A stupid system was replaced by a slightly more effective one... and it was 'markets and economists' that did it! Pure propaganda.
Heres a more efficient system. How much does the food box they give out cost? Say $50? Just give the customers $50 and let them spend it. No more admin
If everyone spent money like a rational, 100 IQ individual with a moderate amount of schooling on basic financial strategies, it'd be a lot easier to manage a population. Unfortunately, less than half of the population is 100 IQ, and in some areas less than 5% of the population understands a single high school course worth of financial management.
And then of course you have fundamentally irrational actors as well, like drug addicts. IQ and education don't help there, addictions are monsters that swallow people of all socio-economic varieties.
So you have to either let those people squalor, or find another solution.
Then you can manage the special cases with specialists.
Which can be traded for money.
Believe me, I understand first hand how difficult a heavily addicted person can be. Recovery is a huge process that takes more than just giving someone a safe place to live and food.
It's a food bank network that uses the monetary donations it receives to support the logistics of moving hundreds of millions of pounds of food to food banks. The value of that food exceeds their monetary donations.
Clearly the root of the problem. Straw Manning "central planning" is a perverted way to characterize the failure.
As per the article, the issue was that due to the food banks operating independently, the food banks were not relying information about their locally sourced food donations to Feeding America. Their solution is a fake currency, basically a way of rationing food from Feeding America. But of course they wouldn't put it in those terms, because of the socialist connotation of the word, "rationing". Instead they call it "market design". LOL. But the point is, Walmart which is more centralized than this operation, has no problem. So actually central planning isn't the issue here. The issue here is that you have a decentralized operation that necessitates a market mechanism.
Politics informed by ideological economists creates the problem. Economists informed by political ideologies create the solution to the problem that only exists because of their design.
I did find it funny that multiple times it cited the medical resident match making algorithm as a success. Anyone who has gone through this process knows how horrible of a system it is. You essentially open an envelop that tells your job and location for the next 3-6 years. Hospitals + government love the system because they can artificially reduce resident wages, applicants cannot negotiate job offers.
SiempreViernes•2h ago