Source: The American Conservative.
This casual essay makes a serious point that is too often ignored: The wealth of nations derives from making things, always.
Farm or Die
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Making things used to be a lot more labor intensive. We can get more food from an acre of land through technology and efficiencies of size. Same with manufacturing.
The jobs the author denigrates pay for, distribute and market the goods. Not to mention provide the basic research that eventually makes life easier, more comfortable and longer.
That being said, if the climate changes result in less productive land, we may need to reconsider how we feed ourselves. There is a grim picture developing in many Third World nations spotlighted by the grain shipments blocked by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Moral of story is that too many people with too little large scale agriculture can be catastrophic.
That grim prediction might hold here as well. Our breadbasket areas, like the Central Valley in CA, may disappear or shrink should droughts continue. Or, perversely, the predicted mega flood could put the Valley under an inland sea, albeit temporary.
On the bright side, there is no doubt that Americans could lose a lot of weight.
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RE: “We can get more food from an acre of land through technology and efficiencies of size. Same with manufacturing.”
But we don’t. That’s the rub.
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Why not?
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RE: “Why not?”
There are different ways to explain. One is that we have moved a lot of food and manufacturing production overseas, meaning we are no longer self-sufficient. Another is that process improvements of the kind that technology provides don’t matter much when too few people engage in real, material production. Another is that economies of scale — while good for profits in large enterprises — don’t necessarily apply in small enterprises, such as growing a kitchen garden.
These points are subtle, but a rule of thumb might be that a healthy economy is one in which the maximum number of people are active in a productive way.
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Around the time of the crash in 2008, the financial sector was the largest part of our economy.
That was a failure in my book. So, yes, there is a good argument for more engagement in production.
But that is a broad category that still includes lawyers, accountants, VC, etc. Without legal and financial support, for example, businesses will stagnate or even fail to be created.
Not to say we aren’t a bit lopsided.
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