[Foundation-l] Chapters

[Milos Rancic]

On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 13:18, Milos Rancic <millosh at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 29, 2011 at 13:04, David Gerard <dgerard at gmail.com> wrote:
>> But then, central planning is famous for its notable successes in economics.
>
> Fortunately, we wouldn't have to eat passers to make it clear how the
> central planning is economically successful.

Thanks to David Richfield, I've realized that this sentence requires
explanation. So here it is:

Sparrows [1], but Serbian Wikipedia article "sparrow" leads to
"passer" and I am bad in flora and fauna terminology.

Eating sparrows is one of the commons issues during the first phase of
the Great Leap Forward during Mao and was a product of centralized
economy.

The anecdote goes: Mao woke up one day and said "Sparrows are guilty
for everything!" After that, it a country-wide hunt on sparrows have
been made. Then, fields without sparrows became easy target for
grasshoppers and the next couple of years were known as the time of
great famine in China [2]. Eventually, even during Mao's rule, China
abandoned centralized economy.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passer
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine