De Minimus Benefits

From Tuesday's Farm Policy:

" Some states, such as New York, will make a $1 Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program  payment to low-income people in order to automatically qualify them for the maximum federal food stamps Standard Utility Allowance for 12 months.
“According to a source tracking the farm bill talks, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that raising the minimum energy subsidy states would be required to make to $20 would be enough to disincentivize states from utilizing the loophole, potentially saving the government $8 billion over 10 years.”

We used to have a "de minimus" provision. I'm ashamed to admit I don't remember in what connection, but the idea basically was that something was too small to worry about.  A similar idea applied to certain small claims, whether it was $10 or $25 I forget.   But why shouldn't the government have a blanket policy: no payments, no claims if the amount is less than $20 or whatever?

Community Gardeners Are No Angels

Grist links to an article on some problems some community gardens face.  Our garden too has locks on the gates and people complain of stolen produce and tools. 

The White House Garden

I've failed to keep up with the White House garden.  Maintenance on it was shut down during the government shutdown in November.  They've had a harvest of fall vegetables, installed some hoop houses, and now are facing ice and snow as the storm moves through.  Don't remember whether they did hoop houses last year.  A few of our fellow gardeners in the community garden are using hoop houses; my wife and I aren't.

The swiss chard won't last through a hard freeze being outside a hoop house; the kale will be fine for spring.  Not sure what she means by the rosemary being gone--that should survive the winter.  Cilantro will be okay in the spring before it bolts.

An Amazing Sentence

From an Ann Althouse post on Andrew Sullivan's defense of Obama:

"Sullivan's analogies and metaphors are a crazy quilt of a mixed bag of bouillabaise."

Base Versus Planted, Continued

From David Rogers at Politico on farm bill negotiations:

In aggregate numbers, the estimated 260 million base acres counted today in farm programs are not so different from the average of real “planted” acres. But within that universe, huge shifts have taken place as corn and soybeans have grown more dominant while rice, cotton and wheat plantings have declined
For example in the South, about 12 percent of the base acres went unplanted in a recent year compared with just 3 percent in the Midwest. Oklahoma and Texas alone accounted for more than 4 million unplanted base acres or 26 percent of the total for the nation that same year.
At the same time in Midwest states, plantings over base totaled almost 9.5 million acres in 2010 — more than double that of the South. And in Kansas and North Dakota, corn plantings have soared as land has been pulled out of the conservation reserve program.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/12/farm-bill-crop-subsidies-agriculture-congress-corn-soybean-interests-100758.html#ixzz2mioXC5Mu

 

The reallocation/adjustment process he's predicting will keep FSA offices busy for a while.

Yale Foodie Meets "Real Farmers"

The Yale Sustainable Food Project has an organic operation at Yale.  It's been going for several years (I keep following it thinking the student enthusiasm will wane, but it hasn't).

In this post, a Yale foodie meets up with a Farm Bureau summer legislative picnic.  Sounds as if both sides learned a bit.

Cotton Farming Today

NPR has a five chapter feature tracing the history of a cotton t-shirt.  The first chapter is focused on a Mississippi cotton farm.  Surprisingly, though he bought 5 $600,000 cotton pickers last year, his total USDA subsidy on the EWG database is $467,000 for 2000-2012.

The Accuracy of Cost Estimates on Regulation

Cass Sunstein at Bloomberg writes on the estimates which are required for new regulations.  A study shows there's no systemic error (bureaucrats underestimating costs or overestimating benefits), although the estimates probably aren't very accurate. 

What would be more interesting to know is how often the analysis results in changes to the regulations or dropping the effort altogether.  I'm still waiting for a thorough redo of the regs on paperwork and regulations to make them fit the 21st century.  Not holding my breath though.

On the Importance of Sex

For science.

Josh Marshall's TPM Blog has a message from a reader asserting the importance of "sexy science" to raise the interest level and the dollars for all science. 

Words of the Day: Making Sausage

"In general, I feel that I’ve experienced a strong pattern in which uncovering new information about an organization or intervention (which I previously understood only at a superficial level) tends to lower rather than raise my confidence in it."

From a post at Givewell.org,written in reference to evaluating NGO desirability as objects of giving. I'm not whether I got there from Chris Blattman or Roving Bandit, but I think the statement applies broadly, specifically in the sayings about not looking too closely at how sausage is made.  As a general rule, we over-generalize, based on limited information and the reality is much more complicated than we think.

A Revolutionary Thanksgiving

Boston 1775 provides a dash of sour to go with the sweetness of our modern Thanksgiving: the sort of meals some of our soldiers enjoyed back in the Revolution.

Base Acres Versus Planted Acres

That's the dispute going on now, according to today's Farm Policy.  Base acres avoids problems with the WTO, planted acres reflect current operations, not something many years in the past.

Sounds like one option is going back to 1977 and the "normal crop acreage".  As someone said: "history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes".

How the Presidency Works, or Doesn't

Conor Friedersdorf has a post up, asking why President Obama would have said the healthcare.gov site would work.  Obama himself says: he's not stupid, he didn't know the problems.  Friedersdorf cites a NYTimes article showing that the developers were well aware of many problems in the months before October 1. He writes:

It does not seem credible that Obama was unaware that failure was likely. And if he really was unaware, the implications are extremely unflattering. Either he failed abjectly to ask the right questions of a staff that was also derelict in informing him, or else he asked the right questions and his staff misled him.  What the Times story confirms is that the launch of Healthcare.gov wasn't the sort of failure that reasonable actors could have failed to anticipate beforehand.

As it happens I'm reading (struggling through actually) a recent biography of John Kenneth Galbraith.  He was an adviser to JFK while serving as ambassador to India in 1961-2, had his own back channel to the President, and was audacious in his infighting (like stealing a highly classified copy of a report to which he'd been denied access off the desk of the NSC type, while the NSC guy's attention was on a phone call, then writing a preemptive counterblast for JFK). 

It's a dense and scholarly effort, which goes rather broadly into the infighting over whether and how strongly to intervene in Vietnam.  And based on the narrative, JFK's decisions were sometimes/often evaded and ignored by the NSC/State/DOD figures.  The bottomline: not only did the flow of decisions from the President to the bureaucracy get interrupted, the flow of information from the bureaucracy to the President was uneven and incomplete.  JFK was smart enough, probably having read Neustadt's book on Presidential Power, to have multiple sources; BHO may not have been that smart.

A Bubble--Yes

So says the economist in this agweb article.

Unlike the early 80's, the developing world is still growing and providing more demand.

$2.75 Corn? A Bubble?

Did we have a land bubble? Agweb has an article saying get ready for $2.75 corn.  I find by searching on this site I was forecasting a land bubble in 2007 and again in 2011.  Guess I got tired of being wrong and have kept quiet since.  A reminder if any were needed of how difficult it is to make economic predictions.

How Paperwork Grows--Good Intentions and Bad Architecture

Congress doesn't want federal money going to corporations involved with committing felonies or evading taxes.  That makes sense, doesn't it?

Well, notice CM-737 shows what happens down in the bureaucracy.  USDA comes up with a form which corporation officers have to sign every year, which places another burden on the county office clerk, and the corporation officers, recognizing that 100 percent of the corporations have to sign, but probably only 1 percent at maxium are actually involved in crime or tax evasion.

Now in a rational world, the bureaucracy which is nearest to the determinations of felony/tax evasion (presumably DOJ) would be responsible for flagging the corporation's records (i.d. tax ID) and all federal payments would bounce against a Do Not Pay database, which would include these flags.  But that would require a unitary federal bureaucracy, and the American people in their wisdom have decided to favor freedom over efficiency.  As long as we're willing to pay the price, we're democratic after all.

Ben Franklin on Lead

My father had to switch from chemical engineering to farming because of lead poisoning, so this letter by Ben Franklin, in a post at Boston 1775, is of particular interest.  The old bureaucrat was one of the smartest men ever.

The Difference a Year Makes: Corn Prices and Farm Bill

Corn prices look very different now than last year, so the provisions of the draft farm bills in House and Senate are attracting scrutiny, as in this Politico article.

The Greatest Generation: Stupid or Ill-informed?

The Edge of the American West doesn't frame it as I do in my title, but I think the post supports the frame--the issue is whether knowledge of geography and history are helpful.

We're Bloodsuckers, Not Farmers?

From Chris Blattman, I think, the Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity, which purports to show the imports and exports of countries around the world.  I say "purports" because I don't really understand it, except the link gives a graphic showing US exports by category in 2010.  Major items are labeled, so "soybeans" is a nice gold block with ".87%" in its corner, which I assume means soybean exports accounts for that much of total exports.  Fine and dandy.  I get the idea.

But wait, down in the left hand corner there's this pinkish purple block which is labeled "Human or animal blood" and it's got "1%" in its corner.

Is Harvard really trying to tell me that we suck that much blood out of ourselves and our animals to ship off to whom? Blood is more valuable than soybeans?  Where are the world's vampires who are importing that blood?  Someone needs to get on this story, which has been totally unreported until now.

Volatility--the Farmer's Enemy

A paragraph from today's Farm Policy:

"Meanwhile, an update yesterday at The Wall Street Journal Online indicated that the cash price for corn (No. 2 yellow. Cent. Ill. bu-BP) on Tuesday was 4.1850; a year ago it was 7.2200."

 The ease with which farm prices can change is a fact often missed by those outside the farm world.  There's not too many commodities out there where the price can drop, or rise, as fast as corn just did.

Colorado and Rainwater

I was surprised to learn that collecting rainwater in Colorado is mostly illegal.  (Hat tip: Life on a Colorado Farm.)  I knew the West had different laws on water than in the East, but not this.

Failure To Launch [Website] Successfully

New guidelines for treating people at risk for heart attack or stroke released today.  That's a subject near and dear to my head and heart, so naturally I went to the new calculator website  
to see how I rated.  Oops--apparently they've a problem (too much traffic perhaps). 

Pollan Revisited

Forbes runs a rather harsh attack on Michael Pollan, saying he's not a journalist interested in truth but pushes an anti-GMO agenda.

Modern Masters

The NYTimes has a piece today on the art market, talking about hard-sell tactics and the high prices expected for some major pieces (like north of $50 million).  It made me feel old, because it referred to "modern masters" like Andy Warhol, Warhol whom I remember as this odd-ball character from Pittsburgh who got publicity for what he called art, which involved no skill at all!

As I say, it made me feel old (as does the kerfluffle over Richard Cohen's latest column--he used to be the man who brought down Spiro Agnew, but that's not even mentioned on his wikipedia page). 

In my defense, repeated exposure to Warhol's work and to writing about it have given me a better understanding than I had in 1969, say.

No-Till Farming

 I was going to use a snarky title for this, like urbanites find out about no-till farming, but instead I'll just refer to an article on Wonkblog.  From there a link to a Philpott piece on cover crops and no-till.  I remember when ASCS  offered cost-sharing for cover crops, back in the late 60's, something which was killed by the Nixon administration.  (I'm trying to remember what the CED said--he was aggressively promoting the practices, I think for workload, not specifically for the conservation benefits.

Ghosts of the Past

I'm always fascinated to see how history crops up in today's public discussions.  Here's Rep. Peterson talking about basing payments on base acres versus planted acres:

"Rep. Peterson also addressed policy issues associated with planted acres in yesterday’s radio interview with Joel Heitkamp: “But we’re having a fight with the Senate over planted acres versus base acres, and they want to pay people based on what they grew 20 years ago, and we don’t want to do that anymore. We want to go to planted acres. And what that does is it shifts the program, the balance of power, from landowners to farmers. And this is a fundamental change that needs to happen in our policy. We should be supporting farmers, not land. And that’s what we’ve been doing the last 20 years, ostensibly, to placate the WTO or whatever.
“But that’s one of the big hang-ups we’re having with the Senate right now. And some of them want to hang onto these base acres. Well, it’s kind of the same issue you’re talking about with the sugar program, where you’ve got people that have the land and have base on it are renting it to somebody else. It’s much better to have the program follow the farmer, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Now it so happens that in the South the landowner, the plantation owner, has always been at the top of the ladder.  And so it would seem it continues to be so today.

As quoted in Farm Policy.

The Most Un-Private Place in America?

Might be a farmer's fields, once the FAA gets off its rear and approves drones for farm use,  drones which can provide data down to the centimeter scale (.4 inch) according to a post on the Rural Blog, repeating an Agri-Pulse newsletter.

Paying Dead People

A very good article in the Post explaining why so many federal agencies have problems paying dead people.  Bottom line: problems in reporting deaths accurately and in sharing data between SSA and other agencies.

A part of FSA's problem is they can't access the full SSA Death file, but have to make do with a subset, apparently because of some restrictions some states put on sharing information.  (Jim Baxa is quoted in the article.)

Yes I Voted

Unenthusiastically, but I did.

Conservation Compliance and Crop Insurance

From today's Farm Policy, discussing farm bill prospects:

"And on conservation compliance, the veteran lawmaker indicated that, “Well, the Senate says they have to have it. They’ve had votes on it where it’s passed by a significant margin. I think, at the end of the day, we’re going to have conservation compliance. But I have been working on this, that if we have to have it—because right now the House is not for this—but if we have to have it, the insurance companies will not be responsible for policing this, so they won’t have to decide whether somebody is in compliance or not.”

I'm not sure the veteran lawmaker (ranking member of House ag) understands conservation compliance, in that I don't know how one would ever require the insurance companies to police it.  Seems to me it would work essentially like the cotton/rice co-ops. 

Broccoli and Industrial Farming

NYTimes Magazine has an article on broccoli,partly discussing efforts to make eating broccoli attractive, partly discussing a farmer in upstate New York:

The farm that he runs with his three brothers and one of their sons is an example of the kind of nonindustrial farm that’s necessary in a revamped vision of American food production and consumption. Last year, Reeves turned out 420,000 pounds of tomatoes, 65,000 pounds of strawberries and 2.4 million ears of sweet corn. And while they have a nice little farm stand just outside the small town of Baldwinsville, with a quaint patch of pick-your-own organic blueberries behind the sales shed, they mostly sell their crops to big grocers, including Tops, Price Chopper, Wegmans and, biggest of all, Walmart.  [emphasis added]

As I wrote in a comment on the article, the food movement tends to label farming operations they don't like as "industrial farming" and "corporate agriculture".  It's not clear to me whether the three brothers are a partnership or corporation but here's the website

MIDAS Updated

The MIDAS page on the FSA website has been updated.http://www.fsa.usda.gov/FSA/midas?area=home&subject=landing&topic=landing

I'd say it was about time.  Certainly the MIDAS effort has been focused on the FSA bureaucrats, not the public.

ACA IT and Testing

I can't resist the temptation to comment on the healthcare software process.  (BTW, here's a link to their blog.)

They've taken hits for not fully testing, which I can agree with.  On the other hand, remembering the test process we had for System/36 software, I can only imagine the problems they would have had. If my imagination is right, they had these choices for beginning to end testing:

• use live data--i.e., have all the 20-something IT types try to sign up for health insurance for real using their software.  That has some obvious problems, particularly when you have to cover 36 state exchanges. 
• create test data.  The problem here is while you can create applicants, you need to have SS numbers which meet the SSA criteria, and/or you need to create credit histories over at Experian, then you need to tack on test data for those SSN's with IRS, etc. 
• use a subset of live data for test data.  That's what we used to do--get a copy of a counties files in and modify the data to create test conditions. That's very problematic, both from a security standpoint and from a Privacy Act standpoint. And  our FSA system was simple compared to the sort of system ACA requires.

UK Versus US: Enclosed Farmland

An interesting piece in Buzzfeed (Hat tip: Marginal Revolution) on Britain's housing problems. But I want to steal one of its 15 graphics:

Note the "enclosed farmland" category, which basically covers most of England and Ulster, plus bits of lowlands Scotland. 

Trying to find the equivalent for the US.  There's this NASS map, which can get very detailed--I'd never seen it before. 

And there's this map of "prime farmland". 

What's important I think is that farmland in the US is much more splotchy; the UK is much more uniformly developed as either farm or urban.

The Monitor Redux: DDG 1000 Zumwalt

Via Lawyers, Guns, and Money, a piece on the launch of the new destroyer: Zumwalt, with a hull design which reminds me of the Monitor.

Apparently a complex and innovative project which came in okay.  Hope it works out, but so far the DOD looks good.

Via the same source, an article on a new long-range bomber.  Interesting that they're planning an unmanned version of it. 

Funny Sentence About WWII Photo

"Landing, from what I’ve read, was considered one of the more important qualifications for a pilot."

Via Kottke, this sentence is from a piece on the "most honored [US]photograph" of WWII, taken by a "nutty crew".

Anyone who has the slightest interest in military history and/or heroism should read it.

Words To Design By

From a TPM post on Kentucky's ACA IT system:

"From a design standpoint, Kentucky made the conscious choice to stick to the basics, rather than seeking to blow users away with a state-of-the-art consumer interface. A big part of that was knowing their demographics: A simpler site would make it easer to access for people without broadband Internet access, and the content was written at a sixth-grade reading level so it would be as easy to understand as possible.
"We wanted it to have a branded feel, but that was not the most important part," said Gwenda Bond, an exchange spokesperson. "The most important part was that it works. I think a lot of people would say that simplicity is good website design."

West Virginia, Farm Bill, and Food Stamps

The Post had an article on how West Virginia has changed from a bastion of Democracy to a state shortly to be dominated by Republicans.  In it, they mentioned that JFK's first executive order included a reactivation of a pilot food stamp program.   This morning Farm Policy discusses the conference committee on the farm bill with the food stamp program being the top issue.

A couple thoughts:

•   even in 1960, black poverty was mostly invisible.  Civil rights issues sucked all the air out of the room, leaving little room to consider other issues.  So the poverty in the Appalachian region was a big focus.  Not only did JFK do the food thing, he also got legislation creating an Appalachian Regional authority, covering parts of 13 states.  The idea was a pale imitation of the TVA, trying to coordinate federal programs to help the area (which included my home county).
• the references to "food stamp program" are a bit misleading. Beginning in the 1930's the Feds distributed surplus commodities to the needy.  In 1939 there was a brief attempt at food stamps--allowing the needy to buy stamps which could be used only to purchase food.  But I believe that program died with WWII.  The surplus distribution more or less continued.  (I'm not sure, but I think schools, Indian tribes, and foreign countries all got surplus food in Ike's administration, along with some of the poor.
•  JFK's order really started a new food stamp pilot project, which worked okay and got legislated in 1964.  I believe, without checking, that Sen. McGovern was a major force behind it. By 1964 the Harrington book on Poverty in America was making an impact; awareness of poverty among blacks was growing, but it still wasn't as racially centered as it seems today.  (Used to be, and probably still is, that the majority or at least plurality of food stamp recipients were white.) That's perhaps why some West Virginians discount the importance of SNAP; the program seems part of the landscape and no longer seems an effort by Dems to help WV whites.
• the problems with distributing surplus food to the food are somewhat similar to foreign aid (PL-480)--you have to establish channels to ship the food to the right destination and the available surpluses aren't necessarily what is most needed by the recipients.  So food stamps for the poor were similar to today's ideas of "monetarization" of food aid. 
• food stamps used to be sold, so you'd get $10 face value of stamps for $x in cash.  The idea was to expand the poor's spending on food.  As the program has evolved, that element faded away. 

Farm Bill Time Again

The House and Senate conferees will meet next week on the farm bill. The Rural Blog passes on speculation about possible effects on FSA offices.

I wonder whether FSA employees are comparing the rollout of MIDAS (which seems to have had problems, though not very visible outside the walls of FSA) with the rollout of ACA. 

Software Problems

There seem to be many experts who are diagnosing the problems with the ACA online system.  I'm not going to join their ranks--I'm no expert.  I expect only those on the inside, and only some of those, know really what has gone wrong and how hard or easy it will be to fix.

The one thing I will say (immediately contradicting the paragraph above) is that they shouldn't have changed the design to put establishing an account first, instead of putting it at the end.  The problem seems likely to have been the change.  It apparently was too late in the day to make it; they should have kept on with the general design they started with.  That raises the question of whether they had buy-in on the system design from everyone, by which I mean Tavenner, Sebelius, OMB, and the President, well in advance.  

The closest I've ever come to this sort of problem was the 1983 payment-in-kind program, in which the Reagan administration strongarmed the lawyers into a tricky device to swap CCC-owned grain for acreage reductions, a program which I remember as being slapped together in about 2 weeks (though memory is probably fallible).  The Secretary had the Under Secretary ramrodding the implementation, because it was a high risk endeavor, and he had regular (daily?) meetings with the peons who were doing the scutwork. 

Found--an Honest Blogger

Diogenes may still be looking for an honest man, but I've found an honest blogger--Kevin Drum, in a post on post-shutdown polls:

I don't want to beat a dead horse, but — oh, who am I kidding? I love beating this particular dead horse.

(Returned from a 5-day trip to NY which explains the hiatus.)

Ranchers' Problems

I may have occasionally voiced the opinion that dairy farmers have a worse job than others, but here's a nice post on ranchers' problems.  Hat tip: Northview Dairy.

I wonder if the ranchers have considered pushing for federal subsidies for the cattle insurance that's available?

I Live in a Rut, But I'm Not Alone

An excerpt from an interview with Nobelist Robert Shiller, the economist:

"What was discovered by some of the behavioral finance research is people are inertial. They don’t do anything. If they have to sign up for the plan, they won’t do it. If they do sign up, they'll put their money in whatever asset seems to be recommended and leave it there the rest of their lives. You would think it’s kind of obvious, that some people aren't that interested in managing their portfolios."

The Right Stuff and Bureaucratic Reports

Was Chuck Yeager a "bureaucrat"?  I guess I'd go too far to call the exemplar of the "right stuff" such, but this laconic bureaucrat's report of his breaking of Mach 1 is worth noting.

(Incidentally, I'm not sure why the National Archives website is still up.)

AGI on Crop Insurance

Chris Clayton at DTN reports both Houses are generally in agreement on limiting crop insurance subsidies for high income insureds:

"On Friday evening, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., saw his resolution tightening income eligibility pass the House on a voice vote. The language was comparable to the Senate provisions. While a voice vote doesn't get everyone on record, the resolution does show GOP House leaders support the provision.

Conferees will have to begrudgingly keep the income cap or find some way to pivot around the issue."

Wonder how USDA would administer this?  Conceivably through FSA, I suppose, so USDA hits IRS only once.  But that assumes the rules for determining a person between crop insurance and USDA are the same, doesn't it?  (As time goes by I"m more and more aware that what I used to know is getting obsolete.)  Given how long it took for RMA and FSA to coordinate on acreage reporting dates, I wouldn't hold my breath for that result.  Might be simpler (remember KISS?) to leave the two operations completely separate and put up with complaints from farmers and Congress about the duplicate paperwork and discrepancies in rules. 

Outed: the Secrets of the Obamas and Their Garden

Found 5.5 inches of rain in our garden plot over the last few days; actually more because the rain gauge only goes to 5.5.

Assuming the White House garden got equivalent amounts, the situation described in this long Obamafoodorama post from yesterday is even worse than the pictures show.  The point of the post is that the government shutdown means very little work done in the garden by staff, so it's quickly become overgrown and unharvested.

The garden evolved from a family project in the spring of 2009, where the girls were supposed to get their hands dirty, into a showcase project for gardening.  The post reveals explicitly for the first time that the plants growing in the White House garden were transplanted from an offsite greenhouse location.  Lots of other details about the garden in the post, [edit] including the fox now prowling the grounds.

"Actively Engaged" in Farming Revisited

You'd think we'd know what a farmer is; after all people have been farming for thousands of years.

But, here, via FarmPolicy at Sen. Grassley's website, is the latest GAO report on FSA enforcement of the rules.

I remember the people (WP and SN) originally developing the rules after the 1985 farm bill.  Amazing to realize that they might well be grandparents by now.  If I remember, the first crack at implementing the provisions got overridden by Congress.  That sort of history is probably why FSA is saying they won't change rules now without having Congress act.  Part of the problem is, once provisions are in the farm bill and passed, members' attention shifts elsewhere, so the members who are more responsive to their farmer constituents gain in influence.
 

What the Past Was Like--59 Years Ago

I stumbled across the program for the 12th Youth Forum, held in NYC in 1954.  The first pages are the text for a speech delivered by Mayor Robert Wagner.  Beginning at page 11 is the actual program.  Panel subjects were:

• How can the United Nations be improved to deal with the problems of international peace?
• How can the United States strengthen her policy toward her friends, her foes and neutralist nations?
• How can the United States best protect itself against the dangers of subversion and still maintain civil liberties? (The panel chairman was a 15 year old Martin Peretz, I assume the Peretz who went on to fame as owner of New Republic.)
• Do current educational practices prepare youth for effective participation in American democracy?
• How can youth and adults meet the challenge of juvenile delinquency?

The panel chairs and co-chairs were balanced by sex, and the panel leaders seem to have been as well (though some unisex names).

Among the speakers and guests were the Philippines envoy to the UN, Wagner, the heads of NYC police, education, and schools, Sam Levenson, a comic, and representatives of three of the NYC sports teams (Jackie Robinson, Whitey Ford(!), and Kyle Rote, plus media types. There were delegates from youth organizations (Scouts, Boys Club, CYO, PAL) and religious organizations, and delegations from high schools in the city.

What struck me?  The seemingly inclusive nature, at least for 1954, more inclusive than I think the time is given credit for.  The prominence of religious organizations.  The seriousness of the subjects--I doubt there's any comparable youth level discussions today.  The dominance of a "communitarian" agenda and the absence of any libertarian one.

A USDA Benefactor of Humanity Dies

Bet you didn't think anyone in USDA ever benefited humanity?  Well, Ruth Benerito was the scientist who's given credit for permanent press.  Link is to her NYTimes obit at age 97.   Wikipedia said she had 55 patents.

I can't resist noting that USDA laboratories are now shutdown, thanks to a certain party.