After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates 332
Peter S. Magnusson writes "As reported widely in business and mainstream press, the ILO recently released world market employment statistics. Most outlets focused on US economic competitiveness vs. China and Europe. Few noticed the gem hidden away in the ILO report: for the first time since the invention of agriculture, farming is not the biggest sector of the global economy — services is. (Aggregate employment numbers often divide the economy into agriculture, industry, and services.) Workers are now moving directly from agriculture to services, bypassing the traditional route of manufacturing."
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
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10,000 years of incredible human engineering isn't going to end with something as simple as "we've developed all the farmland".
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:5, Interesting)
While true, it's unlikely it will ever happen. Barring a collapse of civilization (did someone mention Huns at the door?) humankind will continue to engineer itself forward. Something "complicated" like an Indoor Farm may seem like an overkill, but it does have a lot of advantages over farmland. Not the least of which is control. We've already been engineering our crops and the soil. (Even the "organic" variety still use modern farming techniques.) Thus the next logical step is to engineer the farmland itself to better meet our needs.
Reducing the distance between the farms and the consumers could have a lot of direct benefits. One of which is being able to control and recycle the farm wastes means that open lands are cleaner and better smelling. Future city engineers may even look at ways of pumping filtered CO2 from the city's air into the crops, while pumping the resultant oxygen back to the city.
Lots of possibilities.
(And yes, I've been watching too much "Engineering an Empire" off of iTunes. Excellent show!)
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:4, Interesting)
The oldest profession (Score:2, Interesting)
Almost as soon as there were cities, there were temple prostitutes who, along with grain, formed the backing for much of the early currencies. These days the temple [google.com] is returning to "services" for backing of the value of its currency, but we must ask ourselves one simple question:
When subsistence agrarians are cut off from their lands through centralized land ownership, and wealth is increasingly centralized, how are we going to keep tabs on the portion of "the services sector" that is really just some form of temple prostitution? Or don't you care that the children of the world are increasingly going to have to provide, in the form of "services", what amounts to prostitution for their food and shelter?
The Third Wave (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)
There are a whole lot of factors that contribute to those increases, though. Probably one of the simplest is the affordability of irrigation. One of the most frequently overlooked is the 30% increase of atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
Ignorance is not an excuse (Score:5, Interesting)
Ethanol is most criticized, and with due cause. Traditional methods of ethanol production (for instance) deserve criticism. Using only corn kernels is horribly inefficient, particularly when corn is a food source.
But the old ways are changing. The State of Georgia will host the nation's first cellulosic ethanol production facility [dailykos.com]. Cellulosic ethanol production is more than 15 times more efficient than traditional production methods. Any green biomass can be used: corn kernels, corn stalks, corn roots, switchgrass, cane sugar, tree chips, industrial green waste, and even pig shit. This is the future of biofuels.
Range Fuels is building the new facility in Georgia. They do not use any biomass also used as a food source for humans or animals. The Georgia plant will use industrial tree waste from the many paper mills in the region.
Guess you'd like to clean your own hotel room? (Score:3, Interesting)
Give them more credit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Food remains crucial though... (Score:3, Interesting)
What is the difference between cleaning a shirt and sewing a shirt. Both take raw material ("cloth") and turn it into the same product (clean shirt). But because the sewing typically involved purchasing the shirt and reselling it instead of simply 'taking possesion' of it and returning it, it is considered 'industry' while the cleaning is considered 'service'.
Similarly, there are a whole lot of "service" industries related to agriculture that were ORIGINALLY done by the farmer.
For example, trucking the food to the market, counts as a service, but used to be done by the farmer.
Less obvious are things like the commodity markets. When someone buys a pork belly future he is in truth taking on some of the agriculutral risk which USED to be born by the farmer. Yet the entire agricultural commodity business is counted as a "service".
We have changed our definitions far more than we have actually changed the amount of effort we put into supplying us with food.
Re:6 Billion+ (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, the jury is still out on this one, and most people consider programming to, in fact, be a service job.
The ultimate question is this: is a program real wealth or is it just something that has value? A piece of food or a building is real wealth in that it is something which can be used to directly keep a person alive or directly change matter/energy. The value of a piece of wealth may change, but its inherent utility does not (if we neglect things like aging and falling apart). A 1000 square foot house will still be a 1000 square foot house whether people are willing to pay $50000 or $500000 for it. An apple is still an apple regardless of its price.
Software is an admittedly difficult-to-classify area, because in one sense software is indeed a tool: it allows fast computation for design, or accurate control of machinery. In another sense, though, software itself is a unique type of good in that it is not economically scarce: once a particular bit of software is created, there are no practical physical limitations on the number of simultaneous uses of that software. This is the argument against considering software to be wealth.
I think the best way to divide "service" from "not service" is: is the result of the activity new wealth, or just shifting around of wealth? I understand that services create value, but that is different than wealth. Manufacturing and agriculture definitely create wealth; programming may or may not depending on how you look at it. Everything else is clearly a service, because it just shifts the wealth of manufacturing and agriculture around.
My take on the matter is simply this: I cannot eat a haircut, nor will readily-available newsfeeds keep the cold winter air away. An economy must produce wealth to survive; just providing services means that you're just a slave to whomever does in fact produce the actual wealth.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps people could voluntarily take up gardening in their free time instead?
Re:Newer Studies have contradicted your statement. (Score:3, Interesting)
All we're doing now is currently using huge stockpiles of non-renewing (or renewing on too massive of timescales) biomass to convert to energy. The biomass is essentially a large capacitor or battery that had stockpiled billions of years of the sun's energy. We keep thinking of newer and newer ways to drain this battery, and more efficient ways to extract that energy (or at least widen its pipes for more watts per second). We're using it for everything from getting to space to farming to arguing over the internet. Eventually, whether next year or 3000A.D. it's going to start becoming harder and harder to access this energy, ultimately resulting in it drying up.
Really, this "efficient" farming as we see it is robbing peter to pay paul. It's like saying your hand-cranked flash light is more powerful than mine, while you have a 9v you found lying on the ground hooked up in series. Eventually, it's going to drain.
I venture to guess, however, by the time energy supplies start diminishing and drives the price up, we'll find some more cost effective energy.
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:2, Interesting)
Specialization is nice, but it can go to far. I was thinking of the people whose job it is to process food. For them, food production isn't about feeding their families, it's about maximizing profits and producing units, as though they were making clocks or automobiles or shoes. There's an obvious problem with that -- food is so much more important, as all the poisoned-food-from-China-scares in the US as of late have reminded us. If people were at least closer to the food, so to speak, things would be better. Maybe not everyone needs to be a farmer, but maybe everyone *should* know the person who grows his food, and vice versa.
To start with, maximizing profits and maximizing production leads to cheaper and more plentiful food. The key is in making sure you don't lose quality in the process. Knowing your farmer, however, isn't going to change that - if we, China's best customer, are getting poisoned food from China, what is China giving themselves?
The other thing I was thinking is that people are generally less happy than they were before, at least that's what just about every older person (let's say 70+) I talk to tells me. Why? I'd wager it's at least partly because the pendulum has swung so far from the more agrarian society that existed even 50 years ago.
I'd wager that it's because they're feeling nostalgic and miss when the world made sense to them. Alternatively, it might have less to do with agrarianism and more to do with the fact that we can hear everyone complain more. Think back 50 years ago - how did people learn about each other? They'd have to meet and greet with each other. Nowadays, everyone can be acutely aware of the suffering of children in Darfur, see pictures, and chat with them online. Fifty years ago, the only way you really found out about the horrors of war was if you participated in one. Nowadays, you can find YouTube footage of Chechen rebels shooting Russian helicopters, you get live coverage of air raids from the news... well, you get the idea. Point being, fewer people are living in a self-enclosed Brigadoon-style cocoon, where nothing is wrong in the world, except some stuff that's just really far away.
Now, instead of having time to grow food, we don't even have time to eat healthy food and so we resort to food that is merely convenient.
This actually isn't anything new. Orwell was writing about this in "The Road to Wigan Pier" [george-orwell.org] during the Great Depression. To quote [george-orwell.org]:
When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water.
In short, it's not even an issue of time - the people Orwell was talking about were unemployed. They had plenty of time. They didn't have much money, though, and they had to keep themselves occupied, so instead of eating nutritious food, they ate cheap food with abysmal quality that tasted better. When you're well off, you don't have to choose between "tastes good" and "good for you" - you can get both pretty easily. The poorer you are, though, the more that choice faces you, and, when faced with that choice, 98% of the world will go for "tastes good" each and every time. The way to fix this is by making good food inexpensive and increasing the standard of living. Now, instead of living out of cans of potted meat food product, it's actually cheaper per weig
Re:To me, the really sad thing is... (Score:3, Interesting)