[dahart]

> They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt.

What a strange statement. Most people in most countries aren’t interested in “working with the dirt” as their full time occupation. Are they supposed to be interested in working with dirt more than other countries for some reason, and not aim for science, tech, education, finance, arts, etc? I just looked it up, and Mongolia’s economy is around 35% mining and agriculture, with 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand, so their statement seems especially ironic. The US and European economies have an even lower fraction of mining and agriculture, and aspire to get away from manual labor, especially involving dirt.

Also don’t forget it’s much easier to grow things in NZ than Mongolia: “the high altitude, extreme fluctuation in temperature, long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. The growing season is only 95 – 110 days. Because of Mongolia's harsh climate, it is unsuited to most cultivation.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongolia#Agriculture

[AlotOfReading]

"Agriculture" as a category includes livestock and herding, which make up something like 80% of the Mongolian agricultural industry.

[dahart]

Yeah, correct, because it makes more economic sense to herd than farm, for reasons you and I have both given. It doesn’t make sense nor help anything for foreigners to waltz in and proclaim Mongolians aren’t interested, right?

[robocat]

> 10% of their total GDP from agriculture, which is quite a bit higher than New Zealand

Meat was 11% of NZ export income: a huge amount more than the 1.5% for Mongolia[1]. GDP is weird, and comparing sectors or countries is hard. Comparing meat since that's closer to the topic.

> long winters, and low precipitation provides limited potential for agricultural development. it is unsuited to most cultivation

A better comparison is between the South Island of New Zealand and Mongolia. South Island latitude 41S to 47S. Mongolia latitude 41N to 50N. The South Island has "high-country farms" but yes New Zealand farming is far different from Mongolia where the country's altitude is mostly between say 800m and 1600m (along with continental weather). Our agriculture is very different from Mongolia's (and ours is variable: floods in some areas and bad droughts in other areas).

[1] Data: Mongolia Exports of meat and edible meat offal was US$19.73 Million during 2021, Mongolia of total Exports 1324.80. New Zealand had NZD77.2 billion exports, with NZD8.6 billion exports for meat and offal.

> They said most Mongolians weren’t interested in working with the dirt.

(Edit: removed inane opinion). Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.

[dahart]

That’s all fair, I’d delete my comment if I could.

> Dissecting a second-hand sentence is pointless. Without more context, we can't know what they meant or what they were trying to communicate or the value of their opinion.

Totally agree. Sharing the second-hand sentence out of context also makes little sense, no? That was the only point I intended to make, and I should have left out the sloppy economic comparison.

[robocat]

All good: your comment got me to dig into some economic numbers - worthwhile for me or I wouldn't have bothered trying.

More importantly it reminded me that comparing group statistics is really hard!