Enjoyed the piece by Bell and Renner on the Marshall Plan -- seems to come up in conversation every few years. The writer from Worldwatch quotes this portion of General Marshall's speech: 'He said that there could be "no political stability and no assured peace" without economic security, and that U.S. policy was "directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos."' While I couldn't agree more, I wonder about the proposed solution. The pertinent comment from General Marshall is this one: "Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist." The key word is "revival." General Marshall notes the fundamental characteristic of modern economies is the trade of processed goods from cities for agricultural commodities from farms. Enter a war and destroy the physical infrastructure by which to process goods, and there can only be hunger, poverty, desperation, and chaos. The purpose of the Marshall plan was to restore the physical infrastructure to an urban population that already had the individual skills and social institutions in place to make good use of it, thereby reviving what was there before. Is that the circumstance in which we find ourselves now? Will a provision of physical infrastructure on a massive world scale really achieve the results the authors expect? I worry that the circumstances are not sufficiently the same, and that a parallel to the Marshall plan will not be sufficient.