Your not wrong here. Gov planning tends to failure -and the farther and more alien and indifferent the gov. then – the greater the failure. Nuf Said.

The problem is – that you ( like so many ) miss the even more important basics of prosperity that no desk-bound ‘planner’ can ( or should I say HAS) addressed.

The requirements for prosperity are

1) And this is FIRST and ABSOLUTE! Fail here and fail everywhere! There must be the cultural and legal permission for individual determination. The *right* to prosper or to learn or to increase in dignity. At the very least the right to try.
Sadly, much of the world refuses these rights to some or all – be it on the basis of gender or caste or clan. Well? If 3 or 10 or 51 percent of your population is ‘less then their best’ – what does that do to your ‘commonwealth’? These places will fall behind – just as a relay team that kicked out half of their runners would.

2) Security of person and property. I know – this sounds ‘conservative’ but I’m not just talking ‘law and order’ security. If you can’t harvest your fields for fear of warlords, or you can’t walk to school for fear or rapists – how can you prosper? Likewise, if you can’t trust that the house you build today will be yours tomorrow – why bother building? INVESTMENT – and I’m not just talking money – comes when people expect to be around for the rewards.

This – BTW – is a major cause of both cash drain and ‘brain drain’. Those who do manage to get a little something (be it money or skills ) will try to move it to safer and usually first-world areas.Of the two, I’d say the brain drain was the more damaging. How can a team win if it’s ‘best players’ move to the other side?

3) Respect for the future. Reserving resources for ‘investment’ – not just commercial or industrial and personal. This can mean not over-grazing, or not strip mining. I can mean building roads and wells and houses. It can mean educating a future generation. BUT! None of these will take place if the people making the decisions do not plan to BE THERE in the future – be they ‘colonials’ returning ‘home – or local politicos with their eyes on retiring to Switzerland.

4) Actual and local ‘democracy’. (Actually here I’d credit the libertarians for being closest.) The right to look some high level ‘expert’ in the eye and say “wild idea – but me and my friends – we don’t think so – go try this somewhere else”. Or – some have put it – “this is my bat and ball – so I’m playing the game my way.”

I’d not get into a squabble here as to which of these are ‘progressive’ and which are ‘conservative’ (Given that my personal vote would be – none of the above. ) I’d not get into a squabble at all – because some things are just…. self evident.

Do it this way – you get increasing prosperity.
Do anything else – fall back.
That’s just how it works.

Nah, I don’t miss any of that (the parts I agree with), I’ve even written some articles on that stuff. It just wasn’t the topic of this article and rule 1 of writing is “know what article you’re writing.” I wasn’t writing the one you want me to write.

In any case, Democracy isn’t necessary (more than one nation has modernized without it) and number 1 isn’t all that important, you can’t go through the first stages with half or more of your population as second class citizens – we know this, because almost every country that did it, did it that way.

Finally, central government intervention was key to industrial takeoff in more than one country, and it shouldn’t be though otherwise. Libertarian economic ideas were most fully brought to fruition in Somalia, not in any industrial state, not even city states like Singapore or Hong Kong.

There’s more than one model that allows for takeoff, and some of them are reasonably laissez-faire, but some of them are quite controlled (not communist controlled, but certainly with a huge role played by central governments.)

The problem is – that you ( like so many ) miss the even more important basics of prosperity that no desk-bound ‘planner’ can ( or should I say HAS) addressed.

The requirements for prosperity are

1) And this is FIRST and ABSOLUTE! Fail here and fail everywhere! There must be the cultural and legal permission for individual determination. The *right* to prosper or to learn or to increase in dignity. At the very least the right to try.
Sadly, much of the world refuses these rights to some or all – be it on the basis of gender or caste or clan. Well? If 3 or 10 or 51 percent of your population is ‘less then their best’ – what does that do to your ‘commonwealth’? These places will fall behind – just as a relay team that kicked out half of their runners would.

2) Security of person and property. I know – this sounds ‘conservative’ but I’m not just talking ‘law and order’ security. If you can’t harvest your fields for fear of warlords, or you can’t walk to school for fear or rapists – how can you prosper? Likewise, if you can’t trust that the house you build today will be yours tomorrow – why bother building? INVESTMENT – and I’m not just talking money – comes when people expect to be around for the rewards.

This – BTW – is a major cause of both cash drain and ‘brain drain’. Those who do manage to get a little something (be it money or skills ) will try to move it to safer and usually first-world areas.Of the two, I’d say the brain drain was the more damaging. How can a team win if it’s ‘best players’ move to the other side?

3) Respect for the future. Reserving resources for ‘investment’ – not just commercial or industrial and personal. This can mean not over-grazing, or not strip mining. I can mean building roads and wells and houses. It can mean educating a future generation. BUT! None of these will take place if the people making the decisions do not plan to BE THERE in the future – be they ‘colonials’ returning ‘home – or local politicos with their eyes on retiring to Switzerland.

4) Actual and local ‘democracy’. (Actually here I’d credit the libertarians for being closest.) The right to look some high level ‘expert’ in the eye and say “wild idea – but me and my friends – we don’t think so – go try this somewhere else”. Or – some have put it – “this is my bat and ball – so I’m playing the game my way.”

I’d not get into a squabble here as to which of these are ‘progressive’ and which are ‘conservative’ (Given that my personal vote would be – none of the above. ) I’d not get into a squabble at all – because some things are just…. self evident.

Do it this way – you get increasing prosperity.
Do anything else – fall back.
That’s just how it works.

It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
—Albert Camus

phastphil @ 32

Chairman Mao’s program for micro (backyard blacksmith shops) steel mills back in the 50’s and 60’s looks pretty smart now doesn’t it. PBS in the late 70’s or early 80’s had a British program where the premise was to show how promoting micro industries to kick start 3rd world economies would work best. The World Bank was set up to rebuild post WW2 Europe not 3rd World Economies. Grameen Banks for these 3rd world countries would make more sense.

There was too much central control on that. Grameen works because the individuals decide on what the business will be, with the help of their lending circle – all of whom are locals who know what the local economy will need.

Which isn’t to say there isn’t a place for central planning (though not of the 5 year plan type) but you have to be careful to incentivize what you want done without controlling how it is done by individuals.

Believe me I’m not saying Mao’s central planning is the way to go. I believe we would be much better off if we did the simple small things like helping locals with obtaining pure clean drinking water, disease prevention and education. These are not small things to those concerned, but if we take care of the little things the big economic issues will take care of themselves.

The tragic outcomes from all this ‘throwing away’ only now coming under more sober,deeper observation. What is possible and what is sustainable as we all proceed into the 21st century will not be what the last half of the 20th century revealed or attempted to put in place.

Here in SE Asia what is possible for sustainable cultural,ecological and economic living likely does not fit in very well with Fortune 500 thinking and the short term wealth generation desires that thinking is laced with.

It is certain the top 10 percent of wealthy and well-off inhabitants of this planet cannot continue to subjugate the remaining 90 percent of the world’s population in order to support what is surely a more and more unsustainable scenario on the ethics and morals of or the economic/equity/societal playouts/payouts.

Now the world is more complicated and we’re drowning in alphabet soup. IMF and WB are only the tip of the iceberg – add in FEMA, DHs, TSA, DEA and every other plan that does not work.

But really, the killer virus arrived in 1913 with the Federal Reserve ~System~ and all the chickens have yet to come home to roost. What’s happening to third world countries, a subtle redistribution of value, will eventually arrive at a community near you, us, We the People. But not the one percenters.

There’s no third world corruption that can come close to what our secret masters have achieved.

Ubuntu.

Yes. And Ubuntu — the perfect example.