Income Inequality: Fairfax and Prince William

Propublica has an interactive site which shows, based on Census figures, how equal or unequal the distribution of incomes in your county is.  According to it, about 26 percent of populous counties are more equal than Fairfax,VA.  Meanwhile, Prince William, the next further county out from Fairfax and home of Manassas, VA, more equal than every populous county.  Meanwhile, places like Essex county, MA, Baltimore, MD, and Orleans parish, LA are up there in the 90+ percent.

I'm not clear why the differences, though my guess is: history.  Fairfax has a longer history as a populous county than Prince William, so it had longer to develop pockets of poverty and pockets of wealth (McLean and Great Falls).  The same of course is even more true for the old urban and suburban areas (Fairfax was mostly rural until the 50's.).

Bruce Babcock's Choices: RMA or FSA

From his study for EWG:

"If the decision [by Congress] is that it’s up to the private sector to provide it, the logical course is to reform the current crop insurance program by eliminating the insurance industry’s windfall profi ts as well as insurance-type commodity programs, including ACRE and SURE. If Congress concludes that it would be more efficient to provide a safety net through USDA’s Farm Service Agency (FSA), it should design an easy-to-deliver program in the commodity title that protects farmers against major production risks and frees private insurers from federal oversight. A privatized crop insurance program could then offer policies to farmers who wish to fi ll in any gaps in coverage.

The alternatives are logical, but Congress has rarely been logical.

Phd's Logic Loses Me

Professor Mankiw of Harvard has a post, the logic of which escapes me.  To oversimplify, the question is whether education is the key factor in the rise of the "1 percent".  Professor Krugman argues it isn't, Mankiw in his post argues it is.  But his argument is weird: he says both he and Krugman are in the 1 percent because they both have doctorates (or at least that's how I understand it). If their education had stopped at a high school diploma they wouldn't be in the 1 percent. 

Seems to me the comparison doesn't work.  If education was the or a key factor, one would expect college professors to be in the 1 percent.  They aren't, the examples of Krugman and Mankiw to the contrary.  Depending on the year, the top 1 percent makes between $350000 and $450000, well above the salaries of almost all professors.  (Harvard's average was about half that.)

Planning Ahead and the Auditors

This Federal Computer Week piece describes a conflict between Social Security Administration's management and its OIG: the IG wants SSA to plan its online services more thoroughly, more completely and for a longer period.  SSA is resisting.

I remember back in the day, maybe 1981 or so, either GAO or the USDA IG tore ASCS up over the issue of programmable calculators.  For you whippersnappers,  at one time calculators were the hot electronics item.  This was, I think, back in the day when integrated chips were first being made on a large scale, and companies found they could stick a chip in a case with a numeric keypad and a small display and sell it for big bucks (particularly when you consider inflation, probably several hundred by today's values). 

There were a slew of such manufacturers, some in the US, in Japan.  As Moore's law kicked in, the manufacturers hotly competed by adding features and lowering prices.  But that's a side story. Anyway by the late 70's we had programmable calculators costing in the low hundreds.  And a few ASCS employees, mostly CED's, found they could save a lot of time by buying one and  creating a formula for such things as calculating the deficiency payment, cutting the work down to just keying in the data.  These guys (almost all male I think) used available funds and shared their work.

By the time GAO got involved, ASCS had an investment in programmable calculators of  maybe $3 million (all facts herein based on an aging memory) and one person in DC who tried (rather ineffectually IMHO) to coordinate usage, encouraging sharing of programs, etc.  GAO took a look at the situation and issued a bad report.  They wanted DC to assess which county offices needed the calculators, make one national purchase to save money, and provide standard programs to the counties.

I got involved in drafting the response, which pushed back against the idea.  I'm not sure how well the response would stand up over time--whether we mostly argued for a do nothing approach based on inertia, or whether we were more perceptive..  What we (and GAO) didn't know was that the first CED's were about to buy, or  already had bought, personal computers (maybe an Apple II, maybe a Commodore, maybe a Trash 80) to play with and possibly apply to ASCS business.  My perception is that led to a push from the field which combined with leadership from DC, eventuated in the purchase of the IBM System/36.

Anyhow, our response should have pointed to Moore's law and the rapid transformation of the field and our lack of comprehension of what was happening (always hard for bureaucrats to admit we don't know).  In such a situation, it made sense to stay flexible and relatively decentralized. 

That episode was one of my learning experiences, which sometimes counters my tendency to believe, like IG's do, that good bureaucrats located at the center can establish patterns and systems which work best for the field.  The truth is, it all depends.

Apologies to Commenters

I've screwed up.  There are comments on some of my posts to which I've not responded. I'm sorry and will try to do better.  Responses coming this weekend.

Politico and EWG on Crop Insurance

To balance my recent post on the goodness of crop insurance, let me link to this Politico article on the returns crop insurance offers: when Rain and Hail was bought by the Swiss they promised Wall Street 15 percent return on investment.  The Politico article mentions a new EWG study.

Here's a link to the EWG summary.

Both point out the $8 billion cost of crop insurance, greater than the direct payment and CFC programs currently cost.  But a partisan of FSA can only feel schadenfreude, because EWG would make crop insurance free and open administration of it to competitive bids. 

Florence Nightingale a Mathematician?

Yes, and inventor of a class of graphs.  That's from this interesting site, which says:

Though known as a nurse who changed the standard of health care, she was actually a brilliant mathematician, and the inventor of a class of chart called the polar area diagram.

Those Vassar Girls Are Far-Sighted, and Supremely Confident

" Since Vassar is at present having a conference on the postwar world,"  is a phrase from Eleanor Roosevelts column, as provided by Brad DeLong (who periodically picks up WWII first person stuff under the heading "Liveblogging WWII".  Eleanor was reporting on a group picnic at her house in Hyde Park which included some girls from Vassar, which is just a few miles down the road. More importantly the Canadian PM and FDR were around.

You might suppose the date was sometime in 1944, when I believe the UN was on the drawing board and the Allies were on the European mainland. You'd be wrong.

Nor is it 1943, after the tide had turned in the Pacific and on the Eastern Front and victory in North Africa.

Nor is it 1942, in the darkest days of the Battle of the Atlantic, Japanese advances in the Pacific, and the battle of Stalingrad.

It's Nov. 3, 1941, a month before we officially enter the war.

Why Crop Insurance Is Good

Speed.  The farmer gets a check in 1 or 2 weeks.  That's the story this farmer is pushing. (I owe someone a hat tip, but lost it.) It's an op-ed by a corn/soybean farmer.  Since I usually diss crop insurance here, it's time to acknowledge a different view.  (I guess the writer knows the insurance is subsidized but he likes the fact he pays for (a part of) it.

On Silos and Data Models

FSA issued a notice BU-729.  It seems to me, though I may be wrong, it's just another example of data silos, and a reason why, in 1990's terms, FSA should have developed an integrated data model.  Essentially the question is the relationship of geographic areas (counties) with administrative jurisdictions (county committees and local administrative areas) and county offices (of various types, shared management, etc.).  To administer county elections you need part of that relationship, to administer funds you need an overlapping part, to administer real and personal property inventories you need a third picture, to coordinate with NRCS and RD offices and jurisdictions you need others.  Unfortunately in my days at FSA each of those was administered by a separate office (or no office at all) and there was no overall coordination.  Apparently from BU-729 there still is no coordination.  My technocratic (Kevin Drum has a meditation on technocracy) heart is sore.