More on Strawberries and Such

Back to our Strawberry producers here, it's obvious that because the strawberry farmers were destroying their crops, they made entrepreneurial errors. That is, the decision to continue producing strawberries that was made before the growing season was wrong. Obviously, these producers should have invested less time/labor/capital/other resources in the production of strawberries than otherwise. If the strawberry farmers could go back in time, they would correct for this error, and reduce the amount of factors that went into the production of their crops.

But they can't go back in time. They look to the future with their presently owned resources and products, and make decisions based upon future prospects. Destroying some of their surplus crop raises the per unit price of strawberries, enabling them to produce more than otherwise in the future.

I think that's what our strawberry critics forget: production is future oriented. Producers can't look at the past and base their production decisions off of this alone. What the critics are asking strawberry farmers to do is to compound the errors already made in production. Assuming that strawberry farmers could go back in time, it's as if the critics are asking them not to, to instead produce so many strawberries as to reduce their profit margins and hence their incentives and abilities to continue with production in the future, and ultimately to serve the demand of consumers in the market.

In other news, William Easterly's The White Man's Burden was a fantastic read about the follies of foreign aid, about how local, on-the-ground strategies that attack small problems related to poverty and squalor are often much more effective than grand utopian schemes of eliminating an entire feature of poverty (say, hunger or AIDS) in one fell swoop. I feel as though I understand the IMF, World Bank, etc. much better than I did a month ago. Without giving them much justice, I would have to say they're mostly 'bureaucratic clap-traps:' Big talk without the strategies to make for effective walk.

But, I've been told that I have a bad case of confirmation bias.