…growth?
Lack when your Eyewitness was in short pants, he used to lap up the comics, even the DC ones that didn’t have the snappy banter of Marvel’s heroes like Spidey, which verily were balm to his soul. Anyhow, there was this Cube-shaped planet with the anti-hero Bizzaro, where everything was the reverse of what it was on earth. Reading the IMF report on Guyana’s economy precipitated a panic attack in your Eyewitness when he thought he’d been transported to Bizzaro World. (Actually “htraE” – “Earth” spelled backwards!!)
The Guyanese economy GREW?? What the ****! The IMF accountant types whom they send down to arm-pit type economies like ours are obviously coming from an alternate universe. So what the heck is going on? Well, first and foremost, it is now accepted, after the world’s most developed economies crashed in 2008, that economists don’t really know their asses from their elbows. Really.
Why? Well after EVERY prediction they’d made turned out to be false – not to mention none of them had predicted the crash – folks started examining their tortuously-phrased theories, and found out that, in every theory, their premises were so unrealistic they might as well be living on htraE! Like assuming that people make “rational” decisions!! And if you start with false premises, of course your conclusions will be ridiculously off base. Like the Utopia they posit will be created under the “Pareto optimum”!!
So, back to the growth report of the IMF mandarins. Basically, they take as their premise that the whole economy is interconnected; so if – as in Guyana – gold alone is doing well, the entire economy is doing well, since it is “GROWING!! In primary school we learnt about the “Fallacy of Composition” – which arises when one infers that something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole. But it’s clear in the IMF Bizzaro World that they don’t send their economists to primary school; they start in graduate school, where they are handed their PhD’s for finger painting!
But even they were forced to note that every other sector or subsector was tanking. Bauxite shrunk, rice shrunk, in production and price sugar shrunk, forestry shrunk, commerce shrunk etc. But YET THE ECONOMY GREW!! The only thing that grew, apart from gold — which grew by foreign companies squirreling their money abroad — were the salaries of the Cabinet!! Did any of those gold producers share their wealth with all the others that employ 90% of our working stiffs?
Maybe on htraE, but not on planet Earth!! Here it’s pure sufferation, not growth.
…of sugar workers
Nothing signalled this administration’s view of sugar workers more than its insistence that the newly-created redundant cane-planters at Enmore should start cutting cane!! We all knew the Minister of Agriculture has never set his foot in a cane field to witness any one of the myriad tasks its takes to get the crop to the factory. But even from a purely theoretical basis, he should know that sticking 16’ pieces of cane stalks in the ground needs a totally different skill-set than harvesting cane.
He’s certainly old enough to remember that Burnham made the same mistake when he assumed sugar workers were simply picnicking at the back-dam and anyone could do their work. Determined to break the 1976 sugar workers strike for union recognition, he sent the army and GNS to cut cane.
Holder should remember how many of them ran from the cane fields like Africanised bees were attacking them!!
Sorry Holder, while sugar workers may all look alike to you, they do need different skill sets to plant, manure, cut and transport cane!
…walls?
Seems like all-expenses-paid foreign trips guarantee Govt business. After Minister of Housing was flown to Poland, seems we’ll be buying wall materials from the builder.
So what if Guyana’s short of foreign currency and we have our local wood coming out of our kazoos??!!
