I’m surprised that it’s only a factor of ~300 between the modern, highly mechanized grain farm and 200 years ago (before the engine, before modern fertilizers, and before electrically pumped irrigation).
A lot of it has to do with the governments incentivizing less efficient practices to support smaller farms.
A megacorp running a million acres would be a lot more efficient than a 1000 families running 1000 acre farms but, for various reasons, the system is biased towards the latter.
These Silicon Valley tycoons are trying to “disrupt” agriculture but they aren’t going around telling anyone what they’re up to, just buying up a bunch of land and hoping nobody notices. The political winds will not favor their usual shenanigans.
What kind of economic revolution will happen as that statistics approaches 100% for every good, not just grain?
Because eventually "work" will be so unnecessary we will need to redistribute money to people who have nothing to do and now that I put that into words I have realized that is already happening at my country, nevermind.
Not sure why this is downvoted. The preeminent economists of the age thought that this is exactly what would happen - everyone would be working 2-4 hours a week and there would be nothing left to be done because every hour would be so damn productive.
The problem is twofold. First, there’s a lot of people in the world and bringing them out of poverty increases the economy up to 3 orders of magnitude, e.g. from living on $0.25 a day to living on $250 a day, which can suck up a whole lot of productivity gains.
And secondly, as it turns out, there’s always new places to shift demand when less and less of your budget is required just to subsist.
And then when all those “beyond sustenance” dollars all start chasing the same limited supply of goods, say, a house in the Bay Area, or even a lobster dinner…
If your willing to live by 1800 quality of life then 5 hours a week at minimum wage will be plenty of money. Sack of beans and grain. Few yards of cloth.
Land is the only limiter. Even that is cheap if your willing to live in middle of no where.
Exactly. We are already there to subsist on basic human needs for food and shelter on < 10 hours work per week. But the human need to keep uplifting our lives will ensure we're always in the rat race desiring to settle in California or Hawaii
You could make the case that we're already at that point. The system is being propped up by our ability to buy ever more stuff. Ever more people are employed in the service economy. Ie relatively low skilled but not easily automated work.
For me this is the main point of basic income. If you get to the point where people can't consume enough stuff to keep everyone employed, you end up with a situation with the class that own the means of production not having anyone to sell to, because 'the workers' don't have any income.
The need for "work" is still absolutely necessary in the physical sense. All we've done is replace human/animal labor with cheap fossil fuels. The only way it could appear efficient is with dishonest accounting - intentionally ignoring the physical basis of energy production and assuming watts are infinitely cheap and substitutable.
That sounds like The Matrix (the movie) logic. In reality, feeding humans is energy inefficient. If anything, it takes multiple watts to end up with one watt of human work. Dishonest accounting is pretending human/animal labor is free.
Does this also include the labor to find/mine/refine/ship the fuel and the labor to mine/refine/shape/assemble/maintain both the factory machines and the farm equipment?
Grain was transported by horse back then. We switched to automobiles because fuel is far denser. One semi-truck full of gasoline can provide thousands-of-trips and carry tons-and-tons of product. Ex: 1-ton of gasoline carries hundreds-of-tons of product.
In contrast, 10-tons of horse feed will only feed enough horses to carry maybe 10-tons of actual product, depending on distance.
I forget the math exactly, but there's a reason why the horse-to-automobile tranformation only took a decade. The difference between horse-feed and gasoline is completely massive and almost an unfathomable increase in efficiency, due to the ratio of "fuel-per-ton" (ie: horse bread in the 1800s vs gasoline in the modern day).
I read somewhere how automobiles were the environmental cleanup of their times.
We first had horses producing far more manure than a city could handle, with all kinds of hygiene/smell/viability consequenses. People complained how cities became unliveable.
Cars fixed all that. No more feed, no more manure, no more raising and keeping alive the animals. All replaced with a very energy dense fuel, a machine you can just leave on the street, and some very clean minimal exhaust.
And all of the supporting infrastructure including everything it takes to maintain the governments that write and enforce trade treaties, improve the roads, launch the satellites that makes communication for efficient allocation of resources possible, etc.
I bet this trend will soon reverse, as ecosystems starts to fail one after other, due to climate change, persistent organic pollutants build up, et cetera, and we eventually must replace free ecoservices we rely on today (e.g. pollination by bees, irrigation provided by rainfall) with intensive human work.
And strangely, there's a culture of folks resisting this, trying to get us all back into agriculture. Community gardens, organic food etc. A giant step backward for civilization, to be sure.
I'm not sure people who want community gardens are resisting this. It's more about being able to grow for yourself, should one choose to do so. There is a certain benefit to gardening. It is calming, while still remaining active physically. It provides a low cost food source and some benefit arises from the appreciation you get when you grow and harvest your own food.
Both productive growing and localised growing can exist together.
I don't see it as "resisting" or trying to go "back". Maybe I'm out of touch, but back when I was in school it was starting to be accepted that both (a) industrialization, globalization, and technological progress have lead to dramatically improved quality of life in general, including the ability to feed many many more people much more efficiently, and (b) the way that we're doing this at the moment is literally unsustainable, in the sense that it just won't be possible to continue to do it this way in perpetuity.
Some people take this seriously, and want to find ways to move forward (not "back") to find ways of thriving that aren't doomed to fail eventually... When you look at it that way I don't think it's "strange" at all.
Understood. But things have changed - population growth has leveled off. Efficiency of food has increased geometrically. A sustainable balance could very well be achieved with careful management. And without everybody growing organic tomatoes in their back yard.
As such, no. I'm just sensitive to the organic-type (yes, here on HN) that pushes the crazy notion that only organic food should be permitted. Clearly, a giant step backward.
It’s because for all the productivity gains, we are still working 40 hours or more a week. The gains go to the owners instead of allowing the laborers to work less. Medieval peasants has more leisure time than modern workers.
I would assume that's because the standards of living and quality of life for an average person has gone quite up over the past couple of centuries as well.
Sure, you can produce the same amount of stuff today with much less effort than it required back then. But we also require more of the same stuff produced and also plenty of stuff that wasn't even possible to produce back then.
That is, if we want to maintain the current standards of living and quality of life (instead of that from two centuries ago). And, turns out, people vastly tend to prefer average standards of living and quality of life from today over those from 1800s.
That living standard could be considered a raise. What would someone in 1800 pay to have my air conditioned house with a fridge full of beer, frozen pizzas galore, and a car that can drive me 300 miles approximately 200 times before I need to do maintenance.
And I could afford that as a pizza delivery guy 20 years ago.
A raise implies you're richer than someone, but a rising tide seemed to have lifted all boats.
They haven't, actually. Standards of living were terrible in the 1800s because enclosure had forced most people off farmland and into overcrowded cities where they were effectively forced to work long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions. Actually wellbeing has at best returned to the level of the early modern period in the global north, with standards in the global south being worse by an order of magnitude.
Wasn't enclosure basically a British (English?) issue? This post oddly zooms from an observation about one relatively small country and then tries to make a sweeping claim about the global north and global south.
Perhaps it is, but the overall trend in the 18th and 19th centuries was away from peasant farming towards urbanisation and industrial wage labour, and I don't have a better term to refer to that. I was also assuming knowledge of European colonialism.
By actual wellbeing, I mean the subjective experience of overall happiness, as distinct from material possessions.
Well overall happiness is intangible. If we base it on tangibles like easy access to food, convenient and cheap transportation, safety and security, health care, recreation, mortality rate, access to information etc. there’s no comparison.
Even if the industrial revolution came with a trend towards urbanization and away from peasant farming, if we're talking about people's happiness, the difference between being coerced off the land by enclosure vs being drawn towards economic opportunities in the city seems like an important distinction.
I'm curious -- how can you be so confident in making broad statements about "actual wellbeing" today vs the early modern period? I would have thought at a minimum, a smaller proportion of the population being literate, plus actual costs of paper, ink, light, etc would mean there would be just a lot fewer records of subjective experience of lower class people from the early modern period. And you know ... whose happiness counts? I'd have further expected that half the population having drastically greater liberty today than in the early modern period ought to substantially improve some people's subjective wellbeing even without considering material possessions. Same for the move away from child labor, or child corporal punishment.
I'm guessing no one has 15th century survey data of peasants being asked "on a scale from 1 meaning 'strongly disagree' to 7 meaning 'strongly agree', how would you rate the sentence 'I am happy most days'". And I'm in no way trying to disregard or minimize the possibility that just a different way of living made people better off at some points in the past. But I also think we risk romanticizing or projecting onto past populations.
If we go by health outcomes, I recall reading a paper that found two lows in the modern period of Western Europe, going by height, tooth decay, etc: the first around 1800, and the second around 1900. The first is explicable by the looming Malthusian pressures of the time, since industrialization had only just kicked off.
The second is rather more interesting. By the mid-19th century railroads had connected Europe enough to ensure access to food. People were eating reasonably nutritious fare around 1860-1870.
So what happened? The second industrial revolution also saw the processed foods revolution. Waves of canned, baked, dried, and sugared products descended upon the markets for the first time. They were cheap and tasted good, so people made them staples, not knowing how sick it would make them or their kids. And all the while intensified industry was adding more pollutants, people were smoking more, and the automobile and leaded fuel was just coming on the scene. Thus, the average Edwardian Englishman was quite a bit worse off than his Victorian parents in some measures.
And...it's been 150 years and while we definitely know the risks of this status quo better, we're still dealing with the consequences. The promise of consumerism is always that engaging with the market will make a better life, and countless critiques have been written of this idea. As you say, we don't really know if we're happier. But we can point to material well-being and make educated guesses.
Similar things happened elsewhere. We usually call it colonization or genocide if we acknowledge it at all.
More modern examples are 'the liberalization of the economy' where we make people who were living on and working the commons for survival and a small surplus to trade farm that same land for a massive surplus for someone else to trade who gives them a small wage which they spend on rent.
We then also bring in pennecillin and if they're really lucky get them to build a sewer and attribute all those benefits to having stolen their land and averaging the income of them and their new absentee overlords.
Bonus points if sale of any grain reserves is also forced and it leads to massive famines.
If your issue was that I picked 1800s specifically, then let me clarify. I stand behind the same statement holding up for any other point in time predating 1800s as well.
Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to capital investments if it wants raises.
Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at what it does.
If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.
Labour won't be able to pay for it, because money is a representation of social power, not value, and in our current society labourers do not hold social power. See "Debt: The first 5,000 years", or the video by second thought on the subject.
It’s a product of well coordinated labor. It’s much, much easier to make the wrong thing than the right thing. And the wrong thing can eat a huge amount of labor and be worth much less than nothing.
Me too. You can't build a combine harvester with labor alone. There's a hell of a lot of capital that went into producing one. Land, mining equipment, metal smelters, machine shops, trains and ships, and assembly facilities.
It takes skilled labor too, but you can't make most things purely out of skilled labor.
> If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.
do you have real-life example of how labor can justify a higher wage?
Ignoring the exogenous energy expenditures implicit in industrial agriculture is a foolish oversight, especially in light of the upcoming shortages in fertilizer and other inputs due to supply disruptions from Russia, Ukraine and China.
We may see billions malnourished within a year.
Additionally, if Russia's gas infrastructure is allowed to freeze over, due to demand restrictions, they might not be able to recover. The last supply disruption (When the Soviet Union collapsed) caused damage that took until 2021 to repair.
Permanent loss of a large fraction of the worlds fertilizer supply is a very real possibility. Much marginal farmland would be lost as a result.
64 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadA megacorp running a million acres would be a lot more efficient than a 1000 families running 1000 acre farms but, for various reasons, the system is biased towards the latter.
These Silicon Valley tycoons are trying to “disrupt” agriculture but they aren’t going around telling anyone what they’re up to, just buying up a bunch of land and hoping nobody notices. The political winds will not favor their usual shenanigans.
Because eventually "work" will be so unnecessary we will need to redistribute money to people who have nothing to do and now that I put that into words I have realized that is already happening at my country, nevermind.
The problem is twofold. First, there’s a lot of people in the world and bringing them out of poverty increases the economy up to 3 orders of magnitude, e.g. from living on $0.25 a day to living on $250 a day, which can suck up a whole lot of productivity gains.
And secondly, as it turns out, there’s always new places to shift demand when less and less of your budget is required just to subsist.
And then when all those “beyond sustenance” dollars all start chasing the same limited supply of goods, say, a house in the Bay Area, or even a lobster dinner…
Land is the only limiter. Even that is cheap if your willing to live in middle of no where.
For me this is the main point of basic income. If you get to the point where people can't consume enough stuff to keep everyone employed, you end up with a situation with the class that own the means of production not having anyone to sell to, because 'the workers' don't have any income.
In contrast, 10-tons of horse feed will only feed enough horses to carry maybe 10-tons of actual product, depending on distance.
I forget the math exactly, but there's a reason why the horse-to-automobile tranformation only took a decade. The difference between horse-feed and gasoline is completely massive and almost an unfathomable increase in efficiency, due to the ratio of "fuel-per-ton" (ie: horse bread in the 1800s vs gasoline in the modern day).
We first had horses producing far more manure than a city could handle, with all kinds of hygiene/smell/viability consequenses. People complained how cities became unliveable.
Cars fixed all that. No more feed, no more manure, no more raising and keeping alive the animals. All replaced with a very energy dense fuel, a machine you can just leave on the street, and some very clean minimal exhaust.
Then we all got cars.
so by extrapolation, would we need the world to become unliveable before cars gets replaced?
Both productive growing and localised growing can exist together.
But it's a pipe dream that 'everybody should do it'.
Some people take this seriously, and want to find ways to move forward (not "back") to find ways of thriving that aren't doomed to fail eventually... When you look at it that way I don't think it's "strange" at all.
It's not about productivity, it's about keeping that productivity while reducing externalities.
Sure, you can produce the same amount of stuff today with much less effort than it required back then. But we also require more of the same stuff produced and also plenty of stuff that wasn't even possible to produce back then.
That is, if we want to maintain the current standards of living and quality of life (instead of that from two centuries ago). And, turns out, people vastly tend to prefer average standards of living and quality of life from today over those from 1800s.
And I could afford that as a pizza delivery guy 20 years ago.
A raise implies you're richer than someone, but a rising tide seemed to have lifted all boats.
What do you mean when you say "actual wellbeing"?
By actual wellbeing, I mean the subjective experience of overall happiness, as distinct from material possessions.
I'm curious -- how can you be so confident in making broad statements about "actual wellbeing" today vs the early modern period? I would have thought at a minimum, a smaller proportion of the population being literate, plus actual costs of paper, ink, light, etc would mean there would be just a lot fewer records of subjective experience of lower class people from the early modern period. And you know ... whose happiness counts? I'd have further expected that half the population having drastically greater liberty today than in the early modern period ought to substantially improve some people's subjective wellbeing even without considering material possessions. Same for the move away from child labor, or child corporal punishment.
I'm guessing no one has 15th century survey data of peasants being asked "on a scale from 1 meaning 'strongly disagree' to 7 meaning 'strongly agree', how would you rate the sentence 'I am happy most days'". And I'm in no way trying to disregard or minimize the possibility that just a different way of living made people better off at some points in the past. But I also think we risk romanticizing or projecting onto past populations.
The second is rather more interesting. By the mid-19th century railroads had connected Europe enough to ensure access to food. People were eating reasonably nutritious fare around 1860-1870.
So what happened? The second industrial revolution also saw the processed foods revolution. Waves of canned, baked, dried, and sugared products descended upon the markets for the first time. They were cheap and tasted good, so people made them staples, not knowing how sick it would make them or their kids. And all the while intensified industry was adding more pollutants, people were smoking more, and the automobile and leaded fuel was just coming on the scene. Thus, the average Edwardian Englishman was quite a bit worse off than his Victorian parents in some measures.
And...it's been 150 years and while we definitely know the risks of this status quo better, we're still dealing with the consequences. The promise of consumerism is always that engaging with the market will make a better life, and countless critiques have been written of this idea. As you say, we don't really know if we're happier. But we can point to material well-being and make educated guesses.
More modern examples are 'the liberalization of the economy' where we make people who were living on and working the commons for survival and a small surplus to trade farm that same land for a massive surplus for someone else to trade who gives them a small wage which they spend on rent.
We then also bring in pennecillin and if they're really lucky get them to build a sewer and attribute all those benefits to having stolen their land and averaging the income of them and their new absentee overlords.
Bonus points if sale of any grain reserves is also forced and it leads to massive famines.
If your issue was that I picked 1800s specifically, then let me clarify. I stand behind the same statement holding up for any other point in time predating 1800s as well.
Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at what it does.
If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.
Most startups understand this well.
It's basically impossible to bootstrap something with labor alone
It takes skilled labor too, but you can't make most things purely out of skilled labor.
Even a maxist analysis admits that goods are generated with labor plus the means of production. This is a very important point.
Someone with a laptop might be able to route a million times more packages than someone with a notebook and pen.
Take away the laptop representing capital can you get a sense of the labor contribution
We may see billions malnourished within a year.
Additionally, if Russia's gas infrastructure is allowed to freeze over, due to demand restrictions, they might not be able to recover. The last supply disruption (When the Soviet Union collapsed) caused damage that took until 2021 to repair.
Permanent loss of a large fraction of the worlds fertilizer supply is a very real possibility. Much marginal farmland would be lost as a result.