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I live in Australia. Australia produces 190% of the food it requires, exports 71% of its agricultural production, and only 2.2% of its population work in agricu

by strken 4y ago

I live in Australia. Australia produces 190% of the food it requires, exports 71% of its agricultural production, and only 2.2% of its population work in agriculture. In earlier societies around 60% or more of the population worked in agriculture. I don't believe most of this increasing agricultural productivity is due to us buying things from poor countries, although it's probably a factor at some level. I think it's due to the increasing technological sophistication of farming: the breeding of more productive crops, the use of tractors, the use of fertiliser both synthetic and man-made, better understanding and monitoring of soil health, better storage and better supply chains, new weedkillers, automated and partially automated animal handling, refrigeration and freezers, and everything else. I do understand that someone has to do some work, but if we could have 8.8% of our population work in agriculture for 10 hours a week and not have to compete for housing against 40 hours a week incomes[0], that would be pretty great. [0] Numbers are wrong: farmers work more than 40 hours a week. I think they explain the general point well enough, though.

imgabe 4y ago
People need more than food. Healthcare, education, electricity, water, the fancy phone or computer you’re reading this on, the infrastructure that connects it together with everyone else - all of these require people working in order to exist.
mrtksn 4y ago
Food is just part of the human consumption. Starting with the agrarian society, we as species are having it very easy TBH. Disasters happen and some places are chronically problematic but overall food is solved problem since many millenniums. Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.
- strken 4y ago
  I don't buy the argument that people living in Australia would starve to death if everyone in the world gradually halved their working hours over the next decade. I think current consumption here is so far above subsistence levels that there's a lot of room to drop without facing famine. This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?
  - mrtksn 4y ago
    If halved working hours result in reduced output of the needed chemicals and machinery, that would definitely mean that less food will be produced. If Australia can keep up paying more than the rest and purchase the needed resources and machinery, then other parts of the world will starve and Australia will be just fine, I guess. Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.
    - Dylan16807 4y ago
      > Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die. And you'd have to assume nobody would change jobs. It's a useless extrapolation.
    - strken 4y ago
      I think you're suggesting that - the world is at literal subsistence level overall - all nominal gains in productivity are just shuffling numbers around - if anyone at all stops working, people will die This seems obviously untrue given the increase in agricultural productivity. I know a few farmers, and none of them think agricultural productivity has stayed the same. Additionally, it seems really obvious that lots of industrial production is now going towards making luxury cars, TVs, smartphones, bigger houses, better healthcare, etc. and that not all of these are necessary for agricultural production. Even further, global food insecurity has been decreasing. Only 8.9% of the world's population are food insecure, and prior to the war in Ukraine, those people mostly didn't live in agriculturally productive areas. I find it hard to believe that the remaining 91% are living off the work of the 8.9%. I think a much simpler explanation is that agriculture has actually gotten more productive even if you include the cost of making tractors.
ben_w 4y ago
On this topic, a question I've had for a while but never learned the answer to is: if nobody did anything outside farming, how expensive would farm equipment be? I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Part of it is that there's a certain amount of food each person can reasonably eat - so if you want to feed a hundred people you can have, say, five or so with modern equipment farm the field and feed all 100, or you could have all 100 work with more outdated equipment (think: horses, etc) and farm the same amount.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    I think I’m asking a different question: if we could actually work much less? Can we really feed people if everyone who isn’t currently a farmer or making farm equipment/consumables stopped working, or are greater economies of scale needed to keep the cost of that farm equipment and those consumables low?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Large swaths of people do work that is not even remotely related to farming, even if you need Google and AT&T for the companies that make the supplies farmers need, there's no arguable way the entertainment industry as a whole is necessary for farming or farming equipment. And I daresay there are others.
      - ben_w 4y ago
        Possibly. But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get. Same for petrochemicals, steel. I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.

by strken 4y ago

imgabe 4y ago

People need more than food. Healthcare, education, electricity, water, the fancy phone or computer you’re reading this on, the infrastructure that connects it together with everyone else - all of these require people working in order to exist.

mrtksn 4y ago

Food is just part of the human consumption. Starting with the agrarian society, we as species are having it very easy TBH. Disasters happen and some places are chronically problematic but overall food is solved problem since many millenniums. Thanks to the developments in the last century, incredibly small percentage of people directly produce the food. However this is due to paradigm shift, these people are capable to produce so much food is thanks to other people who produce their tools and resources used in production of food. Still huge number of people are working in feeding the population, just indirectly.

strken 4y ago
I don't buy the argument that people living in Australia would starve to death if everyone in the world gradually halved their working hours over the next decade. I think current consumption here is so far above subsistence levels that there's a lot of room to drop without facing famine. This is less clear-cut for anyone in a society that's close to subsistence and I'm not in any way suggesting that we should all cut our hours by 50%, but why not 20%? Even if food production decreases linearly, we'd still be at a 152% surplus, right?
- mrtksn 4y ago
  If halved working hours result in reduced output of the needed chemicals and machinery, that would definitely mean that less food will be produced. If Australia can keep up paying more than the rest and purchase the needed resources and machinery, then other parts of the world will starve and Australia will be just fine, I guess. Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    > Ideally, paying more should be able to convince people to work and prevent supply chain shortages but if for some strange reason people all over the world insist on working less some people who are less fortunate will definitely need to change their diet or even die. And you'd have to assume nobody would change jobs. It's a useless extrapolation.
  - strken 4y ago
    I think you're suggesting that - the world is at literal subsistence level overall - all nominal gains in productivity are just shuffling numbers around - if anyone at all stops working, people will die This seems obviously untrue given the increase in agricultural productivity. I know a few farmers, and none of them think agricultural productivity has stayed the same. Additionally, it seems really obvious that lots of industrial production is now going towards making luxury cars, TVs, smartphones, bigger houses, better healthcare, etc. and that not all of these are necessary for agricultural production. Even further, global food insecurity has been decreasing. Only 8.9% of the world's population are food insecure, and prior to the war in Ukraine, those people mostly didn't live in agriculturally productive areas. I find it hard to believe that the remaining 91% are living off the work of the 8.9%. I think a much simpler explanation is that agriculture has actually gotten more productive even if you include the cost of making tractors.

ben_w 4y ago

On this topic, a question I've had for a while but never learned the answer to is: if nobody did anything outside farming, how expensive would farm equipment be? I assume there's some scale benefit to agricultural vehicles from the production of everyone else's vehicles, and likewise the construction and maintenance of the transport infrastructure to get food from the farms to the people, but I don't know whether or not that scaling benefit is enough to change the conclusion.

bombcar 4y ago
Part of it is that there's a certain amount of food each person can reasonably eat - so if you want to feed a hundred people you can have, say, five or so with modern equipment farm the field and feed all 100, or you could have all 100 work with more outdated equipment (think: horses, etc) and farm the same amount.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I think I’m asking a different question: if we could actually work much less? Can we really feed people if everyone who isn’t currently a farmer or making farm equipment/consumables stopped working, or are greater economies of scale needed to keep the cost of that farm equipment and those consumables low?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Large swaths of people do work that is not even remotely related to farming, even if you need Google and AT&T for the companies that make the supplies farmers need, there's no arguable way the entertainment industry as a whole is necessary for farming or farming equipment. And I daresay there are others.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Possibly. But also possibly (at least given my limited economics awareness): everyone who uses a motorcar increases the scale of the automotive industry, and the automotive industry gets cheaper per unit the more units are made, so the fewer cars get sold to video game develops the more expensive tractors get. Same for petrochemicals, steel. I don’t have any answers, it’s just a question I doubt I can as yet even manage to phrase well enough for the average real economist to consider interesting.