Accountability or Stooping Low?

I often wonder about our standards, compared to God's (assuming there is a god). The Old Testament God is St. Peter's patron, and a relative of Santa Claus, keeping a list of all one's sins for eternity. That implies that you are accountable for your misdeeds, no matter your age or the situation. Sometimes that's the standards endorsed by conservatives, particularly when liberals are involved. Take this bit from PowerLine, a small part of a discussion of Secretary Rice's return to Birmingham with Jack Straw, British Foreign Minister:

"I noted in the Standard column that the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 had been the handiwork of former members of the Ku Klux Klan -- brothers under the hood to former Ku Klux Klan Grand Kleagle and current Democratic United States Senator Robert Byrd. Byrd of course opposed Rice's confirmation as Secretary of State. "

Byrd has apologized for his Klan membership, though perhaps in a Clintonian manner if my memory serves. In the course of a long (too long) Senate career he's migrated leftward (or maybe Congress has moved to the right) and become much more partisan. There seems to be an inverse relationship: the more pork he's gotten for West Virginia the further from the center he finds it safe to be.

But (many) conservatives don't believe in change, or forgiveness. They don't believe in rehabilitation of prisoners or parole. Some are starting not to believe in a President who says, "when I was young and irresponsible [although older when Byrd when he left the Klan], I was young and irresponsible." Any change is dangerous to these folks, who apparently were born right and never erred, never grew, and never learned.

Personally I find Powerline's linking of Byrd and bombers to be despicable.

More on Thomas C. Schelling and the Madman Theory

I recommend the History News Network for anyone with an interest in history. I blogged before on new Nobelist Thomas Schelling. This piece, Did Thomas C. Schelling Invent the Madman Theory?: by Jeffrey Kimball" discusses his work in the context of the late 50's.

Housing Changes

The Washington Post has a column, It's a Change, Not a Conspiracy, from a black resident of Takoma on the changes he's seen over the years. Recommended, but the bit I'd like to focus on is this:

"In the 16 years that I've lived in Takoma, I've seen three houses that were, arguably, sold out from under black owners who'd been there for decades. Two of the homes had been owned by couples whose children and grandchildren developed problems with drugs and alcohol. By the time the original owners died, the properties were heavily mortgaged. The heirs were forced to let the banks take the houses."

I'd pair this observation with data from New Orleans where the lower Ninth Ward had a very high home ownership rate. We, the mobile, college-educated elite, tend to assume that home-ownership is the result of buying. Thus it's important for the government to subsidize home-ownership, by allowing mortgage interest to be deducted on tax returns. What we forget is lots of homes are acquired by inheritance. Just like lots of farms are acquired by inheritance.

The old phrase about rags to riches to rags in x generations applies. Hurricanes like Katrina and epidemics like crack both result in the loss of status, the loss of inheritance. It's my belief that such things affect the social margins and the lower classes more heavily than the upper classes--there's just less margin of error and reserves available.

USDA Flinches

It didn't take long for the Administration to back off the plan to close FSA offices. See this from House Ag Committe: News from the House Committee on Agriculture: "Goodlatte Supports Delay of FSA Office Closures "

Bureaucrats Resist Change--Wash Post

This is very predictable:

"Farmers are famously resistant to change, and that goes for a recently announced
U.S. Department of Agriculture plan to close as many as 713 of the 2,351
county offices of the Farm Service Agency. "

It's an interesting case study in what some would call pork barrel politics. Some past efforts at closing and rationalizing offices have been successful, some have failed. (One of my former bosses came to DC when the plan was to consolidate state offices in the Northeast. Why do Rhode Island and Delaware need a State office to oversee a couple county offices?) As USDA moves more operations to the Internet and the number of farmers dwindles, the infrastructure needs to adjust accordingly. But from the point of view of the small country towns, the county seats, they both need the good paying federal jobs and whatever traffic the office generates by drawing farmers to the town. See the NASCOE site for a sense of what it looks like from the other side.

This irreconciliable conflict between two goods is one reason I took early retirement.

Assessing the Significance of Attack Data in Iraq--Contrarian

Seems like I'm due to challenge conventional wisdom (warning--this is off the cuff and not based on research):

The media reports that the military reports the average number of attacks per month in Iraq has steadily increased over the years since the end of significant military operations announced by our leader.

But this may not be significant, at least not as significant as it sounds. Counting and reporting is one of the things bureaucracy does. You need a flow of information up the channels to allow decision makers to make good decisions. So the data sounds useful. But changes in the data can reflect a change in reality or a change in the reporting mechanism.

In the early days of the war, DOD did no body counts; that was too much like Nam. My impression is that Rummy and Myers ran away from statistics as fast as possible. But as time has gone on, everyone searches for data, so the attack figure is one that has come to the forefront. My guess is that the military has become more and more concerned about the accuracy of such figures. They're probably also responding to continuous pressure from the media for such information. As the military changes and learns, it inevitably changes the data reported.

Take an example: someone in the lead vehicle in a convoy hears a couple bullets fly over head. That's all, nothing more. I don't know whether that counts as an "attack" today, but I'll bet it didn't count as an attack in July 2003. As a bureaucracy, the military has probably issued instructions on what counts as an attack and probably has a form, hopefully on-line, for reporting details. I don't know when they did that, but my experience is that you refine the instructions. (Did the bullets injure anyone? Was it Iraqi or U.S? Did they cause any property damage?) As time passes, there's also less downside to reporting attacks. Everything gets easier with experience, including reporting. There could also be some perverse incentives at work--don't report attacks, it looks as if the unit is in a quiet area so they may get moved to a hotter area. Report attacks and you may attract more resources. (There was a review of a book over the weekend, possibly in NYTimes--some ex-soldier reporting that his captain ordered an artillery barrage because the captain of a nearby unit had ordered one. ) That's the sort of thinking that leads to inflation of medals.

All this is, I suspect, documented in assessments of our experience in Vietnam. Iraq may not be Vietnam, but some of the dynamics of a (military) bureaucracy never change.

Ferrets and Turtles

The New York Times has an interesting article on a bureaucracy--the Medicaid bureaucracy,
here.

I've a post in draft on Gary Becker's use of "a culture of dependency" in reference to New Orleans residents. To me, the term doesn't ring true, perhaps because I associate it with Reagan's welfare queen anecdote, which implies an active, manipulative role; people as "terrible two's". I think it's more accurate to say that many people are turtles, not good at all at manipulating their surroundings but pretty good at enduring. (Am I saying many people are Russian peasants, renowned for their endurance--perhaps.) Others are ferrets. And most of us age into turtledom.

Anyhow, many of the Medicaid patients described are turtles.

Football Bureaucray--The Tuck Rule

Piece in the WPost yesterday on the "tuck" rule. (Skins thought that Jake Plummer had fumbled into his own end zone last Sunday, but it was ruled a forward pass, hence the discussion.)

The way the rule reads now is roughly this: Once the quarterback starts his arm forward in a pass, it's an attempt to pass until he tucks the ball back to his body or starts a football move.) In the Denver game, Plummer started to pass, rather obviously changed his mind and pulled the ball down, but lost it in the process. The problem is the "obviously changed his mind"--that requires the officials to read the quarterback's mind to tell his intention. That's difficult for a bureaucrat. So the NFL doesn't want to change the rule, because what they have is based on visible moves, no mind reading required.

That's what bureaucrats like--objective evidence.

Inertia, or the Safety of the Known

Yesterday Gallup reported on CNN that, based on a poll of people who applied for relief after Katrina, of those who stayed until the hurricane hit, 45 percent (roughly, I'm going on memory) thought they could ride the storm out where only 25 percent lacked transportation and/or money to leave.

Class and America--Research Topic in the Stadia

In a WPost discussion of how the St. Louis Cardinals revamped Busch Stadium for baseball (as a lesson for DC to do a similar upgrade of RFK stadium) there was a brief mention of the need for luxury boxes. Such status symbols seem to be ubiquitous these days; almost as much as the proliferation of ways to recognize different levels of giving to colleges and cultural organizations.

It strikes me as a fertile area for some sociologist/economist to work: consider the transition from free to paid attendance, from one-class to multi-class tickets at sporting events and theater events, from "contributor" to differentiated giver. My impression is that everyone attending baseball games in the 40's wore suits and hats and paid the same prices. Today I don't know how much differentiation there is in seating, but a lot. (Of course, the attendees may all wear casual clothes these days.) I'm assuming the same forces are at work in all areas. There may be a relationship with the differentiation of culture, a subject Tyler Cowan has written on.