Economics

Yesterday was the official release of Firefox 3 and there was a large marketing push to get as many people world wide to download it.

For those interested in the 24-hour breakdown per country, the Mozilla team put together an interactive global map that allows you to see how many times FF was downloaded in each country.

With over 7 million downloads in 10 different languages, this map can serve as a rough guide for tech generalizations.

Unsurprisingly regions gripped with central planning and socialism rank at the very bottom. For instance, North Korea has had a grand total of zero downloads (due primarily to the fact that only one internet cafe exists in the entire country, personal computers are verboten and all communication is heavily regulated and censored).

On the other end of the spectrum most of the industrialized world and West are nearly ranked according to their respective GDPs, with America, Germany and Japan taking the top 3 spots.

And while there all sorts of odd numbers to be gleaned (like itty bitty Singapore flying equal with its significantly larger neighbors), the numbers within the Middle East are striking. As of this writing:

Iran: 208,215
Saudi Arabia: 7,412
Kuwait: 1,962
Qatar: 1,265
Iraq: 235

Of course, it could be argued that the numbers are skewed because the same user may be downloading multiple copies, but there doesn’t seem to be much evidence of a nationalistic push to compete in the FF3 Download Olympics (USA! USA!).

Much more could be written about ratios comparing total population with FF3 downloads or total amount of households with internet access with FF3 downloads. However, considering that even Iraq’s smallest peer speaks the same language, I think it is safe to say that the Arabic language is not a limiting factor, nor are time zones.

Rather, it is yet another footnote in the costs of occupation. Who is to blame for destroying the infrastructure and failing to rebuild it to even pre-war levels. (Here are some contemporary numbers from IWS)

Unfortunately, even with all of the neato features in this latest FF version, Iraqis don’t have the wonderful opportunity to worry about automated malware protection when basic services like electricity and running water are still unavailable (you know they actually have had to ration oil-products there too, right?). Maybe the numbers will jump after another few surges.

Legitimate milestone, maybe not. But it is difficult to see how another 5 years of occupation and enhanced interrogation will make the 4.0 release for Iraq any more popular. Maybe additional waterboarding will motivate them.

[Cross-posted to Mises.org]

Scifi author Charlie Stross recently discussed other alternatives for the monies that funded the Iraq war. He noted that using current technology the bounty could have created and staffed a colony of 500 astronauts on Mars or enabled the construction of tens of gigawatts in nuclear energy throughout the US. Or even helped build cities for 600,000,000 people in China to live in.

Arguably the fairest solution would be to have simply returned the money to the original taxpayers thereby removing the incentive for the Fed to expand the credit supply to fund the current war.

However, regarding a hypothetical mission to Mars, at the very least none of the astro guys would be kinetically detonating onto population centers.

An entire region of the globe comprising a billion people wouldn’t be annoyed with the West for lofting 500 rocket scientists onto a barren rock. The same can’t be said for 500 pound bombs.

See also: The Broken Window Fallacy and Can the Future Do Without Economic Logic?

Senator Everett Dirksen, a hawk during the Vietnam era, is credited with coining the sarcastic phrase.

However, forty years later, it should be updated to read a trillion here and there. For instance, one of the articles highlighted in the Viewpoints section today details the ever expanding blackhole that is the accounting system(s) used by the Defense of Defense: “The Pentagon’s $1 Trillion Problem.”

It is arguably a depressing piece if for no other reason than to serve as a sobering update to a 3-year-old SFGate report, “Military waste under fire - $1 trillion missing.”

While the details of either investigation may not surprise the readers of AWC, the fact that these problems not only continue but geometrically grow could arguably serve as yet another empirical case-study of how socialism cannot calculate. The military, a bastion for the purest form of socialism, has neither the incentive, the knowledge, nor the ability to price goods and services — let alone produce accurate records of its own nefarious activities.

In many cases it is the sole consumer of vehicles and armaments whose existence is entirely alien to the market-based world that must satisfy wants and needs by providing useful and productive services to potential customers.

And in other instances its insatiable appetite distorts the market-clearing price for commonly used goods such as oil.

Even if a unified, common accounting system was implemented, institutional inertia comprised by secret committees, kleptocratic planners, and politically-controlled technocrats will perpetually fail to coordinate a Byzantine bureaucracy that inherently cannot communicate or calculate.

And there is little reason to believe that the engine for state growth - the health of the state - will be muted or diminished in the coming decades.

See also: Socialism, by Ludwig von Mises
The Security-Industrial-Congressional Complex, by Robert Higgs