That Special Disaster Program

I suppose the funding for Rahm's special disaster program he promised Sen. Lincoln would come from Commodity Credit corporation through Section 32 funds.  Here's a Congressional Research Service report on the authority.  I don't remember FSA's using this for direct disaster payments to farmers, but it's possible.

Institutional Inertia

Two instances of possible institutional inertia today.  Note that I can't be sure on either instance, but I can and do speculate that bureaucracies do not respond rapidly to changing situations, which can be bad or good.

McArdle and her credit union.  
 In this case Megan McArdle and her husband are buying a house.  McArdle goes through their logic of what their maximum is, then calls their credit union, which is willing to approve a loan for twice amount they want, which shocks her.  Here I suspect the credit union never made major changes in its policies in the last decade, at least not in response to the Great Recession.  Most likely their clientele and the geographic area they serve were not subject to a big run-up, and thus the number of foreclosures was within tolerable limits for the credit union.  And even if they weren't, the bureaucratic dynamics of such an institution probably delay their response.


DC and homicides (via Yglesias). DC is on pace to have the lowest rate of homicides since the 1960's, a fact commented on by Yglesias.  What he didn't comment on is the increase in clearance rate, which is something readers of Homicide would be very conscious of.  In this case bureaucratic/political inertia means the number of homicide detectives isn't being reduced as fast as the homicides, so there's more time to pay more attention to each killing, resulting in more clearances.  Here bureaucracy in the way jurisdictions allocate funds means DC is gaining on the down dip; there's a virtuous cycle.  But when homicides increase they'll lose on the up cycle; there will be a vicious cycle.

2 Blocks Bad; 12 Blocks Good?

In Animal Farm, the mantra was: "4 legs good, 2 legs bad".

According to this NYTimes piece on the proposed Cordoba community center/mosque, there's currently a mosque 12 blocks away from the World Trade center site.

But using Google maps it seems there's a limited facility .2 miles away.  When I say "limited", I mean this is included on their site:

Bathroom access is limited. Please make wudu before coming to the Masjid.

 Sorry for the incovenience.
Jazaka Allahu Khyera.

Acting White

"Acting white" is described at Wikipedia as usually applied to African-Americans (and by Ralph Nader to Obama). But this post has a graph indicating Hispanic students turn against their peers with high grades more strongly than do black students. The article to which it refers is worth reading, though it dates to 2006.

The idea is that the peer group fears losing its most successful members so tries to reinforce its sanctions to maintain its integrity.

Slater as Bureaucratic Operative

James Q. Wilson calls those bureaucrats who deal directly with the public "operatives".  They're the DMV clerk, the checkout person, the cop on the beat, the airline attendant.  Although the customer is always right and the public is the boss, I suspect many can empathize with Mr. Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who lost it.

"Re-up for the Bennies"

I dredged that phrase out of my memory prompted by the On Language piece in the NY Times magazine (which discussed "bennies" as a pejorative phrase in New Jersy.  It's also in Chapter Five of this online book.  

For us draftees it was a sarcastic fling at the RA's (enlistees), telling them to re-enlist for the great fringe benefits, like serving in Vietnam, but it usually was stimulated by any specific grievance of the moment.

Will Our Kids Be Better Off in the Future?

Kevin Drum comments on a Peggy Noonan column and attracts a bunch of comments. [Update: here's Scott Winship and lots of polling.] Noonan as quoted by Drum:

The country I was born into was a country that had existed steadily, for almost two centuries, as a nation in which everyone thought — wherever they were from, whatever their circumstances — that their children would have better lives than they did....Parents now fear something has stopped....They look around, follow the political stories and debates, and deep down they think their children will live in a more limited country, that jobs won't be made at a great enough pace, that taxes — too many people in the cart, not enough pulling it — will dishearten them, that the effects of 30 years of a low, sad culture will leave the whole country messed up.

Drum agrees but based on the dominance of an elite:

it's the fact that we increasingly seem to be led by a social elite that's simply lost interest in the good of the country. They were wealthy 30 years ago, they've gotten incomparably more wealthy since then, and yet they seem to care about little except amassing ever more wealth and endlessly scheming to reduce their tax burdens further. Shipping off our kids on a growing succession of costly foreign adventures is OK, but funding healthcare or unemployment benefits or economic stimulus in the midst of a world-historical recession is beyond the pale.

Seems to me you need to distinguish a bunch of different intended meanings in the answer to such pollster questions::

• the answer may be in terms of relative status, where status is an "excludable good", as the economists mights say. Will my child, the son of a farmer, live a better life because he'll be President? But for anyone who becomes President, many million can't become President.  If you want your child to move from the bottom 10th in wealth to the middle 10th, someone else has to drop in relative wealth.
• or a slightly different answer: Will my child, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, live a better life because he'll be a doctor, a lawyer? We've probably got a greater percentage of our population in the law and medicine than in the past, so this interpretation is more "absolute status".  Granted that as the number of lawyers and doctors increases in society, their status may slightly decline, but I'll ignore that.
• or in terms of money, adjusted for inflation:  Will my child earn more than I, or accumulate more wealth during her lifetime than I? Depending on whether we're talking household or individual, this seems to be the area liberals focus on.
• or in terms of welfare:  Will my child live better than I? Have a longer life, better health, more friends, more opportunities, etc. This seems to be the area conservatives focus on--the effects of technological progress.  We drive better cars, have better housing, etc.
• or in terms of the nation.  Will my child live in an United States which is thriving as a nation?
• or in terms of the world.  Will my child live in a world which is more peaceful and more prosperous than the one I lived in.
• or in terms of social norms.  Will my child live in a society with which I'd be comfortable?

IMHO, though I don't have children, I'd bet people who are 10 years old today would, in 2070, agree the answer for most of the above, excluding the first and last, would be "yes".  For my parents, the answer for all of the above, except the last, was "yes".

Funniest Take on Legislators Today

"Generally this ["rational basis" test] is an easy hurdle to clear, because the court is very deferential; if it weren’t for bad ideas about what they want to do, and how they want to do it, many legislators wouldn’t have any ideas at all"  From John Holbo at Crooked Timber on the Walker decision on Prop 8.

Chinese Trash

Early in the week there were some stories (WSJ here, with slide show) about trash on the Yangtze river threatening the operation of the Three Rivers Dam in China.

That's a reminder of how far and fast China has come--even in the western interior of the country their citizens have become wealthy enough to have trash.  I remember when they were so poor and so thrifty they recycled everything.

Michelle and Jackie as Marie Antoinette?

Michelle Obama is catching flack, even from Ms. Dowd in the Times, about her vacation trip.  Reminds me of when Jackie Kennedy and Caroline took a long trip to Italy, I think.  (May have been some hobnobbing with nouveau riche like Onassis and royalty.)

Should Government Be Wrong Half the Time?

Post at Google Operating System on their failures (e.g., they just dropped Wave).

Google's Peter Norvig has a more detailed explanation for this attitude:

"If you're a politician, admitting you're wrong is a weakness, but if you're an engineer, you essentially want to be wrong half the time. If you do experiments and you're always right, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments. You want your experiment to be like the flip of a coin: You have no idea if it is going to come up heads or tails. You want to not know what the results are going to be."

Makes sense to me, although I must admit as a supervisor I wasn't happy about any failures. The distinction is between learning and executing; it's good to fail while learning, but when you say you have the answer, you'd better have the answer.  That may also tie into the free market--it's good for learning, but government can compete when the learning is done.

[I know, some anti-government wiseacre thought to herself when she read my title: if the government was wrong only half the time, it would be an improvement.]

The Not-So-Efficient Free Market System: Alcohol in VA

Our new Virginia governor won office last year based on a campaign of, among other promises, privatizing the system of ABC stores for selling liquor and using the proceeds for transportation.  The Post yesterday had an interesting article on the problems in implementing the promise, including a comparison with the systems in DC and MD.  Turns out VA gets more than 50 percent of the price of a bottle of Jack Daniels, while the other jurisdictions get less than 10 percent. Prices aren't that different, at least at the low and middle end.  So how does the gov get an equivalent yearly return from a private sales system?  Doesn't look as if it's possible.

Of course Virginians are used to Republican politicians making promises they can't fulfill.  (Not that Dems are immune from the syndrome.)

The side-by-side comparison shows IMHO the free market system is not necessarily the best.  Of course, alcohol has special characteristics: most of the products are time-tested.  I suspect if you looked at the Virginia ABC stores they don't do well at keeping up with the fads (like wine coolers, or special vodkas).  But as a child of someone who firmly believed in the merits of Prohibition, I'm not mourning this particular lack in Virginian society.

Clayton Weighs in on the Emanuel Disaster Program, and Pigford

Chris Clayton relates the possible disaster program to make Lincoln happy to the failure to appropriate funds for the Pigford II case.

A Fairfax Green at the Recycle Dropoff

This morning my wife and I drove to the local dropoff point for recyclables, part of our Friday routine which also includes grocery shopping.  The place is set up as an "Y", with the bins for paper products on one arm, the bins for glass and plastic on the other arm, and the junction point is just wide enough for cars to come in, park, reverse, and go out.

When we arrived a young slender woman in a white car had backed up to the paper bins and was disposing of her paper. I parked further in; my wife dumped the paper and I dumped the bottles.  As I glanced in the mirror before backing to turn around, I saw the woman had now backed her car up to the glass/plastic bin and was disposing of her bottles.

The walking distance between her two parking places was no more than 25 yards.

The car was a Prius.

Fructose and Cancer

Respectful Insolence has much more than you'd ever want to know about biochemistry and fructose. He says the recent study on fructose, glucose and cancer cells is interesting, but should have no policy implications as of today.

Lincoln and Disaster

Farm Policy reports others share my doubts over the feasibility and legality of the adminstrative disaster payments proposed by Sen. Lincoln. 

Yesterday’s update added that, “Lincoln responded that it is not unusual for the executive branch to distribute such disaster aid without congressional action. ‘It’s been done before,’ she said. However, House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson, D-Minn., told the press this week his staff is skeptical that USDA has a mechanism to fund the program.”

I think she's wrong and Peterson is right.  The only approach I can think of is to use the Commodity Credit Corporation approach, which is probably what Lincoln is thinking of, but it would be a big stretch to use it for Lincoln's proposal. But then, the lawyers in OGC (office of general counsel) have performed miracles before.

Obama In Trouble?

You know you're in political trouble when bureaucrats start worrying about your initiatives in case you're going to lose.

If Open Gov becomes too associated with Obama and he loses 2 years from now, Open Gov may suffer a serious setback. In fact, Open Gov could suffer as soon as the Congressional Midterms.

So what're you going to do about it? Well, it's time you starting thinking about Open Gov Backup Plans.

Maids in College?

I'm flabbergasted. No, not at the thought of some virgins on campus. (Though there was a legend at my university.  The Arts quad had statutes of the two founders seated opposite each other.  Supposedly if a virgin walked across the quad at midnight, the statutes would rise, walk to the center and bow, and then return to their seats.)

But the Post has an article on social networking and sports recruiting, focusing on a top athlete who tweets his visits to campuses and football coaches who follow his tweets.  And this sentence blew my mind:

" He wrote of being impressed that UCLA has maids cleaning dorm rooms"

Whatever happened to kids cleaning their own rooms? And if it's an athletic dormitory, how about coaches enforcing rules.  

Complaints About SURE

I've resolved I'm not trying to understand SURE.  This is the first paragraph from Farm Policy today:

DTN Executive Editor Marcia Zarley Taylor reported yesterday at the Minding Ag’s Business Blog that, “When Congress wrote what rational people would consider the most complex formula yet for farm disaster aid in the 2008 Farm Act, it was supposed to (1) be a fairer system; (2) compensate people who’d experienced whole farm revenue loss, not a yield loss on a single crop as past farm programs did; (3) pay higher rates to those with better crop insurance coverage. In other words, reward farmers who paid the high premiums for higher levels of coverage. But as I reported in a story on DTN today, these principles aren’t working as the Farm Service Agency struggles to administer the 2008 disaster program.

The question is whether the bureaucrats and Congress can work the bugs out before 2012.

New Health Hazard Identified

By Ta-Nehisi Coates:
"Fully half of the life-span gap between African-Americans and whites is due to African-Americans having to endure punditry about "The Blacks." (From a post on the latest Phyllis Schafly quote.)

Flash: Rising Rate of Blindness in the U.S.

From this post:

Far fewer parents describe their children as overweight or obese than we see in the actual population. Specifically, the GQR poll showed even parents who volunteer their children's height and weight underreported whether they also view them as overweight or obese. Similarly, this McClatchy-Ipsos poll shows far fewer reporting a personal obesity issue or one in their own family than is actually true among the population.

The only rational explanation is that Americans are losing their eyesight much more rapidly than anyone realizes.

Rural Areas the New Blacks?

Back in the day, in Vietnam, black Americans were disproportionately 11B's (the MOS for rifleman) and suffered casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.  Today it seems men and women from rural areas, especially upper Midwest and Great Plains, are suffering casualties in excess of their proportion of the population.

"The study does not look into reasons why soldiers from rural areas have experienced a higher death rate in the Iraq War"

My memory is the 1960's military, at least the Army, was draft-based.  People with the poorest scores on the test tended to end up as 11B's.  Blacks were drafted relatively equally with whites but had the poorer education and poorer scores, so ended up in the most dangerous positions.

When Nixon took us off the draft, blacks would enlist for the opportunity.I remember reading somewhere blacks now are more heavily concentrated in the Army's "tail"--the administrative support services.  As a result, although the current wars are dangerous for truck drivers, the casualty rate for blacks is probably less than their proportion, certainly less than for rural areas.  (Given the loss of black farms over 40 years, I assume without checking that the black population is disproportionately urban and suburban.)

I'm a bit amused by the quote. The illustrious Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, has a book arguing that the South, particularly the Appalachians, is home to natural-born fighters, based on their Scots-Irish heritage.  Maybe the area has lost its edge, in favor of the German-Scandinavian Lutherans of the upper Midwest/Plains.  

I'd think in reality the key question is economic opportunity.  In the past blacks and the upcountry whites Webb writes about have had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.  In the present the northern rural areas have little opportunity, so end up as fighters.  (In the remote past, Scots and Irish had little opportunity, so ended up as fighters.) And immigrants end up as fighters.

There's a more troubling possibility however. Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. And, for those who watched The Wire, the prisoners include some of the most talented leaders.  I think that's a big change since the 1960's, so it's possible if academicians are using as their baseline the number of people 18 and over they're getting a different result than if they used the number of people not institutionalized and with no criminal record 18 and over.

Wine at the Pump

The French may be very regimented, but getting wine at the pump (a la gas pump) is something only they could dream of.

An Administrative Disaster Program?

That's what Sen. Lincoln claims the White House has offered, $1.5 billion of disaster aid done administratively, to get past the roadblocks to the legislative package for small business.  See this Farm Policy report. 

Having been in USDA in 1983 when Reagan's people pulled a land retirement program out of their hat without Congressional authority, I wouldn't bet against it.  On the other, damned if I can imagine how they'll do it.  The effect is psychological--it looks very doubtful Lincoln can win reelection, so the White House is showing they'll run risks to help their supporters.

Speaking of Optimism--Fred Brooks

My previous post was on optimism--Fred Brooks wrote a great book in this area 35 years ago: The Mythical Man-Month.  He has another out, which should be good. The Design of Design.  It's on my Christmas wish list.

Overconfidence Among the Professionals

This post reports on a study showing lawyers are overconfident in predicting the outcome of their cases.  I believe the recent Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker said that doctors are overly optimistic in predicting how long their patients will live.  IT professionals routinely promise to complete projects faster and cheaper than they can (see this on the FBI's Sentinel program).  Military professionals often are overly optimistic in predicting the outcome of military operations. Politicians over promise the results of their votes. Economists, except for Tyler Cowen, are overly sure of the outcome of their proposed policies.

Think there's a pattern here?

[Updated: A day late and a dollar short, Professor Robin Hanson comes to the same conclusion.]

The Final Word for Today

From Tyler Cowen:

We still don't know what we are doing.

I respond to honesty.

The Dark Secret of Ossining Was Not Mad Men

If Matt Weiner's Mad Men keeps rolling along, he may get to the time when Ossining's schools were desegregated.

I was trolling through a site listing the reports of the Civil Rights Commission and stumbled across this report, on the desegregation of Ossining's schools over the period  1969-74.  There was what we used to call de facto segregation, because Ossining had a significant black population (working at Sing Sing, I assume. So back in that idealistic time the effort was to realign elementary school boundaries to provide a more integrated environment.

I Thought Republicans Disliked the Nanny State?

This bit from Farm Policy about a House Ag hearing on nutrition was amusing:0

Subcommittee Ranking Member Jeff Fortenberry, R-Nebraska, expressed concern about health and obesity rates, and noted that data from the Healthy Incentives Pilot (HIP) would not be available for another two years. He went on to ask the second panel of witnesses yesterday an interesting theoretical question about a potential “new paradigm” in linking SNAP benefits to improved choice. He offered a hypothetical example: “Instead of a SNAP card having $100 on it, a SNAP card would have 100 ‘nutritional points,’ and that would also be measured as you buy certain foods and therefore the market would then respond to develop food products that would fit easily into the nutritional categorizations.” To listen to this interesting discussion on linking SNAP benefits to nutritional health, click here (MP3- 8:12).

As technology progesses more and more can be done. I don't know whether the old slogans about "nanny state" work in the new environment.
x

China

 From a Grist post on energy efficiency, talking about China:

For every 100 urban households there are 138 color TV sets, 97 washing machines, and 88 room air conditioners. Even in rural areas there are 95 color TVs and 46 washing machines for every 100 households.

I suppose I should be used to this by now, but somehow I'm often revert to the images of the 1950's and 60's, from the Korean War and the Great Leap Forward. Who whaddya thunk it?

And a Tear Flows Down a Face: Oldest Farm Gone

Sometime in the 70's I think it was there was a famous picture of an Indian, sorry--Native American, with a tear running down his cheek.  If I remember it was tied into the environmental movement.

Don't know why I thought of that when I saw this article on a farm in NH which dates back to 1632, owned by members of the same family, which is now up for sale.

What David Brooks Fails to Mention

In Tuesday's Times, David Brooks imagines he's a Democrat again, and from that position gives advice to Obama, who should be.

focused on the long term? He could explain that we’re facing deep fundamental problems: an aging population, overleveraged consumers, exploding government debt, state and local bankruptcies, declining human capital, widening inequality, a pattern of jobless recoveries, deteriorating trade imbalances and so on.
These long-term problems, Obama could say, won’t be solved either with centralized government or free market laissez-faire. Just as government laid railroads and built land grant colleges in the 19th century to foster deep growth, the government today should be doing the modern equivalents.

What Brooks doesn't mention is the sort of stuff in this OMB Watch post, because, as it says:

The administration gets little credit for these achievements, which are often wonky in nature and easily overshadowed by the hyper-partisan atmosphere of Washington.

The Missing Data for Education: Teacher Data

David Leonhardt in the NY Times reports on a study from Tennessee of kindergarten, under a headline: The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers.

Students who had learned much more in kindergarten were more likely to go to college than students with otherwise similar backgrounds. Students who learned more were also less likely to become single parents. As adults, they were more likely to be saving for retirement. Perhaps most striking, they were earning more.

These results are despite the fact that during most of their school years, the effect of kindergarten doesn't show up in test scores.  I'm sure this is going to attract a lot of attention, and it should.  See Mankiw and Althouse.

Earlier this year I saw a mention of a similar result where early intervention didn't have lasting impact on test scores in school, but seemed to lead to better life results (less joblessness and crime, higher salaries).  Intended to blog it, but it slipped through.

What I'd really like to know is data on the teachers of the best classes back in 1980's: who were they, what were their backgrounds, were they identified as good teachers by their principal and the local community, and, most importantly, what has happened to them in the intervening 20+ years?  Did they find teaching kindergarteners a satisfying career, or did they move on?

Geezers and the Kindle

Interesting discussion here of the fact Amazon is temporarily out of the Kindle, now they've dropped the price to $189. 

Having helped an older relative with her Kindle, but not having one myself, I wonder about this factor.  I assume the elderly, like me, are slower than the rest of the world to adopt fancy cellphones and stuff like the IPad or the Kindle. But simply looking at me, I'm more likely to spring for a Kindle than an IPhone or IPad.  I don't know if that's broadly true.  My logic is that the multipurpose jobbie is a bit overwhelming in its possibilities.  I could cope with learning the Kindle, but not all the stuff that a smart phone or tablet can handle. 

Sherrod as Faceless Bureaucrat

One puzzle about the Sherrod episode is why, why was it so explosive, so radioactive?  Why did the administration and NAACP react so quickly?  Race is obviously part of the answer, but I'd suggest bureaucracy, specifically "faceless bureaucrats", is also part of the answer. [ed--gee that's a surprise.]

As I see it now, this is my best guess at what actually was happening in 1986 and then what happened last week.

What's the context?  The NYTimes has an article published Sept. 10, 1986, which provides some background. Essentially the Farmer's Home Administration (FmHA) of USDA had made lots of loans in the 1970's which, in the hard times for agriculture in the 1980's, had turned sour. Meanwhile the Reagan administration, not known for its enthusiasm about government programs, had tried to cut back on FmHA's programs.  And GAO and the press had found a lot of instances of abuse of the programs. And finally 1986 was the first time there was an automatic cut in federal programs under Gramm-Rudman. All this meant bad times for farmers. Although FmHA was trying to collect delinquent loans, as the Times article says, "The agency has been sued 55 times since 1981 by farmers saying its loan-collecting and foreclosure practices were unconstitutional. The agency lost 37 times...." My suspicion from Sherrod's statement is that the Federation had participated in one or more of the lawsuits and, perhaps, had obtained an injunction against FmHA's pressing its foreclosure actions.

To complicate the situation even more,  in 1986 Georgia and the Southeast were suffering a historic drought as described in this Times article. "In Georgia, Agriculture Commissioner Tommy Irvin is predicting, ''We may lose up to 5,000 farmers over the cycle of the next 12 months.'' That would be 10 percent of the state's index of 50,000 farmers and ranchers, ''and of that 50,000, probably 25,000 are in financial trouble,'' he said."  

From what we are told, in 1986 Sherrod was working for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, Land Assistance Fund,  presumably as a counselor of some kind. Don't know how long she's worked there--the Federation seems to have originated in the late 60's.  (In 1980 there was a Times article about the Emergency Land Fund and its efforts to preserve black land ownership. The Fund  merged with the Federation in 1985.)

Sherrod was about 38.  In comes Mr. Spooner, who is her first white client.  She assumes that he's not here of his own volition; he's not a walk-in customer like other customers (I'm assuming black farmers would often come to her first); he's been sent by USDA or GA Department of Agriculture.  (I'd assume having him as a client means she becomes rather tense, more tense than usual.  That would be my reaction, but maybe that's wrong, because she may be an extrovert people-person.)  She's definitely on guard.

What's Spooner feeling? Sherrod says he eventually ended up in Chapter 11 bankruptcy so I'll assume he probably had FmHA loan(s) and was in trouble. We don't know why he tried the Federation--Sherrod's assumption that USDA had sent him might be correct. If FmHA was trying to foreclose, it might be a conflict of interest for them to advise Spooner on the best way to fight it.  Referring him to a third party, like the Federation, would make sense.

Spooner is about 20 years older than Sherrod, so he's born in the early 1920's, in south Georgia when the KKK is riding high.  We don't know what his opinions and feelings were in 1986; maybe he had evolved faster than other Georgians (who had elected Lester Maddox of pick-axe handle fame, then Jimmy Carter of the famous grain in earlier decades). In the interests of telling the story it's probably fair to say he's not happy about turning to a radical organization, which would have been the reputation of the [coop] and one which caters to blacks, but he needs to save his farm.

Again, we don't know if this is the first time Spooner is acting as the customer/client of a black, a situation where he is a supplicant.  Let's say it is; almost certainly he's never applied for help on such an important matter to a black woman.  So in addition to feeling trapped by his economic situation, he may well be feeling uptight from the situation--he's asking for help from a black woman. And it's a younger person

So, as Sherrod describes it, Spooner talks and talks.  To her he comes across as trying to be superior. Maybe that's true, maybe not; maybe he's compensating for his helplessness..  Maybe he's telling his story from day 1 and trying to show that his predicament isn't his fault; maybe he's just anxious about getting help.

Back to Sherrod now: She says she's trying to figure out how much help she'll give him.  There's an implication of games-playing here; he's trying to impress her, she's feeling her power.  If she's bad, she'll turn him away.  If she's good, she'll help him all she can.  Somewhere in between is where she comes down, at least in her telling; she sends him to a white lawyer. I'm not clear why that's not the optimum solution.  Sherrod isn't a lawyer and he's got legal problems, but maybe she thinks her advice would have been good.  Or maybe she knows the lawyer isn't much good, as he turns out to be, and maybe that fact gives her a little malicious pleasure. It's definitely a situation with a lot of emotional currents.  When the NAACP audience listens to it, William Saletan in his analysis of their reaction only allows for one interpretation, but to me there's enough going on that likely different people picked up on different elements. Most of all, I suspect they were, as we do, empathize with her mixed emotions.

Now what about Sherrod's narrative strikes someone so strongly that they make the excerpt, someone adds text giving wrong information to the front, it gets played, and NAACP and USDA over react to it?

The first and obvious answer is racial.  Breitbart's position now is that she's recounting an episode of discrimination and her audience is enjoying it. The idea is "man bites dog"--a black person has power and discriminates against a white.  And, given the misframed excerpt, the idea which Vilsack and the NAACP was reacting to, the [wrong] fact she was a USDA bureaucrat when she did this. But humans tend to enjoy reversals: we love to see the powerful take a pratfall, so I don't think the racial element, by itself, was enough to account for its power.

I think there's another story here, a story which is symbolized by the conversion of "faceless bureaucrat" into an epithet. In part it ties into American anxieties about the power of the faceless bureaucrat.  We don't like power; we tolerate powerful people if they don't rub our noses in it. But we're aware whenever we deal with a bureaucrat that they know the rules, we don't.  They have the power, we don't.  So the idea of a bureaucrat, like Sherrod, being arbitrary and capricious is frightening; it's particularly frightening if you represent people who usually sit across from the bureaucrat, like the NAACP, or if you manage a bureaucracy, like USDA, which has been called the last plantation.

So arbitrary bureaucracy is our bogeyman (a good old Scots term, apparently) which has a scare power all out of proportion to its reality. That's why the excerpt had its power. And because it was powerful, Vilsack and the NAACP reacted too fast. 

Fred Hoyle Is Laughing Now

When I was growing up there were a number of paperbacks, published I think by Ballantine, on science.  Isaac Asmov was one writer, Microbe Hunters was a title I remember, and Fred Hoyle was another writer.  I believe that's where I first heard about the "Big Bang" versus "Steady-State" theories of the universe--Fred was the leading proponent of Steady State.  Then the Big Bang won out and I thought certainty had been achieved, at least in that minor area of thought.  Then I saw this:

Big Bang Abandoned in New Model of the Universe

A new cosmology successfully explains the accelerating expansion of the universe without dark energy; but only if the universe has no beginning and no end.

I guess I'm doomed to die without knowing what sort of universe I really inhabit.

What Really Gets Commenters Going

I thought the Sherrod case was the prime example of what really got commenters going on blogs.  But I was wrong.  What really gets people stirred up is if a blogger asks how to beat a speeding ticket. 

A Little Remembered Fact? White Lynchings

Matthew Yglesias blows up an American Spectator piece on the lynching of Sherrod's father, but he includes a graph showing lynchings from 1882 on.  In the first 10 or so years, the graph seems to show more whites being lynched than blacks (caution: my memory is that statistics on lynchings were very hard to gather so need to be taken with a grain of salt).  Of course, in proportion to population, the rate for blacks was always higher, but white lynchings remind us just how violent a country we used to be.

On the Limits of Transparency

One of the problems with "transparency" is: who cares?  The data may be out there or available, but unless there's someone with enough interest in the submit to dig into it and make a story out of it, there's little impact.  Part of the solution can be auditors/IG's.  See this piece from the World Bank blog.

To cite one example, we did a big, RCT study on what reduces corruption in community programs. Whereas my entire team thought that increasing participation and transparency would be most effective, in actual fact increasing the frequency of locally publicized audits had far greater effects.

Either I'm Blind or Opengovtracker Disses USDA

I don't see USDA listed on this site.

Dealing with People, Lawmakers Will Keep This Secret?

Here's a discussion of a guide to dealing with "distressed constituents", by which is meant, not constituents who have been impacted by a natural disaster, or the recession, but those, not to put it mildly, who are nuts. (My term, not theirs.)  Anyone who has dealt with the great American public knows they're out there.  H. L. Mencken thought much of the public was.  But it's not something any Congressperson is going to advertise: "hey, I've had my staff read this great guide so now we'll be able to deal with you better."

Audience Approval of What in Sherrod's Speech?

William Saletan does a careful analysis of the audience's reaction to Shirley Sherrod's speech.  My own reaction, which I've hesitated to state because I don't have a lot of experience listening to majority black audiences responding to black speakers and ministers, was that they were giving the audible feedback which seems to be the norm in such settings.  Saletan's analysis is much more careful than that, and convinces me that Breitbart's claims are wrong.

Change in the Armed Forces

Women/mothers make Sailor of the Year.  Turns out we have 4 sailors of the year and women won all 4 spots.  Article says they're about 16 percent of the Navy.

What's Possible and What's Not

The Priest/Arkin series on the post 9/11national security bureaucracy is filled with interest.  As a sidelight, two small scenarios show the difference between what's possible in IT and what isn't.  Here's what's possible:

To understand how these firms have come to dominate the post-9/11 era, there's no better place to start than the Herndon office of General Dynamics. One recent afternoon there, Ken Pohill was watching a series of unclassified images, the first of which showed a white truck moving across his computer monitor.
The truck was in Afghanistan, and a video camera bolted to the belly of a U.S. surveillance plane was following it. Pohill could access a dozen images that might help an intelligence analyst figure out whether the truck driver was just a truck driver or part of a network making roadside bombs to kill American soldiers.
To do this, he clicked his computer mouse. Up popped a picture of the truck driver's house, with notes about visitors. Another click. Up popped infrared video of the vehicle. Click: Analysis of an object thrown from the driver's side. Click: U-2 imagery. Click: A history of the truck's movement. Click. A Google Earth map of friendly forces. Click: A chat box with everyone else following the truck, too.

And here is what's not possible,  from the first article:

The practical effect of this unwieldiness is visible, on a much smaller scale, in the office of Michael Leiter, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center. Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another.

So, in one case IT is able to correlate information from different sources into one presentation; in the other it's unable to.

Why the difference? This is just speculation, but I see two key differences. In the first instance different kinds of information are being brought together and the sources of data probably were created within the last 5 years.  In the second instance similar kinds of information from different bureaucracies are coming in, and probably all of them had deep historical roots.  (For example, FBI's case file system dates back to J. Edgar Hoover's prime in the 1920's.)

Best Sentence of July 23

"But who expected in 2003 that in 2010, the president of the United States would have "Hussein" in his name but the president of Iraq wouldn't?"  Tom Ricks at the Best Defense

Curves

My mind's on curves. Not female curves, but something more nerdy. 

• On the one hand, there's the curves of economics.  I'll probably get the terms wrong, but there's a supply/demand curve that shows for any price there's a market clearing point at which supply and demand are in equilibrium.  And implicit in that, or maybe something else, is a curve that shows the marginal cost of producing something declines as production goes up--mass production saves money in other words.
• There's also the learning curve.  The more time you've spent making stuff/learning a subject, the easier it is. 
• Finally in my thoughts is the Pareto 80/20 rule.  Now it's not usually talked of as a curve, but if you visualize it you can see it.  To me, it's the exact opposite of the supply/demand curve and the learning curve.  I used to use it in discussing software development.  It would be easy to do software to handle simple cases, but as the cases got more difficult it would become harder and take longer.

It seems this week I've got more questions than answers; because in this case I can't figure out how the curves work together, if they do.  Or is it just a case of different tools for different situations.

Must Reading for Those Discouraged by the State of Dialog on the Web

See this post of Dan Drezner's.

Bureaucratic Triage

I'm musing on a question, stimulated by the Sherrod uproar: is it ever right for a bureaucrat to discriminate (in the technical sense, not the pejorative sense) among his clients/customers/public and, if it is, for what reasons? We all agree a bureaucrat working on behalf of the public should not/may not discriminate based on race, religion, etc. But what discriminations are appropriate and why?

I'm thinking about MASH, or other hospital shows, which show a triage process.  If you consider the medical staff to be bureaucrats, then they're discriminating among their clients, but using criteria which normally we'd endorse. 

There used to be a field called operations research, coming out of the whiz kids and WWII, which tried to evaluate different strategies for handling customers: first come, first served; express lines, etc.  Is first come, first served discriminatory?   Or is giving priority to the simple cases, which speeds average throughput, be discriminatory?  Is it okay if you're transparent about your algorithm?

We all know, I think, that some people get treated better than others for reasons of personality.  Is that ever right?

No answers today, but it's an interesting question.

Sherrod: The Albany Movement, New Communities, and Pigford

Shirley Sherrod's husband was one of the leaders of the Albany Movement. 

Apparently they were leaders of the New Communities: 

One of the most important initiatives of the Southwest Georgia Project was the organization of New Communities, Inc., a land trust. By January 1970, the group had purchased nearly 6000 acres of land in Lee County Georgia, which made it the largest single land mass owned by Blacks in the United States. The purpose of the project was to upgrade the quality of life of rural, poor, and mostly Black communities by offering meaningful employment, creating economic leverages to ensure and improve the income of small farmers, and ownership opportunities for its settlers.

Apparently the trust ended up losing the land, under circumstances which led to the award under the Pigford suit.  At this early date it's not clear the ins and outs of how the Sherrods' relate to the money awarded--are they still trustees and who would be the beneficiaries. Fox has a piece here.  My guess is that New Communities was one of the case subsumed under the Pigford class action suit.  The suit was resolved by having two tracks:  Let me quote from the 2005 CRS report:

The Pigford consent decree basically establishes a two-track dispute resolution mechanism for those seeking relief. The most widely-used option — Track A — provides a monetary settlement of $50,000 plus relief in the form of loan forgiveness and offsets of tax liability. Track A claimants had to present substantial evidence (i.e., a reasonable basis for finding that discrimination happened) that
! claimant owned or leased, or attempted to own or lease, farm land;
! claimant applied for a specific credit transaction at a USDA county office during the applicable period;
! the loan was denied, provided late, approved for a lesser amount than requested, encumbered by restrictive conditions, or USDA failed to provide appropriate loan service, and such treatment was less favorable than that accorded specifically identified, similarly situated white
farmers; and
! the USDA’s treatment of the loan application led to economic damage to the class member.

Alternatively, class participants could seek a larger, tailored payment by showing  evidence of greater damages under a Track B claim. Track B claimants had to prove their claims and actual damages by a preponderance of the evidence (i.e., it is more likely than not that their claim is valid). The documentation to support such a claim and the amount of relief are reviewed by a third party arbitrator, who makes a binding decision. The consent decree also provided injunctive relief, primarily in the form of priority consideration for loans and purchases, and technical assistance in filling out forms

7
Finally, plaintiffs were permitted to withdraw from the class and pursue their individual cases in federal court or through the USDA administrative process.

Sounds to me as if the New Communities must either have been a Track B, or an individual case. Although I've reservations about Pigford issues, the Track B cases are the most likely awards to be warranted, IMHO. And without knowing how awards are computed, the current market value of 6,000 acres of Georgia farmland would be high.

[Updated: it's possible the suit was outside Pigford entirely--no doubt this will be clarified as time goes on.]

The Blindness of the Chattering Class

One common meme among the chattering class in discussions of how to fix the deficit is to mock the great American public. Polls often show the public preferring to cut foreign aid as their first choice to fix the deficit, not realizing how small a percentage of the budget is spent on foreign aid.

But, as the Bible used to say, remember the beam in your eye before the mote in your neighbor's eye. The chattering classes, both right (Breitbart et.al.) and left (Vilsack and NAACP) missed the lies in the framing of the Sherrod video.  The main one: that RD spends $1.2 billion in Georgia is easily debunked if you have a sense of the numbers.  My thought process:

• how big is Georgia--don't know, but Atlanta has been growing, so let's say it's 15 million people.  
• the U.S. is something over 300 million, so Georgia is 1/20 of the US.
• if Georgia gets 1/20 of the RD funds, that means RD is spending $25 billion total.
• no way RD spends that much.  The USDA budget is somewhere around $100 billion, about 50-60 percent food stamps and other nutrition programs, etc. $15-20 billion for farm programs, doesn't leave much for all of the rest.

Now I haven't checked my accuracy, except to find I overestimated Georgia's population and, to find RD spends closer to $1.2 billion nationally