Our Health Care System

Had another encounter with our health care system on our recent trip--my wife had to have her gallbladder removed. It was a much more positive experience than my earlier one. A major reason was that her illness was quickly identified so the medical routines and procedures went to work. Another reason was that the Cayuga Medical Center at Ithaca, where the surgery was done, is a newer facility with a more cheerful atmosphere. While part of the difference may be the organizational culture and the difference in patients, another part may be simply the difference in congestion. The previous hospital had two patients to a room, CMC had only one. So the ratio of patients to square footage was much lower at CMC. I believe patient care in a hospital is heavily dependent on people--you need nurses, aides, houskeepers, doctors, maintenance, etc. And each patient attracts visitors. So the lower density of patients meant a lower density of other people, resulting in less conversation and less noise, producing a more peaceful and relaxed atmosphere.

Anyway, my thanks to all of the doctors and staff, particularly Dr. Cora Foster, the surgeon, and Kathy Hauss (sp?), a nurse.

The Economics of Kerry's Words

The Post today runs a column by Uwe Reinhardt (prof at Princeton) pointing out that, whatever Kerry meant to say (and I believe his explanation of intent), some economists like Slate's Steven Landsberg would concur with what he actually said: that young people with good economic prospects through education avoid the military, those with poor prospects go into the military. It makes economic sense in a free market economy with a volunteer army.

So why the outrage? Maybe buried beneath the rhetoric and the political spinning is the feeling that it shouldn't be this way, that equality in a democracy means the burden of defending the nation should be allocated, not on economics, but on citizenship. I'd refer back to Cass Sunstein's "The Cost of Liberty" which made this argument. He said (as I remember) that a good polity needed the allegiance of all, therefore it needed to be fair and to seem fair in allocation of burdens like taxes and military service.

Noticing Change (re: Immigration)

While catching up on my newspaper reading I saw a piece saying that 1/3 of the population of Montgomery and Fairfax counties live in households where the first language is not English.

It's strange how "gradual" change comes not to be noticed. You have to get outside the frame to identify it. I spent the last week in Tompkins county, NY (Ithaca). What was very noticeable were the people who were maids in hotels, workers on construction, etc. They were almost all white (and presumably native-born Protestants). It seemed strange and not in the "natural order", as I've become used to Fairfax county where those jobs are filled by immigrants, especially Hispanics. It's a reminder that while the material culture of the country has become more uniform (witness the same chains of stores and hotels everywhere, the same cable TV channels), the people culture is not.

Reading Newspapers

First an apology--I'd intended to post a warning that I was on vacation beginning Oct. 20 so blogging was out. But I had a senior moment and posted it to a private blog instead. Sorry.

On coming home after 2 weeks I find a stack of WPosts and NYTimes, which I feel bound to read or skim, at least, before recycling. I don't know why--it's an ingrained habit since I was a child. Things like the A-bomb, H-bomb, Korean war, etc. were first reported in the paper.

I saw a report that newpaper circulation is down significantly during the last reporting period--a significant downtick from the previous slow erosion of readership. Seems to me there may be correlation between the rise of cellphones and the fall of newspapers.

I remember the old days when the paper was the source of news. Radio was just the headlines and TV wasn't available. The paper served to filter and highlight items of interest, as well as providing the detail that we needed. Now the functions are separated. I first learned of 9/11 sitting at my computer reading a brief bulletin about a plane striking the WTC--I think it may have been Yahoo picking it up. Today people are most likely to learn of interesting news through their cellphone, then the Net, then TV, so the filtering function is gone.

Atrophying Sociability? Or the Ultimate Aphrodisiac

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution links to and comments favorably on the idea that modern advances will lead us to lose social skills. I strongly disagree. Look at everyone who's using a cellphone, while walking, while driving, while watching concerts... Compare that to 20 years ago--the total social interacting going on has increased dramatically, thanks to technology.

People are, after all, the ultimate aphrodisiac.

Elections--Musings of a Superstitious Bureaucrat

Kevin Drum refers to speculation on what happens if Dems win in 2006. George Buddy provides the URL for election projections. Even the Iowa electoral markets site shows things headed in the right direction (that is, left). But I'm sure that Kevin and others have now jinxed the Democrats in 2006. We're going to lose just like we did in 2000.

The good news is buried towards the end of the Electoral Vote site where there's a list of the Senate seats won in 2002, and therefore up for grabs in 2008. Republicans defend 21, Dems 12. That looks as good to me as current prospects look gloomy.

Don't Invest in India

The NYTimes has an interesting article on Americans who have been hired by Indian firms and are being trained in India. Another article describes looming shortages of well-trained engineers in India and the steps they're taking to fix them. India is booming and one might consider investing there, but this makes me pause:

Mr. Craig [an American hiree/student], who still calls home nearly every day, says he has made an effort to teach himself a few things about his new, temporary home. He has learned how to conduct himself properly at a Hindu temple. He makes an extra effort to be more courteous. He has learned to ignore the things that rattle him in India — the habit of cutting in line,[emphasis added] for instance, or the ease with which a stranger here can ask what he would consider a deeply personal question.

Although the Post gets lots of mail complaining about commuters who cut into line on the road, generally we Americans observe line etiquette. What does it say about a culture where they don't--they're into unfettered individualism and disregard of others?

CEO's and Stewardship and Calvin

Greg Mankiw discusses an economic analysis of CEO salaries:

"Another aspect of Xavier's work, however, should appeal to those on the left: In his model, high CEO salaries are pure economic rents. CEOs are paid what they are worth to their companies, and their high pay reflects the extraordinary value of their talent, but the supply of talent is inelastic, and the allocation of talent would not be affected if everyone faced high tax rates.

Xavier's model encourages people to think of CEOs as similar to Tiger Woods. Woods makes a lot of money because he is really, really good at golf. He is not stealing from those companies that pay him millions for endorsements. To the people paying Woods for his services, he is worth every penny. Yet if Woods were taxed at 50 percent, rather than 35 percent, he probably wouldn't give up golf or forgo the lucrative endorsements. (Response from the right: On the other hand, at a higher tax rate, Woods might play fewer tournaments each year. He might retire earlier. He might take more compensation as untaxed fringe benefits, such as a cushy private jet to fly to tournaments. And so on.)"

If I understand, CEO's aren't that good, but because they have great leverage, they earn the big bucks. That is, when you have a corporation doing $20 billion, you don't want some George W. running it, so you'll pay just a bit more than $400K for someone who's a little better.

The idea of talent as "economic rent" is intriguing. Resurrecting the old-time religion, men were intended to be stewards of the earth they inherited. Suppose we say that people are stewards of their talents? That might bring us around to Andrew Carnegie, who's an interesting study. (New bio just out I mean to read.)

[Back to Mankiw] What's a CEO going to do except CEO? Woods can cut back on his playing and probably increase his gross, because he'll win a higher percentage of those he does play. CEO's can only retire. (Of course, if you consider a CEO as a multi-talented person, then she can find something else to do, so there is some point at which taxes would become too high.)

Disaster Programs and Crop and Flood Insurance

The Post Sunday ran more pieces by the same trio that's done their previous ag articles: Gilbert M. Gaul, Dan Morgan and Sarah Cohen on the agricultural disaster programs and federally subsidized crop insurance. (There's a main piece, plus separate ones on disaster loans, crop insurance on sweet potatoes, and a man who subdivided his operation to qualify for disaster payments.) It's another good job. I'd emphasize the point that "Congress" can't act rationally on agriculture if "reason" means sticking with a long term policy. The legislation that people debate and vote on, whether it's "Freedom to Farm" in 1996, crop insurance reform in 1980, or whatever is one thing. But there are too many ways, particularly riders on appropriations bills, to subvert those plans and grab some glory and some ink for looking out for one's constituents by responding to "disasters".

It's not partisan--Sens. Clinton and Conrad do the same sort of thing that Sens. Grassley and Hagel do.

Farm Programs Lead to Higher Prices?

Not necessarily, but they aren't absolutely correlated with lower prices either. (This follows up a comment at Dan Drezner's blog that, contra another commenter, the farm programs did not necessarily lead to higher production and lower prices. )

From an Agweb post (note the last paragraph):

USDA will soon begin issuing first partial 2006-crop-year counter-cyclical payments for producers with base acres enrolled in USDA's Direct and Counter-cyclical Program (DCP). The 2002 Farm Bill requires that these payments be made in October.

The 2006-crop-year projected first partial payment rates, equal to 35 percent of the total projected amount, are $0.0481 per pound for upland cotton and $30.45 per short ton for peanuts

First installment payments are not available for producers who have wheat, corn, grain sorghum, barley, oats, rice, soybeans and other oilseeds base acres because the effective prices for those crops equal or exceed their respective target prices.

The point is that commodity prices are still volatile.

Categories

A recent Gallup poll asked whether the respondent thought Americans were ready to elect a person of a given background: woman, black, Jew, Hispanic, Asian, Mormon, atheist, gay. It's an interesting question, particularly the categories used, because I'm remembering the categories we used to use.

Gallup didn't ask if we were ready to elect an Italian-American, Greek-American, Polish-American--apparently these ethnicities have lost their power and fall into the general category of acceptable white. (I haven't done research, but I think Jackson was our first "non-English" President, being Scots-Irish and we've still to elect someone from outside the British Isles.) Gallup also didn't ask about Catholicism or Islam. (I understand that Taft was a Unitarian, which was controversial in the day.) Nor did it ask about divorce (which was a weapon against Adlai and Rockefeller).

Gallup should have asked about single--Rep. Foley wasn't out of the closet, but I doubt, unless Father Drinan were permitted to serve again, that there's any single man over the age of 35 who could get elected senator, much less President. No more Buchanans for the U.S. So much for the idea that we grow more tolerant as the nation gets older.

The "lumping" is interesting--are we as eager to elect a Hmong President as a Japanese, a Korean as a Filipino? Is Obama more acceptable than a descendant of American slaves? And Hispanics--aren't there differences among the Cuban-Americans and the Puerto Ricans, Salvadorans and Peruvians, Brazilians and Mexicans? The answer, I think, is the immigrant process creates arbitary groupings, which then become our reality. In an alternate universe maybe we'd discriminate against a Salvadoran and for a Puerto Rican, but in the world we've got, once we're halfway ready to consider a Hispanic, we'll disregard nationality and go right to consider the merits and demerits of the individual. (Just as now we care more about whether Rudy is too liberal for the Republican base than his religion or ethnicity.)

We've also forgotten some of the balancing--look at Kennedy's cabinet A Jew, a Pole, an Italian, and no women. When Clinton tried for a cabinet that "looked like America", he didn't care about East Europeans and religion, he cared about blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and women.

Federalist 10 and Weird Bedfellows

I think it's fair to say that Mr. Madison predicted this sort of alignment of weird bedfellows: it's the sort of shifting alliance of diverse interests that he saw as saving us from mob rule. From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution series on cotton program:

Oxfam, Cato, the Environmental Working Group, Environmental Defense, American Farmland Trust and Bread for the World helped form the Alliance for Sensible Agriculture Policies, an ad hoc, politically diverse coalition preparing to fight the farm bill. Oxfam, along with Yum Brands, the Louisville, Ky.-based company that owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants in 100 countries, decries subsidies' impact on free trade. So, too, does the Food Products Association, the nation's largest food and beverage trade group.

The problem of farm programs and big farms is built into the program's genes: if a program intends to help "farming", then it starts off favoring those who do more "farming" than less. I remember when I started with USDA, the cotton allotment program had a special 10-acre provision. I think it worked that people who usually farmed less than 10 acres got program benefits without having to reduce their plantings in the years that plantings were reduced. The provision was dropped--few people farmed only 10 acres (which probably had originated as a sharecropper's share).

It seems a general principle that you can be equitable to people either by capping at the top end (payment limitations in farm programs, "progressive" tax rates for the wealthy) or by focusing on the low end (the earned income tax credit). But if you focus on the low end, you create inequities. The inequities might be lessened if you do a sliding scale, as EITC does. And with computers we might now have the bureaucratic capacity to administer such a program.

Cause for Worry--Kim Jong-il and GWBush

Causes to worry are always easy to find. Such as the one buried in today's papers (sorry, I've lost the cite) that said that Kim went into seclusion on the eve of the Iraq war, perhaps because he feared that Bush was going for a two-fer against the "axis of evil". Such paranoia and misunderstanding of Bush is worrisome, particularly since I've no faith at all that Bush understands Kim any better.

Marine in Iraq, Some Surprises

Kevin Drum links to a letter from a Marine officer in Iraq, including this bit:

"Highest Unit Re-enlistment Rate - Any outfit that has been in Iraq recently. All the danger, all the hardship, all the time away from home, all the horror, all the frustrations with the fight here - all are outweighed by the desire for young men to be part of a 'Band of Brothers' who will die for one another. They found what they were looking for when they enlisted out of high school. Man for man, they now have more combat experience than any Marines in the history of our Corps. [Italics added]

The last sentence struck me. It's a reminder of how long the war has lasted. [Pause to digest thought.]

It's possibly also mistaken. My wife's uncle was a Marine whose service spanned WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. (He wasn't in combat but I'm sure there are Marines who were.) So a Marine who served on Guadalcanal with the First Marine Division might have had several other landings, then the Chosin reservoir in Korea and then engagements in Nam.

Still, the Marine's points are worth noting--he finds O'Reilly a buffoon and the Iraqi police surprisingly resistant to terror so it's not a simplistic letter.

Slick Language and Giving Away the Farm

Stumbled on this article on the 2002 Farm Bill (referred to by Ilya Somin at Volokh.com in a post on how liberal Democrats could appeal to libertarians). For some reason it strikes me as an example of using slick language in an argument. Some examples:

• "weaning" farmers away from farm programs (implying farmers are babies sucking on the teat of government programs)
• "small family farms" replaced by "large commercial farms" (blurring the fact that the smaller farms of the 1930's were also commercial while the large farms of today are also family-owned and run)
• playing "agribusiness" and "rich farmers" against "small family farmers" (blurring the fact that, given the increased specialization of modern agriculture, much of this is apples and oranges.) Small family farmers who have been growing field corn for the last 40 years get government checks; large operations who grow sweet corn for the last 5 years don't.
  

Oh well, I'm sure similar examples can be found on the other side.

Explaining the Rice "Blow Off"

Slate summarizes the situation described by Woodward's book, but neither the 9/11 commission nor previous books highlight the meeting--why?

Pages 49–52: On July 10, 2001, George Tenet and his top terrorism expert, Cofer Black, visited Condi Rice and warned that a major terrorist attack was coming. "It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming," said Tenet. "This could be the big one." They felt like the then-national security adviser blew them off.

Page 79: "Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the bin Laden threat, but she just didn't get there in time, Tenet thought. He felt he had done his job, laid it on the line very directly about the threat, but Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she wasn't organized and didn't push people as he tried to do at the CIA." Rice has said the July meeting was not as dramatic as Tenet remembers. Woodward quotes Cofer Black: "The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head."

I think the answer lies in the workings of humans and bureaucracies. Remember these things:

1. Tenet and Black have been focused on bin Laden for years. Rice has been on the job for less than 6 months. She was the foreign policy guru for a campaign that never mentioned bin Laden.
2. There's no good solution to the bin Laden problem.
3. Tenet and Black have been out of the administration for years, Rice is still in it.
4. People like to make their stories consistent.
   

And a fourth: the old bureaucrat's saying "it's hard to remember your goal was to drain the swamp when you're up to your ass in alligators". New bureaucrats always focus on the goal, old bureaucrats fight the alligators.

So, Tenet and Black rush off to see Rice with a hot potato for which they've no clear solution. But Rice knows her boss isn't good on coming up with solutions, and certainly doesn't want to do anything Clinton did before him. She also knows Dick Clarke and other bureaucrats are trying to put together an overall plan to drain the swamp (which they'll have ready in early September). So, at best she may have sent Tenet to Ashcroft (Freeh has left, I think, and Mueller won't come on board until September). So much for the meeting--just another case where the linkage between career types and political types breaks down during the transition.

How about the new prominence of the meeting? People are loyal to their fellows. Woodward's earlier books and the 9/11 commission were working right after Tenet and Black had retired. I suspect their residual loyalty to the administration meant they didn't highlight the "blowoff". Now, though, it's 2 more years later. Rice is still loyal to the administration but Tenet and Black have had more time to nurse grievances. Rice's story is consistent: because she took no action, she couldn't have been given any information that should have caused her to act. That tends to shift the onus back to the CIA, which rubs T and B the wrong way. So now they start to highlight the urgency of the meeting and the failure of Rice to act. No one says there was a failure of imagination or a lack of capacity to act.

There may not be any lying going on and, absent any tape recording or contemporaneous notes, we may never know the truth.

Technorati Claim

Technorati Profile
This claims?

Payment Limitation in Georgia

Cox and the Atlanta Journal Constitution have another article on payment limitation .
I had to register to see this article, but not the earlier article.

It's a complex story, with USDA's Inspector General, FSA's county, state, and DC offices, the Senator who leads the Ag Committee, and Justice all playing a role. The bottom line is:

• if there were no payment limitation rules, McNair would be farming the same crops on the same acreage but without the superstructure of paperwork and fake accounting. ("Fake" is pejorative, I know.)
• if his neighbors thought he were cheating on his income taxes they wouldn't be as likely to condone the schemes. But since it's FSA bureaucrats depriving hard working farmers of money, McNair will be at least tolerated by the community.
  
• because McNair and his fellow farmers (on the county committee) are pillars of the community, they pack a lot of political clout. So Congress isn't really serious about enforcing payment limitations (ask Senator Grassley). Can you imagine how dispirited Jim Baxa might feel about the task? (Full disclosure--I used to be his wife's boss.)
  

I hadn't thought about it before, the issue of whether IRS auditors and USDA bureaucrats should coordinate is interesting.

And to be fair to Sen. Chambliss, Clinton's first Secretary of Agriculture had his chief of staff convicted of an offense because of mishandling of payment limitation cases.

Payment Limitations and College Students

Cox News service has a good article on payment limitations in farm programs. A couple of notes--they could have added Queen Elizabeth to the Crown Prince of Lichtenstein in the summary of the background of changes in the mid 80's and it's unclear how much money is "actually left on the table". Ag committees argue that it's effective; cynics disagree.

Foley Hypocrisy

Always love a good serving of hypocrisy but this is overdoing it. Curses on all concerned in this mess.

Farmers and the Future

The Times has an article today on the Kansas farmer who owns the geographic center of the U.S. and his concerns over whether his son will leave the farm. It's nicely written, but with the standard themes. Lebanon, KS has lost 25 percent of its population (now 278 est) in the last 15 years. (Median resident age: 52.4 years; median household income: $23,056 ; median house value: $10,100. )

He farms 3,000 acres, which probably means that there used to be 15-20 families, each with a quarter section, farming where he is now.

Clinton Failed and I Failed

Clinton said he failed to get bin Laden and I failed in the project to get USDA agencies to share data. Here's an excerpt from an article on crop insurance fraud:

In 2003, government investigators found that the Risk Management Agency of the USDA had incomplete information on ownership of 21,000 of the nation's largest farms, so it lost a valuable tool to determine whether farmers falsified production figures to file unwarranted claims.

"It's really a shell game ... to show a loss that probably didn't occur," Bertoni said.

Another branch of the USDA had the ownership information but didn't provide it to the RMA. Up to $74 million in possible false claims resulted.

The difference between Bill and I is that I never headed the project. Well, there are other differences.

What Does The Future Hold?

The Times has an analysis of the new legislation on terrorism which includes these thoughts:

How the measure will look decades hence may depend not just on how it is used but on how the terrorist threat evolves. If a major terrorist plot in the United States is uncovered — and surely if one succeeds — it may vindicate the Congressional decision to give the government more leeway to seize and question those who might know about the next attack.

If the attacks of 2001 recede as a devastating but unique tragedy, the decision to create a new legal framework may seem like overkill. “If there is never another terrorist attack and we never obtain actionable intelligence, this will look like a huge overreaction,” said Gary J. Bass, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton.

The last paragraph is what I'm inclined to think.

Why Catholics in the FBI?

Reading Mr. Wright's "Looming Tower" on the rise of al-Qaeda. It's good. One interesting side note is John O'Neill, the retired FBI agent who died on 9/11 who was quite a character. Wright mentions that Italians and Irish predominated in the ranks of the FBI. I wonder why and when? Was it from the beginning or was it after J. Edgar?

Perhaps it was a generational thing: the sons of policemen who went to college wanted to follow in the steps of their fathers and do law enforcement. Perhaps it was a prejudice thing in that early graduates of Catholic law schools (Fordham, Notre Dame?) found it easier to get admitted to the FBI than to existing WASP law firms?

Why Is a Fighter Pilot Like a Farmer?

This piece in the Times on how the fighter community beat Rummy to get more F-22's (at $350mill a crack) prompts me to compare pilots and farmers:

• Both are robed in the rags of former romantic glory: fighter pilots as the gallant solo aces of one on one combat; farmers as the gallant son of the soil fighting nature.
• Both have strong, bipartisan lobbies on the Hill
  
• Both get taxpayer money for programs of dubious value (a jet designed to outclass the Soviet jets; direct subsidy programs that do little for conservation or production adjustment)
• Both are wedded to past methods that are fast losing potency (I predict the manned fighter jet will be successfully challenged by pilotless drones; individual farmers are being replaced by contract farmers (as in poultry and hogs).
  

Republican Management--An Oxymoron?

Perhaps the most significant long term aspect of the uproar over the National Intelligence Estimate is buried at the end of the Karen DeYoung/Walter Pincus piece in the Post, after noting the NIE was transmitted to the Senate and House committees in April:

In the House, "there was a bit of a snafu with this particular document," said a spokesman for Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the intelligence committee chairman. "We had a massive computer failure on our classified side." The first that the committee knew of its existence was late last week, when "it was requested specifically by a member. That was when it was found and scanned into our system."

Whether the document was ignored or disappeared into cyberspace, however, it seemed to have made little impact on Capitol Hill at the time. No one in either chamber, on either side of the aisle, requested a briefing or any further information on its conclusions until now, the sources said.

If the Republican administration can't communicate with the Republican-led House, what hope is there for the CIA and FBI to communicate with each other? The failure must be both systemic and political.

• Systemic because even the USPS offers "return receipt requested" service. Any electronic transmission system should have the same sort of safeguard to ensure that recipients have received the transmission.
  
• Political because surely any new/updated NIE on the war on terror should have been discussed between the Congressional staffers and Negroponte's office, who should have been waiting for the report to arrive and raising flags when it didn't.

This is just an instance of the broader failure of Congress to carry out its oversight responsibilities. Can you imagine a similar lapse during a shooting war like WWII? (Whoops, we are in a shooting war.) But the Republicans can't take all the blame. If the incumbent Democrats were really out for blood they would have been on this earlier. Perhaps the answer is that incumbent House Democrats feel safe this year, thanks both to custom tailored districts and the political climate.

A final nod to a Republican--the NIE has revived the Rumsfeld question of a couple years ago--are we capturing and killing more terrorists than we are creating. It was the key question when he wrote it and it's key now.

Why I Drink

From a paper trying to prove that male drinkers make more money than nondrinkers, via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:

"Whether abstainers choose not to be as social or whether organizers of social occasions involving drinking exclude abstainers is unclear. Abstainers may prefer to interact with other abstainers or less social people. Alternately, abstainers might not be invited to social gatherings, work-related or otherwise, because drinkers consider abstainers dull."

The argument is that drinking benefits one's social network and the paper is one of two that show a correlation, at least for male drinking. A separate stereotype says females tend to be more social than men, perhaps meaning men rely more on crutches. For me at least that's true--I use(d) drink as a social lubricant, depressing my sense of social unease while participating in a social ritual. So drink is both an indicator of my social participation and a facilitator of it.

I wonder though whether this is as true today as it used to be. My impression is that drinking, at least liquor, is down. Certainly the bars at the Kennedy Center don't seem to be doing the business they used to. Maybe someone should do a study of coffee drinking?

As Close as I'll Come to Making the Front Page of NYTimes

That's today's article on "generator men" in Baghdad:

"In offices across Iraq, a ritual plays out every morning during the hottest months. Haggard employees drag themselves into the room, mumble a pleasantry or two and slump into their chairs, moaning about what a bad night’s sleep they had: the power went out, the backup generator was broken, the heat was unbearable, the baby would not stop crying, mosquitoes were everywhere.

Inevitably, these grievances, like hornets, will gather in a single cloud of fury and swoop down on one target: the generator man, probably the most vilified figure in Iraqi society after Saddam Hussein."

I was a "generator man" in the Army. We had power (a pun).

Who's a Farmer? Whitman College?

The Walla Walla Union-Bulletin reports on a violation of payment limitation rules by Whitman College, which owns 15 farms. CRP payments are limited to $50K, so Whitman leased out land on a 70/30 lease:

Under the arrangement, Tom Peterson Farms would claim 30 percent of the CRP contract, while Whitman would receive 70 percent. The result was annual payments of $20,854.20 and $48,659.80, respectively.

But in addition to those payments, Whitman Farm Committee representative Fred Kimball reportedly negotiated that Peterson pay Whitman a cash lease of about $10,000 for Peterson's part of the acreage.

The $10K off the books evaded the payment limitation regs.

Bolivar County

I visited Bolivar County, Mississippi a time or two as part of an aborted "Info Share" project (trying to get different agencies of USDA to work together). It's Delta country, cotton country, poor country. According to this story in the LA Times on the retiring county librarian it's also 40 percent illiterate.

Risk Management Deja Vu

A couple of different pieces on Risk Management (Federal Crop Insurance Corporation) that brought a smile to my face:

From an interview by Jim Wiesemeyer of the head of RMA:

Where is RMA at regarding reconciling reporting dates between FSA and Federal Crop Insurance?

Gould: "We've already made some progress on that front. That came from one of our informal listening sessions with groups of agents. I started taking a look at it and about half of the dates already were similar, which was a little different than I was aware of being a farmer from the Midwest. Also, on another 25 percent of the dates, either RMA or FSA were willing or able to change. That only leaves 25 percent, and that will take more time."

[Why the smile--this was a big issue 10 and more years ago. Progress takes time.]

A February article on Agweb discussed several items on crop insurance, including trying to get yields right and find abuses, including use of a spot check list (farmers who got crop insurance indemnities multiple years in a row). [Why the smile--one of my first jobs on the program side was to run a similar function for ASCS disaster payments, way back in 1979. Takes a while for ideas to migrate from one agency to another, or for the wheel to be reinvented.]

Cheating and Politics

Academia is acknowledged to be dominated by liberals, particularly the humanities and social sciences, less so the business and engineering fields. Comes now a study that reports:

The study of 5,300 graduate students in the United States and Canada found that 56 percent of graduate business students admitted to cheating in the past year, with many saying they cheated because they believed it was an accepted practice in business.

Following business students, 54 percent of graduate engineering students admitted to cheating, as did 50 percent of physical science students, 49 percent of medical and health-care students, 45 percent of law students, 43 percent of liberal arts students and 39 percent of social science and humanities students.

I hesitate to draw any inferences from the data, but you are welcome to.

Bush Gets One Right

"And, finally, we're going to have to treat people with dignity in this country. Ours is a nation of immigrants, and when Congress gets down to a comprehensive bill, I would just remind them, it's virtually impossible to try to find 11 million folks who have been here, working hard -- and, in some cases, raising families -- and kick them out. It's just not going to work. But granting automatic citizenship won't work either. To me, that would just provide an additional incentive for people to try to sneak in, and so therefore there is a rational way forward."

It's All the Learning Curve

"They gathered data on Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel from 2000 to 2005 and found that for terrorists, just like for regular workers, experience and education improve productivity. Suicide bombers who are older — in their late 20’s and early 30’s — and better educated are less likely to be caught on their missions and are more likely to kill large numbers of people at bigger, more difficult targets than younger and more poorly educated bombers."

Can You Spell "Turkey Farm"?

In bureaucratese, "turkey farm" refers to assignments (or units) to which the least able (or those affiliated to the opposite party) are relegated. I thought of it in connection with these interesting Iraq pieces:

From the Post, Anne Scott Tyson: "The conflict in the Anbar camp, while extreme, is not an isolated phenomenon in Iraq, U.S. officers say. It highlights two clashing approaches to the war: the heavy focus of many regular U.S. military units on sweeping combat operations; and the more fine-grained, patient work Special Forces teams put into building rapport with local leaders, security forces and the people -- work that experts consider vital in a counterinsurgency." [Tyson comes down on the Special forces side, but shows they reinforce the tribal status quo.]

Seth Moulton, an ex-Marine with 2 Iraq tours in the Times op-ed page says: "Green Berets in 12-man teams have already replaced entire battalions of conventional forces in some Iraqi cities."

"Yet despite the success of advisers, [emphasis added] the Army and Marine Corps still have a habit of sending their least capable troops to fill these positions." (Moulton praises advisers and disses the regular units.]

What I take away from these pieces is a renewed faith in the persistence of the military mind-set. Much as I've said about FBI agents, the military is macho, gung-ho. But it's also political, so it doesn't want flack from politicos. Consequently, most of the best and brightest head off to combat units, which is prerequisite to higher command. That means they look down on advisers, giving them less support. It also means they huddle in base camps, well protected against insurgents, but possibly less effective in winning the war. (I say "possibly" because I'm not convinced anyone really knows much about insurgencies.

Humans in Crisis

Slate runs this piece:

In his New York Times column yesterday (TimesSelect subscription required), Frank Rich discussed a photograph taken by Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker on Sept. 11, 2001, showing a group of young people chatting on the Brooklyn waterfront, apparently indifferent to the scene of destruction across the river. Slate has reproduced the photograph below, which the Times did not print with the column.

Shankar Vedantam in the Post discusses research on how people react in crisis:

"Human beings in New York, Sri Lanka and Rhode Island all do the same thing in such situations. They turn to each other. They talk. They hang around, trying to arrive at a shared understanding of what is happening."

His discussion is in terms of how we can be slow to react to alarms--we have to understand whether this is a fire drill or a real fire, etc. etc.

I'd suggest Vedantam's article explains the photo--the people are looking at each other as the towers burn in the background, but they're trying to understand, not discussing last night's bar scene.

Kevin Drum, Blair, and Gore

Kevin Drum today says that Blair's support for the war helped persuade him, as it did me. And he argues that, particularly in foreign policy, that sort of thinking is rational. I agree. Then he posts Gore's speech 5 months after 9/11. Which is interesting.

9/11

It's obligatory to write something on 9/11.

Cats and Dogs

I'm struck by the personality differences between cats and dogs. Imagine a puppy dog who energetically runs around, exploring every nook and cranny, rushing back to you with some interesting stick, running off to search out more. Then imagine a cat, sitting by your side, content to let the world come to her, sure that there's nothing in the world worthy of any exertion, snootily amused at the energy of the dog. Let dog come too near cat, and whap, blood runs from nose.

Of course, cats can be curious and dogs somnolent, but today I prefer my image.

Slow Blogging Til the Weekend

After today, I'll be away until the weekend.

The Rat Race and Productivity Measurement

From today's Post by Shankar Vedantam:

"For years, economists have taught their students a simple maxim: As employers hunt for workers, they want to get the best talent at the lowest price.

According to this theory, whether employees want to work long hours or short hours, employers have an incentive to accommodate them, because asking people to do something they don't want to do raises the price of labor -- workers demand more compensation.

On this Labor Day, consider a paradox: Millions of Americans say they feel overworked and stressed out. Many say they want to work fewer hours and find a better balance between responsibilities at home and work. Given that people have been saying this for quite a while, employers should have figured out by now that they can save money by being more flexible in workplace arrangements."

The piece goes on to cite some research showing that the output of law associates can't be measured, so they get rated based on hours worked. Which leads to the rate race as described by many lawyer-writers. I'm struck me two ways:

• First, I always like cases proving economists wrong.
• Second, Jame Q. Wilson says one of the reasons for bureaucracy is that output can't be measured (if it could, it could be quantified and monetized and marketized and privatized). So it's nice to see private enterprises sharing the characteristic.
  

More Christian than American?

I was catching up with my reading of the Cliopatria blog and found a discussion of Pew's research on the feelings of European Muslims, including this quote:

"French Muslims may feel more French than British Muslims feel British, but the question of how minorities feel about their citizenship and nationality has, in the past, produced highly deceptive results. Those who claim to be true French may have more to say about how integrated French Muslims really are."

I started to wonder. Suppose Pew asked Americans if they considered themselves more Christian or more American, more Jewish or more American, etc.? From my reading, and understanding of my preacher forebears, anyone devoutly religious would have to say: "I'm more Christian than American"; or whatever religion. Certainly anyone who believes in the hereafter would have to. Wouldn't they?

Accelerated Counter-Cyclical Payments

Whoops, I screwed up. My previous post on this issue tacitly assumed that USDA was accelerating the 2006 counter-cyclical payments for cotton, sorghum, and peanuts. In fact, according to a notice issued today and available here, it's the 2005 payments. Makes a bit more sense--roughly speaking this is the final third of the payments. While the official average price data isn't available yet, the data is clear and USDA is safe to issue the payments.

Incidently, this is a case where the Bush administration effectively moves expenditures forward from one fiscal year (2007) to the previous one (2006). There was discussion on the Washington Monthly site over HHS shifting money from FY 2006 to FY 2007 to decrease the size of the deficit before Kevin Drum here concluded that Congress mandated the shift in the Deficit Reduction Act. Ironically, I'm too lazy to check this rainy afternoon but I believe this provision in the Deficit Reduction Act had the effect of moving CCC payments back from FY 2006 to FY2007. So, Johanns has undone the effect of Congress acts:

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, here are 700 million dollars and three shells. Watch very carefully, very very carefully and tell me which shell hides the money--are the millions of dollars here or are they there?

Dependency Ratios Revisited

From Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution:

"Here is a basic argument and model that the youth dependency ratio can matter.

I can see three possible mechanisms. 1) Fewer babies mean that more women work. 2) Fewer babies mean that each baby gets more parental investment; in the long run those people are smarter. 3) Fewer babies raises the savings rate."

He goes on to argue that none of them explain Ireland, at least not very much. I'm still musing over the way economists think, compared to me. But today the Times had an interesting article on manufacturing in India, including the suggestion that manufacturers, because they can look ahead and see China will soon have a high dependency ratio while India will have a low one, are deciding to invest in manufacturing plants in India.

USDA Does It Again (Updated)

As reported on AgWeb - Your Spot for Futures Trading, Commodities Info, Ag News, Successful Farming Tips & More, and many more media outlets serving agriculture:

"Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns today announced during a visit to South Dakota $780 million in assistance to help farmers and ranchers manage drought and weather related production challenges. "

Sounds good, doesn't it? But the reality is less impressive, particularly in South Dakota. Upland cotton, peanuts, and grain sorghum aren't really big crops in that state, and the bulk of the $780 mill is in accelerated counter-cyclical payments for those crops. There's no explanation of why the crops were selected, but perhaps because the economists were reasonably comfortable that the payments would be earned. (The computation of the payment rate typically requires collecting national weighted average market prices for a year. So when I worked cotton payments weren't made until February of the next year.) [Updated note: According to this,
the 2002 Act changed the schedule, partial payments are made in October, then February, then after the end of the marketing year. There's nothing I've seen to specify whether USDA is just moving the October payment up by a month or more.] If I'm right, there's no intrinsic relationship between the drought and the payments, except the fact this is a year divisible by 2.

According to this site, the severest drought is in Wyoming, western South Dakota and western Nebraska, which are wheat areas, and in Texas and Oklahoma which do grow sorghum and cotton. It would be interesting to know if there was any consideration of advancing the payments just to producers in the disaster-affected counties. It would be do-able, if legal.

It's also interesting to note that Johanns has just cost the taxpayers X million dollars. Moving up the payments means the Treasury Department has to borrow the money earlier than it would have, and 5 percent interest on $700 mill starts to add up. (Relax, it's not "real money" according to Senator Dirksen's definition.)

Suicide as Signaling Device

Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution refers to this old Slate story:

Attempting suicide can be a rational choice, but only if there is a high likelihood it will cause the attempter's life to significantly improve.Marcotte couldn't test the relative "life improvement" of successful suicides—since they were, of course, dead—but he could study those who had failed at suicide to determine if their lives improved after the attempt. The results are surprising. Marcotte's study found that after people attempt suicide and fail, their incomes increase by an average of 20.6 percent compared to peers who seriously contemplate suicide but never make an attempt. In fact, the more serious the attempt, the larger the boost—"hard-suicide" attempts, in which luck is the only reason the attempts fail, are associated with a 36.3 percent increase in income. (The presence of nonattempters as a control group suggests the suicide effort is the root cause of the boost.)

A commenter links to this piece on a possible evolutionary link for depression. See Hagen

It seems to me possible that there's a correlation to the evolutionary explanation for such things as peacock tails and conspicuous displays, known I think as "handicapping". The idea is that animals do things that make no apparent sense except to send the signal that they are fit. The bigger the horns, the more striking the tail, the higher the jump, the more dangerous the exploit--each one is a social signal showing more evolutionary fitness.

Depression and suicide attempts might work similarly--the more you invest in showing your unhappiness, the more convincing the signal, and the greater the chance for reaction.

Why Move to DC?

A commenter on my housing post asked:

Does the higher cost of housing in WDC discourage qualified civil servants from taking a transfer to WDC? Why transfer to WDC, fight traffic and parking spaces, while you could receive a comparable income from staying in fly over country. Both jobs provide the ability to do the people's work!

Good question for which I've some answers (using "DC" loosely to mean the general area): Why transfer to DC--

1. Because you're an arrogant SOB who thinks you can compete in the biggest frog pond. Why did Alex Rodriguez move from Texas to the Yankees? Not only can you rise to the top in an agency, but you can switch agencies (though not the way Jimmy Carter envisioned when he pushed the Senior Executive Service).
   
2. Because you can change the whole country from a post in DC. (Early in my first job I instructed the whole bureaucracy to change the way they referred to county offices--instead of "ASCS county offices" it was to be "county ASCS offices". Now that is power!!)
3. Because you can look the bastards who are screwing you straight in the eye, rather than having to imagine what they look like.
4. Because DC really is a great place to live, simply for the opportunities. Opportunities for the single person to indulge in culture, opportunities for children to get into something they love (whether ballet, swimming, science, whatever).
   
5. Because in DC you have the wind behind you, rather than blowing in your face. (To see what I mean, read the book, "Denison, Iowa," to get a sense of what it's like to live where the wind is against you.)
6. Because you can work the system--sacrifice now to get a house, then retire to a low cost region where your dollars buy much more. (I remember a guy from SCS who was transferred to Ft. Collins in 1991. He was having big problems with the move, simply because there wasn't a mansion in Ft. Collins big enough to absorb the proceeds from his DC house. Ft. Collins is highly rated for livability.)
7. Because you're a romantic fool from the sticks who loves to see the Washington Monument every work day and to rub elbows with people from all over the world.
8. Because it's an endless comedy show, watching the politicians come and go, posture and preen, but rarely come clean.
9. Because no situation is perfect and people can adapt to most anything, even a 2 hour commute one-way. Like Gilbert's book, Stumbling on Happiness, says, it's hard to estimate the future because you forget the dailyness of life.
   
10. It feels so good when you leave.
    

Housing Crisis and SRO's

Michael Grunwald had an article on the incredible cost of housing in the DC area yesterday. Today he hosted a discussion on it. He talked about government housing aid, zoning restrictions, and similar subjects. Some comments:

• In the late 60's I was renting an efficiency in downtown DC--somewhere around $110 a month. I started off working for the government at $5K, so I was spending maybe 25 percent of my salary for housing. I ended buying in Reston for $55K at about the peak of the housing boom in the 70's. These may be wrong, but my impression is that starting salary for the Feds is around $30-35K (6 times mine), my townhouse is about 6 times more valuable, and rental rates may be a bit higher than 6 times $110.
• I remember Reston was originally planned (in '64 or '65)to have lots of multifamily housing, but they ended up changing to have more single family houses and fewer townhouses, condos and apartments. Responding to the market they said.
• The free market creates its own solution to housing problems--in some areas, including mine, immigrants are buying houses based on having multiple people rooming there. It may or may not be legal, but it works. It also represents another advantage of immigrants over natives in the competition for opportunity. Immigrant males are more willing to live crowded than are natives.
• One positive sign of the change is there's less competition for parking spaces. :-) The new immigrants don't have money for cars; they ride bikes or buses or carpool.

Dependency Ratios for Countries and Corporations

The always interesting Malcolm Gladwell has a new article in The New Yorker: Fact, concerning dependency ratios (the ratio of workers to dependent children, aged, and disabled). A quote:

"But, as the Harvard economists David Bloom and David Canning suggest in their study of the “Celtic Tiger,” of greater importance may have been a singular demographic fact. In 1979, restrictions on contraception that had been in place since Ireland’s founding were lifted, and the birth rate began to fall. In 1970, the average Irishwoman had 3.9 children. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, that number was less than two. As a result, when the Irish children born in the nineteen-sixties hit the workforce, there weren’t a lot of children in the generation just behind them."

Gladwell argues that dependency ratios explain why Bethlehem Steel went bankrupt, why GM and Ford are headed there and why Ireland is booming. It further explains [much of] the differential between development rates in Asia, where birth rates in China and elsewhere have declined sharply, and those in Africa, where rates are still high.

I found it, as is often the case with Gladwell, a bit stretched but provocative. He rides the idea too far, particularly when he ignores any discussion of why differences in birth rates, as between China and the Congo say. Was it the case that the communist state of China provided cradle to grave security, hence was able to enforce its one-baby policy while the Congo essentially has a kleptocratic state providing no security and therefore the greatest of encouragements to have many children? But how about Taiwan or South Korea?

But to push the idea farther--how about classes--should we take more seriously than we do the differences in birth rates between classes in the U.S.?

Threats to Privacy

Via George Buddy, see this for the ACLU take on future pizza ordering. As a long-time ACLU member (though I hasten to add I don't carry the card) I'm going to take this much too seriously and quibble with it.

• I doubt there'll be a national ID number. Surely we'll have the sense to realize that we already have world identifiers (at least everyone with an e-mail account does).
• No one would verify the information--by then the information would be accurate enough that verification wouldn't be cost-effective in this scenario. (I realize the verification is a means to emphasize how much info the pizza parlor has access to.)
• There's no economic rationale for the parlor to link to some of the records shown; the customer is only going to get aggravated by it and a business wants to please its customer. Cui bono? That's always a good question, particularly when there's a cost to doing something. 10 years from now the cost of transfering data will be negligible, but there's still a major cost in establishing means to move data between bureaucracies (like an insurance company and a pizza parlor).

All of which is not to say that we shouldn't worry. It is rational to worry about things that don't make sense, like the Bush administration. Generally I think people like the ACLU and EPIC worry about the wrong things. I was particularly impressed by David Brin's book, Transparent Society, a few years back. To oversimplify, I'd allow public bureaucracies to maintain lots of data, provided they included their own data in the database and made it generally available as well as giving people access to their own data with a detailed audit trail.

But that's another day.