Government and Wikipedia (Warning: Off-Color Word)

This New York Times article describes a deal between the British Museum  and Wikipedia.  It seems the Museum has realized that people go to Wikipedia to look up information on the Museum, much more than they go to the museum's web site.  So the museum decided: if you can't fight them, join them (or something like that). By cooperating with Wikipedia, they can get more info and more accurate info into the browsers of the users, which presumably in the long run benefits the museum.

The lead guy says: "“Ten years ago we were equal, and we were all fighting for position,” Mr. Cock said. Now, he added, “people are gravitating to fewer and fewer sites. We have to shift with how we deal with the Web.”

I don't know why the same logic doesn't work for all official sites which try to push information--put a good deal of effort into upgrading the Wikipedia pages and, in a pet peeve of mine, making your pages accessible to Google.  Of course, Wikipedia is skeptical of having bureaucrats updating pages on their own bureaucracy, but this is, I think, the wave of the future.

Column on Pigford Claims

Interesting column in the High Plains Journal, with which I agree:

If the Ag Census data is correct, it still seems difficult to understand how the number of people filing Pigford claims could be more than double the number of black farmers in the U.S. Unfortunately, few people at USDA are willing to even discuss this topic for fear of appearing racist.
In the interest of transparency, it would seem helpful to have USDA provide the names and more information about who has or will be receiving payments under the Pigford cases. Adding more "sunlight" to this issue might help close another heart-wrenching chapter in farm loan history.

Unfortunately the "table" of payment data she refers to does not appear.

USDA Rulemaking

From Chris Clayton:

One thing I asked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack about at the Rural Summit was the complexity of rules, and delay getting rules out. He responded there were a lot of rules that certainly have been issued from the 2008 farm bill and that the department had more than 600 such rules to issue from the bill.

That sounds high to me, but what do I know.  I hope that's 600 in all stages of completion, and that most have notices of proposed rulemaking.  I'd hope the new Administrative Conference would work on helping to streamline the process, but I doubt it.  Most Congress people are happy to pass stuff they can point to with pride, and are much less concerned about actual implementation.

The Power of the Food Movement?

According to this article (HT Farmpolicy), consumption of high fructose corn syrup is down by 11 percent from 2003 to 2008.  The only thing in the article to explain the drop is consumer, and hence processor, resistance.  I know corn prices jumped over the same period, so it might be that "pure sugar", nature's food, processed from sugar cane or sugar beets, became a better buy over the time period.  But regardless of the explanation, the food movement will take credit and thus become more powerful in the eyes of other players in the food arena.

Just Another Washington Bureaucrat, Lenny Skutnik

Lenny just retired from the Congressional Budget Office, as noted on the Director's Blog. He didn't jump in the freezing icy Potomac for some "polar bear" stunt, but to save people from the Air Florida crash.

Optics of Cotton and Chickens

Two items froms Farm Policy: (Drafted this a while back, just finished it today.)


“To wit: our crusading president is going to send $150 million of your tax dollars to subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry. Why? so that he can continue to spend several billion more of your tax dollars subsidizing U.S. cotton farmers.
“Reps. Jeff Flake,R-Az., Ron Kind, D-Wisc., Paul Ryan, R-Wisc., and Barney Frank, D-Mass. (find the last time Barney Frank and Paul Ryan agreed on anything) have penned a note to the prez suggesting that perhaps the way to fix the problem is to end the U.S. cotton subsidies.”


Chickens are not nice people.
“Scientists and egg producers warn that deadly skirmishes that start with feather-plucking and turn into bloody frenzies when a bird’s pecking breaks a flockmate’s skin will increase if those same aggressive hens are moved from small cages with five to 10 birds to open pens that can hold dozens.”

Who Do You Have to Outrun When You're a Cotton Farmer?

The Post gets around to writing an editorial on the compensation the US government is giving Brazil for violating WTO rules on cotton subsidies. As you might expect, they condemn it. 

For some reason this sentence hit me: . "Thanks partly to the subsidies, U.S. producers can outcompete lower-cost producers on the world market; American farms account for about 40 percent of global exports."  Now it's the way we usually talk about international competition.  While it's accurate enough for casual talk, when you think about it, and when you remember the joke about the bear in the woods, it needs refinement.


The joke about the bear?  Two campers were in the woods in their tent, just waking up from sleep. All of a sudden across the clearing a bear appeared, obviously feeling as mean and unhappy as Mitch McConnell after the Kentucky primary. The bear starts towards the tent.  One camper opens the tent flap on the opposite side, the other starts putting on his shoes. The first camper says: "Run, we've got to outrun the bear to our car."  The second camper says: "No, I've only got to outrun you."  [Bad joke, I know.]

What's my point? The US has some efficient cotton producers and some not so efficient.  Other countries, like Burkina Faso, or Brazil, have some efficient producers and some not so efficient.  The subsidies we give to our cotton producers help the less efficient (usually the smaller and older ones) stay in business longer.  They also tend to keep people in cotton, rather than switching to other crops, like soybeans, though that effect is much less true that it used to be, say in the 1960's.  To the extent that the subsidies keep our production up, it means the less efficient producers in other nations are under more pressure, either to switch crops or to give up and let more efficient producers in their nation take over the land.

Given these interacting relationships it's difficult to say how badly the subsidies may hurt producers in other countries. So my refrain: "it's more complicated than you think."

Tit for Tat: 110 Murders in DC

Buried in this interesting article, one of a series on a sequence of murders/assaults in DC, is this statistic: about 110 of the 143 murders in DC last year were part of sequence of tit for tat retributions.  Scientists have gamed the right strategy for evolving cooperation, which turns out to be tit for tat with random acts of kindness.  Apparently in DC that strategy is alive and well, except for the random acts.

What struck me though was the idea 80 percent of all DC murders involve these relationships, which doesn't leave many for killings within the family or random acts. 

Peterson and USDA Organization

Sometime in the past the chair of House Ag, Rep. Peterson, was planning on working on a reorganization of USDA, specifically the county service end.  I'm operating on memory here, but I think that's right. 

But recently I've only heard about his hearings on what should be in the 2012 farm bill.  I don't know what that means--whether he's given up on the idea, whether he's planning on doing it next year, or whether he's waiting to see if he can kill the direct payment programs and replace them with crop insurance, which would probably impact the organization. 

Brooks Is Wrong

David Brooks today in the Times has a column on the American public's ambivalence--we don't want the government involved in lots of stuff but when there's a crisis, like the Deep Horizon blowout, we want the President to be front and center.

Here's the sentence I disagree with: "At some point somebody’s going to have to reach a national consensus on the role of government." And closing with"

"We should be able to build from cases like this one and establish a set of concrete understandings about what government should and shouldn’t do. We should be able to have a grounded conversation based on principles 95 percent of Americans support. Yet that isn’t happening. So the period of stagnations begins."

My bottom line is it's an intellectual's fantasy.  We never, in all of American history, have had such a consensus by 95 percent of the American people.  What we've had in the past, and will have in the future, is a tug of war among our various principles and viewpoints, with the balance sometimes one way and sometimes another.  It would be too easy to say we never go all to one side.  We actually do: we decided over time that slavery was wrong, that hierarchical customs were wrong, that segregation was mostly wrong, etc.  But on the role of government we've gone back and forth.  And thus it will be in days ahead.