The Embrace of the Right

In today's Post, two conservative thinkers embrace the Obama administration's policies--Mr. Kagan on foreign policy and Mr. Gerson on education policy.  Toss in the possibility of a compromise on Gitmo and trying KSM in the civilian court system and the left will see Obama as running to the right.

As for me, I'm not terribly concerned about any of the above.  Some of the changes reflect lack of political support, some lack of realism about the world while campaigning, and some the more conservative side of his campaign. The "trick" for political leaders is to tack back and forth while still progressing towards their goals, to evoke a metaphor from reading Horatio Hornblower novels.  And so long as the choice on the Republican side runs from Mitt to Sarah, Obama has lots of running room.

Surprising Factoid of the Day

According to Joel Mokyr's The Lever of Riches, the Koran was first printed in the 20th century (i.e., Islamic or Arab culture resisted the printing press).

Challenge to White House and USDA--Your Gardens

The snow has finally melted in our garden, so it's time to start work.  Since we live in the suburbs, about half a zone colder than DC, I'd expect the avid gardeners at the White House and USDA to be working the soil and close to planting.  (I bought onion sets today--together with peas they're the first things we grow in the spring.  Some years we've had peas in the ground for a couple weeks by now, but March 15 is the target date.)

Since I'm cynical, I wouldn't be surprised if there's less PR about the WH and USDA gardens this year.  But I'd like to be surprised. So, a challenge--tell your devoted public every day you plant something.  And I hope the WH is making less use of transplants this year.

Least Surprising News from Yesterday

From Farm Policy:

Reuters writer Charles Abbott reported yesterday that, “The House Agriculture Committee on Wednesday rejected President Barack Obama’s proposals to reduce crop subsidies to higher-income farmers and federal support for crop insurance.
“There was little discussion as the committee refused farm cuts requested by the president for the second year in a row. With elections in November, the committee approved a letter saying benefits ‘should be maintained’ at current levels.
“‘We are united and I think we have over-whelming support in the House not to open up the farm bill’ enacted in 2008, said Agriculture chairman Collin Peterson, a Democrat.”

And people think Obama has power. Not so.

Words Not Often Found in the Blogosphere

From Ezra Klein, re: Rep. Ryan:

But in the meantime, let me say how much respect I have for Ryan's willingness to engage with substantive critiques. And the reason he is willing engage like this is that he's confident that he knows his stuff. I've not been convinced by his position, but I always walk away from our talks with more respect for his position. Congress needs more like him.

I Like Transparent Government, But Not This

Tom Ricks posts on an Israeli raid which was canceled because a soldier put it on Facebook.

Funniest Line Today

"In fact, it was the best kind of profile: the kind that confirmed everything I already believed."  Ezra Klein, in a post commenting on a profile of Rahm Emanuel.The content is pretty good too.

The Value of Those Fries

Via the Google News most viewed, here's a graphic and article showing the fast food outlets in the US, with an interesting description of the different strategy used by McDonald's versus all the rest (basically relying on their fries to pull people everywhere).

The 5 Percent (Disaster Payment) Solution

John Phipps earlier expressed his disbelief, so I'm late to the game:

Ken Anderson reported yesterday at Brownfield that, “The chair of the National Cotton Council says disaster assistance for farmers will be included in the new jobs creation bill in Congress.
“Eddie Smith says little is known about the proposal, but speculates it could look much like earlier offerings—most likely tied to a disaster declaration by the Secretary of Agriculture, with producers receiving a payment similar to a direct payment. They would have to prove an economic loss of five percent for at least one crop of economic significance.”

From Farm Policy today.  A five percent loss is well within the natural volatility of agriculture.  The only thing which might, I say "might", make this halfway, or a quarter way reasonable is if the yields being used are still frozen from the mid-90's.  They might be, I've lost track and am too lazy to check.

Government Websites

Matt Yglesias highlights the Senate Finance Committee website, which is optimized for browsers over 10 years old.

Gallup and Job Satisfaction

Ann Althouse links to a Gallup poll which shows most people in most occupations think their jobs are ideal for them.

This seems dubious to me, except as an example of people adjusting to reality.  If an interviewer asks the question: is your current job ideal for you? what are the alternatives:

1. You say "yes".
2. You say "no".

"Yes" means you get rid of the interviewer without raising any unpleasant emotions in yourself.  And possibly you're pleasing the interviewer.

"No" means you have to ask yourself what job would be better, and why you haven't done anything to get the job; in other words, you open a whole can of worms.  And you gain nothing by doing so. It's not as if you were sitting down with a counselor at the beginning of your working life to determine what job is ideal and how to get it.


Personal note: no, I never had an ideal job for me.  For a time there was a good fit between my abilities and the demands of the job, at least in my opinion, but not ideal.

I Learn English from an Economist

Is it: "get one's just desserts" or "get one's just deserts"? I learn, via Greg Mankiw.

It's humiliating, is what it is.

New Fangled Stuff Never Works

That was Cliff Stoll in 1995, as I paraphrase his deprecation of the Internet.  (Stoll won same fame by tracking some Internet hackers and writing a book about it.  Good book, bad prediction.)

Media Bias--Telling Us What We Want

Via Marginal Revolution, a study which seems to show that newspapers give their readers what they want, in the way of political bias--that is, there's a correlation between the political leanings of a paper's market and the political bias of the paper.

Fraud and Investigations

Got an email from a person who challenged me to investigate the fraud in the farm loan program.  It wasn't sent as a comment, so I won't be more specific, and indeed it was not specific in its allegations.  I would have hoped that any regular reader of the blog, all X of them, would have inferred I'm retired and just bloviating these days; any investigations, particularly of farm loans which is an area I never was directly involved with, are out of the question.


But for anyone who believes there's fraud and abuse going on, here's the OIG site for reporting.  Because the OIG types are bureaucrats, they'd love to have a nice juicy case of fraud to boast of investigating, so go ahead and make their day.

Are Farmers Wealthy Parasites?

That's a question raised by this excerpt from a farmgate post on ERS research:

" For more than 10 years the median income for farm household has surpassed that of the average US family by a margin of anywhere from 3 to 21%, and farm family wealth has been 4 to 5 times [emphasis added] that of the average US family...."

Of course, my mother would add that farmers are land rich and money poor.  And the rest of the story/sentence is:

"but economists say farm family budgets are either very solid or very weak and 5 to 8% of farm families have negative household income each year, and there is a larger percentage of farm families in the poverty level than the percentage of non farm households. In brief, farm income is highly variable from year to year."

So, the plight of the families at the bottom end of the range is a justification for programs which help the whole range?  Are the fulminations of the greens true--that the programs favor the big farmers and not the people who are really in need?  Maybe, but consider this:

"USDA’s examination of farm households discovered that large farms, which were defined as $100,000+ in sales, had higher instances of both wealth and poverty than farms as a whole and all US families as a whole. Those farms make up only 16% of all farms, but income poverty is 22% among persons living in those households, compared to 14% for all farm families and 12% for all US families.

That counters the stereotype of small poor farms.  All in all, data to support and challenge all preconceptions.

An "A" for Obama

For transparency, at least.  From the White House blog:

Today’s release is just one example of the many efforts that were recognized by a consortium of independent outside government reform groups that gave the Administration an A for its first-year actions making government open and transparent—and these actions have also been praised by other outside experts.  This Administration’s concrete commitments to openness include issuing the Open Government Directive, putting up more government information than ever before on data.gov and recovery.gov, reforming the government’s FOIA processes, providing on-line access to White House staff financial reports and salaries, issuing an executive order to fight unnecessary secrecy and speed declassification, reversing an executive order that previously limited access to presidential records, and webcasting White House meetings and conferences.

Photo Friday

Via Chris Blattman here's the site of a photographer who has a series on "bureaucratics"--nice pictures.

"Maintaining the Story" and Local Food

Here's a UWisconsin-Madison  release on the problems of interfacing (my term) farmers and customers of locally grown food. It's hyping a study they did.  They see rising demand but problems in meeting it.  One problem:

"One common concern cited in the report is maintaining the story behind locally grown food. People who buy local food are often willing to pay a premium for knowing where and how it was grown, a big part of the appeal of farmers' markets."

To me that almost sounds like a version of NAIS--associating a product with a story.  So if big retailers push big packers into animal identification, maybe locavore buyers push the locavore farmers into identification of produce?

NAIS Failure

From Chris Clayton  on the responsibility for the failure of NAIS:

...who at the top of the buying chain pushed back down and stated they would reward cattle feeders and ranchers for using USDA-approved ID systems? Who announced they would dock cattle that started arriving at the packer without approved-ID systems? Who defended the system at the animal ID meetings for packers? The packers complained about the idea of being responsible for essentially retiring tags when animals were slaughtered. The packers also let the livestock groups and USDA take the lead on NAIS and it has failed.

Animal ID would be a national system today if Tyson had simply decided six years ago that is the way it's going to be.

I think it's an overstatement, but points the way to the future. It's rather like when Wal-mart adopts green standards or goes organic--it has a big impact.  So too, if the big buyers push animal identification, their suppliers are going to comply.  But that's true only for the animals and the suppliers involved with the big buyers.  Meat packers would influence beef and pork, but not bison or ostrich.  And those small producers who don't sell to the big packers wouldn't feel the pressure.  So we would, and I expect we will, evolve to a two-level system.

The River of Riches

That's the title of a book I'm reading now. (It's not new, but Tyler Cowen plugged his new book, which isn't yet at the library).  It's by Joel Mokyr, and the subtitle is : Technological Creativity and Economic Progress.  It's interesting, although a bit overwhelming in the number and variety of innovations and inventions he describes.  I'm only up to the late 19th century but I'd recommend it for anyone interested in how and when society changes the way it produces goods.

But on to agriculture. The main chemical fertilizers are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potash/potassium.  As Mokyr observes, there's a long history of creating such fertilizers, but the "father of fertilizer" was Justus von Liebig, (1803-1872). I don't know if you count the making of potash by burning trees, as did my great great grandfather who settled in Ontario county and cleared his land.  The potash was shipped east for soap, glass, and fertilizer. Late in the 19th century mines were developed.   Nitrogen came from mining Chile's guano deposits.  Also in the mid 19th century super-phosphate was developed (making a more soluble form by treating phosphate rock with sulfuric acid.

[Revised the title so it fits the first sentence of the post.]

Not a Millennial

Via Kevin Drum, I took the Pew Research quiz determining how much like a member of the Millennial generation I am.  Answer: 13 (very unlike).  I guess it's those tattoos and text messages.

Klobuchar for SCOTUS? or President?

Via Volokh, a long post by Tom Goldstein predicting what happens in Supreme Court positions.  (Short answer: Stevens retires, Ginsburg doesn't.)  He runs through the possible candidates, ending with Sen. Klobuchar. From what little I've seen of her, I was mentally tipping her for POTUS.  When you ask, who will run for the Dems after Obama, and who might be the next female candidate, she seems to me to stand out.  Remains to be seen whether she would want either job.

[Updated: I Googled "Klobuchar for President" and found I'm out-of-date.  Here's a discussion--apparently she has too much of a sense of humor to be President.  Not a disqualification in my eyes--our most humorous President was also our greatest.]

Comprehensive Information Management System

FSA put out a notice describing the Comprehensive Information Management System (CIMS), not to be confused with SCIMS.  CIMS tries to accomplish what we played with in 1992--reconciling data between FCIC/RMA and FSA data.  The farmer who has crop insurance ends up reporting her crops and acreages twice.  Because the programs differ, there are rational differences in the data.  Because the history of the programs and agencies differs, there are historical differences in the data.  A farmer, and her representatives in Congress, are naturally not eager to understand the differences.  The dual system opens the way for confusion and fraud.  One way to solve it would be to consolidate the programs. Another way to solve it would be to consolidate the IT systems. Both options have the advantage of simplicity, at least in concept, as in KISS. But politics and bureaucracy rule out both.

The worst solution is the one Congress mandated--a rear-end process copying the FCIC/RMA and FSA data into one place so the data can be matched and compared.  (I'm sure I'm unfair to CIMS--no doubt the process of creating it uncovered some places where the data elements themselves could be tweaked for compatibility.)  I say "worst", because the solution probably doesn't simplify anything for the farmer, nor does it put in place any checks to keep the farmer from misreporting.  All it does is enable FSA bureaucrats to identify conflicts, and possibly fraud.  That's better than nothing, so progress is being made. It remains to be seen how well the process will work in 2010.

Twelve Years Ago in FSA

Found an article in Government Executive from 1998 with a good overview of the bureaucratic structures and policies which led to conflict between FmHA and ASCS people after the reorganization.

Centralized Versus Decentralized: Unmanned Drones

Government Executive has a post on the management of drones.  Turns out management of air space is problematic--when you call in an airstrike, you want everyone else (all drones and planes) out of the way.  But years ago we refused to designate an overall manager of drones, so now there's problems in coordinating drone flights over Afghanistan.  As a country we tend to believe in decentralization, which definitely has advantages in encouraging innovation and flexibility.  But there's a time for centralization as well.  Wisdom consists in figuring out when and where to use each tactic.

Faking It

Freakonomics has a post, and a lot of comments, on the subject of "faking it" (pretending one is religious when you aren't, liberal when you're conservative, etc.) in order to enjoy the benefits of fitting in.

Bureaucrats Hall of Shame: Samuel Swarthout

According to a review of a new volume of Jackson papers:

"He [Jackson] also  refused to listen when Martin Van Buren warned against the appointment 
of Samuel Swartwout as Collector of Customs for the Port of New York, yet Swartwout became the first man to steal one million dollars from the U.S. Treasury (pp. 177-178).

Environmental Impact and Nostalgia

Chris Clayton passes on an academic argument that USDA should be doing an environmental impact statement for farm programs, with the implication that the green types may well sue based on the argument.  I'm no expert in such issues, but I remember back when the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which requires the impact statements, was passed, and ASCS scrambled to figure out how to comply with it.  As I remember the lawyers of the day decided an impact statement was needed for the Agricultural Conservation Program (the cost-sharing for conservation practices program which has evolved and evolved since then). I guess they said there wasn't enough direct impact of the production adjustment programs on the environment.  As I remember the Directives Branch in which I worked got stuck with the assembly and typing job, since we had by then bought some IBM Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriters.

MT/ST's were an early and primitive form of word processor.  Few people much younger than I will appreciate the advances technology has made in that area.  Why back in the day we not only walked in the snow uphill both ways to school 5 miles, but we were able to type copy very fast and with no errors, ever. Standards have purely gone to hell since then, and it's all the fault of computers.

A Reason for the Estate Tax

From a post at Overcoming Bias on a study of management of firms in a variety of countries:

Inherited family-owned firms who appoint a family member (especially the eldest son) as chief executive officer are very badly managed on average.

France and Homogeneity

Read a good book called something like: "Discovering France", which was an impressionistic history of France in the 18th and 19th century, with emphasis on the differences  in language and culture among the different regions.  One of the things you see in Mr. Beauregarde's blog is how extensively the state regulates the society and culture.  This post at Strange Maps touches on both themes: the underlying differences and the homogeneity.
 

Silence Is the Law in France

From Dirk Beauregarde: You aren’t even allowed to mow your lawn on a Sunday (unless you have an old manual mower).

Actively Engaged Definition

Via Farmgate, an Iowa State interpretation of FSA notices.

Russians and US Work Together

According to a vendor at the farm machinery show--their GPS uses both US and Russian satellites.

Farmers Markets Are Not Simple

See this post.

The study identified five preference-based consumer segments: market enthusiasts, recreational shoppers, serious shoppers, low-involved shoppers, and basic shoppers -- each with significantly different demographics and behavior characteristics. 

The Reality of Government

Those of us who have wasted too much of our time attending to how the government works know the reality often differs from what's reported in any media. Via Orin Kerr at Volokh Conspiracy, here's a piece on how federal judges are appointed. Similar processes are at work for other appointees.

Nationalism at Work

The National Archives has a post daily which shows a document from their archives keyed to that day's historical events.  Today they disgrace themselves by their nationalism:

John Glenn conducted the first manned space orbit of the earth on February 20, 1962. This is the transcription of his in-flight communication with Mission Control in Florida.
Read more at Our Documents

Or maybe just their youth. Yuri Gagarin was, of course, the first man to orbit the earth; Glenn was the first American into space. [Corrected--my memory is poor, Alan Shepard was the first American into space, Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth. (Remember the fireflies in "The Right Stuff"?]

Those Tunnels in the White House Garden

The make-shift tunnel in our community garden is down--whether the owner took it down before the snow or whether it was damaged by the Dec or Feb snows I don't know.  I wonder how the White House tunnels have held up under the weight of the snow.

The End of the Most Surprising Post Today

From those dour lawyers at Volokh:
"But it is in fact theoretically possible that there will be three vacancies at the Supreme Court this summer."

Pigford Agreement

See here for the text of the statement from USDA and Justice.  I'm not clear how the process will work, whether it differs from the prior one. Congress still needs to appropriate $1.15 billion in addition to the $100 million already done.

All It Takes to Achieve Efficiency: Leadership?

From Federal Computer Weekly:

"When the Office of Management and Budget issued Bulletin 96-02 in October 1995, the number of data centers was believed to be about 200. The OMB directive ordered all federal agencies to close, consolidate, modernize and/or outsource their data centers to increase efficiency and reduce costs. "Industry experience suggests operational savings of between 30 percent and 50 percent from consolidation when compared with unconsolidated operations," then-Budget Director Alice Rivlin wrote.
Fifteen years later, the number of data centers stands at about 1,100, according to OMB."

People should remember such episodes when they focus on what the President can and can't do.

Back When Being a Millionaire Meant Something

From the 1930 blog:

"A record 511 people reported income over $1M in 1928; 26 reported income over $5M, with 11 of those in NY State."

Compare that to this, from Business Week (Bloomberg):

"The 400 highest-earning U.S. households reported an average of $345 million in income in 2007, up 31 percent from a year earlier, IRS statistics show."

So the incomes of the rich have multiplied many times since 1930.  (I won't give a multiple because the figures are apples and oranges.)

Looking Down the Road and Maneuvering--Rep. Peterson

From FarmPolicy: “Peterson said he is opposed to the Obama administration’s plans to cut $8 billion from crop insurance expenditures over the next 10 years, in part because he wants to preserve as high a baseline for agriculture as possible for the next farm bill or reconciliation negotiation."

Tom Ricks and the Right Metrics

I like Tom Ricks' blog, the Best Defense, even though I'm a natural-born civilian whose military career is 42+ years in the past.  He's included some discussion on various metrics useful in war (no, body count which was used in Vietnam is not useful), including stuff from Mr. Kilcullen which seems perceptive.

But this post focuses on how metrics should be used.  I think some of the observations would work for metrics used to measure bureaucracies.  I believe James Q Wilson observed that government bureaucracies often occur because their outputs aren't measurable; the idea being that if the output is measurable it could be sold in a market.  That's one reason why the various proposals for paying bureaucrats for performance are difficult.  It's also why it can be hard to motivate a bureaucrat. Job satisfaction comes from feeling you're accomplishing something, that you can see the results.

Dutch Dairymen and the Move to the US

  The Wall Street Journal has an article on the process by which Dutch dairymen have moved to the US and the problems some have faced. (Sounds like a combination of the boom, over enthusiasm, and some hype from an early mover, not that the farmers described represent all Dutch dairymen who've moved.

Hat tip: Farm Policy

Easy Data Collection

Megan McArdle alerted me first to the possibility, then there was a more elaborate post here.

What's the possibility?  Using a Google Docs spreadsheet/form combo to capture data.  In McArdle's case, she's using it to capture the name and addresses for her wedding invitees.  As a bureaucrat, I can't help but remember a number of occasions when I would have liked an ad-hoc report from state offices.  But trying to get Kansas City to gin up a short report was difficult.  Granted, in many cases the data I wanted was sitting in the county files and could be extracted by using Query/36 and uploaded, but there were some cases where asking the office to data load something would have been helpful.

Now, thanks to Google, it's available.  Or, to be realistic, it would be except undoubtedly the FSA hierarchy will put some limits and restrictions on using Google, like: "Do not ever use it."

"So Yesterday"?

Post has an opinion piece entitled: The Case Against Banning the Word "Retard".  It's a good discussion of changing terminology, "word fetishes", etc. But this struck me:

"The Ad Council and the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network have developed a Web site, ThinkB4YouSpeak.com, that, much like R-Word.org, encourages the public to sign a pledge to cease using the phrase. (The slogan: "Saying that's so gay is so yesterday."):"

As a man of yesterday (or even the day before), I protest this term as unfair.  It stereotypes people of a certain age as out of it and no longer a full participant in society; it establishes a hierarchy of those who are with it and those who are not; it demeans those who feel affection for the norms of yesteryear.

A Return to Supply Management

Actually not a return for dairy, because dairy has never had a mandatory supply management program, but a return for agriculture generally, because tobacco and peanuts did have such programs. There seems to be some support for instituting one, based on this Agweb post:

Maddox supports the Holstein association’s proposed supply management plan, known as the Dairy Price Stabilization Program. The plan calls for a national, mandatory program that sets a base for milk production and assesses producers a fee if they exceed it.

I don't recall, but I think other countries have had such plans.  And it might be bureaucratically possible.  The key to supply management is to have complete reports of product flow from the farm to the next step, such as the tobacco warehouse. Is it likely?  It would need legislation. And my gut answer is: "no", but we'll see.

ERS Food Environment Atlas

ERS has an interactive map here.  (Warning, I had a problem with Firefox 3.5.3, but not with Chrome or Firefox 3.6. And you may have to "reset the map")  It displays state level, and some county-level data, on various parameters relating to food: availability of supermarkets, availability of fast food, demographics, consumption per capita of various kinds of food, etc. etc.

I think I owe a hat tip to Obamafoodorama.

So Long Myer-Emco

The Post reported today that Myer-Emco, a high-end audio-video chain, is going out of business:

The death of MyerEmco can also be blamed on changing consumer behavior. In the past, specialty stores such as MyerEmco could charge more than big-box rivals, such as Best Buy, because they employed highly trained sales-and-service staff who were knowledgeable about the products they sold.

But with the proliferation of product information on the Internet, consumers are far less likely to walk into a bricks-and-mortar store and spend time speaking to an expert about a premium audio receiver than they once were. Consumers can learn about the receiver by consulting online experts and reading customer reviews. Then, they shop online for the cheapest price on the product, altogether bypassing specialist retailers. And even if prices at a specialist retailer were comparable to Big Box and online sellers -- as they were at MyerEmco in recent years -- the smaller stores carried a reputation for higher prices, and that perception has proved difficult to change.

The logic works for me.  But isn't this just a small example of a change in how information is handled in the economy? There's probably lots of instances where someone who used to know something others didn't has lost that edge.  I'm thinking of pharmacists, whose patients can now look up illnesses on the Internet; government operatives who deal face to face with customers, repairmen, etc.