Agricultural Marketing Quotes

Agricultural sustainability doesn't depend on agritechnology. To believe it does is to put the emphasis on the wrong bit of 'agriculture.' What sustainability depends on isn't agri- so much as culture.

Centuries ago human knowledge increased slowly, so politics and economics changed at a leisurely pace too. Today our knowledge is increasing at breakneck speed, and theoretically we should understand the world better and better. But the very opposite is happening. Our new-found knowledge leads to faster economic, social and political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge, which leads only to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future. In 1016 it was relatively easy to predict how Europe would look in 1050. Sure, dynasties might fall, unknown raiders might invade, and natural disasters might strike; yet it was clear that in 1050 Europe would still be ruled by kings and priests, that it would be an agricultural society, that most of its inhabitants would be peasants, and that it would continue to suffer greatly from famines, plagues and wars. In contrast, in 2016 we have no idea how Europe will look in 2050. We cannot say what kind of political system it will have, how its job market will be structured, or even what kind of bodies its inhabitants will possess.

There’s a reason you probably haven’t heard much about this aspect of the heartland. This kind of blight can’t be easily blamed on the usual suspects like government or counterculture or high-hat urban policy. The villain that did this to my home state wasn’t the Supreme Court or Lyndon Johnson, showering dollars on the poor or putting criminals back on the street. The culprit is the conservatives’ beloved free-market capitalism, a system that, at its most unrestrained, has little use for smalltown merchants or the agricultural system that supported the small towns in the first place....

The claim that industrial agriculture is the only way of feeding a large population is about as scientific as a belief in Creationism - and far more damaging.

Again, a Prince should show himself a patron of merit, and should honour those who excel in every art. He ought accordingly to encourage his subjects by enabling them to pursue their callings, whether mercantile, agricultural, or any other, in security, so that this man shall not be deterred from beautifying his possessions from the apprehension that they may be taken from him, or that other refrain from opening a trade through fear of taxes; and he should provide rewards for those who desire so to employ themselves, and for all who are disposed in any way to add to the greatness of his City or State.

The marketplace is an institution that teaches self-advancement, private acquisition, and the domination of nature. Its way of thinking is incompatible with the round river. Ecological harmony is a nonmarket value that takes a collective will to achieve.

The twin signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances (relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world (also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels). Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.

Look at our farmers markets today, bursting with heritage breeds and heirloom varieties, foods that were once abundant when we were an agricultural nation, but that we have lost touch with. Bringing all these back helps us connect to our roots, our communities and helps us feed America the proper way.

The craft, trade, agriculture, science, a large part of the art - all this can only stand on a broad base , on a consolidated, strong and healthy mediocrity. Served in their services and the science of their work - and even the arts. We cannot wish for better: it belongs to such an average sort of person - it is under displace exceptions - it has nothing aristocratic about something and still les in their anarchic instincts - The power of the center is then held upright by the trade, especially the money market: the instinct of great financiers goes against all extremes, - the Jews are the reason for the time being conserve power in our so insecure and threatened Europe.

How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power? Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same basic answer to this fundamental question. The state must be large in territory and self-sufficient in economics, with a balance between industry and agriculture that supported a hardily conformist and ideologically motivated citizenry capable of fulfilling historical prophecies - either Stalinist internal industrialization or Nazi colonial agrarianism. Both Hitler and Stalin aimed at imperial autarky, within a large land empire well supplies in food, raw materials, and mineral resources. Both understood the flash appeal of modern materials: Stalin had named himself after steel, and Hitler paid special attention to is production. Yet both Stalin and Hitler understood agriculture as a key element in the completion of their revolutions. Both believed that their systems would prove their superiority to decadent capitalism, and guarantee independence from the rest of the world, by the production of food. p. 158

Agricultural commodity traders, on the other hand, buy from thousands of individual farmers. That makes the traders’ job harder, but it also provides an opportunity: dealing with so many farmers gives the largest traders valuable information. Long before the concept of ‘big data’ became popular, the agricultural traders were putting it to work, aggregating information from thousands of farmers to get a real-time insight into the state of the markets.

If [the loss of fertility of the soil and the loss of soil as a renewable resource] does happen, we are familiar enough with the nature of American salesmanship to know that it will be done in the name of the starving millions, in the name of liberty, justice, democracy, and brotherhood, and to free the world from communism. We must, I think, be prepared to see, and to stand by, the truth: that the land should not be destroyed for any reason, not even for any apparently good reason. We must be prepared to say that enough food, year after year, is possible only for a limited number of peaople, and that this possibility can be preserved only by the steadfast, knowledgeable care of those people.

History is a treadmill turned by rising human numbers. Today GM crops are being marketed as the only means of avoiding mass starvation. They are unlikely to improve the lives of peasant farmers ; but they may well enable them to survive in greater numbers.

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

But it is far more important that we allow developing countries to use protection, subsidies, and regulation of foreign investment adequately in order to develop their own economies, rather than giving them bigger agricultural markets overseas. Especially if agricultural liberalization by the rich countries can only be 'bought' by the developing countries giving up their use of the tools of infant industry promotion, the price is not worth paying. Developing countries should not be forced to sell their future for small immediate gains.

The free market has never worked in agriculture and it never will. The economics of a family farm are very different from a firm's... the demand for food isn't elastic; people don't eat more just because food is cheap. Even if I go out of business this land will keep producing corn.

Bees are efficient foragers. One example is the southeastern blueberry bee, Habropoda laboriosa, a hard working little creature capable of visiting as many as 50,000 blueberry flowers in her short life and pollinating enough of them to produce more than 6,000 ripe blueberries. At market those 6,000 blueberries are worth approximately $20 or more. Not every bee that you see flitting about may be worth $20, but all of them combined keep the world of flowering plants going. The world as we know it would not exist if there were no bees to pollinate the earth’s 250,000 flowering plants.

There are lots of planned economies-the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk ourselves as a "free market", but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts--like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publically funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well.

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy.

This arrangement, in which users take advantage of services and the company gains all the upside of the data they generate, may sound novel, but it is actually very old. Prior to the rise of capitalism, feudal labor arrangements worked similarly. Lords insulated their serfs from fluctuations in markets and guaranteed them safety and traditional rights to use the land and to keep enough of their crop to survive. In exchange, lords took all the upside of the market return on serfs’ agricultural output. Similarly, today, siren servers provide useful and enjoyable information services, while taking the market value of the data we produce in exchange. We thus refer to this contemporary system as “technofeudalism.

Most of this is due to aggressive overfishing: just as with agriculture, corporations have turned fishing into an act of warfare, using industrial megatrawlers to scrape the seafloor in their hunt for increasingly scarce fish, hauling up hundreds of species in order to catch the few that have ‘market value’, turning coral gardens and colourful ecosystems into lifeless plains in the process.

Jess gazed at the apples arranged in all their colors: russet, blushing pink, freckled gold. She cast her eyes over heaps of pumpkins, bins of tomatoes cut from the vine, pale gooseberries with crumpled leaves. "You could buy a farm." "Why would I do that?" "To be healthy," said Jess. Emily shook her head. "I don't think I'd be a very good farmer." "You could have other people farm your farm for you," said Jess. "And you could just eat all the good things." Emily laughed. "That's what we're doing here at the Farmers' Market. We're paying farmers to farm for us. You've just invented agriculture." "Yes, but you could have your own farm and go out there and breathe the fresh air and touch the fresh earth." "I think that's called a vacation," said Emily. "Oh, you're too boring to be rich," Jess said. "And I would be so talented!

think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.

Gene Logsdon is equally critical of the federal government’s interference with regional farming markets. In The Contrary Farmer,20 he explores how government manipulation of agricultural markets has led to costly, hare-brained, and environmentally damaging practices. For example, farmers are tempted by government subsidies to grow corn on land far better suited for other, unsubsidized crops. The end result: the agricultural and economic diversity of whole regions of the United States is diminished. This has the knock-on effect of undermining opportunities for people in these regions to obtain a variety of affordable, locally grown produce. People talk about addressing such problems by further regulating lobbyists, but every new wave of regulations seems only to make matters worse. The best way to avoid cronyism and the government manipulation of markets in favor of corporate bigness is to have big government shrunk down to size and hemmed in by severe limits.

Weather patterns in the Pacific were not human-driven, but the futures market in Chicago was. The world had shifted so rapidly from subsistence agriculture to a market economy that price fluctuations sent ripples throughout the system, destabilizing entire regions. Traders could now set off starvation halfway across the world with the touch of a telegraph key, sucking up grain supplies in India or the Dakotas and sending them to Europe, where prices were high. It was the dawn of “price famines.”174

It has become increasingly clear that the way we farm affects the local community, and that the economy of the local community affects the way we farm; that the way we farm affects the health and integrity of the local ecosystem, and that the farm is intricately dependent, even economically, upon the health of the local ecosystem. We can no longer pretend that agriculture is a sort of economic machine with interchangeable parts, the same everywhere, determined by “market forces” and independent of everything else.

Think about ethanol again. The benefits of that $7 billion tax subsidy are bestowed on a small group of farmers, making it quite lucrative for each one of them. Meanwhile, the costs are spread over the remaining 98 percent of us, putting ethanol somewhere below good oral hygiene on our list of everyday concerns. The opposite would be true with my plan to have left-handed voters pay subsidies to right-handed voters. There are roughly nine right-handed Americans for every lefty, so if every right-handed voter were to get some government benefit worth $100, then every left-handed voter would have to pay $900 to finance it. The lefties would be hopping mad about their $900 tax bills, probably to the point that it became their preeminent political concern, while the righties would be only modestly excited about their $100 subsidy. An adept politician would probably improve her career prospects by voting with the lefties. Here is a curious finding that makes more sense in light of what we‘ve just discussed. In countries where farmers make up a small fraction of the population, such as America and Europe, the government provides large subsidies for agriculture. But in countries where the farming population is relatively large, such as China and India, the subsidies go the other way. Farmers are forced to sell their crops at below-market prices so that urban dwellers can get basic food items cheaply. In the one case, farmers get political favors; in the other, they must pay for them. What makes these examples logically consistent is that in both cases the large group subsidizes the smaller group. In politics, the tail can wag the dog. This can have profound effects on the economy.

Farmers in the South, West, and Midwest, however, were still building a major movement to escape from the control of banks and merchants lending them supplies at usurious rates; agricultural cooperatives—cooperative buying of supplies and machinery and marketing of produce—as well as cooperative stores, were the remedy to these conditions of virtual serfdom. While the movement was not dedicated to the formation of worker co-ops, in its own way it was at least as ambitious as the Knights of Labor had been. In the late 1880s and early 1890s it swept through southern and western states like a brushfire, even, in some places, bringing black and white farmers together in a unity of interest. Eventually this Farmers’ Alliance decided it had to enter politics in order to break the power of the banks; it formed a third party, the People’s Party, in 1892. The great depression of 1893 only spurred the movement on, and it won governorships in Kansas and Colorado. But in 1896 its leaders made a terrible strategic blunder in allying themselves with William Jennings Bryan of the Democratic party in his campaign for president. Bryan lost the election, and Populism lost its independent identity. The party fell apart; the Farmers’ Alliance collapsed; the movement died, and many of its cooperative associations disappeared. Thus, once again, the capitalists had managed to stomp out a threat to their rule.171 They were unable to get rid of all agricultural cooperatives, however, even with the help of the Sherman “Anti-Trust” Act of 1890.172 Nor, in fact, did big business desire to combat many of them, for instance the independent co-ops that coordinated buying and selling. Small farmers needed cooperatives in order to survive, whether their co-ops were independent or were affiliated with a movement like the Farmers’ Alliance or the Grange. The independent co-ops, moreover, were not necessarily opposed to the capitalist system, fitting into it quite well by cooperatively buying and selling, marketing, and reducing production costs. By 1921 there were 7374 agricultural co-ops, most of them in regional federations. According to the census of 1919, over 600,000 farmers were engaged in cooperative marketing or purchasing—and these figures did not include the many farmers who obtained insurance, irrigation, telephone, or other business services from cooperatives.173

China's food comes from abroad: from South America, the United States and Australia. This means prosperity for agricultural traders and processors, like Archer Daniels Midland, which is making its way into China in every way imaginable, into a $ 100 billion domestic processed food market that is growing more than 10 percent annually. This translates into a windfall for farmers in the Midwest, who are now enjoying a two-thirds rise in the price of soybeans compared to a year ago. It also means a better diet for the Chinese, who have increased their caloric intake by a third over the past 25 years.

The easiest way to run developmentally efficient finance continues to be through a banking system, because it is banks that can most easily be pointed by governments at the projects necessary to agricultural and industrial development. Most obviously, banks respond to central bank guidance. They can be controlled via rediscounting loans for exports and for industrial upgrading, with the system policed through requirements for export letters of credit from the ultimate borrowers. The simplicity and bluntness of this mechanism makes it highly effective. Bond markets, and particularly stock markets, are harder for policymakers to control. The main reason is that it is difficult to oversee the way in which funds from bond and stock issues are used. It is, tellingly, the capacity of bank-based systems for enforcing development policies that makes entrepreneurs in developing countries lobby so hard for bond, and especially stock, markets to be expanded. These markets are their means to escape government control. It is the job of governments to resist entrepreneurs’ lobbying until basic developmental objectives have been achieved. Equally, independent central banks are not appropriate to developing countries until considerable economic progress has been made.

The flowering of the consumerist ethic is manifested most clearly in the food market. Traditional agricultural societies lived in the awful shade of starvation. In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor (who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas) even more severely than the rich (who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies). Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over.

American politicians had done little through the years to stem the flood. Hispanic voters wanted their kinsmen to be able to enter the United States regardless of their ability to contribute to the economy or pay their own bills, yet this wasn’t the decisive factor. Farmers and small-business men wanted a source of cheap labor, and were content to pass the true costs, the social costs, on to the taxpayers. Generous public welfare programs also drew millions of Mexicans, more than small business or agriculture could possibly use. Even draining off an eighth of the population didn’t really help Mexico, which found itself racked by turf wars between vicious criminal gangs that smuggled drugs into the United States to supply the richest narcotics market in the world.

The heart of the issue is not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn—when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public. It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be ‘win- win.’ And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy—Walmart, FedEx, GM—were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring. This alignment of economic interests—combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as ‘serious’ in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line —fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter—root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were available for sale at Walmart.

Agricultural commodity traders, on the other hand, buy from thousands of individual farmers. That makes the traders’ job harder, but it also provides an opportunity: dealing with so many farmers gives the largest traders valuable information. Long before the concept of ‘big data’ became popular, the agricultural traders were putting it to work, aggregating information from thousands of farmers to get a real-time insight into the state of the markets. Each month, when the US Department of Agriculture published its update on the world’s key crops, the agricultural houses’ traders were able to bet on what it would say with near-certainty that they were right. Within most trading houses, there was a group of traders whose sole job was to speculate profitably with the company’s money – they were known as the proprietary, or ‘prop’, traders.

By first light, immigrants haul crates of melons and buckets of ice over the narrow cobblestone streets. Old men sell salted capers and branches of wild oregano while the young ones build their fish stands, one silvery torqued body at a time, like an edible art installation. It's a startling scene: gruff young palermitani, foul-mouthed and wreathed in cigarette smoke, lovingly laying out each fish at just the right angle, burrowing its belly into the ice as if to mimic its swimming position in the ocean. Sicilian sun and soil and ingenuity have long produced some of Italy's most prized raw ingredients, and the colors of the market serve as a map of the island's agricultural prowess: the forest green pistachios of Bronte; the Crayola-bright lemons and oranges of Paternò; the famous pomodorini of Pachino, fiery orbs of magical tomato intensity.

difference, as we have seen in the preceding chapter. In a competitive market economy it is the high-cost producers, the inefficient producers, that are driven out by a fall in price. In the case of an agricultural commodity it is the least competent farmers, or those with the poorest equipment, or those working the poorest land, that are driven out. The most capable farmers on the best land do not have to restrict their production. On the contrary, if the fall in price has been symptomatic of a lower average cost of production, reflected through an increased supply, then the driving out of the marginal farmers on the marginal land enables the good farmers on the good land to expand their production. So there may be, in the long run, no reduction whatever in the output of that commodity. And the product is then produced and sold at a permanently lower price. If

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

MAKING MARKETS SAFE is one of the oldest problems of market design, going back to well before the invention of agriculture, when hunters traded the ax heads and arrowheads that archaeologists today find thousands of miles from where they were made. More recently, one of the responsibilities of kings in medieval Europe was to provide safe passage to and from markets and fairs. For healthy commerce, buyers and sellers needed to be able to participate in these markets safely, without being waylaid and robbed (or worse) by highwaymen. Indeed, the word waylay captures the act of robbing travelers carrying money or valuables on their way to or from a market. Without some assurance of safe passage, these markets would have failed; they would have been too risky to attract many participants. And if the markets had failed, the kingdoms would have been deprived of the prosperity that markets, and the taxes on them, bring.

The flowering of the consumerist ethic is manifested most clearly in the food market. Traditional agricultural societies lived in the awful shade of starvation. In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas even more severely than the rich who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies. Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over. In medieval Europe, aristocrats spent their money carelessly on extravagant luxuries, whereas peasants lived frugally, minding every penny. Today, the tables have turned. The rich take great care managing their assets and investments, while the less well heeled go into debt buying cars and televisions they don’t really need.

The most important question in twenty-first-century economics may well be what to do with all the superfluous people. What will conscious humans do, once we have highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better? Throughout history the job market was divided into three main sectors: agriculture, industry and services. Until about 1800, the vast majority of people worked in agriculture, and only a small minority worked in industry and services. During the Industrial Revolution people in developed countries left the fields and herds. Most began working in industry, but growing numbers also took up jobs in the services sector. In recent decades developed countries underwent another revolution, as industrial jobs vanished, whereas the services sector expanded. In 2010 only 2 per cent of Americans worked in agriculture, 20 per cent worked in industry, 78 per cent worked as teachers, doctors, webpage designers and so forth. When mindless algorithms are able to teach, diagnose and design better than humans, what will we do?

By 2030, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, fish farming will dominate fish supplies. Given how wrong the FAO has been in the past--saying catches were going up when, in fact, they were going down--this statement is worth examining carefully. When you do, you find it to be an observation of previous trends, not a reflection of what could happen or what people might want--in the same way as Red Delicious was once far and away the most popular apple in the United States because it was basically the only apple you could get. The FAO is simply observing that fish farming is the fastest growing form of food production in the world--growing at 9 percent a year and by 12-13 percent in the United States. Nobody is asking us whether we want this. It is just happening. The continued destruction of mangrove swamps in poor countries to provide shrimp for people living in rich countries is simply the market operating in a vacuum untroubled by ethics. It is a reflection of what will go on happening if we do not find ways of exercising any choice in the matter.

Timeline of History Years Before the Present 13.5 billion Matter and energy appear. Beginning of physics. Atoms and molecules appear. Beginning of chemistry. 4.5 billion Formation of planet Earth. 3.8 billion Emergence of organisms. Beginning of biology. 6 million Last common grandmother of humans and chimpanzees. 2.5 million Evolution of the genus Homo in Africa. First stone tools. 2 million Humans spread from Africa to Eurasia. Evolution of different human species. 500,000 Neanderthals evolve in Europe and the Middle East. 300,000 Daily usage of fire. 200,000 Homo sapiens evolves in East Africa. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa. 45,000 Sapiens settle Australia. Extinction of Australian megafauna. 30,000 Extinction of Neanderthals. 16,000 Sapiens settle America. Extinction of American megafauna. 13,000 Extinction of Homo floresiensis. Homo sapiens the only surviving human species. 12,000 The Agricultural Revolution. Domestication of plants and animals. Permanent settlements. 5,000 First kingdoms, script and money. Polytheistic religions. 4,250 First empire – the Akkadian Empire of Sargon. 2,500 Invention of coinage – a universal money. The Persian Empire – a universal political order ‘for the benefit of all humans’. Buddhism in India – a universal truth ‘to liberate all beings from suffering’. 2,000 Han Empire in China. Roman Empire in the Mediterranean. Christianity. 1,400 Islam. 500 The Scientific Revolution. Humankind admits its ignorance and begins to acquire unprecedented power. Europeans begin to conquer America and the oceans. The entire planet becomes a single historical arena. The rise of capitalism. 200 The Industrial Revolution. Family and community are replaced by state and market. Massive extinction of plants and animals. The Present Humans transcend the boundaries of planet Earth. Nuclear weapons threaten the survival of humankind. Organisms are increasingly shaped by intelligent design rather than natural selection. The Future Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?

Centuries ago human knowledge increased slowly, so politics and economics changed at a leisurely pace too. Today our knowledge is increasing at breakneck speed, and theoretically we should understand the world better and better. But the very opposite is happening. Our new-found knowledge leads to faster economic, social and political changes; in an attempt to understand what is happening, we accelerate the accumulation of knowledge, which leads only to faster and greater upheavals. Consequently we are less and less able to make sense of the present or forecast the future. In 1016 it was relatively easy to predict how Europe would look in 1050. Sure, dynasties might fall, unknown raiders might invade, and natural disasters might strike; yet it was clear that in 1050 Europe would still be ruled by kings and priests, that it would be an agricultural society, that most of its inhabitants would be peasants, and that it would continue to suffer greatly from famines, plagues and wars. In contrast, in 2016 we have no idea how Europe will look in 2050. We cannot say what kind of political system it will have, how its job market will be structured, or even what kind of bodies its inhabitants will possess. A

The Industrial Revolution brought about dozens of major upheavals in human society. Adapting to industrial time is just one of them. Other notable examples include urbanisation, the disappearance of the peasantry, the rise of the industrial proletariat, the empowerment of the common person, democratisation, youth culture and the disintegration of patriarchy. Yet all of these upheavals are dwarfed by the most momentous social revolution that ever befell humankind: the collapse of the family and the local community and their replacement by the state and the market. As best we can tell, from the earliest times, more than a million years ago, humans lived in small, intimate communities, most of whose members were kin. The Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution did not change that. They glued together families and communities to create tribes, cities, kingdoms and empires, but families and communities remained the basic building blocks of all human societies. The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, managed within little more than two centuries to break these building blocks into atoms. Most of the traditional functions of families and communities were handed over to states and markets.

Feeding the urban fleet of horses hay and grain supported many thousands of farmers. An idle riding horse in New York City required about 9,000 calories of oats and hay per day. A draft horse in the same city working in construction required almost 30,000 calories of the same feeds. Annually, each draft horse consumed about 3 tons of hay and 62.5 bushels (1 ton) of oats. It took roughly four acres of good farmland to supply a working city horse that year’s worth of feed.9 At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when cities in America were limited largely to the East Coast, farmers seldom transported bulky loose hay more than twenty to thirty miles to city markets.10 The commercialization of the hay press in the 1850s, operated by hand or by horse-powered sweep, reduced the bulk and thus lowered the cost of shipping hay, while the opening of the Midwest’s tallgrass prairies to settlement and farming in the intervening years met the increasing demand for horse feed. By 1879, national hay production totaled 35 million tons, a figure that had nearly tripled to 97 million tons by 1909. More than half the land in New England was devoted to hay by 1909 as well, and at least twenty-two states harvested more than a million acres a year of hay and forage.11 The mechanization of American agriculture with horse-drawn or horse-powered machinery supported this vast expansion.

A confidential report delivered in June 1965 by Abel Aganbegyan, director of the Novobirsk Institute of Economics, highlighted the difficulties. Aganbegyan noted that the growth rate of the Soviet economy was beginning to decline, just as the rival US economy seemed particularly buoyant; at the same time, some sectors of the Soviet economy - housing, agriculture, services, retail trade - remained very backward, and were failing to develop at an adequate rate. The root causes of this poor performance he saw in the enormous commitment of resources to defense (in human terms, 30-40 million people out of a working population of 100 million, he reckoned), and the 'extreme centralism and lack of democracy in economic matters' which had survived from the past. In a complex modern society, he argued, not everything could be planned, since it was impossible to foresee all possible contingencies and their potential effects. So the plan amounted to central command, and even that could not be properly implemented for lack of information and of modern data-processing equipment. 'The Central Statistical Administration ... does not have a single computer, and is not planning to acquire any,' he commented acidly. Economic administration was also impeded by excessive secrecy: 'We obtain many figures... from American journals sooner than they are released by the Central Statistical Administration.' Hence the economy suffered from inbuilt distortions: the hoarding of goods and labour to provide for unforeseen contingencies, the production of shoddy goods to fulfill planning targets expressed in crude quantitative terms, the accumulation of unused money by a public reluctant to buy substandard products, with resultant inflation and a flourishing black market.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.

The blinking message light on the phone screamed at us when we walked into the bedroom of our suite. Marlboro Man audibly exhaled, clearly wishing the world--and his brother and the grain markets and the uncertainties of agriculture--would leave us alone already. I wish they’d leave us alone, too. In light of the recent developments, though, Marlboro Man picked up the phone and dialed Tim to get an update. I excused myself to the bathroom to freshen up and put on a champagne satin negligee in an effort to thwart the external forces that were trying to rob me of my husband’s attention. I brushed my teeth and spritzed myself with Jil Sander perfume before opening the door to the bedroom, where I would seduce my Marlboro Man away from his worries. I knew I could win if only I applied myself. He was just getting off the phone when I entered the room. “Dammit,” I heard him mumble as he plopped down onto the enormous king-size bed. Oh no. Jil Sander had her work cut out for her. I climbed on the bed and lay beside him, resting my head on his arm. He draped his arm across my waist. I draped my leg around his. He sighed. “The markets are totally in the shitter.” I didn’t know the details, but I did know the shitter wasn’t a good place. I wanted to throw out the usual platitudes. Don’t worry about it, try not to think about it, we’ll figure it out, everything will be okay. But I didn’t know enough about it. I knew he and his brother owned a lot of land. I knew they worked hard to pay for it. I knew they weren’t lawyers or physicians by profession and didn’t have a whole separate income to supplement their ranching operation. As full-time ranchers, their livelihoods were completely reliant on so many things outside of their control--weather, market fluctuations, supply, demand, luck. I knew they weren’t home free in terms of finances--Marlboro Man and I had talked about it. But I didn’t understand enough about the ramifications of this current wrinkle to reassure him that everything would be okay, businesswise. And he probably didn’t want me to. So I did the only thing I could think of to do. I assured my new husband everything would be okay between us by leaning over, turning off the lamp, and letting the love between us--which had zero to do with markets or grains--take over.

Liberal anticulture rests on three pillars: first, the wholesale conquest of nature, which consequently makes nature into an independent object requiring salvation by the notional elimination of humanity; second, a new experience of time as a pastless present in which the future is a foreign land; and third, an order that renders place fungible and bereft of definitional meaning. These three cornerstones of human experience—nature, time and place—form the basis of culture, and liberalism’s success is premised upon their uprooting and replacement with facsimiles that bear the same names. The advance of this anticulture takes two primary forms. Anticulture is the consequence of a regime of standardizing law replacing widely observed informal norms that come to be discarded as forms of oppression; and it is the simultaneous consequence of a universal and homogenous market, resulting in a monoculture that, like its agricultural analogue, colonizes and destroys actual cultures rooted in experience, history, and place. These two visages of the liberal anticulture thus free us from other specific people and embedded relationships, replacing custom with abstract and depersonalized law, liberating us from personal obligations and debts, replacing what have come to be perceived as burdens on our individual autonomous freedom with pervasive legal threat and generalized financial indebtedness. In the effort to secure the radical autonomy of individuals, liberal law and the liberal market replace actual culture with an encompassing anticulture. This anticulture is the arena of our liberty—yet increasingly, it is rightly perceived as the locus of our bondage and even a threat to our continued existence. The simultaneous heady joy and gnawing anxieties of a liberated humanity, shorn of the compass of tradition and inheritance that were the hallmarks of embedded culture, are indicators of liberalism’s waxing success and accumulating failure. The paradox is our growing belief that we are thralls to the very sources of our liberation—pervasive legal surveillance and control of people alongside technological control of nature. As the empire of liberty grows, the reality of liberty recedes. The anticulture of liberalism—supposedly the source of our liberation—accelerates liberalism’s success and demise.

Farmers had freed themselves in part from the blind natural forces of storm and insects only to become increasingly the victims of the equally blind forces of market fluctuations. (p. 14)

Getting the new state on its feet economically presented one of the major challenges. Pakistan had virtually no industry, and the major markets for its agricultural products were in India. Pakistan produced 75 percent of the world’s jute supply but did not have a single jute processing mill. All the mills were in India. Although one-third of undivided India’s cotton was grown in Pakistan, it had “only one-thirtieth of the cotton mills.

A few years ago, at a conference on organic agriculture in California, a corporate organic grower suggested to a small farmer struggling to survive in the competitive world of industrial organic that "you should really try to develop a niche to distinguish yourself in the market." Holding his fury in check, the small farmer replied as levelly as he could manage: "I believe I developed that niche twenty years ago. It's called 'organic.' And now you, sir, are sitting on it.

McGahern still lives on and works a farm in Leitrim, and friends say that even though he has held high profile academic posts round the world as a visiting professor he remains essentially a countryman. Last term he taught in an upstate New York college, but seeing him in the soulless urban grid of downtown Syracuse wearing an old tweed flat cap and long black overcoat, he could have been in an Irish agricultural town on market day as he casually engaged strangers on the street to ask for advice on finding a decent restaurant. Friends say he has extraordinary confidence in who he is and where he's from - he behaves pretty much the same way wherever is and whoever he is with.

Throughout history the job market has been divided into three main sectors: agriculture, industry, and services. Up until 1800, most people worked in agriculture. During the Industrial Revolution more people worked in industry, with an increase in services. In the last few decades, the industrial jobs began to vanish, so all those people moved over to services. In 2010, 2 percent of Americans worked in agriculture, 20 percent in industry, and the rest in services. But what will happen to jobs in the 21st century?

There was a sheep-breeding crisis in Western Australia during the 1940s. Otherwise healthy sheep weren’t getting pregnant or were losing their young before giving birth. Everyone was stumped until some bright agricultural specialists discovered the little culprit—European clover. This type of clover produces a potent phytoestrogen called formononetin as a natural defense against grazing predators. And, yes, if you’re a plant, a sheep is a predator! Accustomed to the humidity of Europe, the imported clover plants were struggling to cope with the drier Australian climate. When clover has a bad year—not enough rain or sunshine, or too much rain or sunshine—it protects itself by limiting the size of the next generation of predators. It increases production of formononetin and prevents the birth of baby grazers by sterilizing their would-be parents. The next time you’re looking for some convenient birth control, you don’t have to snack on a field of clover, of course. But if you take many forms of the famous “Pill,” you’re not doing something all that different. The gifted chemist Carl Djerassi based his development of the Pill on just this kind of botanical birth control. He wasn’t using clover, though; he was using sweet potatoes—the Mexican yam to be exact. He started with disogenin, a phytoestrogen produced by the yam, and from that base, he synthesized the first marketable contraceptive pill in 1951.

A common image we still have of capitalism is the innovative entrepreneur opening up a new and lucrative market niche with the invisible hand of the market delivering public benefit (supply matching demand) out of private vice (profit-motivated self-interest). The idea is still routinely invoked as a justification of modern capitalism, but it’s out of date. A more apposite image nowadays for financialised, corporate capital is the visible – though sometimes velveted – fist, aimed at anyone who contests its logic, and many of those who don’t.

The reality of archaic civilization was centralization of political power, class stratification, the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of the weak, and the universal introduction of some form of forced labor for both productive and military purposes. As against these undeniable realities we must also cite the major achievements of archaic society: the maintenance of peace within the realm, more productive agriculture, the opening of markets for long-range trade, and significant achievements in architecture, art, and literature. But equally important was, with the help of a literate elite, a new effort to give political power a moral meaning. The archaic king was almost always depicted as a warrior, as a defender of the realm against barbarians on the frontiers and rebels within; as such he embodied a powerful element of dominance. But he was also seen, and probably increasingly as archaic societies matured, as the defender of justice, in Mesopotamia and Egypt as the good shepherd, in Western Zhou as father and mother of his people. Gods as well as kings were increasingly thought of not only as dominant but also as nurturant. The very appeal to ethical standards of legitimacy for both gods and kings, however, opened new possibilities for political and theological reflection. In the axial age a new kind of upstart, the moral upstart who relies on speech, not force, would appear, foreshadowed as we have seen, by voices already raised in archaic societies.

American slavery was characterized by massive greed and desire for profit at a terrible human cost, “the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use of race hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white was master, black was slave.”8 The South Carolina Constitution of 1669 deemed that such a relationship between white masters and their African slaves was “necessary for society to function satisfactorily.” In all dealings with “Negro slaves,” it provided, “every Freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority.” Slavery took a particularly evil form in the Americas, on the plantation. European colonial plantations produced commodities for the worldwide market, and owners viewed their slaves as commodities to be bought and sold in order to increase profits.

There is also a long tradition in developing countries of governments using price and tax policies to benefit the urban sector at the cost of the rural. Many countries in Africa in the 1970s created what they called agricultural marketing boards. This was a cruel joke, since many of the boards were intended to prevent the marketing of produce so the board could buy it at the lowest prices, thereby stabilizing prices for city dwellers. Other countries, like India and China, banned exports of farm products to keep prices where urban consumers wanted them. A by-product of these policies was to make agriculture unprofitable, encouraging people to leave their farms.

As one of the leading electrical contractors in the North East of Fife, Daniel Gardner Electrical Contractor’s commitment to reliability, safety, customer service and, above all, quality of work has seen our reputation grow from strength to strength. Operating across Fife including Cupar and St Andrews, Tayside, Perthshire, Clackmannanshire and the Lothians we serve the Domestic, Commercial, Agricultural and Industrial markets. We are also available for emergency call-outs.

Narrowness and pragmatism are characteristic of the dominant ways of thought under capitalism, where the individualism of economic man is a model for the autonomy and isolation of all phenomena, and where a knowledge industry turns scientific ideas into marketable commodities—precisely the magic bullets that the pharmaceutical industry sells people.

As one of the leading electrical contractors in the North East of Fife, Daniel Gardner Electrical Contractor’s commitment to reliability, safety, customer service and, above all, quality of work has seen our reputation grow from strength to strength. Operating across Fife including Cupar and St Andrews, Tayside, Perthshire, Clackmannanshire and the Lothians we serve the Domestic, Commercial, Agricultural and Industrial markets. We are also available for emergency call-outs.

Under agricultural collectivization, everything produced by the peasants was purchased and marketed by the state, which managed industry and commerce and controlled all material goods. People relied on state allocation of everything they needed to sustain their lives.

Allow me to say — if you are reading this, and you’re part of the Build, Build, Build team - without you, we wouldn’t have been able to build 29,264 kilometers of roads, 5,950 bridges, 11,340 flood control projects, 222 evacuation centers, 150,149 classrooms, 214 airport projects, and 451 seaport projects. Philippines is in a much better place because of your skill, work, and sacrifices. If it weren’t for your help in building Pigalo Bridge, farmers in Isabela who wanted to take their agricultural products to Manila or Tuguegarao, would still have to take the 76-kilometer detour via the Alicia-Angadanan-San Guillermo-Naguilian Road. Now, farmers are able to reach the same market within a 10-minute time frame. - Anna Mae Yu Lamentillo , Night Owl: A Nationbuilder’s Manual 2nd Edition (p. 1, To the 6.5 Million Build, Build, Build Team)

Attempts were made to ascertain the reasons for these drastic provisions directed to exclude every Arab from the land purchased. The Executive of the General Federation of Jewish Labour were perfectly frank on the subject. They pointed out that the Jewish colonies were founded and established by Jewish capital, and that the subscriptions of which this capital is composed were given with the intention that Jews should emigrate to Palestine and be settled therethat these subscriptions would never have been given had it been thought that they would be employed to support Arab labourersthat it was the business of the Zionist Organisation to cause immigration into Palestine of as many Jews as possible, and that, if Arabs were employed, posts would thus be filled up for which Jews might have immigratedthat the position of agricultural labourer in the colonies, when occupied by a Jew, serves as a training for the immigrant and prepares him to take over a holding himself at a later dateand, finally, that if these posts were left open to the ordinary competition of the labour market, the standard of life of the Jewish labourer would be liable to fall to the lower standard of the Arab.

IRCC Announces Eligible Programs for PGWPs Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has updated its guidelines regarding the programs eligible for a Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP). As of November 1, international graduates applying for a PGWP must meet additional field of study requirements to qualify for this essential work permit. Eligible Fields of Study for PGWPs The eligible fields of study for the PGWP correspond to the occupation-based Express Entry categories introduced by IRCC in 2023. These categories are aligned with national labor market demands and include the following: • Agriculture and Agri-Food • Healthcare • Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) • Trade • Transport Eligible programs in these fields are classified using the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), a systematic approach to describing and categorizing educational programs in Canada, akin to the National Occupation Classification (NOC) system used for job classification. Below is a summary of selected instructional programs eligible for the PGWP, along with their respective CIP codes: CIP 2021 Title CIP 2021 Code Field of Study Category Agricultural business and management, general 01.0101 Agriculture and agri-food Animal/livestock husbandry and production 01.0302 Agriculture and agri-food Plant nursery operations and management 01.0606 Agriculture and agri-food Animal health 01.0903 Agriculture and agri-food Agronomy and crop science 01.1102 Agriculture and agri-food Special education and teaching, general 13.1001 Healthcare Exercise physiology 26.0908 Healthcare Physical therapy assistant 51.0806 Healthcare Polysomnography 51.0917 Healthcare Cytotechnology/cytotechnologist 51.1002 Healthcare Computer programming/programmer, general 11.0201 STEM Chemical engineering 14.0701 STEM Engineering mechanics 14.1101 STEM Water, wetlands and marine resources management 03.0205 STEM Computer graphics 11.0803 STEM Electrician 46.0302 Trade Heating, air conditioning, ventilation and refrigeration maintenance technology/technician 47.0201 Trade Machine tool technology/machinist 48.0501 Trade Insulator 46.0414 Trade Plumbing technology/plumber 46.0503 Trade Heavy equipment maintenance technology/technician 47.0302 Transport Air traffic controller 49.0105 Transport Truck and bus driver/commercial vehicle operator and instructor 49.0205 Transport Flight instructor 49.0108 Transport Transportation and materials moving, other 49.9999 Transport

ike the Rothschilds before him in Europe, August Belmont helped transform America from a provincial and almost purely agricultural nation to a prosperous industrial country.

The province’s most lucrative agricultural export market was Matsutake pine mushrooms, prized in Japan for their fragrance and taste. Consumers in Tokyo and Kyoto were willing to pay up to 10,000 yen (US$110) for the best specimens.34 Chinese consumers preferred the caterpillar fungus Cordyceps sinensis, which consumed its host, the ghost moth caterpillar, from inside out as it hibernated on the mountain grasslands. But rising demand and intense competition is driving foragers to collect earlier in the year, sometimes before the fungus has had time to release spores. This means it has no way to reproduce. Production has plummeted over the past twenty years, driving up the price of the fungus to almost twice the price of gold, gram for gram.35 Many Chinese believe this ghoulish parasite, known in Tibetan as yartsa gunbu, or bu, is variously a cure for cancer, an aphrodisiac, and a tonic for long-distance runners.

The rebirth of China came with a significant move away from one of the most extractive set of economic institutions and toward more inclusive ones. Market incentives in agriculture and industry, then followed by foreign investment and technology, would set China on a path to rapid economic growth. As we will discuss further in the next chapter, this was growth under extractive political institutions, even if they were not as repressive as they had been under the Cultural Revolution and even if economic institutions were becoming partially inclusive. All of this should not understate the degree to which the changes in economic institutions in China were radical. China broke the mold, even if it did not transform its political institutions. As in Botswana and the U.S. South, the crucial changes came during a critical juncture—in the case of China, following Mao’s death. They were also contingent, in fact highly contingent, as there was nothing inevitable about the Gang of Four losing the power struggle; and if they had not, China would not have experienced the sustained economic growth it has seen in the last thirty years.

Known as Naxalites...they attacked "class enemies"- big landlords, policemen, bureaucrats, and "liberated" territories which they hoped would form bases for an eventual assault on the cities, as had happened in China. The Indian government responded brutally, killing and torturing thousands. Driven underground, the Naxalite movement splintered and remained dormant for many years. In the 1990s, when India began to move towards a free market, the Naxalite movement revived in some of the poorest and most populous Indian states. Part of the reason for this is that successive Indian governments have steadily reduced subsidies for agriculture, public health, education, and poverty eradication, exposing large sections of the population to disease, debt, hunger and starvation. Almost three thousand farmers committed suicide in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the government, advised by McKinsey, cut agricultural subsidies in an attempt to initiate farmers into the world of unregulated markets. In recent years, Naxalite movements, which have long organized landless, low-caste peasants in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, have grown quickly in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh- where an enfeebled Indian state is increasingly absent- to the extent that police and intelligence officials in India now speak anxiously of an unbroken belt of Communist-dominated territory from Nepal to South India.

harting the rise of Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street's greatest investment banking houses, essentially traces the gradual emergence of a powerful, industrial United States. Beginning as cotton brokers in an agricultural society, the first Lehmans to arrive in America helped finance the Confederacy during the Civil War, and then turned to Wall Street to dabble in commodities well into the 1900s.

There is no “good,” just passages and pathways to greater depths of pain brought to bear as markets diversify and specialise. In thinking he is winning—be it through miraculous medical advancements, enlightened self-interest which fosters a degree of social stability, or a planet wide agricultural revolution—man is in fact throwing himself into heightened states of artfully dressed turmoil: mayhem which could only thrill a Creator disposed to being thrilled at such sweet turbulences.

Economic growth Stalin style was simple: develop industry by government command and obtain the necessary resources for this by taxing agriculture at very high rates. The communist state did not have an effective tax system, so instead Stalin “collectivized” agriculture. This process entailed the abolition of private property rights to land and the herding of all people in the countryside into giant collective farms run by the Communist Party. This made it much easier for Stalin to grab agricultural output and use it to feed all the people who were building and manning the new factories. The consequences of this for the rural folk were calamitous. The collective farms completely lacked incentives for people to work hard, so production fell sharply. So much of what was produced was extracted that there was not enough to eat. People began to starve to death. In the end, probably six million people died of famine, while hundreds of thousands of others were murdered or banished to Siberia during the forcible collectivization. Neither the newly created industry nor the collectivized farms were economically efficient in the sense that they made the best use of what resources the Soviet Union possessed. It sounds like a recipe for economic disaster and stagnation, if not outright collapse. But the Soviet Union grew rapidly. The reason for this is not difficult to understand. Allowing people to make their own decisions via markets is the best way for a society to efficiently use its resources. When the state or a narrow elite controls all these resources instead, neither the right incentives will be created nor will there be an efficient allocation of the skills and talents of people. But in some instances the productivity of labor and capital may be so much higher in one sector or activity, such as heavy industry in the Soviet Union, that even a top-down process under extractive institutions that allocates resources toward that sector can generate growth. As we saw in chapter 3, extractive institutions in Caribbean islands such as Barbados, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica could generate relatively high levels of incomes because they allocated resources to the production of sugar, a commodity coveted worldwide. The production of sugar based on gangs of slaves was certainly not “efficient,” and there was no technological change or creative destruction in these societies, but this did not prevent them from achieving some amount of growth under extractive institutions.

Consider for a moment the problem of obesity among children in the most economically developed countries. A business executive may frame the issue as one of market potential for new lines of food and clothing, but an educator may frame it as a problem of learning deficits, behavioral disorders, and long-term development issues. A scientist may frame the obesity problem as a population-growth rate that has outstripped agricultural activity, and a sociologist might frame the problem as inadequate family and social structures. An economist may frame the same problem in terms of insufficient purchasing power or the inequitable distribution of agricultural commodities. Each of us frames our strategic problem according to our own experience and what we “know.” Accordingly, we proceed to make assumptions that inform and influence our decision making. Figure 12.1 illustrates this dynamic cycle.

I LIVE IN A part of the country that at one time a good farmer could take some pleasure in looking at. When I first became aware of it, in the 1940s, the better land, at least, was generally well farmed. The farms were mostly small and were highly diversified, producing cattle, sheep, and hogs, tobacco, corn, and the small grains; nearly all the farmers milked a few cows for home use and to market milk or cream. Nearly every farm household maintained a garden, kept a flock of poultry, and fattened its own meat hogs. There was also an extensive “support system” for agriculture: Every community had its blacksmith shop, shops that repaired harness and machinery, and stores that dealt in farm equipment and supplies. Now the country is not well farmed, and driving through it has become a depressing experience. Some good small farmers remain, and their farms stand out in the landscape like jewels. But they are few and far between, and they are getting fewer every year. The buildings and other improvements of the old farming are everywhere in decay or have vanished altogether. The produce of the country is increasingly specialized. The small dairies are gone. Most of the sheep flocks are gone, and so are most of the enterprises of the old household economy. There is less livestock and more cash-grain farming. When cash-grain farming comes in, the fences go, the livestock goes, erosion increases, and the fields become weedy. Like

The “food system,” according to Professor Shaw, now uses 16.5 percent of all energy used in the United States. This 16.5 percent is used in the following ways: On-farm production 3.0% Manufacturing 4.9% Wholesale marketing 0.5% Retail marketing 0.8% Food preparation (in home) 4.4% Food preparation (commercial) 2.9% Apologists for industrial agriculture frequently stop with that first figure—showing that agriculture uses only a small amount of energy, relatively speaking, and that people hunting a cause of the “energy crisis” should therefore point their fingers elsewhere. The other figures, amounting to 13.5 percent of national energy consumption, are more interesting, for they suggest the way the food system has been expanded to make room for industrial enterprise. Between farm and home, producer and consumer, we have interposed manufacturers, a complex marketing structure, and food preparation. I am not sure how this last category differs from “manufacturing.” And I would like to know what percentage of the energy budget goes for transportation, and whether or not Professor Shaw figured in the miles that people now drive to shop. The gist is nevertheless plain enough: The industrial economy grows and thrives by lengthening and complicating the essential connection between producer and consumer.

Extractive institutions are so common in history because they have a powerful logic: they can generate some limited prosperity while at the same time distributing it into the hands of a small elite. For this growth to happen, there must be political centralization. Once this is in place, the state—or the elite controlling the state—typically has incentives to invest and generate wealth, encourage others to invest so that the state can extract resources from them, and even mimic some of the processes that would normally be set in motion by inclusive economic institutions and markets. In the Caribbean plantation economies, extractive institutions took the form of the elite using coercion to force slaves to produce sugar. In the Soviet Union, they took the form of the Communist Party reallocating resources from agriculture to industry and structuring some sort of incentives for managers and workers. As we have seen,

When nations break out of institutional patterns condemning them to poverty and manage to embark on a path to economic growth, this is not because their ignorant leaders suddenly have become better informed or less self-interested or because they’ve received advice from better economists. China, for example, is one of the countries that made the switch from economic policies that caused poverty and the starvation of millions to those encouraging economic growth. But, as we will discuss in greater detail later, this did not happen because the Chinese Communist Party finally understood that the collective ownership of agricultural land and industry created terrible economic incentives. Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party. Their economic reforms, which created market incentives in agriculture and then subsequently in industry, followed from this political revolution. It was politics that determined the switch from communism and toward market incentives in China, not better advice or a better understanding of how the economy worked. W

Japan, a country that had done its best to have no contact with strangers and to seal out the rest of the world. Its economy and politics were dominated by feudal agriculture and a Confucian hierarchical social structure, and they were steadily declining. Merchants were the lowest social class, and trading with foreigners was actually forbidden except for limited contact with China and the Dutch. But then Japan had an unexpected encounter with a stranger—Commodore Matthew Perry—who burst in on July 8, 1853, demanding that Japan’s ports be open to America for trade and insisting on better treatment for shipwrecked sailors. His demands were rebuffed, but Perry came back a year later with a bigger fleet and more firepower. He explained to the Japanese the virtues of trading with other countries, and eventually they signed the Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854, opening the Japanese market to foreign trade and ending two hundred years of near isolation. The encounter shocked the Japanese political elites, forcing them to realize just how far behind the United States and other Western nations Japan had fallen in military technology. This realization set in motion an internal revolution that toppled the Tokugawa Shogunate, which had ruled Tokyo in the name of the emperor since 1603, and brought Emperor Meiji, and a coalition of reformers, in his place. They chose adaptation by learning from those who had defeated them. They launched a political, economic, and social transformation of Japan, based on the notion that if they wanted to be as strong as the West they had to break from their current cultural norms and make a wholesale adoption of Western science, technology, engineering, education, art, literature, and even clothing and architecture. It turned out to be more difficult than they thought, but the net result was that by the late nineteenth century Japan had built itself into a major industrial power with the heft to not only reverse the unequal economic treaties imposed on it by Western powers but actually defeat one of those powers—Russia—in a war in 1905. The Meiji Restoration made Japan not only more resilient but also more powerful.

I have no comments about government development & achievement after complete of one year. “People of India will be appreciated if building will be made with strong foundation. Control of inflation during this year due to reduction of crude price and FII inflows but that is not government achievement. Of course, Inflows of FII money support government and positive sentiment in the market. It is purely on temporary basis, not full proof method. People of India expect creation of employment through development of small scale industry and agriculture based industry. It will control CAD and devaluation of INR. Make economic strong with development work, but not only advertisement in paper. Expectation of people is very very high. Hope government will do so.

The private-equity approach can take the form of simple improvements, such as changing irrigation from antiquated dykes and canal networks to automatic spray systems: these are the equivalent of picking low-hanging fruit. Pricey robots can boost milk per cow by 10-15%. Using “big-data” analytics to plant and cultivate seeds can push crop yields up 5%. “This is an industry where the gap between the top and bottom quartile is greater than anywhere else,” says Detlef Schoen of Aquila Capital, an alternative-investment firm. And yet the 36 agriculture-focused funds, with $15 billion under management, pale in comparison to the 144 funds focused on infrastructure ($89 billion) and 473 targeting real estate ($163 billion), according to Preqin, a data provider. TIAA-CREF, an American financial group, is a market leader with $5 billion in farmland, from Australia to Brazil, and its own agricultural academic centre at the University of Illinois. Canadian pension funds and Britain’s Wellcome Trust are among those bolstering their farming savvy.

Working with living creatures, both plant and animal, is what makes agriculture different from any other production enterprise. Even though a product is produced, in farming the process is anything but industrial. It is biological. We are dealing with a vital, living system rather than an inert manufacturing process. The skills required to manage a biological system are similar to those of the conductor of an orchestra. The musicians are all very good at what they do individually. The role of the conductor is not to play each instrument, but rather to nurture the union of the disparate parts. The conductor coordinates each musician's effort with those of all the others and combines them in a harmonious whole. Agriculture cannot be an industrial process any more than music can be.

bananaland, where the jungle had been leveled and replaced by endless acres of banana trees, each displaying bunches of bananas enclosed in bright blue plastic bags. The bags would be filled with insecticide and chemicals deemed essential to marketing bananas where winter was cold and people liked their fruit in uniform: industrial agriculture gone tropical. Later, after the harvest, many of the bags ended up in the Caribbean, where they would be mistaken for jellyfish and eaten by turtles that would then choke to death. Unlike the complex ecosystems of the rainforest and jungle, mono-crop plantings like bananas couldn’t hold the ground; when the hard rains fell—it

The so-called “Goulash capitalism” episode in Hungary clearly illustrated the problem. In 1994, shortly after the privatization of agriculture and food production, the country was swept by an epidemic of lead poisoning. After searching far and wide for the cause, doctors and scientists finally tracked down the source of the problem. Manufacturers of paprika—a staple of Hungarian cuisine—had been grinding up old paint, much of it lead-based, and adding it to the spice in order to improve its colour. The practice was so widespread that Hungarian officials were forced to order all the paprika in the country removed from store shelves and destroyed. At the time, no laws were in place to prevent such a catastrophe, simply because it had not occurred to anyone that this kind of thing would happen. Under communism, in which firms had no competition, no one had any incentive to poison their customers, and so consumer protection laws were unnecessary. In making the transition to the market, policy-makers assumed that producers would compete with one another to produce the best-quality paprika. They didn’t realize that producers would compete only to produce the best-looking paprika.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries about 85 per cent of the population of India lived in its villages. Both peasants and landed elites were involved in agricultural production and claimed r i g h t s t o a s h a r e o f t h e p r o d u c e . T h i s c r e a t e d r e l a t i o n s h i p s o f c o o p e r a t i o n , c o m p e t i t i o n a n d conflict among them. The sum of these agrarian relationships made up rural society. At the same time agencies from outside also entered into the rural world. Most important among these was the Mughal state, which der ived the bulk of its income from agricultural production. Agents of the state – revenue assessors, collectors, record keepers – sought to control rural society so as to ensure that cultivation took place and the s t a t e g o t i t s r e g u l a r s h a r e o f t a x e s f r o m t h e produce. Since many crops were grown for sale, trade, money and markets entered the villages and linked the agricultural areas with the towns.

Pour donner consistance à cette révolution du temps, il suffit de commencer à énumérer les domaines de production de biens et de services dont l'existence actuelle ne se soutient que de la logique de la société marchande, de la double nécessité d'accroître sans cesse la production-pour-le-profit et de reproduire l'organisation sociopolitique qui la rend possible. Osons donc trancher à la racine et mesurer l'ampleur des secteurs qui, dans une société non marchande, soucieuse de surcroît d'écarter toute séparation entre gouvernants et gouvernés, deviendraient parfaitement superflus. On peut éliminer sans hésiter tout le personnel militaire et policier, poursuivre avec les banques, le système financier et les assurances (ces dernières seules pèsent aujourd'hui 15 % du PIB mondial), sans se priver du plaisir d'ajouter la publicité et le marketing( qui absorbent 500 milliards de dépenses annuelles, soit près d'un tiers des budgets militaires mondiaux). Finalement, le principe d'un autogouvernement à tous les échelons, tel qu'on l'a suggéré dans le chapitre précédent, condamnerait l'ensemble des bureaucraties nationales et internationales à une complète inutilité. Dens pans considérables de l'appareil industriel seront abandonnés, à commencer par la production d'armes et d'équipements militaires. Les impératifs écologiques et l'affirmation de l'agriculture paysanne rendront caduque une grande partie de l'industrie chimique (notamment l'écrasant secteur agrochimique) comme des biotechnologies fortement contestées (OGM notamment). Le secteur agroalimentaire, exemple type d'une marchandisation perverse des formes de production, s'évanouira, au profit d'une valorisation de l'autoproduction et des circuits locaux de production/consommation. […] on voit que chaque abandon de production de biens et de services aura des effets démultiplicateurs importants, puisque les besoins en édifices (bureaux, installations industrielles), en matériaux et en énergie, en infrastructures et en transports, s'en trouveront diminués d'autant. Le secteur de la construction sera par conséquent ramené à une échelle bien plus raisonnable qu'aujourd'hui, ce qu'accentuerait encore la régénération des pratiques d'autoconstruction (ou du moins une participation directe des utilisateurs eux-mêmes, aux côtés d'artisans plus expérimentés). Chaque suppression dans la production de biens et de services éliminera à son tour toutes les productions nécessaires à son installation, à son fonctionnement, sans oublier la gestion des déchets engendrés par chacune de ces activités. Pour donner un exemple parmi tant d'autres, la suppression de la publicité (jointe à celle des bureaucraties et à d'autres changements technico-culturels) entraînera une diminution considérable de la consommation de papier, c'est-à-dire aussi de toute la chaîne industrielle qui lui est associée, dans laquelle il faut inclure exploitation forestière, produits chimiques, matériaux nécessaires aux installations industrielles, transport, etc. Sans nier la pertinence de maintenir des échanges à longue distance, le fait de privilégier, dans toute la mesure du possible, les activités locales et de supprimer les absurdes détours de production qui caractérisent l'économie capitaliste (lesquels mènent, par exemple, l'ail chinois jusqu'en Europe et de l'eau - oui, de l'eau ! - des Alpes jusqu'au Mexique) réduira à peu de chose la chaîne commerciale actuelle et restreindra encore les besoins en transport. Joint à l'abandon d'une logique de production et d'organisation centrée sur l'automobile et le fétichisme égolâtre qui la soutient, tout cela entraînera une forte contraction de la consommation énergétique, qui pourra être satisfaite grâce aux énergies renouvelables, produites, dans la mesure du possible, localement. En conséquence, tout ce qui fonde le poids écrasant du secteur énergétique dans l'économie mondiale actuelle s'évanouira pour l'essentiel. (p. 91-92)

Well, it depends which planned economies you mean. There are lots of planned economies―the United States is a planned economy, for example. I mean, we talk about ourselves as a "free market," but that's baloney. The only parts of the U.S. economy that are internationally competitive are the planned parts, the state-subsidized parts―like capital-intensive agriculture (which has a state-guaranteed market as a cushion in case there are excesses); or high-technology industry (which is dependent on the Pentagon system); or pharmaceuticals (which is massively subsidized by publicly-funded research). Those are the parts of the U.S. economy that are functioning well. And if you go to the East Asian countries that are supposed to be the big economic successes―you know, what everybody talks about as a triumph of free-market democracy—they don't even have the most remote relation to free-market democracy: formally speaking they're fascist, they're state-organized economies run in cooperation with big conglomerates. That's precisely fascism, it's not the free market. Now, that kind of planned economy "works," in a way―it produces at least. Other kinds of command economies don't work, or work differently: for example, the Eastern European planned economies in the Soviet era were highly centralized, over-bureaucratized, and they worked very inefficiently, although they did provide a kind of minimal safety-net for people. But all of these systems have been very anti-democratic―like, in the Soviet Union, there were virtually no peasants or workers involved in any decision-making process.

Another federal law makes it a felony for any person “knowingly to deliver or cause to be delivered for transmission through the mails or interstate commerce by telegraph, telephone, wireless, or other means of communication false or misleading or knowingly inaccurate reports concerning crop or market information or conditions that affect or tend to affect the price of any commodity in interstate commerce.”21 For this “crime,” you can be fined up to one million dollars and imprisoned for up to ten years. If you are ever prosecuted for a violation of this law, the way it is written, all the government needs to do to put you behind bars is to prove that you sent anybody a single bit of inaccurate information that somehow concerned crop or commodity market information or conditions. It does not matter whether you sent that message by telephone or mail or telegraph. It does not matter who you sent that letter to. It does not matter whether the information was actually false, or merely misleading. It does not matter whether your note actually had any effect on market prices anywhere, or even whether you intended for it to have that effect. The way this law was written by the morons in Congress, you are guilty of a felony if you send a postcard to your grandmother in a nursing home, trying to make her feel better by lying about how nice the weather has been in Florida, or how low the gas prices have been. And you will not find this law in Title 18 either; this one is buried in the bowels of Title 7 (sec. 13), which lists the laws supposedly regulating “Agriculture”.

The food industry is a complex, global network of diverse businesses that supplies most of the food consumed by the world's population. The industry has evolved to become highly diversified, with manufacturing ranging from small, traditional, family-run activities to large, capital-intensive and highly mechanized industrial processes . Food production and sale involve various stages, including agriculture, manufacturing, food processing, marketing, wholesale and food distribution, foodservice, grocery, farmers' markets, public markets, and other retailing. Additionally, there are areas of research such as food grading, food preservation, food rheology, food storage that deal with the quality and maintenance of quality

Selling & Buying" Everyone is up for sale, because most are looking for nothing but selling and buying … They sell life to buy a wretched living! You see them selling with no shame or dignity, and whenever you encounter a sign of kindness or a smile, you soon discover that it is fake and for marketing purposes only… You see the sons of bitches and their children and grandchildren all busy selling real estate cars bodies and desires fruit and vegetables countries and agricultural lands natural resources (after proxy revolutions) clothes, shoes, and things – both fake and original – cheap gifts and souvenirs in touristy cities iPhones with ugly accessories long and wide lists of all things, big or small, that are supposed to make them happier trendier more attractive and more human… And between one sale and another, they rest and talk about values, the Creator, ethics, religion, what is prohibited and what’s allowed… Between one sale and another buy, you find them discussing dignity and freedom, theorizing the meaning of life, talking about politics and revolutions nature and the environment diseases and chronic illnesses the latest technological advancements about everything expect the fact that all the misfortunes on this planet are because they don’t hesitate to sell anything and everything their hands can reach, in exchange for one moment of superficiality! You see those who chase after and master the game of selling and buying in perfect harmony with the latest trends and styles, yet dwelling inside miserable bodies whose soul and spirit have long departed with no return… Oh, how fortunate are those who learned to adapt with this game of selling and buying… [Original poem published in Arabic on June 29, 2024 at ahewar.org]

This table only counts physical health effects due to disruptions that took place in the Illusion of Control phase. It considers both short-run and long-run effects. Each of the claimed effects is based on a published study about that effect. First on the list is the disruption to vaccination programs for measles, diphtheria, cholera, and polio, which were either cancelled or reduced in scope in some 70 countries. That disruption was caused by travel restrictions. Western experts could not travel, and within many poor countries travel and general activity were also halted in the early days of the Illusion of Control phase. This depressive effect on vaccination programs for the poor is expected to lead to large loss of life in the coming years. The poor countries paying this cost are most countries in Africa, the poorer nations in Asia, such as India, Indonesia and Myanmar, and the poorer countries in Latin America. The second listed effect in the table relates to schooling. An estimated 90% of the world’s children have had their schooling disrupted, often for months, which reduces their lifetime opportunities and social development through numerous direct and indirect pathways. The UN children’s organisation, UNICEF, has released several reports on just how bad the consequences of this will be in the coming decades.116 The third element in Joffe’s table refers to reports of economic and social primitivisation in poor countries. Primitivisation, also seen after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, is just what it sounds like: a regression away from specialisation, trade and economic advancement through markets to more isolated and ‘primitive’ choices, including attempted economic self-sufficiency and higher fertility. Due to diminished labour market prospects, curtailed educational activities and decreased access to reproductive health services, populations in the Illusion of Control phase began reverting to having more children precisely in those countries where there is already huge pressure on resources. The fourth and fifth elements listed in the table reflect the biggest disaster of this period, namely the increase in extreme poverty and expected famines in poor countries. Over the 20 years leading up to 2020, gradual improvements in economic conditions around the world had significantly eased poverty and famines. Now, international organisations are signalling rapid deterioration in both. The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) now expects the world to have approximately an additional 100 million extremely poor people facing starvation as a result of Covid policies. That will translate into civil wars, waves of refugees and huge loss of life. The last two items in Joffe’s table relate to the effect of lower perinatal and infant care and impoverishment. Millions of preventable deaths are now expected due to infections and weakness in new mothers and young infants, and neglect of other health problems like malaria and tuberculosis that affect people in all walks of life. The whole of the poor world has suffered fewer than one million deaths from Covid. The price to be paid in human losses in these countries through hunger and health neglect caused by lockdowns and other restrictions is much, much larger. All in the name of stopping Covid.

The spinning works of the Northeast and Europe demanded huge quantities of cotton. To supply this world market, the South had clung to slave-based agriculture—at a time when it should have been developing its own industrial base. The refusal to acknowledge the need for change was more than saddening. It was disastrous.

During the Cold War, the US military and intelligence agencies largely replaced Europe’s colonial armies in those regions, supporting virtually any tinhorn dictator who proved his “anti-Communist” bona fides by rolling out red carpets for US multinationals. When the Berlin Wall fell, the United States already had 655 military bases (now 800)80 across the developing world, and US companies had blank checks in host nations to extract agricultural, mineral, petroleum, and lumber resources, and large markets for finished goods including, notably, pharmaceuticals

When we use concepts such as the commodification of labor power and the real subsumption of the labor and production process by capital it is with respect to the wholesale transformation of socioeconomic relations that the foregoing entails. The commodification of labor power involves the effective separation of the direct producers from the means of production and livelihood. These means of production are then concentrated in agriculture in the hands of landlords and capitalist farmers and in industry in the hands of the industrial capitalist class. The working class, whether in agriculture or in industry, gains access to the product of their necessary labor only indirectly through the wages they receive. They must then purchase the full spectrum of goods required to sustain their livelihood, and reproduction as a class, in the impersonal cash nexus of the capitalist market. The capitalist market itself is populated by small independent businesses across a division of labor in producer goods, consumer goods and agricultural. The rise of the mechanized cotton industry in Britain thus heralds the first historical embodiment of paradigmatic industrial capital.

The spinning works of the Northeast and Europe demanded huge quantities of cotton. To supply this world market, the South had clung to slave-based agriculture—at a time when it should have been developing its own industrial base.

did not die in vain. The flowering of the consumerist ethic is manifested most clearly in the food market. Traditional agricultural societies lived in the awful shade of starvation. In the affluent world of today one of the leading health problems is obesity, which strikes the poor (who stuff themselves with hamburgers and pizzas) even more severely than the rich (who eat organic salads and fruit smoothies). Each year the US population spends more money on diets than the amount needed to feed all the hungry people in the rest of the world. Obesity is a double victory for consumerism. Instead of eating little, which will lead to economic contraction, people eat too much and then buy diet products – contributing to economic growth twice over.

That brings to mind Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, who surprised me when we were both members of a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. He took that opportunity to announce that Unilever had adopted the goal of cutting the company’s environmental footprint in half by 2020 (this was in 2010, giving it a decade to get there). That was laudable, but a little ho-hum: many socially responsible companies announce global warming goals like that.8 But the next thing he said really shocked me: Unilever is committed to sourcing its raw agriculture material from small farms, aiming to link to half a million smallholders globally.9 The farmers involved mainly grow tea, but the sourcing initiative will also include crops for cocoa, palm oil, vanilla, coconut sugar, and a variety of fruits and vegetables. The farms involved are in areas ranging from Africa to Southeast Asia and Latin America, with some in Indonesia, China, and India. Unilever hopes not only to link these small farmers into their supply chain, but also to work with groups like Rainforest Alliance to help them upgrade their farming practices and so become reliable sources in global markets.10

Aren’t fears of disappearing jobs something that people claim periodically, like with both the agricultural and industrial revolution, and it’s always wrong?” It’s true that agriculture went from 40 percent of the workforce in 1900 to 2 percent in 2017 and we nonetheless managed to both grow more food and create many wondrous new jobs during that time. It’s also true that service-sector jobs multiplied in many unforeseen ways and absorbed most of the workforce after the Industrial Revolution. People sounded the alarm of automation destroying jobs in the 19th century—the Luddites destroying textile mills in England being the most famous—as well as in the 1920s and the 1960s, and they’ve always been wildly off the mark. Betting against new jobs has been completely ill-founded at every point in the past. So why is this time different? Essentially, the technology in question is more diverse and being implemented more broadly over a larger number of economic sectors at a faster pace than during any previous time. The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology. These changes affect a multitude of industries that each employ millions of people. The speed, breadth, impact, and nature of the changes are considerably more dramatic than anything that has come before.

In basic microeconomics textbooks, even when welfare gets attention, it is in the domain of efficient outcomes. Redistribution through taxes is first introduced as a big ‘no go’ domain with concepts of deadweight loss. However, inefficiency out of market behaviour and market outcomes is plainly ignored and overlooked. Approximately, $600 million daily is needed to feed every extremely poor person, yet about $2.75 billion value of food is wasted every day, according to Food and Agriculture Organization. Consequently, 9 million people die every year from hunger while one-third of all food is wasted. This gross inefficiency in economic resources is not captured or discussed. According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, globally, per capita food supply increased from about 2,200 kcal per day in the early 1960s to more than 2,903 kcal per day by 2014. But under capitalism, the market allocates goods including even food to only those who can pay its price. It does not make a difference whether the willingness to pay is less than the price due to ‘preference’ or due to ‘poverty’. Yet, mainstream economics claims consumer sovereignty.

....during the agricultural age, humans had easier access to high-carbohydrate foods, such as grains and fruits. Sugary foods are a more recent addition to modern diets. Nowadays, in the Western world you are bombarded with an overabundance of refined carbo- hydrates that have been marketed to help make your hurried life more convenient. Your body, however, is not equipped to handle the abundance of these types of carbohydrates. Carbohydrates not used as an immediate energy source are turned into stored fat. Along with Americans’ increasingly sedentary lifestyle, this explains why, even with the development of low-fat and nonfat food choices, excessive carbohydrates have continued to fatten so many people.