Farmers - A Dying Breed. Finally.
Via Instapundit, this sounds like pretty big news:
For the first time in 10,000 years, farming is not the dominating industry on a global basis:
Worldwide, in 1996 agriculture employed 42%, industry 21%, and services 37%. In 2006, the numbers are 36%, 22% and 42%. So in the period, services has overtaken farming on a global scale.
And thus passes a tremendous milestone in the history of our species. Farming, invented around 8000 BC, quickly dominated human activity and has so continued to for the following 10,000 years (give or take a few). And we even find that the tradition agriculture->industry->services transition doesn't hold up globally. The industry segment simply isn't big enough, so many workers skip to services.
posted by Brian at
11:05 PM
3 Comments:
Big news and not necessarily good news -- the switch to industrial farming makes our food chain much more susceptible to environmental attacks on monoculture. Check out what's going on with bee colony collapse sometime.
I'm writing this from the buffet at the Taj, which perhaps gives a unique perspective on how unprepared most Americans are for a disruption in the food chain....
By
Jeff Porten, at 5:14 PM, September 06, 2007
True. Costs & benefits, though - at what point would the world's population no longer be sustainable with non-industrial farming techniques? What happens when the population doubles again? The technological advances allow us to feed all of these people with (relatively) less farmers...
I feel the same way about the bees. Einstein may have been right at the time, but as they say, necessity is the mother of invention...
By
Brian, at 9:52 PM, September 06, 2007
To me this is a terrific milestone. As a lad I picked cotton for $2.50 per hundred pounds. If you were pretty good, and I was, you could pick 200 pounds a day. Thankfully, technology has long since made that obsolete as well as giving us a greatly improved standard of living. If the future of mankind is to be better than the past then its time cannot be spent producing goods.
By
Davo, at 5:15 AM, September 08, 2007
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