Talking Philosophy Economic Dreams - Economic Nightmares I spent most of my working life in the US Forest Service, battling fundamentalism. Most of the battles dealt with economics. My first job was to coordinate use of a linear programming model (FORPLAN) in the development of forest plans. The model may (or may not) have been useful in projecting overall timber sales volumes from big-timber forests, but to have used it as an overall planning model was a mistake. Forests are not factories. Multiple uses for timber, recreation, wildlife, minerals and oil and gas, livestock grazing (and so on) must be carefully balanced against preservation and conservation efforts in the dynamic self-organizing systems that we call Nature—forest and grasslands in particular. I remember one day in 1979, before I joined the Forest Service, having lunch with FORPLAN developer K. The FORPLAN Fiasco During the early years of US Forest Service "forest planning" (1979-1985, generally) there was a big problem with what we then called "analytical determinism."
Socialist Economic Bulletin billy blog Notes from Behind the Blockade Econbrowser The Center of the Universe News: The Blog I am at a loss: I have a scientific proof that can save everyone’s life but no one listens. The proof implies that CERN — the European Research Council – currently attempts to shrink the earth to 2 cm in a runaway process consummated in about 5 years’ time and effective with a probability of about 8 percent, if the LHC experiment is not stopped immediately. The scientific safety conference already demanded three years ago got recently requested from the German government by a Cologne court. But the globe’s media keep silent (except for the tiny “ET-Journal,” Volume 16, pages 58–59, 2011). Maybe the court and the present writer are both crazy? Can one of my readers name a scientist ready to shoulder the job of disproving my result (so far a few tried but none remained in the ring)?