Slashdot Mirror
After 10,000 Years, Farming No Longer Dominates
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."
I can fix that!
--
10,000 years of incredible human engineering isn't going to end with something as simple as "we've developed all the farmland".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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!)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
For corn, much of the improvements have come in the genetics of the seed (hybridization in the 50's and gmo's now) and in the application of ag chemicals for fertilizer and pest control. This year, the USDA is estimating that corn yields will be in the 150 bushels per acre range (but that might be a bit high).
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Read Alvin Toffler's 1980 book _The Third Wave_ which predicted with uncanny accuracy just how this would play out. Stay ahead of the next 10,000 years.
--
make install -not war
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.
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. 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.
Since there is no real value to having someone clean your hotel room, you might as well do it, right? And cook your own burgers? Why do they have chefs, why not just have the customers cook their own etouffee? Maybe if we drive to Iowa to pick up our own corn, we won't have to push money around without adding value. From now on, I'm going to roll my own sushi!
Our entertainers, doctors and teachers all count as 'service' jobs. So are the graphic artists who design our toys and the advertisers who sell them to us. So are the truckers that bring us our food, the McMinions that cook it for us, and the lawyers that sue for us when we eat too much of it. Just because someone's in a 'service' job doesn't mean they aren't useful, valued, and improve the human condition. It also certainly doesn't mean they make minimum wage. (Sure, the McMinions will make minimum wage, but it's not like the assembly line workers or grunt farmers are doing any better for themselves).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
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.
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)