Exactly. The only reason that it’s even vaguely possible to feed the average person in a modern western society is “the economy”.
In the 1500s about 60% or more of the population were farmers. In the 1800s once mechanization became available, it dropped to 30% in some places. These days it’s only about 5% or less.
A tiny number of farmers can support the needs of hundreds of millions of people because of the whole clockwork system we have to get food from the farms to the table, and then get the money back to the farmers so they’re willing to keep doing it. Meanwhile other people build tractors, other people make fertilizer, other people make tires for tractors, other people work on the buying and selling of commodities like grain. And, of course, most people do things completely unrelated to farming.
This whole clockwork system is far from perfect. It wasn’t carefully built to be the best possible system, it evolved over time due to pressures and incentives. There are plenty of useless “cogs” in the system. But, if you smash the system, people start dying of starvation within a few weeks. Even if you make sudden unexpected changes to the system without first studying it, you end up killing people. The DOGE people thought USAID was wasteful, so they removed a few parts of the system. Not only did that cause a lot of death from people depending on the food aid, it also massively hurt the farmers who were counting on USAID buying their crops.
Exactly. The only reason that it’s even vaguely possible to feed the average person in a modern western society is “the economy”.
In the 1500s about 60% or more of the population were farmers. In the 1800s once mechanization became available, it dropped to 30% in some places. These days it’s only about 5% or less.
A tiny number of farmers can support the needs of hundreds of millions of people because of the whole clockwork system we have to get food from the farms to the table, and then get the money back to the farmers so they’re willing to keep doing it. Meanwhile other people build tractors, other people make fertilizer, other people make tires for tractors, other people work on the buying and selling of commodities like grain. And, of course, most people do things completely unrelated to farming.
This whole clockwork system is far from perfect. It wasn’t carefully built to be the best possible system, it evolved over time due to pressures and incentives. There are plenty of useless “cogs” in the system. But, if you smash the system, people start dying of starvation within a few weeks. Even if you make sudden unexpected changes to the system without first studying it, you end up killing people. The DOGE people thought USAID was wasteful, so they removed a few parts of the system. Not only did that cause a lot of death from people depending on the food aid, it also massively hurt the farmers who were counting on USAID buying their crops.