[HN Gopher] Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life in C...
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       Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life in Cycles
        
       Author : bell-cot
       Score  : 60 points
       Date   : 2025-10-18 08:31 UTC (14 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (acoup.blog)
 (TXT) w3m dump (acoup.blog)
        
       | throwup238 wrote:
       | This is a great series and I'd love to see an addendum covering
       | different staples like rice, alternative social structures like
       | tribal systems, and the impacts of different forms of irrigation.
        
         | bell-cot wrote:
         | From memory - Prof. Devereaux has briefly touched on those a
         | few times. But with heavy disclaimers that all are outside his
         | own areas of historical expertise - so anyone who cares should
         | go read accounts by subject-matter experts.
        
       | jstanley wrote:
       | > the heavy extraction regime they operate under
       | 
       | It might be interesting to quantify this. How does it compare to
       | typical tax rates today?
        
         | claytonwramsey wrote:
         | This is covered in a previous article:
         | https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...
         | 
         | In short, most peasant farmers must sharecrop at least some of
         | their land, and on sharecropped land, extraction rates are on
         | the order of 50% (for basically nothing in return).
        
           | nosianu wrote:
           | > _for basically nothing in return_
           | 
           | Basix protection and basic law? Sure, far from an ideal model
           | we would have in mind today, the comparison is against a
           | completely "free" society as in much much longer ago.
           | 
           | > _must sharecrop at least some of their land, and on
           | sharecropped land, extraction rates are on the order of 50%
           | (for basically nothing in return)._
           | 
           | Uhm... so half of an unknown number? That's also an unknown
           | number then, and the very concrete "50%" means nothing.
           | 
           | I'm only complaining about the TL;DR, the original article is
           | great. After reading it, I think there is no good TL;DR
           | possible. There is too much to consider, actually reading
           | that link seems and unavoidable if one actually wants to
           | know. Would someone in two hundred years looking at average
           | income in the US today as the one or two sentence TL;DR have
           | a useful picture of what life is like in the US today?
        
           | lm28469 wrote:
           | > extraction rates are on the order of 50% (for basically
           | nothing in return).
           | 
           | Hey that's pretty much what we have in Germany, probably even
           | higher thanks to vat, capital gains, &c.
        
             | multjoy wrote:
             | You have roads, infrastructure, a social security system,
             | hospitals, schools...
             | 
             | The peasant got nothing.
        
         | xen0 wrote:
         | Part 4c (this is quite a long series) goes into some detail
         | here. https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-
         | death-an...
         | 
         | My own interpretation is that it's difficult to precisely
         | compare how peasants were exploited to modern taxation regimes
         | in the developed world. Perhaps more as an unfavorable
         | relationship with the only employer in town?
        
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       (page generated 2025-10-18 23:01 UTC)