Matthew Yglesias's flawed anti-agrarian logic

Philosopher-cum-economics writer Matthew Iglesias wouldn't agree with my last post about the sadness of people leaving the land for the city. For him, agriculture is a "scourge", while the service sector is the way to go. Like many economic thinkers, he seems to be dazzled by the sheer volume of the service economy (I sell you a shoe, it's a service, I buy a cigarette, it's a service, I get an operation for lung cancer, it's a service!) while neglecting the fact that, despite its ostensibly small share of the value created in any given economy, agriculture underlies everything. Without agriculture, there are no services. We just starve.

Yglesias has posted some random photo of a Cambodian rice farmer so as to illustrate how objectively, qualitatively awful farmwork is. The problem is that the woman in the photo is smiling! Look for that in a US supermarket!

Anyway, the writer uses Marx's term of "the idiocy of rural life". This turn of phrase in uncritical, modernist language comes from the same paragraph as a discussion of "barbarian and semi-barbarian countries". As far as I know, Marx never lived in a rural area, but rather spent his entire life among self-centered, decadent academic types in the various cities of Europe. I've been to Trier, the town where Marx is from. Not much rural life to be experienced or accurately judged, not even 150 years ago, I imagine. Perhaps it makes sense that there are so many economists out there bemoaning the drudgery of rural life (Jeffrey Sachs, Paul Collier, etc.)--they wouldn't have become desk-sitting academics if they actually liked physical work. Their invective against agrarian culture should then strike us not so much as insightful truth but rather as the personal prejudices of a certain type of person. This is not an ad hominem attack, just a recognition that if someone who doesn't know a particular reality comments on that reality, we must regard his affirmations more as a reflection of the person than of the topic he's commenting on. In the same way, my advocacy for agrarian lifestyles could be written off as a subjective personal preference, if I didn't show any evidence to back up my arguments.

Yglesias makes his sweeping pronouncements on rural life with no evidence whatsoever. He does not cite any study supporting his affirmation that farming "is not much fun". I, on the other hand, am trained and experienced in studying farming systems. Talking to farmers about farming is what I do for a living. I don't believe anyone I've ever spoken to in the countryside, in Benin, Haiti, Colombia, the US, or France, has ever cited the lack of fun in farming as a prime difficulty or a reason for getting out of farming. In fact, something I see and hear time and again is that people desperately want to maintain their life of farming, of living in rural areas, of keeping old traditions, and that they are even willing to take a slight economic hit to do so. That is to say that people are willing to make some economic sacrifices to continue farming, but there comes a point when it is so difficult economically that they have no other choice but to leave the land. The prime difficulty in farming most everywhere I've worked is that it does not pay enough to make a dignified living.

I really hate it when economists dump on farming and rural life with a bunch of subjective, biased, unfounded affirmations. If we're going to go into subjective qualities, then to be honest, anyone mentioning the physical difficulty of some aspects of farm labor should also mention the deeply satisfying sensations derived from ties to the land and to one's traditions and roots. Better yet, they should try measuring both the positive and the negative qualitative traits of rural life so as to make an honest assessment. Even better yet, economists should just keep away from emotive language and subjective personal evaluations altogether, and stick to hard, economic numbers. If they were to do so, they might learn some interesting things, as I have and as Alexander Chayanov did almost a century ago.

For one, an honest economic appraisal of agriculture often reveals that a day of work in subsistence agriculture pays a lot better than a day of paid wage labor. Of course the "pay" of subsistence agriculture is in kind, not in cash. A Colombian farmer may generate $50US or more worth of cassava and plantain for every day he works in his small plot. The problem is that he can only consume so much of this production, and poor markets (given that everyone else is also producing the same things for their own consumption) remove the possibility to produce more for sale. So often the problem of "rural life as practiced in pre-industrial societies" isn't that it is "horrible", as Yglesias contends, but rather that it's pretty good and easy-going, but there is a low ceiling to the amount of value you can create from your work. For relatively little work you can provide food and a bit more for you and your family, but beyond that point there's no economically productive way to spend the rest of your time. People aren't overworked or even underfed in many agrarian societies, but rather the opposite; they don't work as much as they might, because there's no profitable work to be had beyond a certain point. Thus they have basic food needs met but have little access to cash money to buy other things, like computers, internet service, etc. (rural people in many places I've studied actually do pretty well as far as access to TV and sometimes electricity).

As for Yglesias's claims about the economic repercussions of people getting out of farming, they are also sloppy. He claims that land is the prime (actually, he implies it's the only) determinant of value creation (he sloppily talks about "earning") in agriculture. This is of course nonsense. My family owns untended secondary forest land in Wisconsin. It is nine acres or so, and produces no economic value. If I were to plant an apple tree (an investment of seeds and labor), it would start producing a few dollars for nine acres. If I were to plant thousands of apple trees, manage them with knowledge (human capital) and hard work, apply fertilizers (a manufactured input), and market the apples through an ingenious sales mechanism, I would be making a comfortable, First-World living from that land. If I grazed goats and pigs underneath those trees, or stocked trout in the ponds, or organized agritourism visits on my land (which is, granted, a detour into services), I'd be making even more money. The bottom line is that in all of these considerations, the amount of land I do or don't have is only one factor, along with use of labor and capital, that determines what I earn from it. So Yglesias's assertion totally ignores the question of intensity of land use, be it through investments of capital, water, manure, labor, or any other number of things you can apply to that land.

Furthermore, Yglesias claims that one person's leaving the land means that his neighbor's income "leaps upward" if he can farm that land. Again, this is a simple and silly assertion from someone who should've done his homework better. Usually when one person leaves the land, it is because prices are falling, and a production level that was formerly enough to get by on is no longer so. For instance, if you sell an amount of wheat that earns enough to live on for a year, but the next year wheat's price falls by 10% (and/or your operation costs go up due to higher fertilizer prices, for example), your yearly production will now fall 10% short of what you need to live on. You will probably get out of farming, sooner or later. If you move, your neighbor might farm your land and thus earn 90% of what he earned last year plus 90% of what you earned last year. But prices inevitably keep falling, leading more people to leave the land, and just a few people now farming broad tracts just to earn enough to get by.

As in any other non-monopoly market scenario, farming tends toward a zero-profit asymptote. It is a trend that favors use of less labor and more capital, and makes less productive use of the land (one guy farming 1000 acres of wheat doesn't produce as much value as 50 families, even barefoot, pre-industrial families, each farming 20 acres intensively). Promoting this model of agriculture made sense in the expansion of the US agricultural frontier in the 1800s, when labor was scarce and land plentiful, and in the industrialization of the US economy in the mid-20th century, when labor was in demand in the cities so those in the countryside had to pick up the slack of those who left. It apparently makes economic sense in today's China, as many people go to the cities to find higher-paying work in services. The cases of the industrialization and then service-ization of the US and Chinese economies are ultimately underlain by the use of fossil fuels that has made possible the apparent jump in productivity in all sectors.

But in the 21st century, when land is becoming ever scarcer, and people are a dime a dozen (or a dime per 10 billion by 2050), do we really want to make more "efficient" use of labor (read fewer jobs) and less efficient use of land? I don't think this is sage policy, and chirpy analyses like Yglesias's only serve to send us closer to the edge of a cliff, an edge we'll get to right about when there's no more cheap oil to replace human labor on the farm.

I don't blame the Chinese, or Yglesias, for cheerleading the service sector as a higher-paying alternative to farming. It is right now. But it's very short-sighted to sever all ties to the rural life (qualifying it as a "scourge" and "horrible", for example), especially when it's very possible that the 21st century will demand that many people return to farming as the oil-guzzling manufacturing and service sectors wind down. Anyway, I extend this offer to Yglesias, who is approximately my age:

Matthew, when the shit hits the fan, and you're scrounging for garbage or grass to eat because you've lived your entire life with an inculcated scorn for farming, you can give me a call. Maybe I'll show you how to wield a hoe!