2010 Food Crisis for Dummies

2010 Food Crisis for Dummies: The world is blissful unaware that the greatest economic/financial/political crisis ever seen is a few months away. While it is understandable that general public has no knowledge of what is headed their way, that same ignorance on the part of professional analysts, economists, and other highly paid financial "experts” is mind boggling, as it takes only the tiniest bit of research to realize something is going critically wrong in agricultural market.

Wisconsin Farm Bureau: It is so unusual for corn harvest to stretch into December that USDA had no year ago or five-year average harvest progress comparisons. Wet weather has plagued harvest in parts of the Midwest and Great Plains. North Dakota corn harvest stood at just 60 percent, while South Dakota stood at 82 percent and Wisconsin at 85 percent.

Computer Modeling - FAIL

Another example of trying to define computer modeling as science with disastrous results.

http://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=2299

No economist influenced the economics profession in the second half of the twentieth century as much as Paul Samuelson, who died Sunday at the age of 94. As the New York Times noted, “Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from one that ruminates about economic issues to one that solves problems, answering questions about cause and effect with mathematical rigor and clarity.”

Unfortunately, Samuelson’s influence was not as positive as the Times would have it. Samuelson turned economics from a social science that tried to figure out how the world worked into an pseudo-science that tried to turn the world into a mathematical model — a model that failed to account for the realities of individual human desires, incentives, and diversity. As a result, by 1960, economists, politicians, and would-be central planners were misled into viewing the economy as a machine that could be controlled by pulling levers, i.e, passing laws, issuing regulations, and setting tax and discount rates.

The economy is not a machine.

Computing is an epic technological advancement. Too many people, however, believe programming always generates correct answers. Reference: http://xkcd.com/676/