I’ve included two weather forecasts with most Daily Bread posts: one from the National Weather Service, and one from the Farmers’ Almanac.
As I noted previously, there is a way to look at the two as a contrast between government and private sector planning. Reader Amy wrote me in early April, and asked me if the two weather reports had a deeper meaning. Here’s what I wrote on April 7th in reply:
Reader Amy writes with her theory about the use of a weather report on Daily Bread: Am I including a daily weather report (1) just as a weather report, (2) as a commentary on planning — from the National Weather Service, (3) or both? She says both.
That’s it — adding a weather report is both a simple daily bulletin and a libertarian’s take on how hard prediction of complex events — key to planning — really is. That’s why, of course, the Farmers’ Almanac prediction runs alongside the National Weather Service one. In one case, we have the finest models of forecasting in the world; in the second, the assessment of a small book that’s by turns interesting, quaint, or funny, but hardly scientific.
Superficially, the contrast appears to be one between a government agency (NWS) and a private forecaster (Almanac Publishing Company). That appearance is only part of the story — it only addresses the organization responsible for the two forecasts, not the method each uses.
Looking deeper, in this case I think that it’s the government agency that exhibits the flexibility and versatility most common in the private sector; the Farmers’ Almanac — although a private concern — adopts a method more typical of long-range government planning.
There are a few common characteristics to most government planning: (1) long-range forecasting, (2) comprehensive forecasting, (3) planning for others’ property, not one’s own, (4) a public nature of the planning that may encourage special interests to co-opt or distort the planning outcome, and (5) general inflexibility (based mainly on characteristics (1) and (2)).
These characteristics may not all apply in every case, but they appear often in government planning. The long-range and comprehensive nature of most government planning exhibits that audacity that most leads government planning astray — it’s too difficult, even for the very clever, to allocate resources as well through a planning process as through the suppleness of market incentives based on prices.
If that’s true, then it’s the Farmers’ Almanac — with its year-in-advance forecasting method, that more closely resembles government planning than an actual government agency. It’s the Farmers’ Almanac that has the boldness to predict something as complicated as the weather a year in advance.
Once they make the prediction, there’s no going back — the forecast is published, and will not be changed. Like most bad government planning, the Almanac seeks to plan far ahead (a year is a relatively long time for a weather forecast), about complicated events (climate on any given day), and is inflexible (once printed, there’s no going back).
The National Weather Service adjusts forecasts quickly and flexibility as conditions change, and even relies on information from ordinary people to adjust its forecasts. (The National Weather Service has an e-Spotter program, where people can use the Internet to report conditions as they happen.)
That’s why, in this case, I would expect that the flexibility and openness to new information would favor the National Weather Service as a forecaster over the Farmers’ Almanac. In this situation — a rare one, I think — it’s the government agency that has the advantage, as its method is more like a market-oriented one that than an actual, privately-owned publication.