The United States could urgently use food policy reform. Right now, we have a lot of subsidies to food growers. That’s questionable economics. But what’s more, we subsidize people to grow food that’s bad for public healthy in ways that are environmentally unsound. That’s terrible. If we’re going to subsidize farming, we ought to be subsidizing people for growing healthy crops in a sustainable way. On the merits, this is a no-brainer — there’s obviously no public interest in taxpayer subsidies for high-fructose corn syrup — but the politics is another matter.

Nicholas Kristof did a column on this subject the other day that used as a framing device the idea that it should be called the Department of Food rather than the Department of Agriculture. The idea is that this reenforces the point that public policy should serve people who eat food (everyone!) rather than companies that grow and process food. As far as framing devices go, that’s a fine one. But the focus on the Department of Agriculture sort of obscures where the real action is: Congress. A president only gets to set a few priorities. In principle, agricultural policy could be a presidential priority. But it’s clear that it’s not on Barack Obama’s top five list and it hasn’t been on any president’s top priorities list for a very long time. That’s the way of the world. By contrast, ag policy is always the top priority of the House of Senate Agriculture committees. That’s what they’re there for. The route to improved policy runs through these committees so whatever clever ideas people have, that would be the place to look.

Meanwhile, Kristof writes:

But let’s be clear. The problem isn’t farmers. It’s the farm lobby — hijacked by industrial operators — and a bipartisan tradition of kowtowing to it.

I grew up on a farm in Yamhill, Ore., where my family grew cherries and timber and raised sheep and, at times, small numbers of cattle, hogs and geese. One of my regrets is that my kids don’t have the chance to grow up on a farm as well.

Yet the Agriculture Department doesn’t support rural towns like Yamhill; it bolsters industrial operations that have lobbying clout. The result is that family farms have to sell out to larger operators, undermining small towns.

I’m not going to lie to you and say I’ve read Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, but I can say in good conscience that I read about half of it in Finland and Pollan makes a similar case. Kristof also quotes him in his column, so I think they’re on the same page about this.

But while there’s truth in what they’re saying, there are also some limits. It’s true that status quo farm policy is bad for many farmers. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves here. The Senate Agriculture Committee is chaired by Tom Harken. He’s a good guy and a good senator. But he’s also from Iowa. And though status quo ag policy may be bad for small towns in Oregon, trying to massively switch consumption in favor of fresh, seasonal, local produced food would be a disaster for farmers in Iowa. An Iowa farmer just isn’t “local” to very many people — the Iowa farm economy intrinsically relies on the existence of a big national and international market. California, by contrast, has both good farmland and metro areas full of people who could be buying locally produced food.

I really highly recommend Malcolm Gladwell’s article on quarterbacks and teacher quality in the current New Yorker. Unfortunately, I think that when talking about this important paper from Thomas J. Kane, Douglas O. Staiger, and CAP’s own Robert Gordon he gets a bit too entranced by the slightly mysterian notion that it’s impossible to identify effective teachers in advance. That may be true, but what the paper actually says is that our current certification methods don’t in fact do a good job of predicting teacher effectiveness.

One response to this could be to try harder to dream up a better method. But while it would probably be good to do some research into this issue, the Kane/Staiger/Gordon research also indicates that we could do a lot to improve the quality of instruction in our schools without identifying such a method. That’s because ex post evaluations of teacher effectiveness are pretty reliable predictors of future performance. In other words, if we look at the first few years of a teacher’s performance we can get a pretty good sense of how well she or he will fare over the course of her career.

The main policy implication of this is that we should be less strict about who we let into the classroom in the first place (since our current ex ante screening mechanism doesn’t work) and more strict and evidence-based about who we give tenure to (since we have good ex post screening mechanisms that we just don’t make much use of). A secondary implication is that it makes sense, at the margin, to commit resources to things that are more likely to draw applicants into the teaching profession through, e.g., higher salaries than on things like smaller class sizes. Basically, we should increase starting salaries and relax (or scrap) credentialing requirements, then make tenure decisions after a few years based on value-added test measures along with financial incentives to try to get the best performing teachers into the high-poverty schools and classrooms where they’re most needed.

Teacher quality is the internal-to-the-school variable that has the biggest apparent impact on students’ learning, and we actually have decent ways of measuring teacher performance. But we don’t actually do very much to put that information to good use. It’s a tremendous waste.

A few days back, Josh Marshall wrote:

It is just bad practice — especially in the face of the last eight years — for numerical majorities not only to use the power of their numbers in straight up votes but to change the rules of the game itself. Notwithstanding the fact that filibuster has been increasingly abused, it was wrong in 2005 and it would be wrong now.

I think this is backwards. The specific thing Republicans were trying to do in 2005, create a special “no filibusters of judicial nominees” rule, was silly. But the correct response, and I said so at the time repeatedly, was to propose to eliminate the filibuster altogether. The filibuster rule was a bad rule when it was used to block anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s, it was a bad rule when it was used to block civil rights legislation in the 1950s, it was a bad rule in 2005, and it’s a bad rule in 2008. Even absent the ability to filibuster the United States would still have an unusually large number of “veto points” at which potential legislation can be blocked, and there’s no compelling reason to add a supermajority requirement to senate votes.

What’s more, as Robert Farley observes the argument from tradition doesn’t really hold up. Traditional practice was for the filibuster to be broken out rarely as an extraordinary tactic. But over the past fifteen years or so, for some reason or another (perhaps related to the increased ideological coherence of the parties), it’s become more-and-more common so that we now speak of a 60-vote threshold as the ordinary hurdle for legislation to pass. Perhaps one can mount a defense of this de facto supermajority requirement on the merits, but it should be understood that routine filibustering is a very recent innovation and that eliminating the filibuster would leave us closer to our traditional practices.