patrick.net

Astrid, I've been following a particular development in sustainable agriculture which, if you've already seen it, then fine, but if not pretty interesting. Thought our very accomplished gardener might be intrigued...

Cornell is working to determine the composition of soils developed in the Amazon basin in pre-Conquistador times. In place of the slash and burn practices of recent times, Amazon indigenous cultures used pyrolysis (low oxygen burning) and plowed the resulting charcoal into their soils. Although the precise methods and processes are still imperfectly understood, the resulting soils have multiple properties of current interest:

They require little or no additional fertilization.
They release no nutrients into surface water.
They generate yields superior to current methods.
They are strongly hydrophylic.
The process of generating and using them is carbon negative.

The local term for the enriched soil is terra preta negra. There is a working group, the Eprida Institute, which has developed a scalable plant using pyrolysis to produce heat, fuel, carbon sequestration and an enriched charcoal agricultural product from biomass.

What interested me particularly is that this method appears to have been employed in several ancient cultures; is capable of improving the worst of soils, clays or sands; it reduces demand for irrigation, reduces or eliminates the need for commercial fertilizers and it returns carbon to the soil in beneficial form. Treated soils release almost no NOX into the atmosphere.

In view of earlier discussion, it is disruptive technologies of this kind which can change our most basic assumptions. We tend to believe we'll never step away from fossil fuels, or feed the planet, or have enough fresh water, or reduce carbon dioxide emissions. As we sort out what we want and get better at determining what we must do, developments sometimes come along which offer solutions.

Things are pretty equal in the Nordic states. Apparently the CEO of Nokia only paid himself about $400K out of the business. If he was in America, presumably he would be angling for $40M p.a.

Social democracies have worked well in northern Europe.

Jimbo Says:
You had me there DS, until this line:
the ’self made’ millionaire was able to manipulate others and their economic relations in a way that disproportionately benefitted him or herself at everybody else’s expense.

This is where we part ways. You think that economics is a zero-sum game, where one person’s success inevitably comes at another’s expense.

More or less it does, doesn't it? Tell me where the money comes from, if it isn't from the exchange of labour for a roughly constant reward for most of us. My pay is rock solid, only creeps up at 3% a year with the odd bonus. So you tell me where the money comes from, given that most people's wages are roughly constant? It comes in tiny slices with every new invention -- the DSL connection, the mobile phone, etc, are actually reducing your income relative to the period before their invention... Money doesn't grow on trees, you know...

That is simply not the way the world works, not even in Late Capitalism. Does Google add value to the world? Should the people who created that value share in the gains?

google is free for me to use, and the money they make is from more tiny slices of advertising revenue -- which sometimes goes 'round into te goods and services I purchase elsewhere. And why should google workers be paid disproportionately from everyone else? Doesn't the garbage collector also serve a useful function? There are other ways of rewarding people in society for their efforts other than with huge sums of money.

The guy who actually wrote DOS (Q-DOS, MS-DOS, etc) still works for Bill Gates as a programmer on a wage.

If you really think the Aborigines are the way to go, go move in with them, no one is stopping you from adopting the lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer. Personally, I think that Penicillin, hot showers and the Internet are great inventions, not ones that I would voluntarily do without. What was the life span of your Noble Savage?

Isn't that what I said about invention and technological advances in the following paragraph? You should read my posts more carefully... This is the sort of attempted argument (which is actually in agreement with what I said) which shows pure illogic and non sequiturs. It is possible however to have inventions without gross inequalities and the mixture of extreme affluence and poverty you see particularly in the US. ref Sweden and the social democracies again.

But I guess people only find the time for the deepest self criticism when times are treating them the best. Another irony.

Not really. In some ways, people are more stressed than ever before. Stressed by time pressures, by their jobs, their bosses, by their commutes, by their expectations. This is the downside of modernity. Fragmented families and groups. Depression rates are actually higher now than in the last 100 years -- why should that be? What's the missing ingredient? Belonging? Living near your loved ones? Having an unpressured life? Are the expectations of doing huge amounts of work that lower our quality of life increasing our quality of life? Have we mistaken the means for the end?

Not to mention pathologies such as speculation in the housing market causing misery for many, the subject matter of this site...

The Australian Aboriginals had a pretty laid-back life, and only had to work 3 hours a day to meet their material needs, as per the work of Sahlins -- he called them 'the original affluent society'. They also had a sense of belonging and community that you now only see in southern Mediterranean and African families and similar...

P.S. I don't want to swap places with the rich, I actually want more equal distribution -- the rich don't need much more to live than the rest of us, the rest of it is just show -- meeting their esteem needs. We all know plenty of undeserving upper and middle managers, a la Dilbert's pointy-haired manager... let alone the undeserved hereditary wealth of the squabbling, narcissistic European aristocracy...

Fortune magazine described it as "the most successful product ever marketed in America." Xerography (Greek for "dry writing") was invented by Chester Carlson, a shy, soft-spoken patent attorney, who grew up in almost unspeakable poverty and worked his way through junior college and the California Institute of Technology. He offered his 1937 discovery to more than 20 major corporations, including IBM, General Electric, Eastman Kodak and RCA. Only the tiny Haloid Corporation in Rochester, NY, took a chance. Although early versions were flops, the photocopier eventually changed business forever and earned Carlson over $200 million in royalties. A modest man, he gave away most of his fortune anonymously. He lived simply, never owned a second home or even a second car. Casual acquaintances seldom suspected he was rich; when Carlson told an acquaintance he worked at Xerox, the man assumed he was a factory worker. "His real wealth seemed to be composed of the number of things he could easily do without," his second wife said. When he died in 1968, his eulogizers included the secretary-general of the United Nations. In the nearly seven decades since Carlson dreamed up xerography, no one has come up with a better way of making copies on plain paper -- an almost inconceivable achievement, given the pace of technology innovation.

we only believe in free markets until China and India become successful and start pulling ahead and taking jobs away from us -- then it's protectionism all the way, making up a few discourses and pretexts like 'they're keeping inflation down artifically, that's what doing it' -- it's not free markets, it's keeping us No. 1 that's the main game...

mull this little lot over then:

The Richest of the Rich, Proud of a New Gilded Age - New York Times

(or, How the Richest of the Rich Got That Way With No Help From Anyone)

Bruce,

American organic farmers are indeed leading the way. Without government help (since most are too small or don't grow the right crops)! Randy might think that we shouldn't lighten our wallets for dubious health claims, but we as a nation are already paying farmers to grow more than they would otherwise, flood the world with cheap grain, and further erode those environments. What's more gullible? Gee, I don't know...

I am aware that slash and burn agriculture works on a very limited scale. But only with extremely low population pressures and only in places like Amazonia, where soil fertility is low and regrowth rate is high. Charcoal is often used to improve soil quality in houseplant planting soil, though my impression is that it would be too expensive to do on a massive scale.

Rice paddies have a much better record of supporting intense population pressures while avoiding erosion and preserving soil fertility. They are very water dependent (a major problem now that much of China's fresh water supply is highly polluted) and requires intense toil in humid 100 degree weather, but it was a system that gave generation upon generations sustenance.

Top 7 Ways To Get Rich

If you can't inherit wealth, can't marry it, can't work for it, can't win it, can't steal or deal it or can't gamble for it then maybe you can invest and get rich. There are 2 good ways to invest and get rich; the real estate market and the stock market.

There's one traditional way of dealing with hereditary wealth. Social revolution, anyone?

Randy, Brand, et al,

Just remember that property rights are a function of the government. It is not absolute and immutable. There's delicate middle road between too much confiscation and absolute claim to ownership. When people (collectively) lose sight of this balance, reality will eventually slap them in the face.

rage against the machine...

Even if Bill Gates Jr. had never inherited one thin dime from Bill gates Sr., he would *still* have had huge competitive advantages, connections and opportunities that simply do not exist for the rest of us common rabble.

and he signed that deal with IBM that said he licensed DOS to them rather than sold it outright... I think he bought Q-DOS with Dad's money, tho...

Jimbo Says:
DS, per capita GDP doesn’t work for me because I am more interested in what the median worker makes in different political and economic systems, not what the overall society makes. It is the old “five guys in a bar and in walks Bill Gates” problem with talking about average wealth.

yes, that's what i said in my comments... maybe the LIS then...

@Randy--
No misconceptions here--I think we are misunderstanding one another on agricultural metrics.

The conference you attended probably told you that the dollar cost per acre using the prevalent factory farming methods is less than in, say, Europe. This is true. If you have one main farmer and some employees farming 2,000,000 acres with machines, petroleum-based fertilizers, and pesticides, the dollar cost to farm each acre is pretty low. The land is not so good, and it will need more fertilizer next year in order to grow anything much at all, and who knows how long the aquifers that make water cheap will hold out, but the cost per acre is low, and the number of acres in production is high, and you end up with a lot of Round-up-ready soybeans. So you are right, if you only want to look at dollars per acre, factory farming wins. I think this may be what you were trying to say.

And what I was trying to say was that the newer alternative farming methods that people have been trying have a tendency to produce more calories per acre, albeit at a higher dollar per acre cost. If your measure is the methodology that gets more calories out of the land, usually the newer alternative methods will win. The food costs more, but I consider some of that extra cost to cover research and development. I don't really care if they also are burying cow horns full of quartz on their land or dancing around their grapevines or whatever, I care that they are using new, clever, logical methods of farming, that they are paying attention, and that the soil is rich and the food tastes good. Bonus if they are local and can get my food to me while it is fresh and at its most nutritious.

So there is a difference between dollar/acre efficiency and calorie/acre efficiency. Again, no misconceptions here. If I have time today I can start citing source material.

Outside of the numbers, human-centered farming offers a substantial difference in quality. My relatively poor family lived off a giant garden when I was young, and my grandparents did the same--and the fact that everything at the Safeway tastes like cardboard by comparison kind of bothers me. Have you ever picked up a basket of strawberries at a farmer's market in France? They are just about the best thing you will ever taste--assuming you like strawberries--and, anyway, you have to eat them fast because they will start melting by late afternoon. I'd rather have one basket of those than 10 baskets of those hard white shippable strawberries at the local Safeway. Quality matters, and I don't believe we have to give it up in order to keep people fed. We just have to think about farming in a new way--which does not have to entail a return to medieval methods.

Randy,

The US & Canada are significantly more productive than Europe, and an order of magnitude more productive than the rest of the World.

On what measure? Output per person, I suspect.

(In which case I very much doubt whether you're an order of magnitude more productive than here in Oz. But I digress...)

There can be other measures. I have a book of agricultural Scientific American articles from the 60's and 70's. Several of the articles deal with how to increase World food production, and one made the point that in terms of output per acre North American productivity was quite low. "Medium intensity" was the phrase they used.

On this measure the "High intensity" areas are peasant-agriculture places like Java and Bangladesh. Bangladesh has half the population of the USA in a country the size of Georgia, and feeds that population on their own agricultural production (not to a very high standard, but well enough to keep the population increasing for the time being).

Astrid,

Well, I'm not really thrilled with the idea of industrial farming producing ever greater gluts of crops for export.

But I do like the idea of reducing agriculture's consumption of water. If the imperial Valley were consuming 30-45% less water, I believe coastal California would breathe a little easier about potable water sources. Same is true of Florida everywhere south of Orlando. And we'd have an easier time of restoring normal flows to the old Everglades lands. In fact, the results Cornell is generating show the runoff nitrogen and phosphate which is destroying estuaries around the globe and feeding red tide blooms could be greatly reduced or even stopped.

Eprida's site doesn't devote much space to the ramifications of what they're doing, but the process adds value in many ways - chaff and crop waste returned to the soil in stable form, carbon capture, reduced need for petrochemical fertilizers. It's too good, really. There must be a catch.

http://www.eprida.com/home/index,php4

Cuba has also been doing pretty well in terms of output per acre--they pretty much lost access to machine parts and fuels and pesticides and fertilizers when the Soviet Union stopped backing them in the early 1990's, and everyone lost weight for awhile, but now they have tons of little farms--even in cities on empty lots--and the output per acre is quite high. Mostly without pesticides, mostly without fertilizers, mostly with compost and with friendly insects and with complementary placements of plants and animals. Plus people are employed on the little farms--apparently it's a pretty good job--and you have entrepreneurs running the little farms, and the neighborhood has fresh produce every day. There are other ways to work this thing. Don't get me wrong--my impression is that there are a number of things Cubans might choose to change about their current situation--but the agricultural side of things is going pretty well.

Oh just look at that comma. This may work...

http://www.eprida.com/home/index.php4

Eliza,

The land is not so good, and it will need more fertilizer next year in order to grow anything much at all

Reference please. The data was the opposite. Tonnes of active-ingredient fertilizer per sq unit has decreased by approximately 8x, not increased in the US over the past 20 years. What has increased is total tonnage, but that's because more square acres are now in production, not because they're using more per acre.

Have you ever picked up a basket of strawberries at a farmer’s market in France?

I lived in Mougins for a while. The best food in the world. I also happen to know that provincial French farms are anything but what you're describing. I'd love to see you explaining your notions to one of these old farmers in Provence. The food there is better for a number of reasons, the main one being the manner in which it is prepared.

anyway, you have to eat them fast because they will start melting by late afternoon.

You mentioned you grew up poor. So did I. My grandparents in rural, agricultural Ohio also tended a multi-acre "garden" which they'd had since the depression & war. The food produced from this garden was seldom a delight. The tiny portion they were willing to serve fresh, including strawberries that rival anything you'll ever eat in France I might add, were delicious. But they canned, pickled, jarred and dried 95% of what came out of that garden. Using all kinds of things we'd call "organics" today, as well as lots of nasty preservatives. Why? Because they were poor, and they learned how to use their land for sustainability during a period of time when many waited in line for food. From my late grandfather's perspective, he'd most certainly view your vision of "sustainability" as purely decedent frivolity. He'd tell you calories per acre isn't what matters, what matters is calories actually consumed from the land.

My grandmother used to tell us when we complained we didn't like the taste of something that taste was something we could enjoy when we were rich, for now we should worry about filling our bellies.

Like I pointed out to DS, discrimination on higher points of quality is a luxury afforded by luxury. I am a food-bigot. I hate bad food. Probably because I grew up eating bad food. But I also have no delusion that all this quality-of-life stuff is mostly the domain of those who are already well off.

Cuba has also been doing pretty well in terms of output per acre–they pretty much lost access to machine parts and fuels and pesticides and

I have that DVD. Very interesting. My take was that Cuba imports enough staple ag (imports have grown something like 5x over the past 10 years) from South America on lucrative terms (for political reasons vis a vis changes in S American governments because of US blunders), that now they are able to enjoy the luxury of little "farmers markets". Lots of things are easy when they're effectively free. What exists in Cuba currently may be a temporary geo-political subsidy program. It could last for a while, but eventually their chums in South America will go the way all state-run economies go. I give it about 6-8 years. Sooner if their trade with the EU forces them to open their markets.

ozajh

Output per acre in terms of yield, tonnes, return on capital, return on assets, efficiency per labor, the list goes on. I don't have calories per acre, but I'll eat my hat if that figure isn't also similarly high at scale.

Anyone can be more efficient on a micro-farm or in a garden. Oz has very small agricultural operations compared to the US or EU. Very very small, in fact. The US operates massive scale ag, which is somewhat essential to the entire chain unless we're all ready to see a whole lotta suffering. Here's an idea of the scale. Even if you buy into the "80% of US grain production is merely an input into meat production" argument, and you eliminate all that, the remaining 1/5 is still larger than the net output of Europe, not to mention the fact this is flawed because Europe also raises livestock, and people actually eat that livestock so eliminating it requires replacement with other sources of foods, probably grown somewhere. (I'll ignore the fact this externalizes the whole overfishing problem; after all, people need to eat 'something').

Your book from the 60s and 70s? You're kidding right? That was 50 years ago, not long after WWII. Of course that was true then. This is the very story. The US didn't sit idle during that period. We modernized our ag production business, which is why my wife's family is on it's last elderly generation of family farmers, all of the kids having long abandoned the family farm for jobs in suburbs and cities.

In fact, the WTO Doha round is very interested to read many of the speeches. There were actually dozens of countries arguing that the US should have "productivity growth caps" placed on our Agriculture because we're *still improving* productivity year-to-year, even today, and at an "alarming" rate. They argued things like the US should stop improving and investing in ag for 10 years, 20 years, longer, in order to allow the developing world to effectively catch up. Ironic, that these countries also have a terrible time feeding their people.

Tell me where the money comes from, if it isn’t from the exchange of labour for a roughly constant reward for most of us. My pay is rock solid, only creeps up at 3% a year with the odd bonus. So you tell me where the money comes from, given that most people’s wages are roughly constant?

I think it is ironic that you make that statement, then in the next paragraph say that Google is "free." Anyway, the average standard of living is going up worldwide, mostly due to the efforts of China, but going up nonetheless. Even in the US, standards of living are creeping up. Where does that come from? Mostly gains in productivity. Sure, the guy who invented the copy machine and then gave away his fortune was pretty noble, but in your vision of the world, he wouldn't get a fortune in the first place. I know I sure wouldn't do my job if I didn't get paid to do it.

Why does the programmer get paid more than the garbage collector? Serious questions only please. But instead of lamenting his sorry plight, you should be trying to figure out ways to automate the collection of garbage. No one should have to do difficult, dangerous, mind-numbing physical labor. Though I wonder what we are going to end up doing with the masses of unemployable, due to either an unwillingness to study or an inability to do so, that this future society would create.

I recently re-read _A_Brave_New_World_ which I had not read since I was a teenager. I know it was intended as a distopian warning, but to me, the society seemed pretty great.

Isn’t that what I said about invention and technological advances in the following paragraph?

I am sorry, I just don't see this anywhere in your writing on this topic. I see your paragraph where you mentioned Aboriginies, but that was the last paragraph in that post. We are actually not that far apart, in many ways. I don't defend our current system of wealth distribution and admire the Scandanavian model (like you do) I am just not ready to throw the baby (Capitalism) out with the bathwater (massive wealth disparity).

Oh and I don't think we are headed to inevitable overpopulation and mass die off. When people have economic incentives to do so, like in post-industrial societies, they naturally decrease their birth rate. All the wealthy countries have a fertility rate below replacement rate.

We just need to get the whole world up to that standard of living before we run out of resources. I don't know if we are going to make it or not, but we have a chance.

The working masses don't have leisure time, they're too busy trying to survive or work multiple low wage jobs due to cover rent, childcare, car repairs, medical.

Folks who have so much leisure time to write long opinions here are among the "rich".

"The land is not so good, and it will need more fertilizer next year in order to grow anything much at all. Reference please. The data was the opposite. Tonnes of active-ingredient fertilizer per sq unit has decreased by approximately 8x, not increased in the US over the past 20 years."

I perhaps was not clear. My intention was to say that fertilizer must be used on a yearly basis, not that the land required ever-increasing amounts of fertilizer. So on that point we are in agreement.

"Have you ever picked up a basket of strawberries at a farmer’s market in France? I lived in Mougins for a while. The best food in the world. I also happen to know that provincial French farms are anything but what you’re describing. I’d love to see you explaining your notions to one of these old farmers in Provence. The food there is better for a number of reasons, the main one being the manner in which it is prepared."

Actually, I was traveling on a budget--this was a backpacking trip in college, and I only had a little savings--so I ate in a restaurant perhaps once. Otherwise, I had a lot of fresh stuff from markets--sometimes cooked by me, sometimes uncooked. Great either way, and I couldn't cook so well then.

I'm not so sure you understand my, um, notions, well enough to dismiss them--perhaps I have not been clear. I think produce is better if the people growing it have the luxury of paying a bit of attention--as they would on a more modest-sized farm, and which they cannot do very effectively on the really giant operations in the midwest. I'm not tied to permaculture or organic or biodynamic or any other such buzzwords--I just notice that the farming goes better when people pay attention and work the living system like a living system rather than a factory. And sometimes the buzzwords go along with that. We are seeing factory farmed organic now, and I'm guessing it will be different from small farm organic. Also, I think that produce tastes better and is more nutritious if it isn't shipped very far and gets to the consumer rather quickly. I'm thinking that one day old spinach tastes better than four day old spinach. Not such wild notions, really. You are more than welcome to disagree, of course.

Yeah, I enjoyed a lot of preserved foods as a child, too--though items frozen in the chest freezer turned out somewhat better than the canned things and required far less work. And make no mistake, our garden was only as organic as the various bugs and blights allowed--but in the end it was mostly organic, and we took care of the land, and thought about what it needed, and there was relationship there. And I'm thinking that the relationship with the land, under any name, may be what matters. That, and shipping time. Shipping produce cross country or around the world may make sense to the market, but it is neither efficient nor delicious. Otherwise a tomato from the farmer's market or from my backyard would not invariably be twenty times better than one from the grocery store, right?

Jimbo Says:
» Isn’t that what I said about invention and technological advances in the following paragraph?

I am sorry, I just don’t see this anywhere in your writing on this topic. I see your paragraph where you mentioned Aboriginies, but that was the last paragraph in that post.

I wrote:
"However, surplus and a fixed habitat also breeds culture, creativity and the space for invention…"

We are actually not that far apart, in many ways. I don’t defend our current system of wealth distribution and admire the Scandanavian model (like you do) I am just not ready to throw the baby (Capitalism) out with the bathwater (massive wealth disparity).

I am. Once again apparently there is only 1 possible form of 'capitalism' which has to lead to massive wealth disparity -- what the Nordic states are doing apparently isn't capitalism -- formally the deployment of capital to achieve a result -- tempered with a social democracy based on delivering universal quality of life outcomes. If only US capitalism worked, it wouldn't be necessary to make films like 'Sicko', for instance.

As the article says:

In contrast to many of his peers in corporate America, Mr. Sinegal, 70, the Costco chief executive, argues that the nation’s business leaders would exercise their “unique skills” just as vigorously for “$10 million instead of $200 million, if that were the standard.”

As a co-founder of Costco, which now has 132,000 employees, Mr. Sinegal still holds $150 million in company stock. He is certainly wealthy. But he distinguishes between a founder’s wealth and the current practice of paying a chief executive’s salary in stock options that balloon into enormous amounts. His own salary as chief executive was $349,000 last year, incredibly modest by current standards.

“I think that most of the people running companies today are motivated and pay is a small portion of the motivation,” Mr. Sinegal said. So why so much pressure for ever higher pay?

“Because everyone else is getting it,” he said. “It is as simple as that. If somehow a proclamation were made that CEOs could only make a maximum of $300,000 a year, you would not have any shortage of very qualified men and women seeking the jobs.”

hmm, I wouldn't think that US ag efficiency would be any higher, or much higher, than Oz efficiency -- many universities here have ag sci programs, and globalisation and communication means that technology transfer occurs very quickly these days, whether it's mechanisation, animal husbandry, pesticides, irrigation techniques, or whatever -- at least between comparable 1st world countries. Further, many Australian farms have been consolidated into larger and larger lots by giant agribusiness over time, also leading to efficiencies and economies of scale.

What would be damaging is the 10 year drought and the consequent massive reduction in primary output in some areas, on the world's driest continent.

Australia is still a massive wheat exporter, tho, constantly bumping into US Senators and US farm subsidies. Wheat, wine, wool and wuranium...

Anyway, I would need to see comparative figures by country by acreage and rainfall... I could see that methods of French cheese production might be a little cottage industry and parochial, but it's high-tech all the way over here...

The WTO Doha observations seem amazingly ass about, but nothing would surprise me about WTO proceedings. I would think that making international donations or reducing prices on massively efficient surpluses might be a good thing to do in these numerous unnamed 'starving countries' with their dictators who refuse to feed the people. maybe the lost revenues from sharing would serve to undercut the flow-on effects which means some people get $50M salaries p.a.

not to mention technology transfer and introducing these massively efficient farming techniques to these seemingly constantly 'developing' countries. after all, we needed regime change in iraq in the interests of freedom and democracy, and heping them rebuild their shattered economy and infrastructure, andno expense is going to be spared, for some reason. let's regime change all the other countries and give them the agricultural techniques and know-how they so sorely need as another, similar act of munificence...

DS: Australia is exporting wheat, wine, wool and... WMD?!? :o

I've quite enjoyed some of the reds coming out of New South Wales.

WMD precursors... we should therefore probably be castigated a rogue nation in the axis of evil, but luckily we get to define what is acceptable instead...

erk, don't remind me of the sparkling shiraz from the mudgee vintner last night...

"The working masses don’t have leisure time, they’re too busy trying to survive or work multiple low wage jobs due to cover rent, childcare, car repairs, medical.

Folks who have so much leisure time to write long opinions here are among the “rich”."

Touche, Sybrib. We have an odd quirk in American society that no one likes to admit they are "rich." Several bloggers have eluded to a million dollar personal net worth, but I would suspect these folks would only apply the "rich" moniker to folks with a pile much larger than thier measley million. A possible reason for the millionare modesty may be the belief that if "I" can do it, anyone can. Another reason may be the newly minted rich do not want to lose touch with their working class heritage. Either way, if you have a million dollar net worth, you are rich.

Using Sybrib's binary of "working masses" and "rich," how many Americans would be in the "working masses" vs "rich"? I suspect it would be somewhat higher than the "1 in 200 Americans is a millionare."

"the ’self made’ millionaire was able to manipulate others and their economic relations in a way that disproportionately benefitted him or herself at everybody else’s expense."

Uh, that is how politicians acquire wealth. The power to "manupulate" others comes from the player with the legal monopoly on the use of force. The businesswoman must use value for value relationships to convince people to buy her products or to work for her.

anyone who owns a house outright in sydney by now is almost by definition a millionaire, or well on the way to it. you only had to inherit a house someone paid $30,000 for in 1970 to do it...

Uh, that is how politicians acquire wealth.

I was speaking most loosely, in terms of generalities of ideas. the politician actually has to convince a lot of people to vote for them, repreatedly, and they don't generally resort to use of force. but if we want to get marxist and sociological, there is the proposal that the 'ruling class' constructs the very law itself to protect their interests, e.g. protection of property, employer-employee relations, corporate welfare, etc.

it seems to me that most people get rich by the perpetration of a 'con' of sorts, e.g. bill gates conned IBM into licensing DOS instead of selling it -- the only real way to get rich through a company is to sell a lot of items to a lot of people, repeatedly -- or a big item to a small number of people -- or charge annual 'maintenance' fees in the case of software -- and other forms of riches such as inheritances, share price escalation and executive salaries flow from that as corollaries, in fact...

"it seems to me that most people get rich by the perpetration of a ‘con’ of sorts, e.g. bill gates conned IBM into licensing DOS instead of selling it"

Pity for Goliath? (IBM at that time, lest we forget.)

Maybe we are thinking on a different scale. I'm not thinking of the richest guy on Earth, but of the run of the mill working millonare. I have read of people who were truck drivers at Walmart who retired as (barely)millionares bcause they put away part of thier pay into stock purchases. How about a middle class couple who saves part of one salary and banks the other? They could be millionares by retirement. How about the joe who (pre-bubble) bought a series of single family homes, using the combination of rents and his work salary (even pre-bubble, rents were lower than mortgages) to pay off the homes over 20 years? I do not see how any of these people "coned" or "manipulated" anyone.

The Neolithic Revolution is the term for the first agricultural revolution, describing the transition from nomadic hunting and gathering communities and bands, to agriculture and settlement, as first adopted by various independent prehistoric human societies, in numerous locations on most continents between 10-12 thousand years ago. The term refers to both the general time period over which these initial developments took place and the subsequent changes to Neolithic human societies which either resulted from, or are associated with, the adoption of early farming techniques and crop cultivation - the domestication of plants and animals. The first agricultural revolution introduced a completely new way of human existence, of dramatic social changes: including an increasing population density, specialization in non-agricultural crafts, such as clay figurine making in Catalhoyuk, barter and trade, the organization of a hierarchical society; the introduction of slavery, armies, the state, marriage and personal inheritance. This revolution marked a dramatic expansion of human "control" over nature and of humans over humans.

In particular, in opposition to the moveable personal property and communal property of the nomadic hunter-gatherer, a new way of life began that introduced private property, private ownership of land and buildings, valuable artifacts (and later accumulated money) - a private ownership system protected by the state that allowed one man to have control over the livelihoods of others. Systemic slavery also emerged in human evolution in this period, in almost all continents, where captured humans were considered as "things", the private property of wealthy individuals and families. The walled town of Jericho was established almost 12,000 years ago, in which captured hunter-gatherers were enslaved.

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"anyone who owns a house outright in sydney by now is almost by definition a millionaire, or well on the way to it. you only had to inherit a house someone paid $30,000 for in 1970 to do it…"

My mistake. I assumed that the blogger millionares were refering to one million in productive assets (bank accounts, rental property, stocks). Adding residence equity (real or imagined) would skew things a bit.

the cliche and concept of a millionaire has been attenuated by inflation anyhow -- its currency has been debased over the decades -- owning a net $10 million may be a better cut-off point to be 'rich' -- plenty of pensioners are asset-rich and income-poor, for instance. i'm thinking more about the basis of differentiation or departure from the 'regular stiff's dream' of owning a single house, with 2 cars in the drive, with 2.6 kids, with 1 or 2 household incomes (although of course, the price of houses has escalated with dual incomes, for one, in a market response), in a regular paid job, and paying off a regular mortgage, rather than resorting to buying multiple houses (thus forcing others to rent from you, possibly in perpetuity) or any other scheme -- investing in shares is really taking indirect advantage of my theory of multiples. of course you need entrepreneurs and risk-takers to establish companies in the first place, people who don't take a wage from somebody else. however, i'm just trying to atomise what it is that makes the difference between gatesy, your average charismatic CEO on a bloated salary (as per the topic of the thread), or Tom Anderson of myspace, or whoever, and the average wage worker...

DS: I'm not much of a sparkling wine guy. More of a cabernet, pinot noir, merlot drinker. It goes well with some fresh bruschetta or a Caprese salad and fresh baguette.

The Neolithic article was interesting reading, but I'm not sure what point we were meant to infer? The way I'm interpreting the conversation, it seems that people believe that hunter-gatherers were happier than agrarian cultures? Quoting:

Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin, in their book Origins, explain the human transition from cooperative and sharing communities, to agricultural settlement: "Why then, is recent human history characterised by conflict rather than compassion? We suggest that the answer to this question lies in the change in way of life from hunting and gathering to farming, a change which began about ten thousand years ago and which involved a dramatic alteration in the relationship people had both with the world around them and among themselves. The hunter-gatherer is part of the natural order: a farmer necessarily distorts that order. But more important, sedentary farming communities have the opportunity to accumulate possessions, and having done so they must protect them. This is the key to human conflict, and it is greatly exaggerated in the highly materialistic world we now live in."

I find this to be a highly suspect premise. First, we have very little evidence of the psychological disposition of hunter-gatherer societies. We have so few artifacts and bodies that it's impossible to conclude that all H-Gs were peaceful. Contact with Native American H-G tribes showed that some of them were considerably hostile, notably about their hunting lands.

Second, I am not willing to write off the accumulation of possessions solely as a result of a sedentary lifestyle. Villages are an enabler to collecting items, but they are not the cause. Value is always the key to mating. In a H-G society, value is effectiveness in securing food, strength to protect one's offspring and social standing within a tribe. In an agrarian society, value is based on the productivity of one's land, the comfort which one can provide to one's mate and inheritable advantage for future offspring.

In short, in a H-G society, perceived value is based primarily on physical attributes. In an agrarian society, perceived value is based on wealth as represented by the accumulation of valuable and pleasing assets.

It's really just primates showing off. We haven't evolved past that yet. :)

"In particular, in opposition to the moveable personal property and communal property of the nomadic hunter-gatherer, a new way of life began that introduced private property, private ownership of land and buildings, valuable artifacts (and later accumulated money) - a private ownership system protected by the state that allowed one man to have control over the livelihoods of others. "

Are you saying that humanity went straight from hunter-gatherer to capitalism? That "one man" who had "control over the livelyhood of others" has been known throught the centuries as "king," "pharoh," "emperor," "khan," "kalifa," etc. The whole of human history since the Neolithic age has used the social order of king-priest-slave, save for some short time on Greece, Rome. and isolated areas in the last 2 centuries.

Why do you think that although some of the king-priest-slave civilizations achieved a high level, they never had an industrial revolution? Was it perhaps that since all increases in production would become the property of the monarch, thus no incentive to advance techniques? Maybe the real industrial revolution took place where the power of the nobilty to confiscate had decreased to the point where the inventors would be able to keep enough of thier earnings to make inventing productivity enhancements worthwhile.