Thursday, August 16, 2007

Kudos to CARE

Nothing for Nothing

CARE, one of the development industry's long-time "partners" has finally kicked the habit of government money. CARE is on the record saying that government food aid programs do more harm than good - in this case dumping subsidized unsold "developed world" agriculture products on the "developing" world, causing a fetter on the local economies' ability to create sustainable food markets.

Workers is happy to see this and wishes that it perhaps represents raised awareness of the futility and self-fulfilling prophecy of the "development industry," which doesnt really offer development but perpetuation of the industry itself. And hopefully this might too be the start of a trend towards the freeing of the world's poor from the neo-imperalism of development and vulgar superstructure of us versus them, rich versus poor, developed versus underdeveloped.

Solved: Why Central Economic Planning is Impossible

It's not a game

Some brilliant people at the University of Alberta have written a computer program, taking longer than 10 years to do, that calculates and wins every possible checkers game. There are more than 500 billion billion of these possible game iterations. Note that an economy's interaction - millions or billions - of people trading with each other, let alone producing and distributing, is much more complicated than checkers, with an almost incalcuable number of possible iterations. There is no way that this can be done centrally with computers. Thus, by definition central planning is a non-starter.