Dredging as good government

A few summers ago we had really bad floods in Madison. There were a lot of reasons. The proximate reason was it rained a lot. But also: we keep the levels of the lakes artificially high with dams, in part because not doing so would make the lake levels fluctuate a lot, and that is a problem for people who have houses on the lake. It’s hard to have your dock reliably terminate at the shoreline if the shoreline keeps moving. Another problem is that the waterways joining the lakes in the chain are choked with sediment and vegetation — so even when we DO open the dams and let the water flow southward towards the Rock River and eventually the Mississippi, the water is pretty slow to drain and it eventually overtops Lake Mendota and washes into the streets of downtown.

(Which, by the way, it was 10 years I lived in the Upper Midwest before I realized that Rockford, Illinois was a place where you could ford the Rock.)

Anyway, I was happy to see that the county is spending a few million dollars to dredge those connecting waterways so the lakes can drain more easily. This is not a headline-making move or an internet sensation; as far as I can tell, the number of times this effort has been mentioned on Twitter is in the single digits. And the effect won’t be dramatic — there’s no shiny new building or bridge or factory at the end of the expenditure. The effect is on what doesn’t happen, or at least is less likely to happen: another flood causing hundreds of millions of dollars of damage.

We pay pretty high property taxes in Madison, as things go, but what’s good about our local government is that I truly feel a lot of this kind of thing happens here. We fix things before they break. It’s something governments mostly don’t get credit for. But they should.

Dane County Fair

Dane County fair.  Food consumed:  some Chocolate Shoppe ice cream, lemonade, a banh mi, Thai iced tea, chicken yassa from Keur Fatou.  We saw two young cows auctioned for $400 and $425.  We rode the Blizzard and the Ferris wheel.  (The trip is now just two revolutions long — sorry, but that’s a ripoff, for five bucks I should get at least four top-offs.)  This year’s circus acts were frisbee-catching dogs and two motorcyclists in the Globe of Death.  (Good, but not as good as the year the Flying Wallendas themselves came to town.)  We didn’t stay for the Christian rock act but heard them soundcheck a very faithful “Can’t Stop The Feeling!”

First place hay:

 

First place oats:

The T-shirt concession failed to stake out a clear ideological location.

More pie than plate, Dane County edition

One chapter of How Not To Be Wrong, called “More Pie Than Plate” (excerpted in Slate here) is about the perils you are subject to when you talk about percentages of numbers (like “net new jobs”) that may be negative.

Various people, since the book came out, have complained that How Not To Be Wrong is a leftist tract, intended to smear Republicans as being bad at math.  I do not in fact think Republicans are bad at math and it sort of depresses me to feel my book reads that way to those people.  What’s true is that, in “More Pie Than Plate,”  I tear down an old Mitt Romney ad and a Scott Walker press release.  But the example I lead with is a claim almost always put forward by liberal types:  that the whole of the post-recession rebound has accrued to the 1%.  Not really true!

Long intro to this: I get to polish my “calling out liberal claims” cred by objecting to this, from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

UW-Madison, the fourth-largest academic research institution in the country with $1.1 billion of annual research spending, has helped spur strong job growth in surrounding Dane County. In fact, employment gains there during the last 10 years far outstrip those in any other Wisconsin county, accounting for more than half of the state’s 36,941 net new private-sector jobs.

I’m pro-UW and pro-Dane County, obviously, but people need to stop reporting percentages of net job gains.  What’s more — the reason job gains here outstrip other counties is that it’s the second-biggest county in the state, with a half-million people.  Credit to the Journal-Sentinel; at least they included a table, so you can see for yourself that lots of other counties experienced healthy job growth over the decade.

But just as I was ready to placate my conservative critics, Rick Perry went to Iowa and said:

“In the last 14 years, Texas has created almost one-third of all the new jobs in America.”

Dane County and Rick Perry, you both have to stop reporting percentages of net job gains.