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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023

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I lost two posts replying to you and @fuckduck9000 on this, but the short version is that your arguments are persuasive. There's a number of details I'd be interested in arguing further given the time, but your point:

This is exactly the kind of problem that markets are wonderful at solving and central planning is terrible at. Obviously if too many people start to move to the cities, wages drop because of supply effects, because there's limited capital, and because the productivity of the marginal migrant goes down, which discourages more migration.

And duck's similar point:

Take trade, for example. No need to work the land if you can trade clothes or swords for more polish or egyptian grain than you could ever have produced. And the mere presence of that transport capacity makes famine less likely.

There were other points I'd like to pursue, but I'm sure we'll get back to it sooner or later. For now, consider me educated.

There's a number of details I'd be interested in arguing further given the time, but your point:

Sure, and I appreciate your willingness to be persuaded (and to admit to it!).

To hopefully try to give you a few more specifics:

With no IC engines, no electricity, no pesticides, no modern crops and techniques and a general iron-age toolset at best, we would in fact most likely all be starving if we didn't work the land. That's my understanding, at least. Is yours different? ... What tools then existing and proven would make up for, say, a 30% reduction in agricultural labor?

I don't think the portion of peasants trying to move into cities (many just wanted to move to a better paying farm) was ever like 30% post-Black Death. The population of London was probably not much more than 100,000 around this time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_cities_in_history#Timeline:Roman_Empire%E2%80%93Modern_Age(1%E2%80%931800_A.D.)) while the total population of England was around 2 million (https://brewminate.com/the-collapse-of-the-middle-ages/) even after the plague decimated it. It was never going to be remotely feasible for 7x the population of the largest city to just move in all at once even if they wanted to; you don't have to ban that. My understanding is that somewhere around a few percent of the population would have left agriculture. Prior to the plague, average productivity had been declining as more and more marginal land was being ploughed, so the reduction in population probably allowed for a little bit of breathing room.

Also, there were options to improve productivity at the time. To give a few examples, oxen were being replaced by horses as draft animals (20 percent in England in 1086, 60 percent by 1574). Watermills were also being constructed at a quick pace, one for every 50 people in Southern England in 1086 and twice that 200 years later. Nothing revolutionary, but it was certainly feasible to absorb a minor decline in agricultural labor, especially if some of that decline is being invested in things that increase productivity.

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