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The greatest innovation in the history of mankind was a land consolidation. It took what 100 peasants all making enough food for subsistence living to 100 peasa
by earlINmeyerkeg 7y ago
The greatest innovation in the history of mankind was a land consolidation. It took what 100 peasants all making enough food for subsistence living to 100 peasants be able to make enough food for thousands of people.
It's not sad, it's progress.
- zorpner 7y agoIt's not sad, it's progress. These are not mutually exclusive concepts.
- kristiandupont 7y agoIndeed. Also, many things that are good in moderation are bad in excess.
- temporalparts 7y agoIt's sad that progress must mean sadness for some. We should have better social safety net so that displacement doesn't mean despair.
- macinjosh 7y agoWhile the financial/livelihood component is a major factor I think most of those affected, if asked, would say that is the least of the reasons for their sadness. It is the intangible things being lost and the end of a way of life that causes the most pain IMHO.
- earlINmeyerkeg 7y agoYou're right. I think I personally just get so incredibly upset with people who always look toward the past or are just mortified of change. I associate the sadness with their fear of change.
- macinjosh 7y agoProgress on a societal scale for certain. Sadness on the personal scale as new generations mourn the loss of their family's historical way of life. Both can exist :)
- earlINmeyerkeg 7y agoThat only exists on a generational level. The generations born afterward will never know about it, and therefore not care because it wasn't embedded in their cultural perspective. It's like taking a childs binky away. Over time, you totally forget why you even had the thing in the first place.
- cpach 7y agoNo need to be condescending.
- sl1ck731 7y agoThe same could be said for robots displacing humans in factories or trucks or anywhere else. That doesn't make it less sad for people's whose livelihoods depend on those positions just because its technological progress.
- wolco 7y agoWhat is the fear around robots? Machines have been displacing human labour for the last 100 years.
- cmcd 7y agoDuring the industrial revolution hard labor jobs transitioned to maintenance work for the machines. The problem is as we improve at automation the need for non-technical maintenance decreases. A small team of engineers can displace thousands or tens of thousands of workers without creating any new opportunities.
- wolco 7y agoIt frees up a population to do other work. A small team of engineers can create a platform that creates something new to work on. Second life clothing shop for example that would not exist without machines displacing humans.
- mrb 7y ago«A small team of engineers can displace thousands or tens of thousands of workers without creating any new opportunities.» A corporation that did that would have significantly increased its profits, and this new wealth is often (not always) indirectly redistributed to society. For example the corporation could increase its production (ie. hiring more workers), or increase salaries/bonuses, or increase stock buybacks (therefore benefiting stock owners whoever they are), or spin off new business units, or decrease the prices of their products/services to further improve their competitiveness (hence benefiting customers), etc. Rarely does a corporation sit on piles of cash doing nothing (one notable counter-example: Apple.)
- dwnvoted2hell 7y agoI wouldn't call it all progress. I mean, we require fertilizer and pesticides today. There was a time when neither was needed.
- trhway 7y agoit is a great progress, yep. We just always implement it in a sad, social darwinism style, way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8&list=PLwcGjCE72Unr2EgwZSc3uYiOpYiDlUolK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEYHczRar8&list=PLwcGjCE72U...
- andrepd 7y agoLand consolidation can be done through communes/co-ops, in which case the benefits of increased productivity are fairly distributed, or through private corporations, in which case profits are privatised and concentrated on a small owner elite class.
- jessant 7y agoNothing stopping people from doing that.
- ahoy 7y agoThere is an enormous body of law in the US that incentivizes a top-down corporate business structure and disincentives a co-op business structure.
- jessant 7y agoI think human nature incentivizes top-down corporate business structures and disincentivizes co-op businesss structures.
- apt-get 7y agoWhich is why 75% of France's farmers belong to an agricultural cooperative?
- cpach 7y agoAre those profitable though? Farming is heavily subsidized by the EU.
- Apocryphon 7y agoAnd American agriculture is likewise heavily subsidized by the federal government.
- 7y ago
- Amezarak 7y agoThis particular progress makes us vastly more vulnerable to a catastrophic systems collapse. A lot of small, independent farmers are more antifragile to natural events than a few giant megacorporations. We're optimizing for profits at the expense of disaster.
- 8bitsrule 7y agoHere we are, in a time when the shortcomings of centralization are rabidly apparent -across the board-. Counting that as some kind of win can only appeal to those who believe they are winning. For all the rest of us, the cheerful irony is more than a little disarming. Efficiency and longevity can be inversely proportional. May the reductionists alone reap their crop.
- jv22222 7y agoI heard somewhere that the greatest innovation (the most impactful at the particular stage of our evolution) was the bicycle, because, it enabled human cross breeding over much larger distances at a much faster rate than possible before.
- Armisael16 7y agoThat seems rather implausible given that railroads came about at the same time.
- jv22222 7y agoWell, there would be a lot more bicycles and they could go a lot more places a lot faster, no? I.E. They would enable a much faster rate of genetic mutation.
- jeffrallen 7y agoAlso isn't it a lot more comfortable cross-breeding in a sleeper car than on a bicycle? (Asking for a friend.)
- Armisael16 7y agoNo. Bicycles were heavy, uncomfortable products for the first ~40 years of their existence. Rubber tires and pedals didn’t come to bicycles until the 1860s. By that point the US had >30k miles of extensively linking most of the northern states. The modern bicycle didn’t really come into being until the 1890s. I’m having a hard time getting numbers for track in Europe, but the UK was the real pioneer and Germany followed quickly.
- jv22222 7y agoWell, clearly, wherever I heard that from was a terrible source of information! I stand corrected!
- lmm 7y agoHow affordable was railroad travel? Even assuming there was a railroad in the right place, would people have been able to go back and forth often enough for courtship?
- vonnik 7y agoWho says progress can't be sad? The consolidation you're talking about was a massive disruption, which brought a lot of change to families and societies. Most kinds of change are painful even when they lead to greater efficiency. While the transformation of agriculture has led to great prosperity, prosperity also brings hierarchy; i.e. more unequal social forms. Much of the US has transitioned from a relatively agrarian and egalitarian society to one that is much richer, but also less equal and more divided, in the last 150 years. There are clear tradeoffs in that transition, which some people might call the march of progress. Ways of life die off, and those who knew them in childhood often regret their passage, regardless of whether the world's wheat production increases.
- durge 7y agoYou should read 'The Storm Before the Storm' by Mike Duncan. It details the fall of the Roman Republic and highlights the role played by land consolidation and the social dislocation that gave rise to the empire. For better or worse, it was definitely less stable.
- ydb 7y agoIt looks like the neoliberal cult of "progress" has its acolytes on Hacker News, but that really shouldn't surprise. What is sad, though, is the distinct lack of empathy that this ideology instills in its adherents. Leaving people behind is not a sign of progress; instead, it's a sign of an ill society.
- danem 7y agoI'll take being able to feed the entire world's population more affordably than ever over the jobs of a small group of people in a rich country. This isn't to say the government should play no role in cushioning those affected by progress, but the progress has been undeniably good.
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoProgress implies improvement. s/progress/change/
- danem 7y agoAnd how haven't things improved for the vast majority of people on Earth in regard to food security?
- TeMPOraL 7y agoThe dependence on fossil fuels goes so deep that we may end up having to choose between going hungry and overheating the planet.
- carapace 7y agoWell, it's interesting, we now have obesity problems and other issues brought on by our very success. "Too much is always better than not enough." But too much still brings trade-offs. Further, consider that, since the invention of artificial nitrogen fertilizer[1] we have been converting oil into humans[2], and population growth is the main driver of environmental impacts. Food security is an illusion: if anything ever interrupts the production of nitrogen fertilizer in a serious way billions of people will starve. Jared Diamond called agriculture "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race"[3] We cannot judge the benefits of our civilization just yet. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process circa 1910 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population Look at the graph, notice that it curves up sharply circa 1925-1950. [3] http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Diamond_WorstMistake.pdf http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/THOC/Readings/Diamond_Worst...
- NeedMoreTea 7y agoThe end of peasantry was long before the rise of corporate, industrialised agriculture. Like so many human activities, fashions, and innovations, the reduction in numbers required to work the land started off providing a benefit and ultimately went much too far. Looking at the destruction such as algal blooms in countless water courses from over fertilisation, steady soil erosion, loss of wild flora and fauna caused by industrialised agriculture and the colossal fields with a single crop, as far as the eye can see in every direction, it's hard to call it progress. It's change. Milk in shops is older than it was, homogenisation allows older milk to pass without notice. It's not progress, and hasn't been for quite some considerable time. We have large, pretty, consistent fruit and vegetables, but there's been a 50% decline in nutrient content since the war, and a similar decline in taste -- frequently replaced by sugars. We've hugely increased systemic risk from use of monocrops as all it takes is a single virulent disease to put the entire world's production at risk -- see bananas. Even the productivity gains are overstated. On the old mixed, family farm the raw individual crop productivity was far lower, but the chickens, pigs and plants overlapped such that the waste of one provided food or fertiliser for the others, the animals provided some degree of pest control, and as a whole the productivity was far better than usually assumed. Industrialisation begets simplification, begets monoculture, for the sake of profit not progress.
- joshuahughes 7y agoThank you for taking the time to give a detailed response here. I’ve always found it astonishing that the side-effects of ‘progress’ like diminishing nutrient content and environmental impact are so willingly ignored. Feeding more people is a positive, but it’s rather a hollow victory if their well-being and health ultimately takes a hit.
- holoduke 7y agoYes maybe the word progress is wrong. It should be control. In the end the goal of human kind is to take control of every square inch on this planet. Farming has shown some real advancing examples of this principle