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There are a lot of choices which go into all of this, too. One interesting story is about which poor countries tried to copy 20th-C US farming, and which did al
by iguy 8y ago
There are a lot of choices which go into all of this, too. One interesting story is about which poor countries tried to copy 20th-C US farming, and which did almost the opposite.
The first path was a mistake -- it looked modern, all those big machines, but was optimised for near-infinite land and very expensive labor. What poor countries typically had was the opposite: plenty of peasants and no room, and no diesel. So the winning strategy was actually closer to a million vegetable patches, with incentives, training, and transport to get this to the cities & export. An acre of vegetable patches can easily produce 100x the market value of an acre of wheat. Getting this right was a big part of how Taiwan & Korea for instance kick-started their growth. Getting it wrong was part of what killed the USSR -- if I remember right, they never even equalled the 1917 harvest.
- brianjoseff 8y agointeresting anecdote. any recommended sources?
- iso1337_ 8y agoHow Asia works by studwell. It’s also a Bill Gates book recommendation.
- iguy 8y agoThis is a great book, and easy to read. For russia I also like Yegor Gaidar, there's a book but the summary is http://www.aei.org/feature/the-soviet-collapse/ http://www.aei.org/feature/the-soviet-collapse/
- jamii 8y agoSeeing Like A State goes into a fair amount of detail. From my notes: * Soviet collectivization. Inspired by huge mechanized farms in the US. Vision of doing for farming what assembly lines did for manufacturing. Both Soviet and US attempts to do so failed badly. Party resorted instead to martial law and grain seizures, creating peasant uprisings. Forcibly relocated peasants into standardized, pre-planned mega-farms which were ruled by agricultural specialists. Ignored local conditions, vastly over-simplified and over-abstracted different areas of land and differently-skilled populations. Pressure from above to deny failures led to plans quickly losing contact with reality. Peasants gained most of their food by farming their own private plots in their little free time. Peasants effectively became indentured slaves, stripped of any cultural institutions that might be a focal point for rebellion, and naturally responded with terrible productivity. More deaths from starvation that WW1 and civil war combined. * Compulsory villagization in Tanzania. Similar story. Government (with support of the Western world) wanted to modernize the peasantry. Forcibly relocated peasants to standardized, pre-planned villages. (Was supposed to be voluntary, but top-down pressure for results led to initiative-taking). Peasants were moved vast distances, rendering their deep local knowledge worthless. (Peasants don’t come in standardized, fungible units). Forced to apply Western farming techniques which failed badly in the local climate and ecology. (The peasant practices of dense polycropping turn out to be much more effective in climates with high primary productivity than monocropping and ridging as is common in the West). Authorities heard reports of atrocities but insisted they were isolated cases. * And again in Ethiopia. Lead to widespread famine.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago"You should use wheat-growing techniques that do work for us, but don't work for you" isn't quite the same message as "you should grow wheat (using techniques that work equally well for us and for you) even though wheat is only economical for us because we have a lot of land and no people to farm it, whereas you have a lot of people but not so much land".
- iguy 8y agoThere are varying levels of communist madness, from "you must pursue this strategy, sub-optimal for conditions here" all the way to "you will stay in this barbed-wire pen until you all starve". In the 60s/70s Tanzania was further along this line than was Russia.
- iguy 8y agoFor downvoters (who perhaps don't like my swipe at commies): my point here is that not all of these were honest if misguided attempts to improve farm productivity. Some, like in Ethiopia, were closer to ethnic cleansing -- deliberately moving people (esp from Tigray IIRC) who were violently unhappy with the government, to less fertile places where they didn't understand how to farm, especially with new crops to boot. But by claiming this was a modernisation scheme was excellent PR, people like those, and the resulting famine was seen primarily as a great tragedy, and brought in lots of aid money.
- jacobush 8y agoI wonder if the Communists just got bad timing. I am not saying Capitalism isn't better - but maybe they could have made it if they'd had robotics.
- Iv 8y agoCommunism and capitalism will hopefully be made irrelevant by advanced robotics. A post-scarcity economics does not care much about structure of ownership of the means of production.
- pacala 8y agoRegrettably, there is no such thing as post-scarcity society. The exponential nature of biological reproduction ensures that no matter how much carrying capacity one builds, it will be filled to the brim in a geological blink of an eye.
- Iv 8y agoHopefully a society that is liberated from the burden of work will devote much more time at understanding and solving its political problems and should see unchecked growth as an evil to fight. Especially if we also get very extended life expectancy.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoThere have been plenty of societies historically in which very little work was required in order to live normally. What people did with the resulting free time was generally to make war on those nearby.
- Iv 8y agoThat's simply not true. Until recently agriculture was extremely labor intensive and only an elite caste could have free time.