The Persistence of Elites

Brad DeLong blogs on a Parliamentary inquiry from the 1820's. Casually skimming, I note a "Mr Bonham Carter" is a member of the committee, who I assume is a distant ancestor of  Helena Bonham Carter, whose great grandfather was  Prime Minister Asquith.  This prompted me to visit wikipedia:

Bonham Carter was born in Golders Green, London. Her mother, Elena (née Propper de Callejón), is a psychotherapist.^[1] Her father, Raymond Bonham Carter, was a merchant banker, and served as the alternative British director representing the Bank of England at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C. during the 1960s.^[1][2][3] He came from a prominent British political family, being the son of British Liberal politician Sir Maurice Bonham Carter and renowned politician and orator Violet Bonham Carter. Helena's great-grandfather was Herbert Henry Asquith, 1st Earl of Oxford and Asquith, Prime Minister of Britain from 1908–1916. She is the grand-niece of Asquith's son, Anthony Asquith, legendary English director of such classics as Carrington V.C. and The Importance of Being Earnest. Helena's maternal grandfather, Spanish diplomat Eduardo Propper de Callejón, saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust during World War II, for which he was recognised as Righteous among the Nations (his own father had been Jewish). He later served as Minister-Counselor at the Spanish Embassy in Washington, D.C.
Helena's maternal grandmother, Hélène Fould-Springer, was from an upper-class Jewish family; she was the daughter of Baron Eugène Fould-Springer (a French banker, who was descended from the Ephrussi family and the Fould dynasty) and Marie Cecile von Springer (whose father was Austrian-born industrialist Baron Gustav von Springer, and whose mother was from the de Koenigswarter family).^[1][4][5] Hélène Fould-Springer converted to Catholicism after World War II.^[6][7] Her sister was the French philanthropist Liliane de Rothschild (1916–2003), the wife of Baron Élie de Rothschild, of the prominent Rothschild family (who had also married within the von Springer family in the 19th century);^[8] her other sister, Therese Fould-Springer, was the mother of British writer David Pryce-Jones.^[4]

Have a Good Thanksgiving

Who's Your Daddy? The Fate of E-Gov

This Federal Computer Week post describes efforts to preserve the e-Gov fund. The problem, as I see it, is that the administration's e-Gov effort has no daddy on Capitol Hill. E-Gov is the sort of effort which gets pushed by an individual representative and/or senator.  In some situations it's known as an earmark; in others it's just someone's hobbyhorse; in a few situations it's brilliance.  Hold your laughter, but Senator Gore did have a major role in pushing the internet into civilian control. Or Senator Lugar has had a major role in safekeeping nuclear material in the former SSR's.

As far as I know, e-Government has no such sponsorship by someone in Congress.  It's an orphan.

Two Good Sentences

Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution writes on spiders:

Thus, the rituals of silken wrapped gifts conceal intricate conflicts over resources and sex. Only among spiders, of course.

Bubble Time

Research shows that if farm income dropped by 20% in Illinois, half of the state’s farmers could not make their loan payments. If land values dropped 30%, between 24% and 27% of Illinois’ producers would have a negative debt-to-asset ratio.

That's from an Agweb piece on "Weathering the Risk Storm".  Of course, there's no possibility that land values will drop so much. One thing we know for sure, real estate holds its value.  As someone famous said: "they aren't making more land."  And prices for grain are high and will remain high--the new middle classes of the world are eating meat, and we're the main exporter of grain.  But we can't expand production as fast as the world economy is growing. And there's no producing areas elsewhere to take up the slack.  So any farmer reading this should definitely go out and spend $15,000 an acre for good Iowa farmland and sleep peacefully at night.

What Happened to Ironing? and Washing?

A while back Megan McArdle got into an exchange with other bloggers and commenters about changes in technology which helped women.  The focus was on the kitchen, as I recall. I don't recall whether she was taking the side which said improvements since 1950 had been a big help to the homemaker (a word which may show my age) or whether she denied that.[Updated: here's a link to her post, arguing against Cowen that kitchen technology has changed.]

Anyhow I was remembering the cycles which I've experienced over my life: one of which was the weekly housewife cycle of the 1940's and 50's.  Monday was washday, Tuesday was ironing, cleaning and baking came later in the week.Which led me to muse on the changes.

Mom had a wringer washer: she rolled it into the kitchen from the "old kitchen", filled it with water (which she'd heated on the stove, since our hot water supply was limited, or nil in summer), and put in the clothes and let it agitate away.  Then she'd take the clothes from the water and put them through the wringer a few times to get the soapy water out, and put them into a washtub of clean water (actually the process varied a bit over the 20 years or so I'm remembering) to rinse, then back through the wringer to get the rinse water out.  Meanwhile she'd start the next load, probably the colors, washing.  The rinsed clothes would  be hung on the  clothesline, outside.  Towards Monday evening or maybe Tuesday morning, she'd gather the clothes off the line.

Because this was before the days of permanent press, all the clothes, except underwear, and all the linens would have to be ironed, which would take up the next day. We still had the old irons around, I mean the iron "irons", which had to be heated on the stove and then applied to the clothes.  But mom had an electric iron so she rarely had to use the old irons.  I learned to iron when in I was in college, took me probably 10 minutes to iron a shirt, not being very well coordinated. It seems to me her ironing was faster, though because dad wore overalls and wasn't a white collar worker her job was lighter than those of many other homemakers.

Compare that with today's permanent press, washers and driers.  Other than loading and unloading the appliances and folding the dried clothes there's no work at all, well, almost none.

WordPerfect: Blast from the Past

This USAToday story on the lawsuit by Novell against Microsoft over Windows 95 support for WordPerfect, or the lack thereof, brings back fond memories:

• Remember WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS?  It was great. 
• Remember macros in 5.1.  A guy whose name I forget made good money by writing a guide on writing macros.  And I got pretty good with them, chaining them together, doing things just for the sake of showing I could do them.
• Remember DOS? It wasn't so great.
• Remember Novell? It bought WordPerfect about the time of the transition to Windows 3.1.  It used to be the system to connect PC's together.

Remember, ah remember, when life was sweet.

Compromise and the Ratchet

One aspect of the discussion over the deficit and possible compromise is the ratchet effect:

• if the Republicans accede to the Democratic demand for tax increases, that is not a permanent change--it's something which will be changed down the line.  Look at tax rates after the Reagan/Rostenkowski tax deal in 1986--they've gone up and down as it seemed appropriate and according to the power of the parties.
• if the Democrats accede to the Republican demand for changes in entitlement programs, those are permanent changes.  Look at the Greenspan/Reagan Social Security "fixes" in 1983--the change in the age for full eligibility for Social Security was changed to 67. No one expects that change to be changed--it's a ratchet effect.

In this context, see Ezra Klein on why Republicans should like Simpson-Bowles.

The Profitability of Organics

This report  (Iowa State) at the extension site says organic field crops are as productive as conventional.

The LTAR [Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment] experiment shows that organic crops can remain competitive with conventional crops even during the three-year transition. Averaged over 13 years, yields of organic corn, soybean and oats have been equivalent to or slightly greater than their conventional counterparts. Likewise, a 12-year average for alfalfa and an 8-year average for winter wheat also show no significant difference between organic yields and the Adair County average.

Because of higher returns for organic grains, the study showed a $200 per acre premium over conventional. Given these results, I would think there'd be a lot of acreage being converted from conventional to organic; that's what economics says should happen, isn't it?. On the other hand:

I assume doing organic requires a different set of knowledges and perhaps skills, creating an entry hurdle.  A farmer who is beginning farming and who wants to begin as an organic farmer faces a major challenge.  An established farmer who want to switch to organic faces a major transition, which few people like to do when they're established.

As I've written before, I think the biggest problem for organic farmers is they produce crops for which the market is small.   Note these rotations:
Organic corn-soybean-oat/alfalfa (3 year)
Organic corn-soybean-oat/alfalfa-alfalfa (4 year)
Organic soybean-wheat/red clover (2 year)
 A farmer who converts from corn/soybeans now needs to find a market for oats, alfalfa and clover. In the old days the horses would eat those, but not any more, except for the Amish.


Think about the process of marketing these organic outputs. The transportation costs are going to be the same regardless of how the crop was raised, but because the markets are smaller on average the crop is going to have to travel a longer distance.  So the costs facing a possible organic chicken farm will mount up. 

Looking at the brochure, there's also the question of inputs. "Organic corn and soybean plots receive an average of two rotary-hoeings and two row cultivations per season for weed management."  and "The organic plots receive local compost made from a mixture of corn stover and manure"  Now the cost accounting would cover the costs, but on an operational farm four trips over the land is going to require more labor, which might be a limiting factor.  There's also the question of where the manure, and maybe the corn stover, comes from.  Once again, if we go back to the sort of farming done pre-WWI or on Amish farms, everything works together; the crop rotations include feed for the livestock; the livestock produce manure for the land, etc. But the challenges of integrating  organic operations on a large scale with today's patterns of marketing and consumption are great.

Congress and MIDAS

From the conference report on the appropriations bill:

The conferees provide that not less than $66,685,000 shall be for Modernize and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems. The conferees strongly support the implementation of Modernize
and Innovate the Delivery of Agricultural Systems (MIDAS), and encourage the agency to ensure that MIDAS’s initial operating capability will be released by October 2012. The conference agreement provides $13,000,000 for the Common Computing Environment.

October 2012 seems a bit late to me, but then it's easy to carp from the sidelines.