4 ms·

The other obvious answer is that the Shire is distributist in its economy.

by hprotagonist 2y ago

skybrian 2y ago
How do you mean?
- 7thaccount 2y ago
  Look up distributivism. Catholics like Chesterton advocated for it as something of a middle ground between the abuses of capitalism and communism after the Pope write an encyclical on the tragedy of workers. They recognized both capitalism and communism as being abusive. Tolkien would have been aware of the theory I believe and it could have influenced him. Distributivist thinkers promote a more localized system of government with a strong community where the ultimate goal isn't milking out all value (capitalism). One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system (your local community isn't going to design and manufacture an Xbox or advanced medical equipment). It does sound more equitable on paper though. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/distributism-shire-political-kinship-tolkien-belloc.html https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/distributism-...
  - orwin 2y ago
    That sounds a lot like anarchist communism, what are the difference?
    - hprotagonist 2y ago
      metaphysics, for a start. Rerum Novarum is fascinating reading. They're nonexclusive options, though: dorothy day, for example, was comfortable in both camps (as much as she was comfortable in a camp at all)
    - 7thaccount 2y ago
      There are still strong property rights and ownership of the economy should be more distributed, but they don't advocate for some elite government entity to come scoop up everything and decide who gets what or outlaw people from owning land and property. Unlike capitalism, instead of a factory making some kind of widget or product (example: ice cream) that makes one individual very rich and provides a low salary to a hundred workers, you'd have thousands of people across the country doing all kinds of jobs like that and hopefully making a living wage. Unlike communism, you don't have a fully centralized power dictating all aspects of life. I'm no expert on this theory though and it isn't perfect. Such a society probably doesn't build an iPhone...maybe that is the point haha. Or maybe it can, but I'm guessing technological advancements and discoveries would take longer with less efficiency and specialization.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        Under capitalism, as soon as some business owner gets rich, everybody else goes into business to compete with him. This drives up the demand for labor and hence wages.
        7thaccount 2y ago
        First, the competition is only in markets with free competition where everyone can compete. There are many market structures within a capitalist society (example - monopolies or where other barriers to entry exist) where this simply isn't true in some large scale way. Maybe you say that isn't true capitalism, but it's the form of capitalism that actually exists. Think about fast food wages still being at minimum wage in a lot of places despite widespread competition. McDonald's CEO is rich, but their employees are still on welfare. Wages only went up during the pandemic when labor became scarce.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        Everyone? Only one competitor is needed to provide competition. Fast food wages translate directly into how the fast food is priced. Increasing min wages for fast food workers is followed immediately by price increases.
  - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
    > one of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system What kills these systems is economies of scale. You're citing one example, those in R&D, but it crops up as a handicap across production. The net result is such a society could really only exist if protected by a great power. (As we see with the Hobbits and Rangers.) And at that point, we're splitting hairs between a new economic system and benevolent feudalism.
    - skybrian 2y ago
      Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce. When labor is cheap and land is expensive, getting more food per acre is more important.
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce Economies of scale are fundamental. If 100% of your labour pool is farming, you're going to get invaded.
    - 7thaccount 2y ago
      I thought of the economies of scale issue, but didn't add it. I definitely agree it's an issue unless Hobbits are just really keen on not accepting cheap imports from abroad. I'd say it's also a problem globally if your country adopted such a system, but an enemy didn't and overcame your country's ability to defend itself. It's not that soldiers don't exist in such an economy, but that I don't think you'd be able to be competitive from a logistics standpoint and thus an easy target. For example, they're producing tanks and planes in a factory, while your country has a lot of rural blacksmiths.
      - TeMPOraL 2y ago
        That's pretty much the reason the world order looks the way it does. You could argue that people were happier as hunters and gatherers than as farmers, but agriculture allowed for growth in population and technology, leading to it plain outcompeting the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. Same with industrialization and markets. You can have whatever social order you like if it's isolated, but the moment two groups clash over some resource they both covet, one of them will dominate, and the other perish - interacting societies are subject to natural selection.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity. That's an earlier stage before industrialization, but does help make it possible. The US could be seen as another example of the benefits of cheap or free land being widely available to small farmers, even though it didn't happen through land reform. Tolkien wasn't writing about how to encourage economic growth, though. Rather the opposite. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Colonial America set up a system whereby colonists could lay claim to a piece of unused land, and if they farmed it for a while then they received ownership of it.
    - throw0101c 2y ago
      > I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity. I have read that book as well: The point of wasn't (entirely?) about agricultural productivity, but rather about giving every one / peasants a job to do to earn a living. As a country's economy progressed into higher value areas you wanted the people to leave the farms and move into factories. Over time farms should be consolidated and mechanized so that less labour is needed to produce food and more labour can create (proverbial) widgets and stuff. The books describes this as one of Japan's 'failures': there are still a lot of small, unconsolidated farms being worked by aging farmers, with little interest from younger people on working in that area. The authors argue that the answer is to consolidate the farms and mechanize, but that seems to be a difficult thing to do in Japan, culturally speaking.
  - coldtea 2y ago
    >One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      You're free to start such a commune. They're not illegal. People start them up all the time in the US. The trouble is, they don't work. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, and the people left after turning the fields into a sewage farm. The Summer of Love in San Francisco lasted 3 months or so. There are lots of others.
      - hprotagonist 2y ago
        The Bruderhof communities, the Amish, and many of the other peace churches are largely sustainable examples of communities which seem quite self sustaining in this vein. Monastic communities have operated this way, to varying degrees, for millennia. To a certain extent, even the tenured academic system reflects this sort of dynamic -- and came from the same roots.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        The Amish communities are not communes. The Bruderhof has many communes, with a total of 2900 members worldwide. Doesn't sound very successful. Monastic communities and academic communities seem to survive on external donations. "The Bruderhof run a variety of businesses that provide income to run their communities and provide common work for the members who almost all work onsite." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business? Or is it more of a cooperative?
        coldtea 2y ago
        >The Amish communities are not communes. Even if that's true (and, sure, they certainly aren't hippy communes), so? Neither me (in the original comment that spawned this subthread) nor your direct parent said anything about communes or this idea being restricted to communes. I just said "I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements" That said: >Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business? Yes - "commune" is not the same as "communist". Just means sharing stuff and living together as a close community, it's not tied to Marxism, the Paris Commune of 1870, or other such doctrines (and obviously many of the examples are religious based).
- hprotagonist 2y ago
  tolkien saw it as the person-centric economy, and advocated for it. it’s easy enough to see the idea reflected into the Shire, itself kind of an idyll of what a good society was like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
- vundercind 2y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism I assume it’s a reference to how most hobbits seem to hold and manage productive land, or at least to be attached to a family that does. (I’d not made the connection to distributism, but also get a similar sense of how their society is structured, just from reading The Hobbit and LOTR—but, this may be a biased perspective because we’re hanging around with some of the richest Hobbits that there are)
  - markus_zhang 2y ago
    I guess the Shire is probably small enough to maintain such a political structure. J.R.R.Tolkein does model it with an ideal English countryside in mind, in which people like Bilbo Barkins, who are wise, participate in the politics of the community.
svieira 2y ago
This is the right answer. The author calls it out subtly too: > the gap between the lower gentry and upper yeomanry isn’t very large, and most families are able to support themselves with only minimal assistance. For those who want to fall down the rabbit hole see: 1. The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882 2. https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-distributism https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-di...
- davyAdewoyin 2y ago
  A more quality version of the epub of the servile State can be found at https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hilaire-belloc/the-servile-state https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hilaire-belloc/the-servile...

The other obvious answer is that the Shire is distributist in its economy.

skybrian 2y ago

How do you mean?

7thaccount 2y ago
Look up distributivism. Catholics like Chesterton advocated for it as something of a middle ground between the abuses of capitalism and communism after the Pope write an encyclical on the tragedy of workers. They recognized both capitalism and communism as being abusive. Tolkien would have been aware of the theory I believe and it could have influenced him. Distributivist thinkers promote a more localized system of government with a strong community where the ultimate goal isn't milking out all value (capitalism). One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system (your local community isn't going to design and manufacture an Xbox or advanced medical equipment). It does sound more equitable on paper though. https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/distributism-shire-political-kinship-tolkien-belloc.html https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/distributism-...
- orwin 2y ago
  That sounds a lot like anarchist communism, what are the difference?
  - hprotagonist 2y ago
    metaphysics, for a start. Rerum Novarum is fascinating reading. They're nonexclusive options, though: dorothy day, for example, was comfortable in both camps (as much as she was comfortable in a camp at all)
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    There are still strong property rights and ownership of the economy should be more distributed, but they don't advocate for some elite government entity to come scoop up everything and decide who gets what or outlaw people from owning land and property. Unlike capitalism, instead of a factory making some kind of widget or product (example: ice cream) that makes one individual very rich and provides a low salary to a hundred workers, you'd have thousands of people across the country doing all kinds of jobs like that and hopefully making a living wage. Unlike communism, you don't have a fully centralized power dictating all aspects of life. I'm no expert on this theory though and it isn't perfect. Such a society probably doesn't build an iPhone...maybe that is the point haha. Or maybe it can, but I'm guessing technological advancements and discoveries would take longer with less efficiency and specialization.
    - WalterBright 2y ago
      Under capitalism, as soon as some business owner gets rich, everybody else goes into business to compete with him. This drives up the demand for labor and hence wages.
      - 7thaccount 2y ago
        First, the competition is only in markets with free competition where everyone can compete. There are many market structures within a capitalist society (example - monopolies or where other barriers to entry exist) where this simply isn't true in some large scale way. Maybe you say that isn't true capitalism, but it's the form of capitalism that actually exists. Think about fast food wages still being at minimum wage in a lot of places despite widespread competition. McDonald's CEO is rich, but their employees are still on welfare. Wages only went up during the pandemic when labor became scarce.
        WalterBright 2y ago
        Everyone? Only one competitor is needed to provide competition. Fast food wages translate directly into how the fast food is priced. Increasing min wages for fast food workers is followed immediately by price increases.
- JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > one of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system What kills these systems is economies of scale. You're citing one example, those in R&D, but it crops up as a handicap across production. The net result is such a society could really only exist if protected by a great power. (As we see with the Hobbits and Rangers.) And at that point, we're splitting hairs between a new economic system and benevolent feudalism.
  - skybrian 2y ago
    Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce. When labor is cheap and land is expensive, getting more food per acre is more important.
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce Economies of scale are fundamental. If 100% of your labour pool is farming, you're going to get invaded.
  - 7thaccount 2y ago
    I thought of the economies of scale issue, but didn't add it. I definitely agree it's an issue unless Hobbits are just really keen on not accepting cheap imports from abroad. I'd say it's also a problem globally if your country adopted such a system, but an enemy didn't and overcame your country's ability to defend itself. It's not that soldiers don't exist in such an economy, but that I don't think you'd be able to be competitive from a logistics standpoint and thus an easy target. For example, they're producing tanks and planes in a factory, while your country has a lot of rural blacksmiths.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      That's pretty much the reason the world order looks the way it does. You could argue that people were happier as hunters and gatherers than as farmers, but agriculture allowed for growth in population and technology, leading to it plain outcompeting the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. Same with industrialization and markets. You can have whatever social order you like if it's isolated, but the moment two groups clash over some resource they both covet, one of them will dominate, and the other perish - interacting societies are subject to natural selection.
- skybrian 2y ago
  I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity. That's an earlier stage before industrialization, but does help make it possible. The US could be seen as another example of the benefits of cheap or free land being widely available to small farmers, even though it didn't happen through land reform. Tolkien wasn't writing about how to encourage economic growth, though. Rather the opposite. [1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    Colonial America set up a system whereby colonists could lay claim to a piece of unused land, and if they farmed it for a while then they received ownership of it.
  - throw0101c 2y ago
    > I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity. I have read that book as well: The point of wasn't (entirely?) about agricultural productivity, but rather about giving every one / peasants a job to do to earn a living. As a country's economy progressed into higher value areas you wanted the people to leave the farms and move into factories. Over time farms should be consolidated and mechanized so that less labour is needed to produce food and more labour can create (proverbial) widgets and stuff. The books describes this as one of Japan's 'failures': there are still a lot of small, unconsolidated farms being worked by aging farmers, with little interest from younger people on working in that area. The authors argue that the answer is to consolidate the farms and mechanize, but that seems to be a difficult thing to do in Japan, culturally speaking.
- coldtea 2y ago
  >One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements.
  - WalterBright 2y ago
    You're free to start such a commune. They're not illegal. People start them up all the time in the US. The trouble is, they don't work. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, and the people left after turning the fields into a sewage farm. The Summer of Love in San Francisco lasted 3 months or so. There are lots of others.
    - hprotagonist 2y ago
      The Bruderhof communities, the Amish, and many of the other peace churches are largely sustainable examples of communities which seem quite self sustaining in this vein. Monastic communities have operated this way, to varying degrees, for millennia. To a certain extent, even the tenured academic system reflects this sort of dynamic -- and came from the same roots.
      - WalterBright 2y ago
        The Amish communities are not communes. The Bruderhof has many communes, with a total of 2900 members worldwide. Doesn't sound very successful. Monastic communities and academic communities seem to survive on external donations. "The Bruderhof run a variety of businesses that provide income to run their communities and provide common work for the members who almost all work onsite." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business? Or is it more of a cooperative?
        coldtea 2y ago
        >The Amish communities are not communes. Even if that's true (and, sure, they certainly aren't hippy communes), so? Neither me (in the original comment that spawned this subthread) nor your direct parent said anything about communes or this idea being restricted to communes. I just said "I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements" That said: >Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business? Yes - "commune" is not the same as "communist". Just means sharing stuff and living together as a close community, it's not tied to Marxism, the Paris Commune of 1870, or other such doctrines (and obviously many of the examples are religious based).
hprotagonist 2y ago
tolkien saw it as the person-centric economy, and advocated for it. it’s easy enough to see the idea reflected into the Shire, itself kind of an idyll of what a good society was like. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism
vundercind 2y ago
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism I assume it’s a reference to how most hobbits seem to hold and manage productive land, or at least to be attached to a family that does. (I’d not made the connection to distributism, but also get a similar sense of how their society is structured, just from reading The Hobbit and LOTR—but, this may be a biased perspective because we’re hanging around with some of the richest Hobbits that there are)
- markus_zhang 2y ago
  I guess the Shire is probably small enough to maintain such a political structure. J.R.R.Tolkein does model it with an ideal English countryside in mind, in which people like Bilbo Barkins, who are wise, participate in the politics of the community.

svieira 2y ago

This is the right answer. The author calls it out subtly too: > the gap between the lower gentry and upper yeomanry isn’t very large, and most families are able to support themselves with only minimal assistance. For those who want to fall down the rabbit hole see: 1. The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882 2. https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-distributism https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-di...

davyAdewoyin 2y ago
A more quality version of the epub of the servile State can be found at https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hilaire-belloc/the-servile-state https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hilaire-belloc/the-servile...