Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!

Bret Devereaux · 24 Jul 2020 · acoup.blog ↗

4 korrents from this piece

Bret Devereaux did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Farmers were the overwhelming majority of every pre-modern agrarian society — 80 to 90 per cent of it — and that single fact shapes everything else about how those societies worked.

Their wordsBecause these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say ‘the majority’ I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases

Interesting
Our reading
Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood.

Their wordsThese small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.

Interesting
Our reading
A pre-modern countryside produces an enormous amount of food and almost no extractable surplus, which is the hard limit on everything the state above it can do.

Their wordsThere is a ton of food in this countryside (nearly everyone is producing it) but hardly any surplus.

Interesting
Our reading
The "lazy peasant" is a slander of the leisured classes: pre-modern farmers stopped short of maximum effort because their priorities were not served by more of it.

Their wordsThis isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization.

Interesting