[dijit]

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials).

The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food.

This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" comes from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector

The goal of each sector is to make the previous sectors more productive, and so they're squeezed to become commodity.

We therefore intentionally incentivise de-valuing the things that bring us value as a civilisation, and over-valuing the things that don't.

[pjc50]

That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.

[dijit]

just because people don’t wanna do it doesn’t mean it’s not important.

It’s interesting that we would care about monetary value more than societal value- that kind of leans into my point don’t you think?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

IME the people who care about societal value more than monetary value either already have plenty of the latter or aren't going to be the ones doing the work.

[johnnyanmac]

Charity fails when the charitable can't even pay rent. Offer $40/hr to these "essential workers" and suddenly people will be charitable again.

[theptip]

Seems like you’ve smuggled in your conclusion with your definition of “highest value”?

Using the normal definition (how many dollars we will pay for it) the statement is of course objectively false.

Agriculture is certainly necessary, but to take a more extreme example, is air valuable?

[mrguyorama]

>Using the normal definition (how many dollars we will pay for it)

Ah, pot calling kettle black!

The "normal" definition you claim is smuggling the equivalent of an entire cultural ideological framing.

[showerst]

Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.

I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our system is _incredibly_ successful at creating it so I can go do other stuff.

I do agree we have some huge policy issues to deal with around food affordability and skilled labor and supply chains, but I don't think it's because we've de-valued food production.

[dijit]

ehhhh, lets be real. I’m a dyed in the wool meat eating junk eater.

But, a lot of how we produce food today is not humane or sustainable, and a lot of the food itself is so poor in nutrition that it leaves us unhealthy and unbalanced.

This isn’t a lecture, just an observation, I am guilty of eating (almost exclusively) poor quality, over processed, mass produced foods.

But realistically speaking, if we solve the worlds hunger, what should be left is the pursuit of art and science.

Not whatever we seem to be doing with Excel; how can that be more valuable than feeding and healing humanity?

[pfdietz]

Why isn't it sustainable? All the inputs can be derived from non-fossil sources.

Maybe N2O emission? But I think that could be addressed technically.

[dijit]

Not sustainable due to the fossil-fuel laden garbage we feed to bovine stock.

Not sustainable because it causes major health issues which stress the healthcare system and limits quality of life - especially the affordable stuff that people tend to think is “normal value”

[pfdietz]

As I said, all the fossil fuel inputs could be replaced with renewables. In particular: farm machinery can be run on non-fossil energy, nitrogen fertilizer can be made with green hydrogen, and pesticides can be synthesized with feedstocks derived from non-fossil sources like biomass.

The second sentence doesn't make any sense. None of that makes something unsustainable, just regrettable.

[dijit]

Sure, so we're agreeing I think.

It's possible, but we're not doing it because we believe it makes more economic sense to ignore those issues.

When economic sense no longer makes sense sense then we're going to be having issues. And going back to my primary point, everything should really be serving the primary sector, not the other way around really.

[_DeadFred_]

Huh? Nitrogen fertilizer is mostly derived from fossil fuels and has been since the 1900s food boom. Aren't phosphates mainly shipped from islands that build up huge stocks of bird poop? The inputs are all fossil fuel intensive.

[pfdietz]

Nitrogen fertilizer is synthesized from hydrogen and nitrogen. The hydrogen is currently derived from fossil fuels, but there is no requirement that it be so.

Saying "ammonia is produced from fossil fuels, and so must always be" is like saying "cars run on fossil fuels, and so always must". A non sequitur.

Phosphates are derived from large phosphate deposits in various places, such as Florida. Phosphorus will ultimately have to be mined from lower concentration deposits, perhaps ultimately from average crustal rocks, where it appears at about 0.1% concentration. However, build up of mostly insoluble phosphates in soils will I think likely reduce the need for this fertilizer if erosion is kept in check.

[_DeadFred_]

This can't be replaced at a volume that can feed the world nor in a way the world can afford. Lots of things can be done in alternative ways if you remove half the requirements (in this case volume and affordability).

[nine_k]

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

This highly depends on the actual productivity. Producing food by subsistence farming barely feeds you and your children. Making something that improves food production, from ploughs to better seeds to fertilizers, has a significantly larger impact, even if you're not directly producing something edible.

[pas]

People change their diets to live longer, and in general medicine seems more valuable. People happily pay a lot for more QALYs.

Having food security is important, just as having warm clothes and shelter too, right?

Providing what people need is value, just providing "food" can lead to a lot of negative value (see the obesity epidemic).

[DonHopkins]

What is the lowest value thing you can do with your life? Props comedian who destroys good food with a sledge hammer?

Bill Hicks on Gallagher and Carrot top

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJjgFcJ0DoQ

[dylan604]

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.

[dijit]

I think you missed my point.

My point is that we’ve inversed the “value” of each sector.

The highest good you can do for civilisation/society is also the least profitable.

The lowest good you can do for civilisation is the most profitable.

Thus our incentives are opposed diametrically from the benefit of society.

[tim333]

I'm not sure going into farming is even good for society at the moment. My dad was a farmer for a while and there was mostly a food surplus with the EU paying him to set aside land to control that. You do good for society by providing things it's short off.

[spookie]

You should take a look at the price of food after Russia launched their full scale invasion in Ukraine. A significant increase, 15% at its peak and lowering thereafter to about 5%. Still, it is above pandemic levels.

You rise food prices and there's a domino effect on the economy, everything else also increases in price.

It is important the EU is able to produce its own food at acceptable prices.

[pas]

if food security is important then the EU should pay for cost-effectiveness, economic sustainability, ecological resilience, storage capacity, and so on.

AFAIK right now it pays the same for a huge unproductive monoculture of non-edible corn (ie. for bioethanol) as it pays for wheat. (though there's finally talk about some changes to CAP, mostly to stop paying already rich big farms.)

food prices are pretty volatile anyway, and as you see even a war only moved them 15% whereas in Hungary inflation was more than 20%.

[spookie]

Hungary is facing a stagnant economy, with poorly targetted subsidies and overall high corruption. Inflation was already high since 2019 compared to other OECD countries with similar GDP per capita (checked Estonia, Poland, Portugal and Slovakia). They have also continued to engage with Russia economically despite sanctions (even outside the energy sector) leading to sometimes having exemptions or attempting to use that as leverage against EU policies. All of this has further destabilized their economy, given neighbours will hesitate in trade.

Hungary is the worst example you could pick from the EU.

[mrguyorama]

>Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is.

America spends $20-$30 billion a year paying corn growers per bushel of corn they grow

America spends $100 billion+ per year paying people to buy the output of those farmers using food stamps.

America requires that 10-15% of all gas in the entire nation is actually ethanol derived from corn.

Twice now, President Trump has personally destroyed the market for American soybean production and dropped $20 billion on the industry to not piss them off.

I am family friends with the family that grows a significant amount of Potatoes in Maine. They love to complain about anything and everything as they drive around in $80k pavement princess trucks that aren't their $80k work trucks about how much liberals suck as those at least third generation farmers inherit the entire thing and they switch to cute "artisanal" breeds of potatoes that they sell to those same liberals for a nice markup and harvest them with the literal undocumented workers they swear they hate and pay a few dollars an hour, and insist the men aren't men anymore as they drive their airconditioned harvesters and aren't missing any fingers like their ancestors, and spend all their free time getting piss drunk and smoking weed which was grown by their cop buddies as they vote for people who want to make such a thing a crime again, and reminisce about when they were important; In high school. They are actually pretty friendly if you have the right skin color and genitals though.

I think farmers can maybe quit the bellyaching. Most of the modern world solved famine by just giving farmers money for doing a basic job, one that's been so improved and enhanced by technology that they are allowed to care about such things as "How will a trade war affect my profits this year" instead of "Oh my god oh my god an unexpected frost we are all going to die". It is some of the best $150 billion the US spends.

[vablings]

Most of the food production in the United States has been moved over from small individual farmers to large corporations. Any time there is government policy that negatively hurts farmers there is a big push from the media to show small time farmers hurting but the biggest losers are actually the much larger corporations.

Farmers are the ultimate DEI hire and are small farmers are just used as political tools, eventually if companies like John Deere keep getting away with blatant consumer rights abuses these small farmers will be completely wiped out and just left with massive corporations that heavily lobby the government for more subsidy's and free hand-outs