Paper:ewp-get/0405001 From: Thomas Cool < > Date: Sat, 01 May 2004 23:14:35 +0200 Date (revised): Sat, 01 May 2004 23:31:20 +0200
Jan Tinbergen helped creating the Dutch Central Planning Bureau after 1945, and Dutch society has benefitted enormously up to this very day in 2004. The Dutch situation has also been an example to the world. But there is a down side when the CPB adopts a wrong theory and when policy becomes misguided. Economic theory is created by people, the behaviour of people can also be described by Public Choice theory, and good theory need not get properly adopted. Dutch society suffers huge problems, which problems do not exist just by themselves, but they can also be judged from the angle of the failure of co-ordination. It can be established as a fact that the directorate of the CPB has been censoring economic science for almost 15 years now, so that society is in a suboptimal state. The mechanisms in Dutch society apparently are too weak to solve this issue. The stress in Dutch society even causes the breakdown of the mechanisms that might work otherwise. That stress in Dutch society is highlighted by political landslides and political murder so unexpected of this country. With 9-11 there is the new terrorism that increases the stress in Dutch society. The censored theory originally provided a solution to Stagflation, but it can also help to resolve the social and economic problems following 9-11. The censored theory would be relevant for other nations as well. For theoretical and practical reasons the censorship must be resolved at CPB itself. Given the weak mechanisms in Dutch society to protect the integrity of science in the preparation of policy, it becomes rational to advise an international boycot of Holland. Economic sticks and carrots are strong incentives to motivate people to stop and think. An international boycot of Holland would likely induce the Dutch to restore the integrity at CPB as intended by Tinbergen.
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EconWPA began as a conversation between Bob Parks and Larry Blume on January 28, 1993. I located Paul Ginsparg's archive (then xxx.lanl.gov) and he graciously installed his software on a Sun Sparc system which was supporting the department of economics email and computation. EconWPA began accepting papers July 1, 1993 and had ftp, email, gopher and web interfaces. The web interface for submissions was engineered into existence in July 1995. A complete and catastrophic machine failure in 1999 caused the loss of EconWPA's email new paper announcment service at which time there were over 15,000 subscriptions with over 8,000 unique email addresses.
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A Chinese curse states May you live in intersting times. I have. Bob Parks - Jan 2006