Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT: 11-15 October 2010 (1771-1775)

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Rimwolf:
John Kenneth Galbraith grew up on a farm. He's said that one advantage of that background is that after that, nothing else really seemed like work.

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: Exar_Kun on 17 Oct 2010, 03:22 ---"people can only be expected to learn as much as they need to learn to get the job done"
--- End quote ---

If you only learn what you need, you are never ready at the moment a new skill is needed, and others who have learnt things they didn't immediately need will pass you again and again.

Akima:

--- Quote from: raoullefere on 17 Oct 2010, 06:19 ---One of the things we tend to forget as nations is that each country's viability is really based on food production. If your country can't feed itself, it's a rotten log waiting to fall, no matter how advanced its tech or what fancy services it offers (Good luck eating a web page).
--- End quote ---
Yes, because specialisation is bad. Every nation should only consume what it produces domestically, and trade is a source of weakness. Why stop at nations? Cities within a nation rely on trade to bring in food, so they're obviously rotten logs too. Individuals providing "fancy services", like judges, doctors, teachers and engineers for example, rely on others to grow their food. Rotten logs all of them! Send them to the countryside to grow food! Trade and specialisation are bad! Subsistence agriculture is the way to go!

I'm sorry about the sarcasm, and of course Raoul was not advocating that sort of primitivism, but I'm sensitive on this point. Within living memory, in the land where I was born, the idea that trade and specialisation were bad, and a source of national weakness, while regional autarky was good, led to... unfortunate results.

Any form of agriculture much above the level of a bronze-age village ceases to be self-supporting in any event. Even in the bronze-age, long-distance trade was often needed to bring in rare tin to alloy with copper. Later, iron tools relied on the "fancy services" supplied by the smith, and the smith relied on the iron-smelter, who relied on the charcoal-burner. Farmers routinely pat themselves on the back about how self-sustaining they are, and how much city-dwellers depend on them, but the modern high-yield agriculture even relatively self-supporting-for-food countries rely on to feed themselves is heavily dependent on city-based manufacturing and "fancy services" like higher education, engineering, communications, chemistry, biology and meteorology, and a good deal of it comes from overseas. International trade is just another step along the chain from trade between regions within a nation, and, I hope, binds countries together as once it bound villages into counties, and counties into nations.


--- Quote from: Exar_Kun on 17 Oct 2010, 03:22 ---people can only be expected to learn as much as they need to learn to get the job done
--- End quote ---
I hope, and believe, that this is not so:

We travel not for trafficking alone.
By hotter winds our fiery hearts are fanned.
For lust of knowing what should not be known,
We make the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

raoullefere:
Of course I don't beleive that, Akima.

But in the U.S., it often seems to me we go the other way. To work on a farm is to be a hick; it's a fate to be avoided at all costs, something for people who 'can't do anything else' to do. That doesn't work too well, either.

Mike Rowe makes this point pretty often on his show (Dirty Jobs): we need to value the folks that do all jobs that make civilization possible. A farmer is certainly not more important than a judge, doctor, teacher or engineer. But he's not less important, either. We need them all.

Is it cold in here?:
It's not just a contemporary US thing. Look up the etymologies of "churl" and "villain".

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