[vdupras]

In terms of joules spent per blade of grass cut, a well honed scythe in the hands of a skillful operator is more efficient than mechanized solutions. If you have an area where you already have an abundance of agricultural workers, it might be that scythe is a better solution than having your agriculture sector being dependent on fossil fuels.

[troupo]

"If you already have a bunch of people doing back-breaking labor, do not even think about giving them efficient machines"

[Syonyk]

"Efficient" in terms of what outputs, for what inputs?

You can't just handwave the term as a synonym for "I think it's better!" - it actually does imply inputs, outputs, and depending on what you want to optimize for, you may get very different results.

If a scythe is genuinely better for the job than a sickle, great!

But in a country without a lot of infrastructure and without modern supply chains, I'm pretty sure a tractor is the wrong solution to the problem. Unless, of course, your problem is "how to burden nations with loans they will never be able to pay back so you can come in and take over."

[troupo]

There are very few, of any, countries without "modern supply chains".

[Cthulhu_]

Imagine a farmer in a region that exclusively has manual laborers gets a machine that makes a hundred laborers' already meagerly paid jobs obsolete. You now have a hundred angry unemployed laborers and a prime suspect.

Yes, this is exactly what the Luddites were about (iirc). But you can't just barge in and make people's jobs obsolete. I'm sure even the scythe is seeing resistance because it can make a single person do the work of three others.

That said, something needs to be done to improve quality of life and reduce poverty. There need to be a lot more better paying jobs in the global South, but it seems that only China is willing to invest in e.g. the infrastructure required for that.

[xupybd]

You have to incrementally improve. You can't jump an economic step.

I'd love to have everyone have no labour to do and be served by robots but let them eat cake doesn't work in reality.

[toast0]

You can absolutely jump economic steps. Many countries never got wide deployment of wired telephones, and never will. They skipped right to wide deployment of mobile phones. Many of those same countries skipped right past desktop computers in every home and laptops to replace desktops and have gone straight from limited computer access to the mobile phone replaces desktop computers.

You certainly don't need to hit all the economic steps, but using capital to reduce labor doesn't make sense when labor is much less expensive than capital.

[xupybd]

By economic steps I meant you have to generate enough capital to afford tractors. This is a good stepping stone.

[reverius42]

Those with excess capital could just, like, give them the tractors.

[xupybd]

You could but you might not have enough money to send enough tractors and infrastructure to have as big of an impact. If you were optimising for impact you might find that Scythes are a better return on your investment.

[vdupras]

Working in the field is difficult, yes, but the western world still hasn't figured out an answer to the question "what happens when we run out of dead dinosaurs[1] to eat?". Until it has, any idea to not exacerbate the problem until we figure it out is, in my mind, a good idea.

[1]: fossil fuels, with poetic license

[troupo]

The world has figured out how to feed the world without the looming threat of starvation common in subsistence farming