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> But if you're already growing enough to survive on, the marginal effort to grow a whole lot more than that is not so big. You're forgetting that people like
by tablespoon 6y ago
> But if you're already growing enough to survive on, the marginal effort to grow a whole lot more than that is not so big.
You're forgetting that people like to have kids, and those kids like to eat, too.
> And you probably already grow more than you need anyway, so that you don't starve in bad years.
IIRC, this problem was usually solved by having good relationships with your neighbors so they'd help you when you had a bad year. There's whole host of reasons why individualist solutions probably didn't work: e.g. storing surplus food for long periods using pre-modern technology is not as easy as it may seem.
> Seems to be that even subsistence agriculture will inevitably provoke some sort of economy, as long as other people are around.
But not necessarily a market economy.
- dTal 6y ago>good relationships with your neighbors so they'd help you when you had a bad year Yes! that's exactly the point. That's an economy. You share your food with your neighbors when their harvest is bad, and vice versa. You also swap foods when you get bored. And the more people in your food-ring, the better it works, but also the more complex it becomes to keep track of, and eventually someone gets the bright idea to start writing it down, or swapping tokens...