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PONTIFICIAE ACADEMIAE SCIENTIARVM SCRIPTA VARIA - 
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Now for other aspects at Professor THEIL’s paper I may perhaps 
be a little more critical. First of all, regarding the very principles 
of using rules of strategy. I really doubt whether that is a practical 
proposition in actual economic planning. To me it would seem 
much more efficient, much more practical, to use what I call and 
what I will speak about on Thursday — the principle of moving 
planning. That is to say, each year you are going to work out a 
completely new, say, five-year plan, taking account of the new infor- 
mations you have got, what ever new slants to your preference func- 
tion you would like to give and so on. Let me give you an example, 
suppose I am out in the woods and I am lost in the darkness of 
the night. I am lost; I do not know where I am. All right, what 
to do? Will have to wait till morning and the sunrise to find my 
way. Now what would be the use of sitting down and enumerating 
to myself the various alternatives that might happen and how I 
should then react to them? Suppose in the morning, when the sun 
comes up, I see that there is an abyss to the north. I would not go 
there. A river to the east; I would not try to pass that. If I discover 
a hill to the left I may decide to go up to the top of that hill and 
look around. It is little use from the practical point of view, to 
enumerate all the possibilities and to decide beforehand about 
the action I ought to take if any given alternative materialises. It 
is much better to wait till the moming comes and then decide on 
the basis of actual alternatives, what to do. That would be an 
Alustration of my principle of moving planning. Then there is the 
question of this desirable rate of increase, or desired rate of increase 
in consumption. If I have understood Professor THEIL’s presen- 
tation correctly this is taken as a datum. That is correct, isn’t it? 
(Professor THEIL answers yes) All right. Now I can easily understand 
that from the pre-programming viewpoint you can impose a lower 
bound on consumption and on the rate of increase in consumption, 
perhaps from nutritional data, calorie contents, right vitamins and 
so on. But it is very difficult for me to understand that the precise 
size of the rate of increase of consumption can be fixed in advance. 
7] Theil - pag. 32