics, at least liberal politics, or in the American social/political establishment.

As a country boy, I'm amazed by the extent to which social and political circles overlapped, often through the beds of the "pretty girls" for whom Schlesinger had a weakness. Shocking. A handful of reflections sparked by the book:

• some women attack Hillary Clinton for staying with her errant husband. This book reminds one that Happy Rockefeller stayed with Nelson, Lady Bird with Lyndon, Eleanor with FDR, Jackie with JFK, etc.
• speaking of Hillary--Arthur is very impressed with her, intelligence, charm, and humor, finding the humor unexpected. Of course the book ends when she had just won the Senate seat, but she, and Kay Bailey Hutcheson, are the two women politicians he praises.
• while a liberal, civil rights wasn't high on his mind in the 50's. The politician for whom he wrote many speeches, Adlai Stevenson, is quoted as arguing the Negroes should be quiet and not demonstrate.
• he has some self-knowledge, enough to be interesting, but he remained a Kennedy die-hard, without any real reflection on the dynamics of the dynasty.
  
• his reflections on the relationship between history and reality are interesting, but too few. Towards the end he takes a rather cynical tack, saying people use history to justify what they want to do.

Most of all, it's the gossip that's interesting, and often frightening when you remember that these are people of power.

French Aren't Human--Withholding Taxes

Someone, I think Milton Friedman, wrote that his worst mistake was helping the IRS to switch to income tax withholding during WWII. The theory was that humans mind big bites--pay your taxes yearly and you'll resist the growth of government. Take it out of each pay check and the left can cheerily persuade humans to agree to higher and higher taxes.

However, according to this post, apparently the theory doesn't work with the French, who are notoriously highly-taxed (as well as highly-sexed), so either they aren't human or the economics has a flaw.

Security Clearance Process

If I remember correctly, Al Gore was proud of his efforts on security clearances. Of course, the Bushies are even more proud. This Government Executive article describes the results of 14 years of reengineering and improvement.

Though I often have some sympathy for failures in government, I don't have much for this. The point is that, once the process was consolidated (which I think Gore's effort did--in DOD), whoever manages it should have the users by the short hairs. All you need is agreement from the President--by date X only security clearances processed the way I want are effective. So you ought to be able to force all the agencies to use your process. That's a big big hurdle jumped. The other problem is getting a process that works, but if you do something incremental, that can be done.

Payments to Dukes and Princes? Not Us

This story hasn't appeared on the EU farm program blog, but apparently the EU has its own entrenched recipients of farm subsidy payments, including the odd duke and prince (read Mark Twain for a take on dukes and princes--he thought they were odd). They've dropped the plan to cap payments.

Ginseng Marketing Order

Under a marketing order, growers of a crop get together to establish standards and do other good things that ordinarily the laws ensuring competition would prohibit. But who knew that ginseng had a marketing order? See here.

FSA's GIS Replacement

Not sure how I feel about this announcement in FCW (Federal computer week):

"The Agriculture Department is seeking information about methods for delivering, disseminating and integrating large geospatial datasets for its Farm Service Agency and other users. USDA is interested in commercial software and/or online mapping interface services that could replace FSA's current systems."

On the one hand, I hope they do better and faster than the System/36 replacement project(s). It's also interesting it's described as strictly FSA--NRCS is not mentioned.

On the other hand, they're pushing centralization. That's an idea which I approve of as a bureaucrat, but resist as a retiree thinking of the small towns of rural America.

As usual, I'm ambivalent.

If Foodies and USDA Are Right

Then Mexicans are due to get fatter and Americans are due to get slimmer over the next 10 years. From an Agweb summary of the USDA's baseline projections over the next 10 years:

"Duties and quantitative restraints on sugar and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) trade between the United States and Mexico ended on January 1, 2008. This results in increased use of HFCS by Mexico’s beverage industry and, consequently, larger sugar exports from Mexico to the United States. • The production value of U.S. horticultural crops is projected to grow by more than 3 percent annually over the next decade, with consumption of horticultural products continuing to rise. Imports play an important role in domestic supply during the winter and, increasingly, during other times of the year, providing U.S. consumers with a larger variety of horticultural products."

For Rep. Lucas, Relax

From the Enid, OK paper, Representative Lucas worries about the sleep of FSA employees:

"The change would be a nightmare for Farm Service Agency employees, Lucas said, who would have to dig up the old records and figure out what things were like back in 1949, then try to explain it to farmers and ranchers.

“The world has changed dramatically in the past 60 years,” Lucas said. “It’s like the Middle Ages compared to now.”"

He can relax. We tried in the 1990's to update and data load the old wheat allotments into the system. The data was so bad that management then said, forget it. That was 15 years ago or so. The data hasn't improved since. If anyone in the South building thinks there's any possibility of doing wheat allotments, they're smoking something.

Games Congress Plays

I'm feeling cynical today. A link to a discussion of the House Ag proposal for a farm bill. Two sources of savings:

–requiring growers to sell their crops when they claim loan deficiency payments. Some farmers have collected windfalls by claiming an LDP when market prices are low and selling the crop when prices are higher.

–ending windfalls to growers who manipulate the rules for loan deficiency payments.”

I wonder how this provision of law was described when it was put into the last farm bill (I'm too lazy to check). Now it's described as a "windfall", but someone wrote the language that made it possible. Maybe Congressional staffers and Congress people don't know what they write?

They also are playing their usual game with accounting rules and provisions. How do you cut the cost--drop payment in the last year. (Same way Bush cut the cost of his tax cuts--which is now coming due.)

FBI Fails Again

Some time I ago I blogged about the FBI's IT system. (See here for one.) Their problem is that each field office was its own empire, with its own files and, until the rise of terrorism, they never really had to transfer data across field office lines. This article seems to say it's still a problem. The Immigration Service is going ahead with issuing green cards to applicants whose FBI background checks aren't complete.

There's not enough background in the piece to know whether it's really fair to blame the FBI for not making progress. It's possible that some of these applicants date back to the dark ages before the FBI got even half-modernized.

I do like the philosophy though. I believe in 80/20 rules and getting the most bang for the buck. As long as there's a tracking system to ensure that USCIS knows which green cards were issued on the basis of incomplete data and to follow up with the FBI to work them through.

Easier Tax Returns

Freakonomics highlights a proposal by Prof Goolsbee--have the IRS prepare the return (for the majority of cases that are simple. It's the sort of thing I really like (my comment is about no. 44). A commenter refers to a British site, seems several countries already do this sort of thing.

South Dakota Swampbuster Case

"Swampbuster" is a provision, originating with the 1985 farm bill, which prohibits farmers who get farm program benefits from draining wetlands. That's the over-simplified version. This article describes a case in SD where a big partnership (brothers) receiving big bucks ($2.5 mill in 10 years) is fighting a determination by National Resource Conservation Service. There's enough description to show some of the complexities involved, though it doesn't say when the violation is said to have occurred.

Inputs, Outputs, Procrastination and Heaven

Here's an interview in a Mauritius newpaper with Paul Romer, a noted economist (hat tip--Marginal Revolution) (the interview is on causes of growth and is interesting in itself):

Many governments try and measure the inputs that go into their education system like the number of teachers on their staff list, the number of students enrolled, but that’s not what you should measure. What should be measured are the outputs. Part of the goal of the government should be not just to spend more resources but also to get more productivity, more learning for the resources that you’ve got.

This reminds that the Government Performance and Results Act also pushed the same theory. The strategic plan for each agency is supposed to focus on outcomes and outputs, not inputs. But I've a problem with procrastination. And often I make New Years resolutions to overcome the problem. In the past I often focused on outputs/comes--I wanted to be more organized, to accomplish specific things. Of course I failed. Why? For one thing I always was overly optimistic--I think it's true of most people, we overestimate how good we are and how easy the job is--we forget Murphy's law. So when I failed to accomplish things when I expected to, I beat myself up, removing the motivation to accomplish.

So this year I tried something a little different--if I spend at least 1/2 hour a day working on something that's difficult to bring myself to do, then I earn some self-indulgence after supper. Note I'm focusing on inputs, not outputs. The logic is that, if I work, I do accomplish something, maybe not as fast as I want or expect, but something. So far, over a month in, I've had better success with this resolution than previous ones.

So, should this work for governments? Perhaps not, but an initial focus on inputs does reflect a commitment to the job. If a President spends an hour of his/her time on an issue, it's important. If it's an hour a week, it's very important. That's behavior that provides good signals to the flunkies, regardless of the output of the meeting.

And how does this ramble tie to heaven? Mauritius is not Mauretania (the big island off Africa). But, according to Mark Twain, it's the prototype of heaven--from wikipedia:

The island is well known for its natural beauty. Author Mark Twain, for example, noted in Following the Equator, his personal travelogue, "You gather the idea that Mauritius was made first and then heaven, and that heaven was copied after Mauritius".

Agency Consolidation--Even in Maine

We once said: "As Maine goes, so goes the nation." That was in the days when Maine's election day was earlier than the rest, so they served as an advance indicator.

These days, Maine is just one of the crowd. This piece outlines problems the governor is having in streamlining his natural resource agencies. It sounds familiar.

Better Than Pollan and Kingsolver?

No, I haven't read the book (The Fattening of America) but no two people are going to be better writers than Michael Pollan and Barbara Kingsolver. That said, this interview
makes me think the analysis is better.

Alzheimer's and Total Weirdness

Long ago, Cornell's School of Agriculture had a cow whose stomach (one of them) was visible--I think they'd opened her up and installed a plastic window--allowed them to observe the process of digestion. That struck me as gross.

But then I started worrying about Alzheimer's. So this report of mice with glassed brains (so scientists can watch amyloid plaque form in the brain) strikes me as marvelous ingenuity, totally tasteful.

Our Up-to-date Government: OMB

This may be unfair, but I linked to this Government Executive article touting Bush's e-government:

President Bush's electronic government initiatives saved agencies $508 million in costs during the 2007 fiscal year, according to the Office of Management and Budget.

The goal of e-government is to "improve services to citizens, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the government and to provide savings to the taxpayer," according to OMB's memorandum. To achieve those goals, the Bush administration is developing governmentwide IT services provided by one agency or service provider to manage cross-agency functions such as payroll, training and travel management.

But when I clicked through to the OMB memo, I found an August 2006 memo.

Pollan Again

Two additional thoughts on Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food:

• One raised by my better half--people need to start smoking again. Increased obesity correlates strongly with decreased smoking.
• The other is all mine, though suggested by this abstract of scholarly research--people need to go back to old-time parenting--it's all this permissive, lovey-dovey parenting of boomers and the x generation that leads to obesity.
  

Senator Grassley and Payment Limits

Farm Policy has a summary, including this from Sen. Grassley:

“Earlier on Tuesday, Grassley sent a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Agriculture committees, saying more reform was needed on payment limits.

“He said landlords could evade income tests, such as the administration’s $200,000 cut-off, by renting their land for cash, rather than for a share of the crop, by reorganizing operations to spread payments among more recipients or manipulating their income, such as buying land.”

I'm not sure how he would change the rules to prevent such changes.

Us Old Fogies--Ruth Marcus on the Budget

Marcus has a column this morning bemoaning the change from paper to electronic publication of the President's budget. She collects a fair amount of scorn in the comments.

I sympathize with both sides. But one advantage of paper that she didn't mention which I found invaluable--you can stack it up on your desk and let everyone know you're overwhelmed.

Immigration, Housing--Am I a Traitor?

Here's my opinion, again. And here's the comments on my letter.

How To Handle Rules

I totally missed the fact that Joe Buck and Troy Aikman conducted a 15-minute discussion of rule interpretation during the Super Bowl, including references to Wittgenstein. But Michael Berube at Crooked Timber gets it.

Earl Butz and His Legacy

Timothy Noah in Slate celebrates the Butz contribution to racial harmony and justice. Hopefully it's a permanent one, unlike his contributions to farm policy.

A Slip of the Congressional Pen [Updated]

I posted here on the delay in signup for dairy disaster assistance. This article explains a bit more.

Forms getting information from the public need OMB approval, which means they need to be accompanied by regulations. What I get from the explanation is that FSA was ready to go until the OMB forms approval people said they wanted final regulations.

But now they've got to worry about 2007 losses and prorating payments. Brings back memories of the 1986 disaster payment program, which was the first time we had to worry about prorating. [Ugh].

Health Insurance Comparison

I was impressed by this comparison of Canadian and US health systems.

The Long-lasting Legacy of Earl Butz

As predicted, the Times obit of Earl Butz led with this:

"Earl L. Butz, who orchestrated a major change in federal farm policy as secretary of agriculture during the 1970s but came to be remembered more for a vulgar racial comment that brought about his resignation during the 1976 presidential election race, died Saturday in Washington."

But on October 6, 1976 Butz is interviewed by the Times on his legacy (he'd resigned the week before). It's headlined: "Butz is Confident That His Policies Will Be Continued."

His legacy (the 1970 bill had implemented optional set-aside programs), he'd pushed for full production, admitting that world conditions had lifted exports. But he claimed a "firm opposition to high price supports had kept United States farm commodities competitive in world markets".

On Oct 13, 1976 President Ford raised price supports by 50 percent on wheat and 20 percent on corn.

Michael Pollan Returns II--Recipe for a Best Seller

I posted before on this book. Now I've read it, so I can take up the challenge of the commenter:

Recipe for a Best Seller

I note that Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food made number 1 on both the NYTimes and WashPost's list of nonfiction bestsellers. When I checked on Jan 27, it was no. 5 on Amazon's bestsellers. And he's getting glowing reviews, both in the Times and Post. (See his website: MichaelPollan) What's his recipe for this success?

1 First, you need a subject--food is always good. (The books that beat Pollan's on Amazon were the recent John Grisham and Stephen King novels, and two books at least partially on food.)

2 Second, you need a narrative, preferrably one with conflict. So you need some good guys and some bad guys. Pollan's good guys are old reliables: common sense, tradition, and mother; the bad guys are also familiar types: nutrition scientists with their reductionist science, the food industry which shoves empty calories down the throats of good Americans, and journalists who push food fads and get things wrong.

3 Third, you need some evil deeds, like the beef industry defeating Senator McGovern in 1980 after he had chaired a committee which challenged the beef industry.

4 Fourth, you need the good to be threatened, a declension, a decline and fall, an ejection from the Garden of Evil. Pollan's declension runs like this. In the good old days people and their food systems had evolved together so Eskimos and Mediterraneans lived comfortably within their ecosystems. But we in the U.S. eat the dreaded Western diet, which threatens a "global pandemic" (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc.). Sauron must be gaining power. The clouds from Mordor are spreading.

5 You need some interesting quirky characters. Pollan has a whacky dentist who studied diets in remote areas before WWII. Pollan doesn't mention the guy's claim, reported in the NY Times in 1934, that vitamin D could slow the progress of cancer, heart disease, etc. The bottom line is whether you're an Eskimo, eating an all-meat diet, or whatever, your food culture has evolved so you're healthy. But the Western diet is not evolved so it causes disease.

6 Above all, you need a sauce of great writing to pour over your other ingredients. Pollan as usual rises to that challenge.

And, as the strawberry on the creme, the finishing touch, you need the magic seven words to summarize your teaching: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." He supports those words with specific advice, most of which are pretty good. Indeed, although he doesn't recognize it, I think he comes out at about the same place as that temple of nutritionism, the USDA. I don't see much in teir suggested 21 day menu that's contrary to Pollan's advice. So, in the end, one could call him a lamb in wolf's clothing.

I've some problems with the book. (Surprise!) The romanticism, the anti-scientific bias, the suspicion of the motives of his bad guys, all rub me the wrong way. (See Daniel Engber at Slate for a challenge to this line of thought. Also this piece on the Scientific American site.) While I've no expertise in nutrition and can't check his facts, where I know the subject he's often wrong, particularly attributing McGovern's defeat to the beef trust. (McGovern moved away from his South Dakota roots as he moved into national politics, he was saved from defeat in 1974 by Watergate, but lost in 1980. 1980 was not a good year for Democrats you may recall. Indeed, a brief search of the NYTimes archives doesn't support the breathless description of McGovern's nutrition commitee changing its recommendations.) I think I've commented previously on his lack of comprehension of agricultural policies and the roles of Nixon and Butz. He brings in the myth among the foodies that Nixon and Earl Butz made a dramatic and final change in agricultural policy that gave us cheap food. (Not so, agricultural policy is made by Congress, not the President or USDA, and it's wiggled back and forth over the years but no dramatic break occurred in Butz's reign. What was dramatic was selling grain to the USSR, but that was more Kissinger than Butz.)

When Mr. Pollan cites traditional food cultures, he praises human ability to adapt and adjust diets to circumstances. When he discusses American food culture, there's no adjustment, just a bunch of suckers for the reductionist science of nutritionism, the false panaceas of journalists, and the advertising dollars and machinations of the food industry. I think he inadvertently nails it when he reminisces about his mother cooking meals--to give herself a rest she served TV dinners. That was a rational choice, a part of Americans adjusting to their new environment. There's been lots of changes in society over the last 60 years, changes that impacted our choices of what to eat and how we eat. Pollan doesn't recognize them.

As a way of recognizing those changes, and mocking Pollan's lessons, here's my advice for good eating:

1 Sell your car. Surely the fact that we have 765 cars per thousand people (leading the world) relates to our obesity.
2 Get a job digging ditches. Manufacturing, moving metals, has declined while services, moving bytes, has increased. The food culture that supported steelworkers and auto workers isn't right for programmers and screen writers.
3 Don't live alone. The percentage of single-person households doubled between 1970 and 2002, It's harder to cook for one person--much easier to buy TV dinners.
4 Don't grow old. Many oldsters, particularly living alone, opt for the ease of TV dinners as opposed to cooking meals from scratch.
4 Move to the inner suburbs. Commuting is a prime time to eat on the go, i.e., unhealthily. Cities are bad because of the lack of supermarkets.
5 Cook. Of course, that means no two-job households, and no feminism.

Pollan admits he wants to make Americans pay more for their food, work harder at preparing it, and have fewer choices. It's not a prescription that sells broadly, certainly not one that any national candidate is going to run on. It's elitist. So USDA and Pollan both are preaching to the choir, IMHO.

Significant Change in Service Center Budgeting

If I understand the USDA's budget proposal, where in the past years the Office of Chief Information Officer had the funding for the "Common Computing Environment", now they've moved it back to the agencies:

"Funding of $64.2 million for certain IT operational expenses and related Geospatial Information Systems (GIS) initiatives which had previously been requested and provided for in the Common Computing Environment account managed by the Office of the Chief Information Officer, are requested in FSA’s salaries and expenses account for FY 2008. The maintenance of modern digitized databases with common land unit information, integrated with soils and crop data and other farm records and related initiatives, is vital to the development of more efficient and effective customer services at the Service Centers. In addition, FSA continues to review its county office structure consistent with Congressional guidance to obtain local input and thorough analysis to determine appropriate restructuring of its county offices."

Not sure of the significance, but interesting (inside baseball).

Faceless Bureaucrats--British Style

A Brit has a new book out, according to this.

I strongly recommend this document translating British bureaucratic jargon, showing that bureaucrats are brothers and sisters under the skin, even though British "civil servants" are more prestigious than their American cousins.

"Elephant trap" for them equates to "swamp" for us.

Earl Butz Dead

According to this and Bloomberg. (Wikipedia already has his death.) I'll be watching the obits to see if they adopt the Pollan/locavore/organic food idea of a big shift in government policy that led to high fructose corn syrup. (In my mind, a myth.)

Are Farmers Psychotic?

Megan McArdle posts an analysis of drug prices and drug R&D and why limited drug company profits would decrease R&D.

She points out that Merck could earn 5 percent on its money by investing in government bonds, and doing no drugs at all. So it needs a chance of profits over that rate. It would be "psychotic," in her estimation, for Merck to continue making drugs if they have only a 1 in 1000 chance of making big profits.

But the same logic could apply to farmers, at least those who own their land free and clear. They could earn more by selling out and investing their capital. But, unlike drug companies, they keep farming (mostly, at least until they get too old). (Of course, this is a point my mother used to make some 60 years ago.)

A Slip of the Congressional Pen

Agweb notes a delay in the dairy disaster signup, because FSA had to do regulations.
Normally in farm legislation Congress exempts USDA from complying with the usual requirements for getting public input--i.e., issuing a notice in the Federal register asking for comments, or at least doing an interim rule with provision for amending it in the final rule. Why is that important?

For speed. Requiring comment slows down the implementation process several ways:

1. First, if the regulations have to be done before the implementation, rather than concurrently with it, it's like the difference between serving concurrent sentences of 10 years versus consecutive.
2. Second, if you get comments and really consider them (two big "ifs"), then you likely end up making changes. While the change may improve the program, it's likely to slow the development of forms and software.
3. Third, distractions. Usually in FSA the same people who are working on the forms and instructions for the field are also the ones who do the regulations. That's good for coordination but poor for single-minded concentration on implementation.

Why my parenthetical in no. 2? The nitty-gritty of most farm programs is not of interest to most people. So comments often come from the usual suspects--the farm organizations which pushed the legislation in the first place. If you're trying to implement their program, then you already are trying to follow their intentions (because that's the intentions of the members of Congress), so comments don't do much. [Note: Statement true as of 10 years ago--might have changed in the interim, but I doubt it.]

Dan Morgan on the Farm Bill

Keith Good at Farmpolicy picks up a Dan Morgan piece on the current status of the farm bill. I was particularly struck by these paragraphs on the budgetary games and impact of high prices:

One irony of the congressional budget system is that the current record high commodity prices serve to protect the existing web of price supports and price guarantees. Even if Congress slashes those rainy day subsidies, CBO won’t credit savings, since CBO sees prices staying well above the existing subsidy floor most of the time. This leaves Congress with little budgetary incentive to make reforms.

(CBO projects that of the $66 billion in commodity costs between fiscal 2008 and 2017, only about $16 billion will go to traditional price supports and guarantees related to what farmers grow. The other $50 billion is accounted for by income support, known as direct payments, that goes to farmers automatically, regardless of prices.)

CBO’s new projections see federal crop insurance subsidies rising sharply, by as much as $14 billion over 10 years. (As farm prices rise, so do insurance premiums that are subsidized by USDA.) Congress could cut the subsidies and capture funds with which to pay for other priorities. But crop insurance subsidies have already been cut in the House and Senate-passed farm bills, and it isn’t clear how much more pain Congress is willing to inflict on the industry.

Greg Mankiw Beat Me to It--The Truth About Economists

See the link.

Fritterware--Google Experiments

A former co-worker called some software "fritterware" because you'd fritter away time using it. Here's Google experimental search site, for anyone with time to spare.

Saving Everything in the Government

This is an interesting endeavor:

"A new international task force will convene for the first time Tuesday to address the problem of maintaining data for future generations.

The National Science Foundation and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation are funding the Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access panel's two-year mission, with support from institutions like the Council on Library and Information Resources, Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and the United Kingdom's Joint Information Systems Committee."

And later

"But she said the formal processes used to designate materials for storage or deletion are integral to sustainability across the globe because it is impossible to save everything."

It might well be possible to save everything. After all, Google Docs saves all the changes made to a document, just as Wikipedia does. Storage costs are going down and down and down.

But if you do save everything, will anyone be able to find what they want? Maybe. Google desktop indexes most everything.

But if you save everything, and anyone can find anything, will anyone care? The problem is the same as for wiretapping, or security cameras, you mostly can only review some stuff in real time. And humans are easily bored. As a natural born pack rat, I saved most everything from my bureaucratic career, at least after the PC landed on my desk. But no one will care. (Unlike Samuel Pepys, no one will write books about mid-level bureaucrats.)

Noted Bureaucrats--Bob Ball

See here for Josh Marshall's note on Bob Ball--the face of the Social Security system for many years. Here's the Post obit.

Rep. Gingrich, Pay Attention

Here's a site which impresses me, at least on first glance. I particularly like the ability to blog about bills, though I suspect the design might not scale up to a national level. I don't know what other states have done. It's possible people in other states are ahead of this. Comparing state and local government operations, although this isn't governmentally sponsored, is something our media doesn't do well, but should

Identifying Government Employees

Government Executive reports on the progress towards having all government employees given background checks and given secure ID cards. (HSPD-12) (Goal was Oct 27, 2007 for < 15 year employees--no agency met the deadline.) The article cites Labor and Education for doing well, both using gradual rollouts.

Most Depressing News of the Day

Here
(Ralph Nader launches exploratory effort to run for President.)

Innovation in Government

Here's a Post story on the government's use of a wikipedia.

This sort of thing is needed. I remember the old SCOAP QandA's and the various bulletin board systems and mailing lists we used to have. There's limits on how much you can do with a straight up and down hierarchy--you need some other methods. A problem for us in ASCS was that technology opened up possibilities, and each innovator followed his or her own nose. Of course, when technology is changing fast, you don't want to standardize quickly.

And another problem was that this was all guerrilla stuff--top management was mostly only vaguely aware of what was going on, if that. It's possible now that wikipedia has given the "wiki" methodology enough visibility and prestige, and its experience has mapped out some parameters that this is truly a useful exercise. (Assuming that the relevant user community is all comfortable with computers, etc.)

Another Rural Program

Ran across this Federal Register document:

Household Water Well System Grant Program Announcement of
Application Deadlines and Funding

I'm no doubt being unfair by linking to it without any background--my guess is that it's funding one or two non-profits who loan money for drilling wells in God-forsaken places, but that's only a guess.

Noted in Passing--E-regulation

The No National Animal Identification System blog refers to a Federal Register document requesting public comments on a "naturally grown" label. (They don't like the proposal, nor does Sugar Mountain farm.) I took the opportunity to try out the regulations.gov process for submitting comments on regulations (said their label ought to be more like the FDA food label, rather than a certification of history).

The process worked reasonably well, though the "help" process is a little lame. I requested a report on the usage of the process--I'm betting they don't have one, but maybe I'm too cynical. We'll see.

Race, Class, and Organic

Tom Philpott notes, from his attendance at a California eco-farming conference:

And yet, sustainable-ag remains a passion limited largely to white, middle-class folks. Eco-Farm displayed a broad diversity of ages and sartorial styles. Ethnically, though, a kind of monoculture flourished. That fact was seldom mentioned; and only with a dose of self-flagellation. What was missing, though, was analysis. Why are so few non-whites drawn to small-scale farming? I never heard the question come up. Like the national food-justice movement, the California contingent has failed to open a broad and sustained conversation on food, class, and race. Indeed, the whole question was essentially relegated to a single informative session on urban farming. I think the vexations of food and class will have to be fully aired and addressed for the sustainable-food movement to move beyond niche status. But the lack of discussion at Eco-Farm doesn't mean there isn't plenty of powerful activism around food in low-income, minority-dominated areas in California. In the next days, I plan to visit and post about San Francisco's Alemany Farm and Oakland's People's Grocery.

Why doesn't it work for Latinos and African-Americans? Money. Eating local, eating organic is the sort of crunchy life-style choice that made by people who have it made. Not to say that it's only rich people, but it's people who aren't striving to make it, to put kids through college, to advance a rung up the ladder. In Thorsten Veblen's terms, it's another form of conspicuous consumption. It's the people who can afford to be skinny, to devote their life to art, who seem to gravitate to this.

John Phipps Counsels Moderation

John Phipps comments:

We're going to need another justification than "cheap food" to continue our subsidies with farm income for many growers at record levels. When disposable income stagnates with slow growth, our oft-repeated statistic about "less of their income" could shoot up significantly, revealing it is 90% about income and 10% about commodity prices.

Grain farmers are also going to have to contend with increasingly restive livestock producers.

I think payment limits and means-testing would be a strategic compromise to consider right now. Ya gotta know when to fold 'em.

Complexity in Politics

Shankar Vedantam has an article discussing research on state of the union addresses. They tend to be more complex in the first 3 years of a presidential term, and less so in the 4th year/re-election cycle. The argument is that the public likes its liquor straight and its politics simple, unmixed with qualifications or cautions. So when a president is running for office he/she keeps things simple, when governing he/she acknowledges more complexity.

It's interesting, though it fits my preconceptions a bit neatly.

Bud Light + Honda = Ivy League Economist

Maybe I should return to my alma mater--Bob Frank's Crib