[HN Gopher] In two centuries, the labor to produce a kilogram of...
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In two centuries, the labor to produce a kilogram of grain was
reduced by 99.7%
Author : hubraumhugo
Score : 67 points
Date : 2022-08-22 16:40 UTC (6 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| thevagrant wrote:
| Yet 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| They 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 wrote:
| Wasn'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"?
| djbebs wrote:
| Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to
| capital investments if it wants raises.
|
| Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost
| entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at
| what it does.
|
| If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on
| its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that
| capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase
| in productivity was thanks to them.
| janef0421 wrote:
| Capital is itself a product of labor.
| djbebs wrote:
| Great, then surely labor will be able to pay for it.
| daly wrote:
| Does 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?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Grain 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).
| melony wrote:
| That's a mostly fixed cost.
| MerelyMortal wrote:
| And all of the supporting infrastructure including _everything_
| it takes to maintain the governments that write and enforce
| trade treaties, improve the roads, launch the satellites that
| makes communication for efficient allocation of resources
| possible, etc.
| Gravyness wrote:
| What 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 wrote:
| zaroth wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| If 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.
| zaroth wrote:
| If I am calculating it correctly... That's what a 2.89%
| productivity increase every year for 200 years gets you!
| sokoloff wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Row farming is still very labor intensive compared to other
| industries. Farming is hard.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| A 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.
| [deleted]
| Qem wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| And 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.
| thevagrant wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| Oh I understand. My wife and I have 7 gardens.
|
| But it's a pipe dream that 'everybody should do it'.
| jrussino wrote:
| I 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.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Understood. But things have changed - population growth has
| leveled off. Efficiency of food has increased geometrically.
| A sustainable balance could very well be achieved with
| careful management. And without everybody growing organic
| tomatoes in their back yard.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Community gardening is a form of leisure and organic food is a
| luxury good, neither of which are a giant step backwards for
| civilization.
| jimcavel888 wrote:
| titaniumtown wrote:
| That's insane! I mean, I don't know what I expected lol.
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