Knowledge problem

 See Farrell at Crooked Timber has a discussion of the "Knowledge Problem". If I understand, it's the argument that market prices encapsulate a lot of information and provide a key basis for a decision.  

Based on that understanding I can agree to support market capitalism, at least partially. The argument depends on the framework that someone is deciding what to buy and when to buy, and the price conveys information.

But as a failed historian I'm struck by the idea that humans make decisions based on history as well.  Some of our history-based decisions are also economic decisions; we know what prices were yesterday and have an expectation of what they'll be tomorrow.  Or we know how good or bad our last car has been and how good the service from the dealer has been, which has a big impact on which new car we buy and who we buy it from.

But we also have history-based noneconomic decisions with little or no price involvement.  We know, or think we know how good or bad a politician or political party has been; the knowledge guides our future.

Resistance to Remote Work

 The Times has a piece on remote work, describing some research and a categorization done by a social scientist.  Attitudes fall into four categories:

resistor--high level types who go their own way.

defector--who will quit

quiet quitters--who don't work hard when at the office

skeptics--(not clear how they differ from the quitters, except maybe they're more vocal and still work harder than the quitters).

The breakdown reminds me of the Hirschman analysis in Exit, Voice, and Loyalty.

Note however that the Times expert is focused only on forms of resistance; he does not address the loyal employees who try to do the job both in the office and at home.

Thomas, Crow, and Heirs Property?

ProPublica reported this:

In 2014, one of Texas billionaire Harlan Crow’s companies purchased a string of properties on a quiet residential street in Savannah, Georgia. It wasn’t a marquee acquisition for the real estate magnate, just an old single-story home and two vacant lots down the road. What made it noteworthy were the people on the other side of the deal: Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his relatives.

Lots of discussion about the propriety of the purchase, but I wonder about something else, given the last 5 words.  Apparently Thomas' mother lives in the home.  

Slate reports that:  "All three properties were co-owned by Thomas, Williams, and the family of Thomas’ late brother."   That sounds to me like confirmation of what I suspected when I started this post--the property was "heirs property", meaning the original owner died without a will. That's been a big issue for ASCS/FSA, since having clear title to the land you're farming used to be a requirement for obtaining some loans. Congress has recently provided money for FSA to dole out to NGO's who are supposed to help owners of heirs property. 

I've always mentally ascribed the prevalence of heirs property among blacks to the historical lack of lawyers in the community. But here we have one of the nine most powerful lawyers in the US involved with heirs property. The iriony.

On Distribution LIsts

 Kevin Drum and many others don't understand how a National Guard member could have access to the sort of information which was leaked.

I think part of it is the pathology of distribution lists.  One of my early jobs in ASCS was reviewing and updating the distribution lists we maintained for various types of directives. These were paper or telegraph messages, but similar logic would apply in the world of data.

I think there's severa; aspects of what I'm calling pathology:

• no one pays any attention to distribution lists.  Once they're set up they can go on forever, automatically.
• distribution lists can be based on an office, a position, or an individual. If you specify x number of paper copies for an office, it's then up to the office manager to see they get distributed.  In today's world, the email/is sent to the office url. If it's a position, then whoever occupies the position or acts for the occupant would have access.  If it's an individual, then an individual address. Each of these are vulnerable.
• The vulnerability is in part the fact that things change, but as I said, the distribution list is automatic.  Bureaucracies may have procedures for "out-processing" people, but that's not a priority (I remember my outprocessing from Nam).
• The other vulnerability is the gap in comprehension between the originator of the classified info and the actual recipient in the bureaucracy. 

I'll be interested to see how close my guesses come to the reality in the current case.

A Large Dairy, Poor Cows

 Big explosion at a dairy in Texas Monday, with estimates of the number of cows killed at 18,000!

Don't know the cause of the explosion--possibly methana from manure would be a guess.  

Can only feel sorry for the cows which died, which have to be killed because of injuries, and which survived but won't be milked on schedule, not to mention their likely PTSD. 

Artificial Versus Natural

 Virginia Postrel has a post discussing our current aversion to "artificial" by reexamining the story of 19th century resistance to "artificial" ice, which wasn't true.

She observes nature in the 19th century was something to be mastered. As in the movie African Queen, nature is something humans must rise above.

In the 20th century the interests behind the "natural" products: butter, milk, use that fact to fight against the innovations which threaten their markets: margarine, oat milk, etc.

Counter-factual--while fighting nature, conquering the continent has been a meme in American history, valuing nature over the artificial  also has a long history.  Look at Thoreau and his reaction to the railroad and telegraph.  

Morrill Land Grant Act and ROTC

It turns out the Morrill Land Grant Act, enacted in 1862 during the Civil War, included some vague language about military training.  It's language on the purpose of colleges with the money athorized reads:

the endowment, support, and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life. [emphasis added]

The language is awkward, but the reasonable interpretation is the colleges is to focus on agriculture and mechanic arts but also including classics and science, including military. Apparently the phrase was added late, as earlier versions of the act preceded the Civil War.

The meaning of "industrial classes" is "working people", a little more expansive than "working class".  

What's Long Range in Abortion Battles?

 Kevin Drum questions whether a national 15 week ban on abortion with exception for the woman's health would be acceptable to his audience. Many of the comments don't reply, instead insisting it will never happen.

I wonder what happens if and when liberals gain a majority on SCOTUS. I assume that will happen at some point in our history, and before anything medically has changed the landscape. So SCOTUS changes, and liberals bring a test case asking the court to reverse Dobbs. Seems as if they'd have some choices--push for the landscape after Casey using Casey's arguments, come up with different arguments (as RBG had thought), go for different rules (maybe a national position). But I wouldn't see any new arguments or positions as changing the logic of the pro-life camp.  

So if Dobbs is reversed then the pro-lifers revert to their simple position and we're fated to continue the argument and possible SCOTUS flip-flopping into the future?

Women's Economic Activity

 Reading "The Wife of Bath".  Stumbled on the first sentence of Chapter 3, where the author Marion Turner claims that "women have also always been economically active.."  She's focused on European women and the Middle Ages, but somehow the phrase caused me to think.  "Economically active" isn't defined here, but I'd expect it to mean earning and spending money, which would make it more limited than working, although there might be a Venn diagram there.

I think we can assume that almost all women everywhere have worked for much of their lives, if competent, just as almost all men have worked, if competent. I don't know that we'd usually consider spending money as working, at least in common parlance, but we would, I think, consider it as economic activity.

The formal definition of "work" seems to be the expending of effort or thought to accomplish something.

Somehow the subject is fascinating, even if I'm not going anywhere with it today.

How Did the Academy Become Liberal

 IIRC in my young the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association were generally quite conservative, perhaps with an exception for the ABA on civil rights (though ChatGpt says it was criticized for being too conservative).

At my college the most liberal professor was Douglas Dowd, an economist.  

My question: the right today claims that colleges are dominated by liberals/the left.  The right says that today liberals essentially veto the hiring of almost all conservatives in almost all fields, perhaps less so in engineering. Assuming that's right, how did we get to this point?  Certainly liberals didn't dominate the academy in in the 1950s and 60s, so what happened?

My guess is that it's the result of the civil rights movement in the 1960s.Some protests split the professors, certainly they did at my alma mater--my advisor moved to Yale,  But I think after the protests died down the academy found itself pretty much united in supporting civil rights for blacks, rights for women, and open to the other cultural movments--notably Hispanics and gays.