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The immense productivity gains in agriculture have driven down food costs, which improves the standard of living of everyone. It also frees up those who would h

The immense productivity gains in agriculture have driven down food costs, which improves the standard of living of everyone. It also frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy.

radiorental 8y ago
> frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy That's the ideal, in reality too many of these people live in areas where there are no other opportunities. They are also often fed the line that the job can be brought back. Put simply, we've observed generational shifts to higher-valued jobs in urban areas. A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries
- dv_dt 8y ago
  > A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries Don't confuse what is the current outcome with what has to be the outcome. Those individuals might not reskill in todays environment because of a combination of receiving an insufficient amount of the value they produced in their wages (preventing them from having the resources to retrain themselves), as well as social programs for reskilling being severely limited in both funding and how they constrain how and what skills are trained. (preventing gov't resources from retraining workers). Neither of those has to be a forgone conclusion.
  - radiorental 8y ago
    I don't disagree it can be done... https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-code/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-... I'm saying it can't be done at the current rate of change. There are just too many people caught off guard, compounded by technological & automation adoption too rapid for them to adapt. I think you may underestimate the scale of the problem. Why so many people in the center of this country voted for a catchy tag-line on a baseball cap.
    - dv_dt 8y ago
      I agree with you on the rate of change, and the scale is only becoming bigger, and worse with student loan costs. Imagine 10-15 years down the line when a generation of workers needs to invest in some other skill set, and are still paying off their original loans? If we want to continue to advance as a nation/civilization we need to build in a social/economic way for people to afford potentially multiple major learning opportunities that can happen at multiple stages of life, without having to commit to massive life/lifestyle on the line risks. It can't be this program that gets hauled out into the light occasionally, constrained by industry, geography, time, and whatever else gets thrown into the mix to constrain the program cost - it ends up costing us all more (in money and social instability) to not address the problem.
knieveltech 8y ago
In theory. In practice, this has lead to collapse of rural economies, rampant poverty, and epidemic drug usage amongst rural populations. As to driving food costs down, that's trivially disprovable. Loaf of bread in 1950: 12 cents. Adjusted for inflation that's $1.26 currently. A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26. Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly more valid than observed reality.
- dexterdog 8y ago
  First, my local stop n shop sells a loaf of white bread for $1.29 and that's not even a sale price. Second the average income has gone up by more than inflation as well so you would expect the cost of staples to go up accordingly.
  - 8note 8y ago
    is that including the richest folks in the average or not? my understanding is that other than the top 10% or so, average income is not keeping up with inflation
    - WillPostForFood 8y ago
      Median income adjusted for inflation, has been growing, albeit very slowly, for all groups, including the bottom quintile (+6.7%). https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378b6429-750.jpg https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378...
  - jimbokun 8y ago
    So you prove knieveltech correct, the price of bread has not gone down despite whatever productivity advances may have come about since then.
    - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
      No because the average person can afford a lot more bread now than they could in 1950. But bread is not the best argument as it’s cheap to make even in the 50s. Go buy a roast chicken and compare that price and you’ll see a difference
ionforce 8y ago
Like what labor? Are they skilled appropriately to fill what's actually in demand?
anigbrowl 8y ago
frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor But what if they don't want to? Yay for consumers but throwing people into economic limbo is a Bad Thing. That's like looking for the next record-breaking swimmer by randomly throwing kids into swimming pools.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  Almost nobody who loses their job wants to. It's still a net win for the economy as a whole that people lose the jobs that are no longer worth doing.
  - anigbrowl 8y ago
    But pure capital allocation efficiency isn't a good indicator of social well being, just as infinite sugar sounds momentarily delightful until you think about diabetes.
    - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
      That's kind of irrelevant to my comment, unless you consider workers part of the "capital" that is being allocated efficiently. Even if you do, allocating capital (and workers) efficiently usually eventually leads to better social well being than allocating it inefficiently. (Perhaps reversing the inequality makes the historical examples more obvious: allocating capital and workers inefficiently leads to worse outcomes.) But note well the word "eventually". There certainly is room for doing better at helping with the social well being of those dislocated by this process...
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
      - thelasthuman 8y ago
        Efficient how? Finding the leader of the grand "race to the bottom" and moving the work there? Maybe the workers should be as free as capital in seeking a country that benefits them the most. Then it'd be a race to the top because people can just leave your abusive country for a place that sees them as human beings.
deialtrous 8y ago
Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats. More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.
- infinite8s 8y ago
  I think you are romanticizing the past. 150 years ago most people were living subsistence lives, with hunger and malnutrition a constant issue.
  - deialtrous 8y ago
    No, you either have an incorrectly negative view of the past or don't realize we're talking about developed countries. Hunger was not an issue, and malnutrition was more an issue with the wealthy who could choose to eat expensive things they didn't realize were bad for us. https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-diet-08032018/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-di...

radiorental 8y ago

> frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor in the economy That's the ideal, in reality too many of these people live in areas where there are no other opportunities. They are also often fed the line that the job can be brought back. Put simply, we've observed generational shifts to higher-valued jobs in urban areas. A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries

dv_dt 8y ago
> A farmer, coal miner , etc who loses their job today is unlikely to re-skill & move to other industries Don't confuse what is the current outcome with what has to be the outcome. Those individuals might not reskill in todays environment because of a combination of receiving an insufficient amount of the value they produced in their wages (preventing them from having the resources to retrain themselves), as well as social programs for reskilling being severely limited in both funding and how they constrain how and what skills are trained. (preventing gov't resources from retraining workers). Neither of those has to be a forgone conclusion.
- radiorental 8y ago
  I don't disagree it can be done... https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-code/ https://www.wired.com/2015/11/can-you-teach-a-coal-miner-to-... I'm saying it can't be done at the current rate of change. There are just too many people caught off guard, compounded by technological & automation adoption too rapid for them to adapt. I think you may underestimate the scale of the problem. Why so many people in the center of this country voted for a catchy tag-line on a baseball cap.
  - dv_dt 8y ago
    I agree with you on the rate of change, and the scale is only becoming bigger, and worse with student loan costs. Imagine 10-15 years down the line when a generation of workers needs to invest in some other skill set, and are still paying off their original loans? If we want to continue to advance as a nation/civilization we need to build in a social/economic way for people to afford potentially multiple major learning opportunities that can happen at multiple stages of life, without having to commit to massive life/lifestyle on the line risks. It can't be this program that gets hauled out into the light occasionally, constrained by industry, geography, time, and whatever else gets thrown into the mix to constrain the program cost - it ends up costing us all more (in money and social instability) to not address the problem.

knieveltech 8y ago

In theory. In practice, this has lead to collapse of rural economies, rampant poverty, and epidemic drug usage amongst rural populations. As to driving food costs down, that's trivially disprovable. Loaf of bread in 1950: 12 cents. Adjusted for inflation that's $1.26 currently. A cheap loaf of white bread costs substantially more than $1.26. Edit: of course this gets downvoted, because econ gibberish is certainly more valid than observed reality.

dexterdog 8y ago
First, my local stop n shop sells a loaf of white bread for $1.29 and that's not even a sale price. Second the average income has gone up by more than inflation as well so you would expect the cost of staples to go up accordingly.
- 8note 8y ago
  is that including the richest folks in the average or not? my understanding is that other than the top 10% or so, average income is not keeping up with inflation
  - WillPostForFood 8y ago
    Median income adjusted for inflation, has been growing, albeit very slowly, for all groups, including the bottom quintile (+6.7%). https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378b6429-750.jpg https://static.businessinsider.com/image/59bc19b538d20d7f378...
- jimbokun 8y ago
  So you prove knieveltech correct, the price of bread has not gone down despite whatever productivity advances may have come about since then.
  - albertgoeswoof 8y ago
    No because the average person can afford a lot more bread now than they could in 1950. But bread is not the best argument as it’s cheap to make even in the 50s. Go buy a roast chicken and compare that price and you’ll see a difference

ionforce 8y ago

Like what labor? Are they skilled appropriately to fill what's actually in demand?

anigbrowl 8y ago

frees up those who would have worked farm jobs to do higher-valued labor But what if they don't want to? Yay for consumers but throwing people into economic limbo is a Bad Thing. That's like looking for the next record-breaking swimmer by randomly throwing kids into swimming pools.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
Almost nobody who loses their job wants to. It's still a net win for the economy as a whole that people lose the jobs that are no longer worth doing.
- anigbrowl 8y ago
  But pure capital allocation efficiency isn't a good indicator of social well being, just as infinite sugar sounds momentarily delightful until you think about diabetes.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    That's kind of irrelevant to my comment, unless you consider workers part of the "capital" that is being allocated efficiently. Even if you do, allocating capital (and workers) efficiently usually eventually leads to better social well being than allocating it inefficiently. (Perhaps reversing the inequality makes the historical examples more obvious: allocating capital and workers inefficiently leads to worse outcomes.) But note well the word "eventually". There certainly is room for doing better at helping with the social well being of those dislocated by this process...
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - thelasthuman 8y ago
      Efficient how? Finding the leader of the grand "race to the bottom" and moving the work there? Maybe the workers should be as free as capital in seeking a country that benefits them the most. Then it'd be a race to the top because people can just leave your abusive country for a place that sees them as human beings.

deialtrous 8y ago

Except most people don't do higher-valued labor, we mainly do completely pointless busy work either because someone somewhere thinks there is a chance they can extract a large amount of wealth from having that pointless busy work be done (every tech company on the planet) or because a government has taken money from everyone else and given it to people to do pointless busy work so we can say "unemployment is only X%". Nobody would pay the millions of useless bureaucrats if they had a choice, they only get paid because the government takes money from everyone else at gunpoint to give to those bureaucrats. More to the point, I think you are incorrect about the standard of living impact. 150 years ago almost everyone could eat safe, healthy food. Now access to safe, healthy food is incredibly limited, in many cases impossible to obtain without growing/raising it yourself. We've traded our health and happiness for pointless gadgets, that's not an unambiguous improvement in standard of living. With the knowledge and technology we have now, families could easily provide 80+% of their own food with almost no work (and I mean what we have now, no need for robots of the future). Instead of having a tiny number of farm jobs providing massive amounts of garbage "food", we should have a huge number of tiny "farm jobs" producing good food in people's backyards.

infinite8s 8y ago
I think you are romanticizing the past. 150 years ago most people were living subsistence lives, with hunger and malnutrition a constant issue.
- deialtrous 8y ago
  No, you either have an incorrectly negative view of the past or don't realize we're talking about developed countries. Hunger was not an issue, and malnutrition was more an issue with the wealthy who could choose to eat expensive things they didn't realize were bad for us. https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-diet-08032018/ https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/victorian-di...