The African ag problem (I)...  

I've been trying to assemble my thoughts and conclusions from my Africa trip and I think there is one consistent theme emerging: we still have not found a truly workable solution to improve agriculture there as well as advance the lives of the overwhelmingly rural poor.

First of all, food aid is a flat out bad idea. I cannot understand how farmers of all people cannot appreciate what surplus grain being dumped onto local markets would do to local farmers. By dampening price rises, consumers may briefly benefit, but the economic incentives to produce more are depressed.

Scandalous barely covers it. Since America began donating surplus wheat, corn meal, vegetable oil and other farm commodities to the world’s hungry six decades ago, the programme has been captured by an “iron triangle” of farm interests, shippers and voluntary organisations, with plenty of help from Congress. Rules state that most food aid must be bought from American farmers and processed in America. At least half must then be carried on American-flag ships. With competition severely curbed, ocean shipping eats up 16% of the budget for the largest food-aid programme, Food for Peace.
In a related scandal called “monetisation”, involving non-emergency aid (which represents about 30% of Food for Peace), charities and non-governmental outfits receive American produce, sell it on local markets abroad and then use the proceeds for good works. Compared to directly funding projects, “inherently inefficient” monetisation on average wastes 25% of the money sent, according to the Government Accountability Office. And the food supplied often floods fragile markets, hurting local farmers. [More]

Our food aid program is a pretty blatant form of export subsidy intended to help American farmers under the guise of humanitarian concern. If the government did not pay for the grain farmers wouldn't be donating it, that's for sure. Even the modest reforms urged almost unanimously by economists have hit strong political headwinds in Congress.

This is the first thing that we know doesn't work, and while I don't blame the original efforts years ago, or the times when food is needed NOW! it is time to stop ignoring the harmful and wasteful aspects of such programs.

This keeps popping up...  

No wonder the food industry is a tough market - consumers are a restless bunch. One particular idea that keeps popping up in new forms is the anti-carb concept. Three anecdotes:

1. A former NCGA president is dropping white carbs from his diet.  When I raised my eyebrows he ascribed it lamely to his wife, but did say he felt better and had lost weight. The better mental attitude was the claim that struck me.
2. At dinner the other night in a slightly too-trendy-for-me restaurant in the Chicago suburbs, I had to ask what the abbreviation "gf" stood for. (Gluten-free) The waiter explained it wasn't that people were gluten-sensitive, but rather a range of reasons why they wanted to avoid it.
3. Then there was this hidden note in an article about the most-highlighted passages in Kindle books. [For those who don't use a Kindle, it shows you how many people have highlighted a given passage, and of course, Amazon keeps track of such things. I have always been mystified by most of the selections]:

The bleakness of the worldview suggested by those passages is striking. It’s no surprise then, to find self-help passages appearing alongside them: They help us cope with our inherently flawed human selves. Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People appears several times—“It’s not what happens to us, but our response to what happens to us that hurts us”—as does Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends and Influence People. Quotes about the healing power of God also make a strong showing, as do musings on the nature of marriage, and work, and leadership, and white carbohydrates. [More] [My emphasis]

Really? Carbs are one of the existential questions of our day? The fact this curious aversion has been around now since the Adkins diet suggests it may have enough penetration and longevity to seriously affect the American diet. Jan has decreased our potato/bread/rice intake surreptitiously enough I haven't really noticed anything except a deeper apprecation for French fries at the occasional meal out.

Like other seemingly hopeless trends in the US, perhaps a series of relatively small adjustments, rather than a massive campaign can actually affect a curve bending change. The last thing anyone expects is for people to solve the obesity problem on their own, but it's not impossible, I guess.

Downgrading the gun debate...  

As fast as folks seem to be buying weaponry, they may be becoming lame. In an outcome I certainly didn't imagine, the macho-ness of personal firepower could become quaint, like being able to chop a tree with an ax or cultivate corn.

TrackingPoint, a startup tech company in Austin, Tex., has just started selling the most advanced long-distance rifle available on the civilian market. The weapon incorporates laser and computer technology, as well as a three-dimensional color graphics display, to allow even a novice shooter to hit moving targets at 500 yards (five football fields) or farther. Its Wi-Fi transmitter permits the user to stream live video and audio to an iPad (AAPL) and post impressive kill shots on Facebook (FB) or YouTube (GOOG).
“This is a weapon that will get the Call of Duty generation into the real shooting sports,” says TrackingPoint’s chief executive, Jason Schauble, a 38-year-old decorated special-ops officer who formerly served in the Marines. A genial, smooth-talking ballistics pro who retired from the military after being seriously wounded in Iraq, he is making the rounds in New York and elsewhere to promote TrackingPoint. Schauble readily acknowledges that to make the transition from pretend shooter games to the real-life range or hunting grounds will require serious money. TrackingPoint’s customized rifles sell for $22,000 to $27,000 apiece, depending on just how tricked-out consumers want their weapons.
The gun part of the TrackingPoint system resembles a modern military-style bolt-action rifle. The science-fiction part looks like a three-headed long-range scope. Shooter tracks targets on the graphics display. By pushing a small button near the trigger, they lock a red laser dot on their quarry—a deer or bear, for example. The red laser tag remains on the target, even if it moves. Shooters then align the red dot with a blue cross-hair, or reticle, which also appears on the screen. They depress the trigger. The gun “decides” exactly when to fire. That happens only when the cross-hair aligns perfectly with the red dot, taking into account the distance, barometric pressure, temperature, the curvature of the earth, and other variables. [More]

So as I understand it, you find the target in the scope, pull the trigger, and wave the gun until it passes the optimal firing point. Kinda takes the sportsmanship out of hunting, I would say.  It reminds me of straight rows nowadays - just not a big deal or the sign of ag prowess it used to symbolize.

Or worse still, why bother to pick up the firearm at all?

The Super aEgis 2 is an automated gun tower that can find and lock on to a human-sized target in pitch darkness at a distance of up to 1.36 miles (2.2 kilometers). It uses a 35x zoom CCD camera with 'enhancement feature' for bad weather, in conjunction with a dual FOV, autofocus Infra-Red sensor, to pick out targets.
Then it brings the pain, either with a standard 12.7mm caliber machine-gun, a 40mm automatic grenade launcher upgrade, or whatever other weapons system you want to bolt on to it, including surface-to-air missiles. A laser range finder helps to calibrate aim, and a gyroscopic stabilizer unit helps correct both the video system's aim and the direction of the guns after recoil pushes them off-target. [More]

Knowing the South Koreans, there will be  a home model available someday, and then we'll see an interesting Supreme Court case. For that matter, I wonder what the NRA will do about such advanced weapons. While they seem to be OK with laser weapons, taking the human out of the firing decisions doesn't strike me as the best membership program ever conceived.

Like so many seemingly intractable public debates, maybe this one will simply fade into irrelevance as technology advances beyond what we think are the defining parameters.  After all, think of all those knights who were good at riding down peasant while wearing tons of armor and wielding a whacking sword. Did we think guns were the last word on killing?

Junkbox, Episode MMXIII☈...  

Almost can get in the field. Almost.

• SNAP: the best economic stabilizer we have
• College: not for the poor, despite appearances of aid
• One half-second of high frequency trading of one stock
• China channels Monty Python
• America keeps adding to the standard menu, too
• Skin in the game = less skin treatment
• Economists fantasize about what a farm bill should be about. It won't.

An amazing year for dandelions, though.

Live long...  

Made my day.  Especially since we won't be planting soon.



[More]

Technology answers...  

One of my greatest reasons for optimism about the future is the flood of new adaptations of novel technologies to surprising problems.



I don't think we can begin to envision the scope and ingenuity of such ideas, nor evaluate their impact.  Which makes any long term prediction or analysis suspect.

SNAP in your backyard...  

A very cool interactive graphic for discovering how SNAP affects those around you.

Check 

Check it out here. I doubt the reason it has grown so much in Edgar County is because they are Obama supporters. In fact, check out some of the reddest counties in WV or IN for comparison.

SNAP use is up because people are unemployed or don't make much money.

Time to stop sniggering?...  

Maybe the feral pig problem isn't just redneck reality show fodder. Maybe it's something we should take a little more seriously.

In southern states like Texas, backyard encounters with feral swine have become routine. The pigs — ill-tempered eating machines weighing 200 pounds or more — roam city streets, collide with cars, root up cemeteries and provide plot lines for reality TV shows like “Hog Hunters.”

But the pig wars are moving north. In Michigan, New Hampshire, New York, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania — states where not long ago the only pigs were of the “Charlotte’s Web” variety — state officials are scrambling to deal with an invasion of roaming behemoths that rototill fields, dig up lawns, decimate wetlands, kill livestock, spread diseases like pseudo-rabies and, occasionally, attack humans.

In 1990, fewer than two million wild pigs inhabited 20 states, according to John J. Mayer, the manager of the environmental science group at the Savannah River National Laboratory in Aiken, S.C., who tracked the state populations. That number has now risen to six million, with sightings in 47 states and established populations in 38 — “a national explosion of pigs,” as Dr. Mayer put it.

The swine are thought to have spread largely after escaping from private shooting preserves and during illegal transport by hunters across state lines. Experts on invasive species estimate that they are responsible for more than $1.5 billion in annual agricultural damage alone, amounting in 2007 to $300 per pig. The Agriculture Department is so concerned that it has requested an additional $20 million in 2014 for its Wildlife Services program to address the issue.

There is wide agreement that the pigs are undesirable — like the Asian carp that is threatening to invade the Great Lakes, but far bigger, meaner and mounted on four legs. But efforts to eradicate or at least contain them have been hampered by the lack of a national policy to deal with invasive species as a whole, the slowness of states to recognize the problem and the bickering between agencies about who is responsible for dealing with them.

“As a nation, we have not thought through this invasive species problem, and we just have disaster after disaster after disaster,” said Patrick Rusz, the director of wildlife services at the Michigan Wildlife Conservancy. Dr. Rusz, who travels around the state educating farmers about the menace posed by the wild pigs and encouraging them to set traps on their land, is so avid a hog-hater that in the early stages of Michigan’s invasion, he went to bars to eavesdrop on hunters who might have spotted the porcine invaders. [More]

What woke me up was mentioning Michigan - not some southern swamp. If they are breeding up there, it wouldn't take much for Illinois to enjoy this pest.

The wild pigs’ destructive feeding behavior poses a particular threat to sensitive wildlife species and their habitats. According to studies by researchers at Texas A&M University, wetlands and riparian areas suffer the most damage from wild pigs. In some areas, nearly 50 percent of the habitat is significantly degraded by the hogs’ rooting and wallowing. Additionally, these wet areas also are experiencing increased bacterial contamination in the form of E. coli and fecal coliform from the ever-present pigs.
“Hogs are deadly to anything that nests on the ground,” stated West.  “One of the best examples is the depredation of sea turtle eggs on Ossabaw Island.” Before the Georgia Department of Natural Resources (GDNR) began an intensive wild pig removal program on Ossabaw, a barrier island south of Savannah, sea turtle nests on the islands’ sandy beaches suffered greater than 30 percent mortality. Today, as a result of the GDNR removing nearly 3,000 hogs from the island annually, those nests experience less than 5 percent mortality.
Interestingly, researchers also documented a significant increase in the body weight of Ossabaw’s white-tailed deer following wild pig reduction efforts. This fact, along with other research conducted in southeastern hardwood forests, demonstrates that wild pigs present a formidable source of competition for dozens of native wildlife and plant species. Largely due to the pigs’ habit of bulldozing seedlings and rooting for mast crops, such as acorns, these forested areas are experiencing dramatic change.  Hardwood regeneration has nearly halted and many wildlife species are outcompeted for critical resources.
Unfortunately, the wild pig’s impact on native mammals is not restricted to increased competition or habitat destruction. Hogs harbor numerous diseases as well as internal and external parasites that are transmissible to wildlife, livestock and even humans. Many of these diseases, such as brucellosis, tuberculosis and the pseudorabies virus have been the target of national disease-eradication programs for livestock. As wild pig numbers continue to increase and spread to new areas, biologists are concerned that their efforts to eradicate or reduce the prevalence of these diseases in wild and domestic animals will be in vain. In addition, researchers at the USDA National Wildlife Disease Center note the possibly insurmountable challenge of controlling an “accidental or intentional outbreak of a foreign animal disease, such as foot and mouth, rinderpest, African swine fever or classical swine fever” if those diseases were ever to find their way into the wild pig population. [More]

I suppose this is one of those problems too outlandish to consider soberly until your poodle gets eaten by one. But it seems to me climate change will favor their spread. Or maybe this species doesn't need any help.

Junkbox, Episode MMXIII⚗..  

We just might sneak some grains into the ground Thursday.

• Would you farm for Sauron?
• The non-End of Oil
• This week's equality essay (actually quite good)
• Cornstarch and your kitchen sink.
• How 'bout that weather, huh?
• North Dakota is full of it

 I'm converting some life insurance and discovered I don't have to pay any more premiums after age 121. Sweet!

It just won't die...  

The Corporate Farming Myth seems indestructible by hard data or even reason.  I was reading about how ag singles groups are shrinking and came across this paragraph:

Single farmers face an especially difficult task finding others like them. In recent years, many farm families have sold out to corporations and moved away; the rural population has been gravitating to the cities, leaving small towns to wither, cafes to close, social organizations to decline. Meeting people is harder than ever. [More][My emphasis]

Somewhere along the line the concept of large farms merged with corporate. Simply put, big must mean non-family. But this is exactly what isn't happening.

Most U.S. farms—98 percent in 2007—are family operations, and even the largest farms are predominantly family run. Large-scale family farms and nonfamily farms account for 12 percent of U.S farms but 84 percent of the value of production. In contrast, small family farms make up most of the U.S. farm count but produce a modest share of farm output. Small farms are less profitable than large-scale farms, on average, and their operator households tend to rely on off-farm income for their livelihood. Generally speaking, farm operator households cannot be characterized as low-income when both farm and off-farm income are considered. Nevertheless, limited-resource farms still exist and account for 3 to 12 percent of family farms, depending on how “limited-resource” is defined.[More]

I think what has happened is farms have been conflated with what most of us would call agribusiness. An amazing number of people I have met think ADM and Monsanto run and even own farms. They also assume large operations have deep operational ties with those links in our chain. 

How did this occur? One contributing factor, I think has been our profession's reluctance to be seen as anything other than an agrarian, diversified and nostalgic businesses. We were perhaps rightly afraid of losing public sympathy by showing enormous operations without any puppies or duckies and children bottle feeding calves.

That has changed somewhat, but we are still pretty shy about embracing the large operation as our stereotype. And we are horrified at the idea Joe Taxpayer might discover how freakin' much money we have been making.

This may prove a tactical mistake, as the above article suggest. The connection between "big" and "corporate" is now pretty well fixed in the public mind and being exploited by small farm proponents from local food to organic. The sympathy ploy may have lost its effectiveness.

Pigford stuff hits the fan...  

Boy, are we going to be hearing about this for a long time. A simmering bureaucratic fiasco is about to have its day in the media sun, I think. 

In the winter of 2010, after a decade of defending the government against bias claims by Hispanic and female farmers, Justice Department lawyers seemed to have victory within their grasp.

Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.

But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

The deal, several current and former government officials said, was fashioned in White House meetings despite the vehement objections — until now undisclosed — of career lawyers and agency officials who had argued that there was no credible evidence of widespread discrimination. What is more, some protested, the template for the deal — the $50,000 payouts to black farmers — had proved a magnet for fraud.

“I think a lot of people were disappointed,” said J. Michael Kelly, who retired last year as the Agriculture Department’s associate general counsel. “You can’t spend a lot of years trying to defend those cases honestly, then have the tables turned on you and not question the wisdom of settling them in a broad sweep.”

The compensation effort sprang from a desire to redress what the government and a federal judge agreed was a painful legacy of bias against African-Americans by the Agriculture Department. But an examination by The New York Times shows that it became a runaway train, driven by racial politics, pressure from influential members of Congress and law firms that stand to gain more than $130 million in fees. In the past five years, it has grown to encompass a second group of African-Americans as well as Hispanic, female and Native American farmers. In all, more than 90,000 people have filed claims. The total cost could top $4.4 billion. [More of a must read investigatory story]

There is simply nothing good in this scandal - even if you are a bitter opponent of the president or USDA or minority action efforts. The scope, political malfeasance, judicial system failure, and pandemic bad judgement will stoke outrage and justify already hardened opinions about all involved.

While credit must be given to the right-wing media for attacking this program earlier, there is one curious thing about their complaint: lack of any followup effort to prove their assertions of wrongdoing.

The article contains a lot of surprising revelations, but the article itself is a sort of surprise in that it appeared in the New York Times and not Fox News or the National Review or any of the conservative media outlets that are already champing at the bit to roast liberals who had supported Pigford for their malfeasance. The right wing has been whining about Pigford for years. But rather than do the legwork to expose the true problems underlying the program, Breitbart and his ilk were content to put out misleadingly edited videos of Shirley Sherrod to try and smear the USDA as being a haven for "reverse" racism.

Mother Jones' Kevin Drum has a good and simple lesson on why Pigford got out of hand: "You can either set a high bar for evidence of discrimination, knowing that it will unfairly deny compensation to lots of people who were treated wrongly. Or you can set a low bar, knowing that this will unfairly give money to lots of people who don't deserve it."

But that explanation won't change the fact that many will look at Pigford as further evidence that blacks are lazy takers and that federal programs intending to right America's historical and racist wrongs are always wasteful. In other words, it's going to give fuel to racists who will in turn go on discriminating against blacks and Latinos, who will in turn push for institutions to help them get ahead in a racist country. Lather, rinse, repeat. [More]

So why do I think the almost-certain celebration of vindication over this truly monumental scandal could be problematic for conservatives? I remember video loops of Jeremiah Wright and his truly awful blend of activism and religion. I think the replays of his inflammatory language soon convinced many like me the man was a fringe figure and embarrassed the overwhelming majority of minority members. Just like modern redneck reality shows, having these sterotypes rubbed in your face does not encourage rapprochement with political opponents who are trumpeting them.  I just can't imagine the right not running this non-stop for as long as possible. Efforts by Republicans to make inroads to minorities won't be helped, regardless of the justification.

For the administration it is a major failure and deserved embarrassment. For Vilsack, it should cost him his job. For the USDA, another massive piece of hard evidence of bureaucratic incompetence and political subservience. This isn't going to boost generous farm bill prospects, either, IMHO as a result of damning-by-proximity. For direct-to-farmer loan programs, this could be the death knell. (Okay, I think the last two actually pluses) 

For Republicans who supported actions to settle/fund the case years ago just to get it over, a one-note Tea Party primary opponent may suddenly appear, if they don't have one already. For trial lawyers, another stereotype is reinforced, and litigation reform gains a little steam, especially for class action suits. For a justice system as a whole, more public trust is shamefully squandered by corrupt motives and actions.

And even for claimants who rightfully, or more likely, wrongfully receive a windfall, sad experience shows few will handle it well. In the process, they may have reset racial antagonism to a point that should have distant history.

In fact, I don't see any real winners here, except the economy a teensy bit. The vast majority of the awards will be spent quickly - a micro-stimulus, if you will. Much of the legal fee, of course, will likely head to Grand Cayman. 

And perhaps, after reflection across the media spectrum,  the oft-despised NYT will begin to remind people what good investigatory journalism looks like. 

 

SA farmers still struggling...  

One of my worries from my Africa trip was for the future of South African agriculture. Given the abundance of very cheap labor and even more abundant unemployment of the unskilled, most of their farms have been built around employing large numbers as opposed to capital intensive big machinery. Much of their sector is necessarily high-labor products as well - tobacco, fruits, vegetables, grapes, etc.

But I just now found out the farm labor problem threatening the SA ag future is at least partly a political power play.

The agricultural trade association - AgriSA - argues the strike was politically-driven and the farming sector is suffering because of a political battle between the ruling ANC and the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance.

The Western Cape region is the only province in South Africa ruled by the DA.

Carl Opperman, AgriSA’s Western Cape chairman, says the strikes were pushed there by ANC officials to destabilize the DA.

Opperman argues the national wage increase is not a solution to empower farm workers or reduce poverty. Rather, he says, the government should focus on helping the farms to be more productive by protecting them against international competition.

"The South African farmer is the only framer basically in the world that has a 100 percent free market economy," he said. "We don't get any support from our government. We have got to fight our way in a world market and in our own country. We will need support, we don't need financial support, we need policy support. We need protectionism, we can justify it, not like at the moment where it is a free fall.”

The commercial farmers’ trade union, TAU SA, says that more than 1,500 workers were laid-off in the weeks following the wage increase, in Limpopo Province alone. Whereas in the Western Cape Province, many farmers say they will not be able to hire casual farmer workers again for the winter harvest season just weeks away. [More]

It is almost refreshing to hear a clear, blatant call for protectionism instead of some euphemistic language that promotes trade barriers without seeming to. Due to the odd, pervasive spin of SA government information and data, it isn't east to pinpoint their ag imports, but appears two contentious commodities are chicken from Brazil and olive oil from the EU.  

The need for a second viable political party is IMHO absolute. The level of corruption and incompetence of the ANC can only be improved by a presence of the real possibility of loss of power by a split black African vote. 

The continued decline of SA agriculture would cripple efforts to anchor the rise of sub-Saharan economies. But the Catch-22 here is one of the most logical solutions for individual farmers is to switch to capital-intensive (machinery) methods and lose their dependence on increasingly unreliable labor. This is really bad news for nation with far too few jobs already.

Another arrow problem...  

Just as the R & R uproar in the economics community has reminded us correlation is not cause and sometimes it's really hard to see which way the causal arrow points, another landmark study receives a startling new interpretation.

From the introduction to a refreshingly contrarian article by Stephanie Stern, a law professor at Chicago-Kent College of Law:

In 2007, accompanied by a firestorm of publicity, Robert Putnam announced that residential racial diversity causes declines in social capital. Social capital is a prominent theory, popularized by Putnam, of the aggregate value of citizen participation in associations and organizations, social ties and networks, civic engagement, trust, and norms of reciprocity. In a study of forty-one U.S. communities, Putnam found that people living in racially diverse communities were less likely to work on a community project or volunteer, less likely to expect others to cooperate to solve collective problems, reported lower trust in others, had fewer close friendship ties, expressed less confidence in local government, and registered to vote lessfrequently. Most provocatively, Putnam found a strong “hunker[ing] down” effect, contrary to both the constrict and contact hypotheses of integration, where racial diversity caused residents of diverse communities to withdraw from social and civic life and report lower trust in members of other races and their own race. Unsurprisingly (to all but Robert Putnam it seems), his research provoked a torrent of political commentary and academic response. Conservative commentators argued that the findings called into question the value of racial mixing, headlines trumpeted the conclusion that “greater diversity equals more misery,” and Putnam’s research featured in a recent amicus brief as evidence against the value of affirmative action in college admissions. Sociologists and economists reanalyzed Putnam’s data and conducted their own empirical studies to assess his findings (these studies indicate that the diversity decrement is statistically significant, but small). Legal scholars accepted, albeit unhappily, the conclusion that racial diversity diminishes local social capital.

Curiously, in the handwringing about the harms to social capital and the ensuing debate, no one questioned whether the problem was social capital. From a property scholar’s perspective, one plausible interpretation of the correlation between high social capital and low diversity is that high social capital reduces the costs of excluding minorities (i.e., the non-dominant race in a community) and maintaining racial homogeneity. Holding preferences for racial homogeneity constant and positive, there may be reverse causation: high social capital, in the form of close social networks and strong tastes for organizational participation and voluntary action, may facilitate community organizing to exclude by race or class through both informal and legal mechanisms. The motivation for exclusion may be preferences for homogeneity, increased property values from exclusionary land use policies, or in predominantly minority, lower-income areas, concerns that white gentrification will make housing unaffordable. Conversely, low social capital may make it difficult for residents to organize to exclude and may result in greater racial fractionalization.

More succinctly: social capital facilitates NIMBYism.
The whole point of social capital, after all, is to facilitate collective action. It's usually bandied as a cure for commons-type problems like littered parks or crime-infested streets, but there's no reason to assume a neighborhood will deploy  its social capital only for wise and benevolent ends.  A neighborhood that is adept at organizing litter patrols and crime watches will also likely be adept at organizing opposition to real estate developments that threaten to add economic or racial diversity. If this is the case, then we should expect, rather than be surprised, to see high social capital negatively correlated with diversity. [A little more after my generous excerpt - sorry]

I find this idea plausible at least. Our automatic reaction to ascribe the logical flow of cause and effect makes our initial reactions "sticky", I guess. Being able to devise tests that can detect the chicken from the egg is crucial to preventing the establishment of false world-views and even faultier solutions for problems.

Junkbox, Episode MMXIII⚔...  

Another 1.3" (Tuesday night).  What's a boy to do?

• The rule of thirds for your Facebook photo 
• Maybe calorie menus are having some effect 
• All this economic upheaval and they changed the spelling, too 
• Windows 8: Not Vista, but not great either.
• The Big Bag O' Wine
• The continuing RFS headache
• The growing concern on the right over long-term unemployment

Looks like we might get in by midwe-... wait, what's that in the forecast?

Dead sport walking...  

John Kass, the reporter/columnist who had to follow Mike Royko, has never been a favorite of mine. But I couldn't help noticing his surprising column today.

With all that college beef on parade this week, the NFL draft is a wonder of sports marketing, a televised pageant for the multibillion-dollar American football industry.
But there's something football fans should know:
Football is dead in America.
...
Make no mistake. I loved football. I loved it desperately. Even now, four decades later, I remember endlessly damning myself for being too small to play it at a big-time college. I ached for it, for the violence of it, for the training, the salt pills and no water on hot August fields, the helmet scabs on the forehead, but mostly the collisions. And I still love it, but I can't shake the guilt of supporting the physical ruin of great athletes. My wife and I wouldn't let our sons play. We just couldn't.
Future historians may explain all this in terms of cultural change, of more information about concussions, spinal cord injuries, paralysis and brain damage, and another football killer, taxpayer liability.
Some 4,000 former NFL players have joined lawsuits against the league for allegedly hiding the dangers to the brain. This follows a rash of depression-related suicides, with some players shooting themselves in the chest so that their brains could be studied after their deaths. One of these was the great Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson. He left a suicide note, asking that doctors examine what was in his skull after a lifetime of bashing it. College players have also filed suit.
Eventually, lawsuits will overwhelm the high schools. And high school superintendents won't be able to increase property taxes to pay for the additional cost of subsidizing the game.
"The idea that five years ago I would have forbidden my kids to play football is hard to imagine," said Joseph Siprut, a lawyer representing former Eastern Illinois University player Adrian Arrington and other athletes in federal court over the long-term effects of head injuries.
"It never would have occurred to me. Now, given what I know about the concussion issue — first as a lawyer who has litigation, but also as someone who reads the papers — for me as a parent, I don't think I would ever let my kids set foot on a football field. Ever." [More]

The NFL has decent support among younger people compared to other major sports, but I don't know how fast that would erode if fewer young men were playing in high school. Given the personality/image of Kass, the idea he would forbid his children to play is significant to me.

I also think pro football has, like other sports, suffered from public aversion to astronomical salaries, unattractive conduct on and off the field, and high ticket prices. Shorter player tenure discourages fan loyalty, and cable TV pricing shrinks coverage.

The NFL needs a major health issue like it needs a blow to the head.

Inequality in the blood...  

I have long asserted that the most relevant predictor of your success as a farmer was if your father (or father-in-law) was a successful farmer. While our profession may be an extreme due to the nature of landowning, it is not alone.

The advantages of a privileged background don’t stop at graduation. Tufts economist Linda Loury suggests that half of all jobs in the U.S. are found through family, friends, or acquaintances. Canadian economists Miles Corak and Patrizio Piraino look at how often men end up working at the same company where their father worked, finding that as many as 40 percent have done that at some point. The proportion rises to 70 percent among the top 1 percent in income distribution. This helps to explain why the relationship between the earnings of parent and child is even higher at the top end than it is across the population at large, according to Corak. One-third of successions between chief executive officers in publicly listed companies in the U.S. involves an incoming CEO related by blood or marriage to the old CEO, the founder, or a large shareholder. That’s bad news for the share price, according to Francisco Perez-Gonzalez of the NBER, but clearly good news for the newly appointed relative. [More]

The longer I look at this troubling (to me, anyway) trend the less sure I am if it is correctable (assuming we can agree on what correct looks like). There seems to be a snowball effect that can only be overcome by astonishingly poor choices of the wealthy (NBA stars, for example) or extraordinary rare coincidences of luck and opportunity - usually in a developing economy or entertainment industry.

But wealth inequality feeds income inequality to accelerate the trend. The American economy is already past the peaks we have seen historically.

[Source]

The debate rages, and rightly so, about possible cures or even the advisability of a cure. I don't see our tax system getting radically more progressive anytime soon. More to the point, I don't the the old reliable equalizer, education, packing the same therapeutic power as before as systemic changes in our workforce lower the value of many degrees, and higher education costs spiral beyond the payback threshold.

The biggest question for me is how our economy will look and work after another decade or so of lop-sided growth?

 

Gray work...  

There has always been an underground economy in the US, but most of us have thought of it as essentially illegal stuff - drugs, mob, gambling, etc. That may be the smallest part of it, as effects of the Great Recession drag on.

Another clue to the underground economy comes from government data on the percentage of Americans who forego banking services, finding other ways to handle their money. The percentage of Americans who are "unbanked" or "underbanked" rose from 25.8 percent in 2009 to 28.3 percent in 2011. Some of those people may be low-income customers getting hit with a slew of new banking fees, forcing them to reject traditional banking. But others may be choosing to keep their money out of the mainstream financial system so that nobody checks up on them.
We tend to think of the underground economy as a place where Mafiosi and other types of criminals operate. But that's more or less a constant. The new underground economy may entail a lot of people doing honest work, such as freelancers and consultants who used to be full-time professionals, computer-repair people laid off from corporate IT departments, home remodelers benefiting from a revived housing sector, people running eBay business, and retirees earning a few extra bucks by running errands for busy parents. The Internet obviously makes it easier to work from home these days, another boon for the gray market. [More]

There are many things that could be causing this, but taxes and regulations usually get most of the blame. Also employers keep hired workers in the gray market to enjoy significant advantages over the formal labor market.

The increasing importance of the gray economy isn’t only a reaction to the downturn: studies suggest that the sector has been growing steadily over the years. In 1992, the I.R.S. estimated that the government was losing $80 billion a year in income-tax revenue. Its estimate for 2006 was $385 billion—almost five times as much (and still an underestimate, according to Feige’s numbers). The U.S. is certainly a long way from, say, Greece, where tax evasion is a national sport and the shadow economy accounts for twenty-seven per cent of G.D.P. But the forces pushing people to work off the books are powerful. Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another. Most important, perhaps, are changes in the way we work. As Baumohl put it, “For businesses, the calculus of hiring has fundamentally changed.” Companies have got used to bringing people on as needed and then dropping them when the job is over, and they save on benefits and payroll taxes by treating even full-time employees as independent contractors. Casual employment often becomes under-the-table work; the arrangement has become a way of life in the construction industry. In a recent California survey of three hundred thousand contractors, two-thirds said they had no direct employees, meaning that they did not need to pay workers’-compensation insurance or payroll taxes. In other words, for lots of people off-the-books work is the only job available.
Sudhir Venkatesh, a sociologist at Columbia and the author of a study of the underground economy, thinks that many workers, particularly younger ones, have become comfortable with casual work arrangements. “We have seen the rise of a new generation of people who are much more used to doing things in a freelance way,” he said. “That makes them more amenable to unregulated work. And they seem less concerned about security, which they equate with rigidity.” The growing importance of services in the economy is also crucial. Tutors, nannies, yoga teachers, housecleaners, and the like are often paid in cash, which is hard for the I.R.S. to track. In a 2006 study, the economist Catherine Haskins found that between eighty and ninety-seven per cent of nannies were paid under the table. [More]

To be fair, I resisted for most of my career hiring full-time help largely because of the paperwork headache and liability issues employment adds. I did handle part-timers by the book (mostly).

But it is the whacking size of this hidden economy that interests me. While our economy could be doing much better, it may not be doing as badly as we think. We're just not getting the tax revenues from it we should be.

Maybe a carbon tax or other consumption type taxes (VAT) would be a better way to fund government than increasingly hard-to-track income.

Oddly soothing...  

I dunno - you just get locked on, somehow.

Saves a trip to the farm store for entertainment.

 

Junkbox, Episode MMXIII☂...  

On the bright side, the tile are working pretty well.

• The obligatory drone story: The Dehogiflier
• Maybe we should be looking at Reddit more.
• Where the poor people are.
• Old family companies
• Drawing the arrow between growth and debt just got messier
• The politics of SNAP and farm bill blowback
• The landline battle - soon in your state!
• The best short summary on H7N9 I have seen

Now up to a 90% chance of over 1" on Tuesday.  As one friend told me at church, "At least the South American seed corn had time to get here."

The good death...  

All the anti-meat fervent has me questioning if fuller disclosure would help any or not (from the perspective of the meat industry). Without a doubt, the slaughterhouses of today are much, much closer to humane than they have ever been, but is it enough for consumers to face the basic idea of killing animals for food?

The next cow, the cow I watch die, is quiet. It is black. It comes casually down a walkway. It steps into a squeeze chute, the metal hugging cage that closes in on the cows’ sides to calm them. Scott Towne, the guy in charge of the killing, hits it with a CASH Knocker, a blank shell shooting from a metal apparatus at the end of the long, wooden-handled device and into the front of the head above the eyes, denting the skull but not penetrating its brain, rendering the animal insensible. Instantly the cow’s eyes close. Its neck is lax and its mouth open, easy as a child asleep at the dinner table, or a businessman asleep on a plane.
Stopping at a bar on the way home to bourbon-gargle the lingering deathiness and nausea from the back of my throat, I ponder the cow’s existence. Whether or not farmers should torture animals, or keep them in disgusting and overcrowded and shit-filled conditions, or murder them slowly, are not even questions. Prather’s Northern California grass-munching herd is obviously as well treated as any in natural life, but “good” death is not so easily codified.
“Can you make a slaughterhouse perfect?” Grandin asked in Iowa. “No, nothing in this world that’s a practical thing can be made perfect. That’s just impossible.”
For those who kill animals for a living, making peace with those imperfections is a daily affair. Sure, Prather’s Towne looks tough enough to kill you in a bar fight, but he smiles easily, giggles sometimes, even. He tells me it makes him sad when the cows aren’t stunned on the first shot. He says that that can happen anywhere, even when a small farm hires him to kill one cow in a field. At Prather, it happens about twice each slaughter day. And the cow that was mooing on our way in isn’t the last one we hear that morning; another starts mooing in the squeeze chute. Because its skull is too old, too thick for a stunner, Towne has to use a 9 mm instead. It moos and moos until Towne yells, “Fire in the hole!” and shoots it between the eyes.
Two cows mooing and two cows having to be shot twice out of 21 is below Grandin’s standards of acceptability, and a higher percentage than at her usual McDonald’s plant audit. But even if I did believe a cow possesses a level of consciousness equal to a human, having seen Prather’s cows living and dead, the Rickerts do live up to their oft-stated goal to “Give them the best life possible.” [More worth reading]

Like most farmers of my era, I have killed animals, dogs, cats, cows, even helped my friend put his horse down, but did not come away from the process with anything but regret and a sense of duty accomplished. I have seen suffering animals as well, and those memories still haunt me more powerfully, though. Maybe there is no way to harvest other animals without an emotional toll, and maybe we ought to acknowledge this and appreciate those who process things we obviously like to eat a little more.

More humane immigration laws would be a start.