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In two centuries, the labor to produce a kilogram of grain was reduced by 99.7%
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zaroth 4y agoIf I am calculating it correctly... That’s what a 2.89% productivity increase every year for 200 years gets you!
- hackernewds 4y agoThat doesn't sound right with compounding
- dTal 4y agoI get a 2.86% percentage point decrease in work year on year, or a 2.95% increase in productivity. Seems okay either way.
- sokoloff 4y agoI’m surprised that it’s only a factor of ~300 between the modern, highly mechanized grain farm and 200 years ago (before the engine, before modern fertilizers, and before electrically pumped irrigation).
- captainredbeard 4y agoRow farming is still very labor intensive compared to other industries. Farming is hard.
- UncleEntity 4y agoA lot of it has to do with the governments incentivizing less efficient practices to support smaller farms. A megacorp running a million acres would be a lot more efficient than a 1000 families running 1000 acre farms but, for various reasons, the system is biased towards the latter. These Silicon Valley tycoons are trying to “disrupt” agriculture but they aren’t going around telling anyone what they’re up to, just buying up a bunch of land and hoping nobody notices. The political winds will not favor their usual shenanigans.
- titaniumtown 4y agoThat's insane! I mean, I don't know what I expected lol.
- Gravyness 4y agoWhat kind of economic revolution will happen as that statistics approaches 100% for every good, not just grain? Because eventually "work" will be so unnecessary we will need to redistribute money to people who have nothing to do and now that I put that into words I have realized that is already happening at my country, nevermind.
- jimcavel888 4y ago
- zaroth 4y agoNot sure why this is downvoted. The preeminent economists of the age thought that this is exactly what would happen - everyone would be working 2-4 hours a week and there would be nothing left to be done because every hour would be so damn productive. The problem is twofold. First, there’s a lot of people in the world and bringing them out of poverty increases the economy up to 3 orders of magnitude, e.g. from living on $0.25 a day to living on $250 a day, which can suck up a whole lot of productivity gains. And secondly, as it turns out, there’s always new places to shift demand when less and less of your budget is required just to subsist. And then when all those “beyond sustenance” dollars all start chasing the same limited supply of goods, say, a house in the Bay Area, or even a lobster dinner…
- treeman79 4y agoIf your willing to live by 1800 quality of life then 5 hours a week at minimum wage will be plenty of money. Sack of beans and grain. Few yards of cloth. Land is the only limiter. Even that is cheap if your willing to live in middle of no where.
- hackernewds 4y agoExactly. We are already there to subsist on basic human needs for food and shelter on < 10 hours work per week. But the human need to keep uplifting our lives will ensure we're always in the rat race desiring to settle in California or Hawaii
- daly 4y agoDoes this also include the labor to find/mine/refine/ship the fuel and the labor to mine/refine/shape/assemble/maintain both the factory machines and the farm equipment?
- melony 4y agoThat's a mostly fixed cost.
- dragontamer 4y agoGrain was transported by horse back then. We switched to automobiles because fuel is far denser. One semi-truck full of gasoline can provide thousands-of-trips and carry tons-and-tons of product. Ex: 1-ton of gasoline carries hundreds-of-tons of product. In contrast, 10-tons of horse feed will only feed enough horses to carry maybe 10-tons of actual product, depending on distance. I forget the math exactly, but there's a reason why the horse-to-automobile tranformation only took a decade. The difference between horse-feed and gasoline is completely massive and almost an unfathomable increase in efficiency, due to the ratio of "fuel-per-ton" (ie: horse bread in the 1800s vs gasoline in the modern day).
- hyperman1 4y agoI read somewhere how automobiles were the environmental cleanup of their times. We first had horses producing far more manure than a city could handle, with all kinds of hygiene/smell/viability consequenses. People complained how cities became unliveable. Cars fixed all that. No more feed, no more manure, no more raising and keeping alive the animals. All replaced with a very energy dense fuel, a machine you can just leave on the street, and some very clean minimal exhaust. Then we all got cars.
- chii 4y ago> People complained how cities became unliveable. so by extrapolation, would we need the world to become unliveable before cars gets replaced?
- Qem 4y agoI bet this trend will soon reverse, as ecosystems starts to fail one after other, due to climate change, persistent organic pollutants build up, et cetera, and we eventually must replace free ecoservices we rely on today (e.g. pollination by bees, irrigation provided by rainfall) with intensive human work.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAnd strangely, there's a culture of folks resisting this, trying to get us all back into agriculture. Community gardens, organic food etc. A giant step backward for civilization, to be sure.
- jimcavel888 4y ago[flagged]
- helen___keller 4y agoCommunity gardening is a form of leisure and organic food is a luxury good, neither of which are a giant step backwards for civilization.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoAs such, no. I'm just sensitive to the organic-type (yes, here on HN) that pushes the crazy notion that only organic food should be permitted. Clearly, a giant step backward.
- thevagrant 4y agoI'm not sure people who want community gardens are resisting this. It's more about being able to grow for yourself, should one choose to do so. There is a certain benefit to gardening. It is calming, while still remaining active physically. It provides a low cost food source and some benefit arises from the appreciation you get when you grow and harvest your own food. Both productive growing and localised growing can exist together.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoOh I understand. My wife and I have 7 gardens. But it's a pipe dream that 'everybody should do it'.
- jrussino 4y agoI don't see it as "resisting" or trying to go "back". Maybe I'm out of touch, but back when I was in school it was starting to be accepted that both (a) industrialization, globalization, and technological progress have lead to dramatically improved quality of life in general, including the ability to feed many many more people much more efficiently, and (b) the way that we're doing this at the moment is literally unsustainable, in the sense that it just won't be possible to continue to do it this way in perpetuity. Some people take this seriously, and want to find ways to move forward (not "back") to find ways of thriving that aren't doomed to fail eventually... When you look at it that way I don't think it's "strange" at all.
- thevagrant 4y agoYet since as long as I can remember, I see business claiming we need to raise productivity before workers can expect a rise in wages.
- filoleg 4y agoI would assume that's because the standards of living and quality of life for an average person has gone quite up over the past couple of centuries as well. Sure, you can produce the same amount of stuff today with much less effort than it required back then. But we also require more of the same stuff produced and also plenty of stuff that wasn't even possible to produce back then. That is, if we want to maintain the current standards of living and quality of life (instead of that from two centuries ago). And, turns out, people vastly tend to prefer average standards of living and quality of life from today over those from 1800s.
- jvanderbot 4y agoThat living standard could be considered a raise. What would someone in 1800 pay to have my air conditioned house with a fridge full of beer, frozen pizzas galore, and a car that can drive me 300 miles approximately 200 times before I need to do maintenance. And I could afford that as a pizza delivery guy 20 years ago. A raise implies you're richer than someone, but a rising tide seemed to have lifted all boats.
- janef0421 4y agoThey haven't, actually. Standards of living were terrible in the 1800s because enclosure had forced most people off farmland and into overcrowded cities where they were effectively forced to work long hours in incredibly dangerous conditions. Actually wellbeing has at best returned to the level of the early modern period in the global north, with standards in the global south being worse by an order of magnitude.
- abeppu 4y agoWasn't enclosure basically a British (English?) issue? This post oddly zooms from an observation about one relatively small country and then tries to make a sweeping claim about the global north and global south. What do you mean when you say "actual wellbeing"?
- mikewarot 4y agoIgnoring the exogenous energy expenditures implicit in industrial agriculture is a foolish oversight, especially in light of the upcoming shortages in fertilizer and other inputs due to supply disruptions from Russia, Ukraine and China. We may see billions malnourished within a year. Additionally, if Russia's gas infrastructure is allowed to freeze over, due to demand restrictions, they might not be able to recover. The last supply disruption (When the Soviet Union collapsed) caused damage that took until 2021 to repair. Permanent loss of a large fraction of the worlds fertilizer supply is a very real possibility. Much marginal farmland would be lost as a result.