From the Ag Outlook Conference

Some items from this year's Ag Outlook conference  via Illinois extension--Farm Policy..  For those who might not know, there's an annual confab in DC where USDA types and ag people get together to assess where agriculture is and where it's going.  Typically the chief economist for the department gives an overview (I think this is one of the positions proposed to be moved from DC under the plans for relocating ERS , etc.)

From the slides we see that the states with the highest rate of bankruptcies for 2018 are ME, NY, and WI, with GA fourth.  I think this is likely the result of the consolidation of dairy farms, a subject on which I've posted fairly often recently.

Also interesting is this graph I copied from the Farm Policy.  While the line depicting the Chinese share of our export sales drops sharply, the total values don't.  This may reflect the higher value of the dollar in 2018/9--our sales volume drops but the money we get stays flat?  (I don't know, just guessing.)

Advice to Trump: Don't Play Games With Congressional Appropriators

When I joined ASCS one of the things to learn was the relationship of ASCS and CCC.  Essentially the Commodity Credit Corporation was a way for USDA to put on another persona, a corporate one, allowing it to bypass the annual appropriations process.

It had the most impact for me when we were trying to impact new farm legislation and were on a very tight schedule.  Lew Calderone, the head of printing, would ask whether the program specialists could justify the rush job as fitting under the CCC's responsibilities.  When the answer was "yes", he could bypass requirements to go through the department and GPO and send the work to a printing contractor. (At least, that's the way I remember it.)

I was also aware that CCC and ASCS had separate inventories of personal property, depending on whether the item had been bought with appropriated funds (ASCS) or corporate funds (CCC).

The agency's ability to switch between ASCS and CCC personas was the envy  of other agencies,like SCS and FmHA.  

In the mid-80's through into the 90's ASCS and USDA began to use the CCC authority more widely, which is where the agency came to grief.  As I understand it, the procurement and automation people used CCC funds to buy a lot of computer gear.  What's worse, the computer projects didn't work out--success might have had a different result

Anyhow, the bottom line was the House Appropriations Committee put restrictions, tight restrictions, on ASCS and USDA on their spending, including spending of CCC money.  As far as I know those restrictions remain in the current law.

This leads to my advice to Trump: any effort to reprogram money to build your wall runs the risk of stepping on the toes of the appropriators.   If that happens, and I'm sure DOD will try to avoid touching anything in the districts of the members of House appropriations, the committee is perfectly capable of putting tight clamps in the appropriation act.  

Spring Is Almost Here

Weather forecast for tomorrow is for snow, along with rain, and sleet, but I'm looking forward to spring and being able to garden again. The winter has been mild enough, except for one cold spell in February, that the ground is not frozen.  After 40 years or so gardening in the same plot of the Reston gardens the soil is good enough that it can be worked relatively early. And beyond tomorrow's snow the forecast looks pretty good.

I wonder whether people who grew up in town (i.e., suburbs/cities) have as strong a sense of cycles as do those of us who grew up on farms?  I doubt it, but don't know.

Salute to the Ballantines

Betty Ballantine died at 99, following her husband Ian.  They were very important in my life, because they founded the Bantam and Ballantine lines of paperbacks.  In the 1950's I could find a rack or two of their paperbacks in a couple stores in Greene, NY, and at $.35 or $.50 they were affordable for a teen.  I know I have a bunch of their books packed away in boxes.  I remember their line of WWII books, one by Adolf Galland the German ace, and one by C. Vann Woodward on Leyte Gulf.

And the science fiction, though I can't be sure the books I remember were Ballantines, nor some of the fiction, like "God's Little Acre", the risque book of the times.

The Extremes of Farming: Enlightenment Versus Romance

Having just blogged about Netherlands agriculture and precision farming, I was struck this morning as I was skimming Twitter by a proposal to combine small farms with a small town (sorry but I didn't note the tweet and can't find it now).  It seems to be that we can see the long time contest between the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras being reenacted today in farming.

On the one hand you have the increasing consolidation of farming in the US and elsewhere, consolidation being driven by investments in technology which increase the amount of commodities per acre and per hour of labor, with decreasing inputs per unit.  It's the application of intelligence and human control to farming.  On the other hand you have the less tangible byproducts and the emotions elicited by the process of organic and/or small farming.

I guess with that summary there's no hiding which side I basically favor.

"Flerds" Are the Coming Thing?

See this piece. 

Short explanation:  a "flerd" is a "flock" + a "herd", the idea being by mixing different types of animals (usually sheep/goats with cattle) you reduce predation.

Trump's Own Words

Great analysis of what Trump has said about his wall/barrier/fence and who will pay for it.

A Case for Intensive Farming: the Netherlands

National Geographic has a piece on Netherlands precision farming.

From his perch 10 feet above the ground, he’s monitoring two drones—a driverless tractor roaming the fields and a quadcopter in the air—that provide detailed readings on soil chemistry, water content, nutrients, and growth, measuring the progress of every plant down to the individual potato. Van den Borne’s production numbers testify to the power of this “precision farming,” as it’s known. The global average yield of potatoes per acre is about nine tons. Van den Borne’s fields reliably produce more than 20.

I've viewed with skepticism reports about the Netherlands high value of exports, figuring it was mostly flowers of all kinds.  But it's the top exporter of potatoes and onions. I've been skeptical about proposals for vertical farming and urban farming, but this article is changing my mind. 

What I'm taking as the bottom line is intensive farming can work in the market place.  It's not clear what the additional equipment and the inputs cost, but the adoption of the techniques in the Netherlands means you likely have positive cash flow. 

I do retain a bit of skepticism--Netherlands is cited as being in the top exporters of potatoes and onions, both of which strike me as unlikely to be exported over long distances because both have high water content.  

Is a Democratic Victory in 2020 a Cinch?

Some twitter traffic suggesting that President Trump will be defeated in 2020 by almost anyone the Democrats put up.

I violently disagree.  Let me count the ways:

One: I remember the late 70's when it looked as if we liberals might be lucky enough to face Ronald Reagan in 1980.  We knew we could beat him with Carter or with Kennedy.  Look how that worked out.

Two:. Even if today's polls are reasonably accurate, and I don't doubt them, there's the issue of fundamentals:  right now Trump is riding the best overall economy in years, perhaps better than Clinton's late 90's boom.  He's also seeing "successes" in foreign policy--defeat of ISIS, withdrawal of troops from Syriana, and likely Afghanistan (by 2020), possible agreement with North Korea, renegotiated NAFTA, NATO countries responding to his harangues, etc. etc.  (I put quotation marks on successes because they mostly aren't, but as of now they can be sold as such.)  Those fundamentals would guarantee any normal person reelection.

Three: There's always the possibility of rally-round-the-flag episodes, a black swan event which rallies the US around its president.

Four: The reality is that some of the Democratic candidates and potentials can beat Trump, unless he has a real run of luck (somewhat like he had in 2015-16)and some can't.  Right now we don't know which is which.

Five: Because we don't know the future, we need to work, and contribute, and vote as if we're underdogs.

Six: My mantra is, even if we win the presidency it doesn't do much good unless we keep the House, gain the Senate, and take some more state legislatures.

Amy Is In But Who Would Run With Her?

Sen. Klobuchar has officially entered the Democratic primary race. 

I think I've said here, certainly on Twitter, that Il like her, mainly because I think she will appeal to independent voters along with Democrats and thus will be in a good position to beat an incumbent president and, I hope, have coattails to help candidates for the Senate and House.

That's the sort of reasoning I've used before, voting for Sen. Edwards in the 2004 primary over Keerry and Sen. Obama in 2008 over Clinton, and Clinton in 2016 over Sanders.  I've more enthusiasm fro Klobuchar than I had for Edwards or Clinton, but less than for Obama.  Klobuchar has a better record than Obama had but his candidacy was more historic than hers is, which made the difference in my enthusiasm.

As I see it, Klobuchar's main weakness is foreign affairs.  In the past that would have meant she'd pick as vice presidential candidate someone with better credentials in that area.  But, big as the Democratic field of candidates and potential candidates is, Dems don't seem to have a lot of such figures. Looking at the rosters of the Senate Foreign Affairs and Intelligence committees I don't see people with a combination of the right age, the right background, and a national reputation.  The closest we can come, I think, are the two senators from VA: Kaine and Warner.. 

Interesting times.

Blast from the Past--Investigating President Carter

FiveThirtyEight has a piece on how presidents get investigated by Congress, including an interesting graph showing investigations of presidents from Nixon to Obama. 

Three points of particular interest:

• based only on eyeballing, ranking the presidents from least investigated to most (counting days of investigative hearings in the House) you get this list:
• GWBush
• Clinton!!
• Obama
• GHWBush
• then Carter, Nixon, and Reagan, much more investigated and hard to rank.
• the graph shows whether Congress was under the control of the president's party or not--which accounts for Bush's position, but what's most surprising to me is the high ranking of Carter.--if you discount Watergate, he likely was more investigated by his own party, than Nixon was by his opponents. 
• Reagan's high ranking is partly accounted for by Dem control of the House throughout his terms in office, but it's also a reminder of how rocky his administration was and the number of scandals.  

Northam and Boyd

John Boyd, head of the National Black Farmers Association, met with Gov. Northam and offered support, according to this.

Why Blue America Is Blue--II

See this tweet on bankruptcies increasing from 2017 to 2018.

And see this report from Politico. 

I'd predict some "emergency" farm legislation will move before 2020.

A Leap Too Far for the Army

As a former draftee I retain a deep skepticism of the wisdom of the US Army.   So I would have said "I told you so" to the Army's plan for its "Iron Man suit", that is if I'd known about it, which I didn't.

As it turns out it was impracticable to integrate all the features desired into one outfit, so the Army appears to be separating the bits out to use individually.

The Marginal Utility of an Extra $50 Million

Jerry Brewer had an interesting column in the Washington Post about star basketball players seeking new teams.  This was the bit which stood out to me:

 In the doc [made by ESPN on Chris Paul's decision], he met with his friend, Jay-Z, the rap and entertainment mogul. Paul was telling him about various offers, ranging from $150 million to $200 million. Jay-Z listened and then spoke his mind. “Ain’t gonna change your life,” Jay-Z said about the offers. “You get 150, you get 200 — it’s the same thing. You’re gonna ride the same plane. You’re gonna wear the same sneakers. That [expletive] ain’t gonna change your life. One-fifty, 200 — same thing. . . . Your happiness, now that’s worth everything.”

Why Blue America Is Blue I

From the Rural Blog:

About 15 percent of Americans live in rural areas; the percentage has been declining for more than a century. The 35 percent of counties that have experienced long-term, significant population loss now have about 6.2 million residents, a third less than in 1950. Depopulation mostly started with young adults moving to cities or suburbs; the slide in population continued because fewer women of childbearing age were left in rural areas to boost the population"

That's part of the "Big Sort" which underlies our political divisions. 

"Seeing the Whole Picture"

T.J. Stiles had some tweets participating in a discussion on Winston Churchill (Newt Gingrich had triggered it by comparing Trump's work habits to Churchill's, to which some, including Stiles, took issue).

He had this tweet in which he said it was important "to see the whole, real picture".   I replied to the tweet, but have had some added thoughts.

"Seeing the whole picture" sounds good, but when you think about the meaning of the word, it's more complicated.  A picture, whether painted or photographic, is basically a two-dimensional  representation of reality; it's not a 360 degree holographic image.  And it's static, representing a moment in time, not a movie showing the lapse of time.

I'm being nitpicky, of course. It's best to look at every corner of a picture, to look up close and stand way back, while remembering the limits of a picture in representing reality.

Simple Gifts--the Handshake

According to this, Quakers popularized the handshake in America.  I can see them as disliking the bow or the tipping of the hat as perhaps signalling social differences. "Simple Gifts" is a Shaker song but the emotional basis is similar.

What Historians Don't Know--the Case of Jill Lepore

So I got several books for Christmas.  First I read "Becoming" which was very good.  Then I read Carl Zimmer's "She Has Her Mother's Laugh", which also was very good.  Now I'm ready for Jill Lepore's " These Truths, a History of the United States". 

Lepore is a good writer.  I think I've read most of her books and enjoyed them.  She's more of a narrative historian than an analytical one, but she knows how to tell a story.

So she starts her history by imagining in the fall of 1787 readers of a New York newspaper seeing the language of the new constitution. By page ii of the Introduction she moves to the people of the United States considering whether to ratify it, "even as they went about baling hay, milling corn, tanning leather, singing hymns, and letting out the seams on last year's winter coats for mothers and fathers grown fatter, and letting down the hems, for children grown taller."

So what does she get wrong?

Obviously farmers weren't baling hay in 1787.  (I  know I've seen a similar error somewhere recently, forget where, might even have been Lepore in another form reusing the same material. )

I'd also challenge the idea of "milling" corn.  I find to my surprise that wikipedia covers it, but I'd be more comfortable with the wording: "grinding corn".

As the proportion of Americans who farm, or grew up on farms, dwindles, the understanding of that way of life starts to vanish.

ERS on US Agriculture: the Case of Hay

Farm Policy has a post summarizing a recent ERS report on the characteristics of farms in the US.

There's the points which are not new to me: when considering total value of production the dominance of the family farm, except in the case of very high value crops and beef, especially what are known as "large-scale family farms", which are the modal and median farms in the ERS categorization  Except, except in the case of hay and poultry.

Because poultry is, I think, dominated by contract farming I won't comment on it.  But hay is interesting--I suspect in part it representatives the last gasp of small scale dairy farms, where the production pattern is harvesting hay in the summer and feeding the hay in the winter.  But dairy itself is dominated by the large-scale family farms, likely meaning their cows don't graze the pastures, but have their feed delivered to them in their barns/feed lots.   In that context a small farm can find a niche space--growing and harvesting hay is not that difficult to combine with getting income from elsewhere, like social security or off-farm employment.  And the the big dairies provide a market.

Agreeing with Althouse on the Past

I've been following Ann Althouse's blog for years. In the last few years I think she's become more conservative, often defending President Trump.  I also think she tends to find hidden motives buried in people's statements and in news article, explaining things by those motives rather than the simpler explanation offered by Murphy's Law and taking things at face value.

But the other day she and her son collaborated on a post with which I can agree.  Basically they're remembering a past when liberals and the left were vehement in defense of free speech.  Mario Savio and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement come to mind, though definitely before her son's time.

All things being equal, I think I generally lean towards free speech (joined the ACLU back in the days of the Nazis marching in Skokie) and am reluctant to see boycotts, even though they are a part of our American heritage (boycotts of British goods led up to the Revolution).

The Petty Frustrations of Old Age

What's bad about getting older:

• finding that after typing a few letters, you didn't get your fingers on the right keys, so "this types as " yjod yu[rd sd "
• it takes seconds to turn the newspaper pages, so you turn from page 2 to page 6.

Your temper gets shorter so you're more enraged by the petty than you should be.

On Assimilation of Immigrants

Tom Brokaw got himself in trouble this weekend by comments on immigration.

When people talk about assimilation of immigrants, I think of two things:

• examples of immigrants to America who have not "assimilated", at least if defined as speaking English and abandoning their language of origin:  the Pennsylvania "Dutch", aka Amish and some related communities, and some Hasidic Jewish communities, along with Native American tribes, Cajuns (I think), etc.  
• Switzerland.  A long time democracy with at least  3 definite language communities.

So my message is relax:  have faith in American soft power and its ability slowly to permeate the norms of people living here, as well as those living elsewhere.

Rules and Regulations: Ms Rao

The Times had an article on the Trump administration problems with the Administrative Procedure Act.  It seems the courts have dinged the administration a number of times for not following the act, not providing for notice and opportunities for public comment on policy changes and not doing good enough analysis of policy alternatives to support the decision.

I didn't have a great regard for the act during my bureaucratic days--it was a pain.  A pain in particular because mostly there was no one to present an opposing view.  Most "regulatory" agencies have two or more sides interested in their decisions: should the agency be strict or lenient in writing regulations.  But ASCS/FSA was giving out money.  While there were groups like CATO or AEI who disputed the whole basis of many/most of the farm programs, they didn't usually involve themselves in the regulations, just trying to make their case to Congress and the administration.  There were issues: most notably payment limitation and sodbuster/swampbuster/conservation compliance where you'd find significant interest, but even those didn't compare to the hot issues before the regulatory agencies.

One thing the article misses is the role of OMB.  Basically the writer says Trump administration appointees to agencies were either ignorant of the requirements of the APA or rushed their process.  That's true enough, but OMB does review regulations through its OIRA. Who is the head of the office? Neomi Rao  Who is Ms Rao--the Trump nominee to sit on the DC Circuit Court, the court which reviews challenges to agency actions.

McConnell's Gift to KY Farmers: Hemp Price Support Loans to Follow?

Mitch McConnell will face the electorate in 2020.  Kentucky has announced 1000+ farmers have been given licenses to grow hemp. That might help Mitch in his primary in 2020 since he's closely identified with getting the approval for hemp. But the farmers are planning to grow 42,000 acres of hemp, which strikes me as possibly threatening a hemp surplus. (To compare, KY may have about 4,000 tobacco farmers and something under 100,000 acres of tobacco.)

(I don't know, but I don't think anyone else does either.  We don't know how big the demand will be, how well the farmers will do in growing hemp, how good the processing facilities will be. The Rural Blog post I link to mentions CBD oil.  I had the impression that CBD oil came from marijuana, not hemp.  I found this assertion though: ">BD is one of 60 chemicals known as cannabinoids that are specific to cannabis plants. The CBD that we use in our CBD hemp oil tinctures is made from industrial hemp, a non-psychoactive derivative of cannabis that contains insignificant traces of THC. Industrial hemp products are legal nationwide and contain less than 0.3% THC.")

So I wonder how long it will be before hemp farmers find the need for and the political clout to get price support loans incorporated in farm legislation?

20 Years of Amazon

Was just logged into my Amazon account and noticed it says I've been a customer since 1998.  The company was founded in 1994, so I was a relatively early customer, but nothing notable.

I remember reading investment advice from some guru of the time.  Essentially he said one way to choose stocks was to buy those you used.  That would have been good advice.  I could have had a fortune now had I invested in Amazon when my first purchase was satisfactory.

But I didn't, never have invested in it, just paid it a bunch of money over the years.

As you get older you know not to dwell on opportunities you missed.  That's life.

FSA Employees Turn Out To Be Essential?

USDA has decided to recall 9500 FSA employees beginning Jan 24 to provide services.  Chris Clayton reported this on twitter and here's an article.

Apparently all field offices will open (not clear on DC and KCMO) and will handle most, but not all, program activities, including MFP applications, the deadline for which has been extended. 

The Interplay of Tech and Behavior

Peter Moskos has an interesting post at his blog.  In New York City if a policeman answers a 911 call for a person who's waiting for an ambulance she has to  enter the person's data into her phone which results in a check of the database for outstanding warrants.  Moskos argues that's wrong and bad: people will associate EMTs with law enforcement and avoid calling for help.

Towards the end he notes a separate issue--in Baltimore every time the police stopped someone, they ran a check for outstanding warrants.  In NYC, they don't.  Moskos traces the difference to a difference in technology: apparently in NYC multiple precincts share a radio band; in Baltimore each precinct has its own band.  So, as an economist would predict, there's rationing of a scarce resource in NYC but not in Baltimore.

Interpreting Human Facial Expressions

I may have written about this before.

Humans are very good at reading other people.  At least scientists say we are, and we're eager to believe it.

For years I was sure that when I grinned, it was rather like Hugh Grant's smile: bashful and attractive, expressing good feelings.

Then I went to therapy.  Early on my therapist blew away my illusions: my smile came across as unpleasantly supercilious.  I came to realize that underlying my smile was nervous tension about how the social interaction.  At least some of the therapy group were unable identify the insecurity beneath the expression.

Bottom line: I don't know how common it is to have such a disjunction between what a person is feeling and what people perceive.

Watergate Reporting and Now

Josh Marshall at TPM has, I believe, noted that reporting on Watergate had its problems.  There were news reports which were correct, there were news reports which were wrong, reports which were incredible at the time and subsequently borne out, and all sorts of variations in between.  Mostly the administration denied the reports, launching ad hominem attacks on both the reporters and the sources.  Some of the denials turned out to be well-founded, but most of the denials and the deniers lost credibility as time went back.

History can teach many lessons; one of which is events move at their own pace and sometimes patience is required to know the outcome.

LBJ's Biggest Mistake: Vietnam or Fortas?

Was in a discussion this morning on Supreme Court confirmations, which caused me to remember one of LBJ's biggest mistakes. Briefly, without checking my facts, Earl Warren decided to retire in 1968 as Chief Justice. 

LBJ decided on a cute doubleplay--promote his attorney and longtime friend, Abe Fortas, from Associate Justice to Chief, and put Texan Homer Thornberry in to replace Fortas.  In my memory, LBJ could likely have gotten a different person confirmed as chief but Fortas was a bridge too far.  Not only was he a liberal justice, but he had always been an adviser to LBJ, something he continued as a Justice.  (Still not publicly known, he had a yearly retainer from Louis Wolfson, a wheeler-dealer of dubious reputation who had been convicted in 1967.) 

In 1968 LBJ had lost most of the clout he used to have, and people (senators) were tired of him.  So Fortas was not confirmed, meaning no vacancy for Thornberry to fill.  The next year Fortas was forced to resign over the Wolfson retainer, meaning Nixon could nominate and get confirmed the Minnesota Twins: Burger (as Chief) and Blackmun.

The bottom line: had LBJ paid more attention to ethics, he never would have appointed Fortas and continued using him as an adviser. And with better judgment he would have replaced Warren with a moderately liberal justice. Although Blackmun evolved into a liberal justice likely comparable to anyone LBJ would have nominated, a more liberal Chief Justice would have changed the composition of the Supreme Court for decades. 

As I think about it, our defeat in Vietnam seems to have been less consequential than we thought it would be in the 60's and 70's, while the changes in SCOTUS seem to be more consequential.  Hence my title.

More on FSA and Shutdown

Politico has a piece more focused on farm loans than farm payments.

FSA Goes Back to Work?

Only in part.  Here's the Politico piece on Perdue's telling 2,500 employees to return on Jan 17, 18, and 22.

And here's the USDA press release.

And here's the list of offices which will open.  (My impression is that a smaller share of offices in the Northeast are being reopened than in the rest of the country.  They may have given preference to locations with heavy MFP activity?)

I wonder how they determined the employees to call back?  All CED's of offices they're reopening?  Might not be the best employees to have. 

I wonder what happens after Monday?

Will be interesting to see how this works out.

And here's a NASCOE explainer from yesterday.  (Thumbs up to NASCOE for the post.)

It's All Downhill from Here

This month I got my first hearing aid.  Today I was told I need my first  dental crown.

My health has been generally good up to now--no hospital stays, no broken bones, etc.  But it's all downhill from here.

Small Dairy? Test Farm

The Times today had an article on a supposed small farm; actually a billionaire's test farm (i.e. playtoy given my cynical mood today) trying out various systems intended for small farms.

It's call Rivendale (it doesn't tweet much).

The article is frustrating--apparently  one person is mostly responsible for the 175 milking Jerseys, using an automated feeding system and $200,000 robotic milking systems.  The cows determine when they are milked (4 times a day) and produce 15 percent more.  But it's not clear whether it's their breeding or the milking system which is responsible for the gain.

What I'd like to know, among other things:

• what's the expected life of these robotic systems? 3 year, 5 year, 8  years, 10 years? 
• how much maintenance and downtime do they require?  my guess is 4 systems means that 3 systems can handle the 175 with the fourth providing for some backup and fudge factor.
• what happens when Murphy's law strikes and the systems go down?  With the systems I grew up with, as long as you had electricity you could milk cows.  Without electricity, it was hand milking.
• can the farmhand handle the technology or does it require a tech?
• how does the feeding system handle the "non-processed feed" they claim to be using?
• what's the overall picture--are the cows on pasture or is it a CAFO?

John Boyd on BBC

Since I mentioned Boyd's appearance in a Post article, I should give equal time to the BBC, where a sound bite from Boyd was included in their piece on the impact of the partial shutdown of the government.

In fairness to Boyd, I suspect he has a reputation for giving good quotes to the media--he's articulate.  In the last century I was  bit dubious of him, thinking he was more a paper farmer than a real one.  But apparently he's (re?)married with kids now and still going with soybeans, getting older along with all the rest of us.

John Boyd and the Shutdown of FSA

When the Post wanted a farmer to talk about the hardships caused by the shutdown of FSA one of the ones they found was John Boyd.  See yesterday's article.

Forgive me for finding it ironic that Boyd still depends in part on the agency which he sued.  Just another proof that life is complicated, as are people.

Fences and Landowning in the Post

Marc Fisher had an article in the Post about walls, which touched on fences, which included a quote from an expert which I found to be wrong!!  I commented there, which I'll copy here:

"From the nation’s earliest days, when only white male landowners could vote, many built fences on their land to show their neighbors they were eligible voters, Dreicer [the expert] said."

This is irrelevant to the theme of the article.  Irrelevant because a fence to mark boundaries of ownership isn't like a wall.  Think of our northern boundary: it's marked, but neither fenced nor walled.  We have the symbol of ownership (US sovereignty ends and Canadian begins) without needing a physical barrier.

But I call BS--I'm sure Dreicer never built a fence. A fence requires work, both to build it the first time (particularly stone wall fences but even split rail fences) and work to maintain.  You don't build a fence to declare ownership; you build a fence to keep animals in or out.  That's why we used to have fence viewers.  See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fence_Viewer.  BTW there are interesting regional and historical differences whether a landowner was required to fence his/her animals in, or to fence to keep free-ranging animals out.

Land ownership in the 13 colonies was marked by the metes and bounds system

Our Decentralized Systems

John Phipps twitted about this piece, specifically this:

This industry, and in particular the few groups who control the narrative, need to actually just agree and make one darn file type used to transfer and create data.I know this has and is being tried and there are a plethora of ways to go about it. Also, there are legacy systems and what not. We are not going to progress much more unless this finally gets solved though. Let us “you know what” or get off the pot.

I commented, comparing this problem with the problem of incompatible data sets in the healthcare industry.  I think this is a general feature of American society and economy: with a federal system, the size of the country and its population, the market economy, and our history we don't have centralized systems comparable to those in France or in Estonia

First American Cotton Mill and Eli Whitney

On Dec. 20 there was mention of the anniversary of the first American cotton mill. What struck me at the time, though I'm just getting around to commenting, is the date: 1790. 

Why is the date significant?  Well, we all know there was no cotton industry before Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, which was in 1794. So what was Samuel Slater's factory spinning in 1790 and after, if no cotton was available?

The answer, of course, was cotton, and the point I'm trying to make is our mental picture of history is wrong.  In fact cotton was grown and de-seeded for centuries, in all continents except Antarctica.  The thing about cotton, as you can see if your aspirin bottle has a wad of cotton to suppress rattles, is it's light so a little goes a long way.  Try weighing the cotton clothes you're wearing now--they're light.  So if the elementary ginning tools in use before Whitney's invention could process a pound of cotton a day that would be sufficient for a lot of yarn and then weaving a fair amount of cloth.

Taxation Policy and Staffing

I commented on a Noah Smith tweet a couple days ago, a thread discussing tax policy. AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)  has gotten notoriety by proposing a tax bracket of $10 million and above with a rate of 70 percent.

I've not followed the debate enough to know what, if anything, she or others have proposed for the current brackets and rates.  Personally I'd add more brackets (because "simplicity" isn't important when you use software packages to file your taxes, with increasing rates.  And I'd have no problem with the 70 percent proposal.

What I do have problems with is IRS staffing.  IMHO the first priority for Democrats is to try to get bipartisan agreement on improving IRS staffing and administration, by which I mean something like doubling the auditors of richer people.  One of my early blog posts was to complain about a then-celebrity evading taxes. As an ex-bureaucrat, I want people to follow the rules, damn it.

Kentucky Dairy Farms Fading

The Rural Blog had a post on the plight of Kentucky dairy farms recently.  A lowlight:

In Kentucky, more than 10 percent of dairy farms shuttered in 2018, lowering the count to 513, down from 1,400 in 2005, Bill Estep reports for the Lexington Herald-Leader. 

I don't know what the reduction in cow numbers was--Estep wrote: ""Farm Aid pointed to Walmart’s new Indiana processing plant as a example of large players taking over more of the milk-supply chain. Large companies with processing plants typically would rather deal with a few large farms than many smaller ones," 

Police Shootings by State

Moskos has two new pieces here and here on the subject:

First piece on  police shooting people

The national annual average (of police shootings) since 2015 is a rate of 0.31 (per 100,000). And yet New Mexico is 0.98 and New York is 0.09. This is a large difference. 
Western states worst, NE states best, highest black states better than average.

Second piece is mostly on people shooting police

Quotes from the second piece:

Lack of density -- more space -- is correlated with being more likely to be killed by cops. Think of what this means. Common sense tells you it's not a view of "big sky country" that makes cops shoot someone. Whatever really matters, is correlated to density (or lack thereof). Maybe it's single person patrol. Or the time for backup to arrive. Or meth labs. Or gun culture.

The greater the percentage of blacks in a state, the less likely cops are to shoot and kill people.

1) Whites don't really care about who police shoot; period; end of story. And without the pressure over bad (or even good) police-involved shootings, cops never learn how to shoot less. Other things being equal, cops simply shoot more people if there isn't any push-back from (to over-generalize) blacks and liberals and media and anti-police protesters. Call it the Al Sharpton Effect, if you will. Basically, in many places, police organization and culture do need to be pressured into changing for the better.

2) Police can be recruited, trained, and taught to less often use legally justifiable but not-needed lethal force less. The state variations in police use of lethal force are huge. Some states (and particularly jurisdictions within states) do it better than others. Instead of saying "police are the problem" we could look at the states and cities and department that are doing it better and learn. 

Inbred Economist Professors?

A day after I noted the possible inbreeding of law professors, Tyler Cowen posted this, excerpts from an interview:

He [Cowen] said that he agreed with the idea that influence of economics comes from a relatively small number of institutions, and he thinks the number is shrinking. “What used to be something like a ‘top six’ has over time become the ‘top two,’ namely Harvard and MIT.”

I've not checked to see how many of the Harvard/MIT economics professors graduated from those universities--I suspect a lower proportion than with women law professors at Harvard, but it looks as if they're on the same path.  It's a logical extension of trends: education is important, so the best education is very important, so it's best to hire only those with the best education.

What City Folks Don't Know

This post doesn't cover everything city folks (as my mother would call them) don't know, but just one thing.

Got a new biography of Benjamin Rush from the library the other day. (Rush was the prominent doctor in PA and a founding father and abolitionist.)  Just read a few pages, since I'm behind my reading of other books.  It looks good, well-written.

But, and there's a but.  Rush was born when his parents had a farm outside Philadelphia, though they moved to the city where his father soon died, leaving his mother to support the family.  Anyhow, the author writes about the work of "cutting and baling hay".  That's wrong--they would have cut the grass with a scythe, but they would not have "baled" it--that's a 19th century innovation--they would have likely stacked the hay, possibly stored it in a barn.

Inbred Law Professors?

I engaged in comment threads on Powerline--commenting on a Mirengoff post about Sen. Warren and the DNA test--asserting she had a false story.  As one might expect from my earlier post on the subject, I defended the test and, as you'd expect from the leanings of the website, got a lot of pushback from its devotees.

One point made was that Warren graduated from Rutgers Law.  I did a quick check of the (most of) women professors in Harvard Law and was a bit surprised by the results.  Some professors didn't include their education in their backgrounds, but most did.  Almost all of those I checked graduated from Harvard or Yale.  There was one graduate from Chicago and one from Texas in addition to Warren.

The predominance of Harvard/Yale bothers me--looks as if the system is rather inbred, at least at the law school level, less so at the undergrad level.  Also relevant is this: I noted in passing several cases where the professor had background in other fields, like history or math.

Loss Aversion Equals Fear of Change?

Economists have the theory of "loss aversion"--people fear losing what they have more than they want to gain more. From wikipedia:

In cognitive psychology and decision theory, loss aversion refers to people's tendency to prefer avoiding losses to acquiring equivalent gains: it is better to not lose $5 than to find $5. The principle is very prominent in the domain of economics. What distinguishes loss aversion from risk aversion is that the utility of a monetary payoff depends on what was previously experienced or was expected to happen. Some studies have suggested that losses are twice as powerful, psychologically, as gains.^[1] Loss aversion was first identified by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman.^[2]

Also see wikipedia on the  status quo effect, which includes this:  " Loss aversion, therefore, cannot wholly explain the status quo bias,^[4] with other potential causes including regret avoidance,^[4] transaction costs^[5] and psychological commitment.^[2]"

I wonder whether part of the effect is the narrative difference between what you have and what you might get.  The latter is naked, so to speak.  It has no history, no web of memories, no particular narrative.  What you have, whether it's a coffee cup or whatever, is clothed with a past, with a skein of memories, a place in a narrative.

Evidence of Ascension--USA Climbing

Since I blogged yesterday about declension, I should balance the scales by recognizing ways in which the US/world is better than in my youth:

• no famines, like we had in India and China during my lifetime
• progress in development--see Hans Rosling's presentations and books.  Back in the 50's and 6's the issue was how the Third World would do.  As it's turned out, it has done a lot better than we thought at points during the last 50 years, doing so in different ways than the conventional wisdom believed.
• technology has opened the flow of information
• in the US, LBJ's civil rights and Great Society legislation, aided by steps taken by later presidents, has changed the social landscape.  For all the continuing problems we have made great progress.
• peace--despite our participation in wars in the 21st century, the Cold War is dead and buried.
• health and safety--we've lengthened our life span and made life better even for those living longer.

I could go on, but my bottom line is I prefer living today to the past.

Evidence of Declension--US Going to the Dogs

Don't know why but today I want to write about what can be seen as evidence of decline in the U.S. over my lifetime:

• holidays have changed.  When I was young blue laws meant many stores were closed on many holidays (except George Washington's birthday) and holidays were celebrated with more attention to their significance.  The rise of shopping every day of the week and every evening has enabled women to participate in the market economy, getting money for their work.
• the culture has gotten "coarser".  Expletives abound, porn is available, available not only for "normal" sex but all sorts of "deviations".  There's a possible relationship to the greater openness about many subjects ("cancer" was discussed in whispers when I was young).
• the economy seems to have gotten more concentrated--we've lost a lot of chains of department stores, a lot of family farms, a lot of local stores, a lot of newspapers. On the other hand, we used to have just 3 TV networks, and there were concentrations in steel, autos, and coal--the sectors which used to be the pride of the country and the arena in which we competed with the Soviet Union.

FSA Offices Closed; NRCS Offices Open

That's the word.  For NRCS here.

BTW, neither agency has updated its "farm bill" page to reflect the signing of the 2018 farm bill.