Boundaries
“And you shall not go up by steps to my altar,
that your nakedness be not exposed on it.”
(Exod 20:26 ESV)
Boundaries
By Stephen W. Hiemstra
Early in January 1983, I finished the last interviews that I had planned for my dissertation project, which had kept me busy for the previous six months. My dissertation eventually was entitled—Labor Relations, Technological and Structural Changes in U.S. Beef Packing and Retailing (1985)—but at that point I just returned from driving all over the the mid-west and as far west as Colorado visiting companies and their union representatives. At the time, cattle slaughtering plants all over the Eastern Corn Belt were being shut down, usually after a lengthy strike, due to competition from integrated cattle slaughtering and beef processing plants on the high plains, especially Nebraska, Kansas, and Texas. Managers and union officials were eager to tell the story of their plant; how they had worked there for their entire career; and how the plants were now being shut down and being sold for scrap. The integrated plants kept humming along, located next to enormous cattle feedlots with tens of thousands of head of cattle and employing immigrant workers from far away places, who lived in trailer parks, spoke no English, and were members of union from outside the meat packing industry.
My interviews were both fascinating and deeply disturbing, as I had a front row seat observing the merger of two industries—cattle slaughter and beef processing—creating enormous, new efficiencies in production and eliminating large numbers of highly paid, blue-collar union jobs. And having returned from my adventure in technological change, I found my own funding cut off before I was able to even write down my experiences.
Classmates a year or two ahead of me interviewed for teaching positions, started work, and finished their dissertation projects while working on their new jobs. In my case, I interviewed successfully with the University of Hawaii, who found my master’s research on Puerto Rican agriculture directly pertinent to their own agricultural research. When push came to shove, however, a friend of mine with no such experience was offered the position because he was presumably closer to finishing his dissertation.[1] Worse, a year later when I reached the same point, cutbacks in funding announced by the Reagan Administration led the land grant universities to curtail their hiring altogether. Much of the research previously done in the universities was federally funded through cooperative agreements that were cut and never again funded, leading the field of agricultural economics into a long term decline.
With my grant money cut, I had to leave Michigan State University without finishing my dissertation. Normally, doctoral students who leave campus never return and the rule of thumb is that about two-thirds of the doctoral candidates never complete the dissertation. Some of these students actually list their degree as ABD, “all but dissertation”; others simply quietly suffer ridicule the rest of their careers. No one expected me to return from Northern Virginia where I moved back in with my parents for the first time in about a decade.
The hard times continued at home. The Reagan Administration announced arbitrary, back-to-back hiring freezes on federal agencies, including the USDA office that wanted to hire me. Without a job or any prospect of a job, I lived in my parent’s basement and worked days to type my dissertation on my father’s manual typewriter. I ventured outside the house once a week to have lunch with our associate pastor, who considered me a good prospect for his counseling business, and occasionally to interview for different USDA offices hoping to be able to hire at some point.
The last pay period of 1983, I finally was able to start work in USDA—the timing was a godsend because the Reagan Administration introduced a much less generous retirement system on January 1, 1984. In USDA, I was encouraged to join the World Trade Branch (WTB) in International Economics Division where my old supervisor was the new branch chief. WTB focused on developing and maintaining international agricultural trade statistics. My new supervisor offered me several projects to choose from, but I chose to work with an old friend, who had been a branch chief but was pushed out with the change of administrations. I owed him a favor and hoped that I could help him improve his standing within the group.
The project involved reconciling bilateral trade statistics (country to country trade figures published by the United Nations) with the Food and Agricultural Organizations (FAO) summary statistics on trade with the world (total exports and total imports), which were considered the more reliable numbers. An export table, for example, would list the country in focus, total exports reported by the FAO, and all the destinations where a particular commodity, like wheat, corn, or soybeans, would be exported. My friend spent the previous year reconciling all the countries of the world for only one commodity, wheat, because he needed to hunt up these export destinations manually in each country’s trade statistics books. He had lots of trade statistics books in his office.
I spent about a month reconciling trade statistics by hand before I began having second thoughts about my choice of projects. As my mind wandered one morning, I realized that these tables that I was filling in with country yearbook statistics were all computer printouts. If the figures were all in computer files, then the numbers could be reprogrammed to reduce the amount of manual labor required to complete the tables because we had two estimates for most trades: the export reported by one country and the import reported by their trading partner. Comparing those two estimates, we would be able to identify both trans-shipments and missing data, which would be a really big deal because during the Cold War many countries tried to hide their trade, particularly with Communist countries. The United States, for example, embargoed trade with Cuba back then, but making such comparisons would allow us to identify cheaters among our trading partners. I checked with our computer staff, verified the existence of these data, and, then, approached management with a proposal to automate the construction of review tables. Management was intrigued and I was given a few weeks to see what could be done.
I was encouraged to learn a new computer language called SAS and spent a month deciphering the SAS documentation. Everything was done on an IBM 370 computer which meant that I also had to learn to program in Job Control Language (JCL) and, later, to manage a series of SAS programs with a CLIST script. In the end, I had a menu driven system for managing trade statistics that USDA continued to use for more than a decade. The analytical side of the project was published as a Foreign Agricultural Economics Report—Methods of Reconciling World Trade Statistics—from which we garnered an invitation for our team to travel to Rome, Italy to brief the FAO, which we had to turn down, and a briefing later for the Central Intelligence Agency, who was interested in using our procedures for tracking contraband trade more generally.
This automation of a manual processes was an important theme during the Reagan Administration, which was especially interested in administrative efficiency. Large databases throughout the government are maintained by the information technology groups, but oftentimes are poorly understood by other staff tasked with research and administration. In order for technology to improve productivity, data systems need to be understood well enough by other staff that procedures can be integrated with the data.[2] In order to take full advantage of the automation, regulations and procedures may need to be updated and staff retrained, a process that could take years even if it were a priority. Because such changes are not usually a priority, professional groups that may be disadvantaged by the change have enormous incentive to resist the change. Secretaries may not want to learn to use a word processing program; analysts may not want to learn a new spreadsheet program; programmers may not want other staff learning to program. Nevertheless, success in this project required transgressing administrative and professional boundaries, which was not always appreciated or tolerated.
In my case, the data system that I developed yielded about half a dozen publications (see reference citations) and the invitations cited above before I was promoted and offered a very interesting job in my old office—Western European Branch. Being outside of trade and already well-published, completing my dissertation and receiving my doctorate had no tangible effect on salary or my government career until much later.
REFERENCES
Hiemstra, Stephen W. 1985. “U.S. Share of World Rice Market Declines,” Rice: Outlook and Situation. U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Economic Research Service (ERS). March.
Hiemstra, Stephen W. 1985. “U.S. Share of the World Wheat Market Declines,” Wheat: Outlook and Situation. USDA. ERS. May.
Hiemstra, Stephen W. 1985. “U.S. Share of World Wheat Flour Market Declines,” Wheat: Outlook and Situation. USDA. ERS. September.
Hiemstra, Stephen W. 1986. “U.S. Farm Exports to EC Continue Falling,” Foreign Agricultural Trade of the United States. USDA. ERS. November/December.
Hiemstra, Stephen W. and Arthur B. Mackie. 1986. Methods of Reconciling World Trade Statistics. USDA. ERS. Foreign Agricultural Economics Report No. 217. May.
[1] As it turned out, he never finished his degree. He did not possess the “killer instinct”.
[2] Many administrative procedures were developed in the 1960s in the Kennedy Administration, well before automated systems were widely available, and agency regulations codified in the Federal Register during that period.
