You can see that, while the countries were at different levels of development, in the 50 years from 1885-1935, England, Netherlands, France, Italy, and Poland all experiences rapid reductions in their farming share of labor. Eyeballing it, I’d say the range was between a third and a half of the labor share lost over that period.

Even France and Italy had nearly 4 out of every 10 workers on the farm at the beginning of that era, when they were some of the most developed Western countries and major world powers.

It was a global revolution in work: slow but steady, and fast enough to be disruptive. Now we’re having another one.

The high grain prices pumped a ton of money into the U.S. ag sector. A lot of farms bought out their neighbors and took on a lot of debt during the boom when land prices were highest. Grain and land prices tanked after the war and the ag economy struggled but with higher debt than before the war.

While the stock market was roaring in the 1920s, farmers struggled and were remembering the war years as the good old days.

If anything, I’d expect real estate prices to fall in most places. As technology turns more and more people into Zero MP workers, there will be less reason for them to hang around expensive cities. What dollars these people do have will go a lot further in Lynchburg than they will in Arlington.

For instance, the famous ‘Sunshine Harvester” – the first commercial combine dating from 1885, was from Austrlalia, but of course everyone was using them right away.

I don’t have a good chart for the half-century period in question (1885-1935), but I do have one from 1961-2006, and you can see that developed Northeast Asia, Europe, and North America seem to stay pretty close to each other throughout the period.

The argument I made earlier attributing The Great Stagnation, The New Commanding Heights, and persistently low interest rates to The Great Reset is very similar to this ‘technological-determinism’ story.

The key observation is that continuously improving automation had led to manufacturing going the way of agriculture in terms of the shrinking portion of the (global) labor force required to be employed to produce more than enough for everybody.

On the one hand, at least ‘production wealth per capita’ is high enough and redistribution already robust enough that the transition will be mostly comfortable for most people. No Great Depression-like starvation or exposure, homelessness, etc. – just ‘first world poor problems’.

On the other hand, this time will be even more economically disruptive than the last, because agriculture had manufacturing to soak up the labor force in other goods-producing activities, but manufacturing can’t have anything like that, so the transition is to an almost all-services economy, which will probably look more like Downton Abbey.

Internet services replace formerly human intermediaries in a way that is immediately infinitely scalable and has effectively zero marginal cost. Also, since global transport, information storage, and bandwidth is cheap, anything with a significant labor component that can be outsourced to a place with cheaper average labor costs will be.

The big question is, “What is the character of those activities that remain?” and the follow-up question is “What does that imply for labor increasingly concentrating in major urban hubs, real estate prices, and interest rates?”

My answer is “Non-outsourceable, non-automatable services that have to been done by human for other humans in close proximity.” That’s health-care, education (so far…), government (aka, “The New Commanding Heights), and a lot of ‘medium-to-strong-AI’ but low-skill, low-pay ‘servant-like’ activities, like driving Uber cars, making deliveries, maid-service, hair-cuts, waiting and busing tables and cooking affordable food. There are also a few lucrative jobs in management and creative-class jobs that require lots of team-work interaction and coordination, for instance, in engineering and programming.

But as a result, companies must centralize their operations to keep all their domestic (developed country) creative workers in one place to collaborate and coordinate, and they must also co-locate with other companies and government headquarters to easily coordinate with the other entities in the ecosystem.

That means almost all lucrative employment that isn’t artificially maintained in some location by government fiat will centralize into hubs, and because these workers have to live in these places if they want that kind of work, they will have no choice but to bid up real estate prices to the sky, eating up all their surplus.

We are going through the slow attempts to discover solutions to a radical recalculation problem, but the old ‘blue social model’ was built on the now obsolete assumptions of the post-war period (“the heyday of the everyman”), and has introduced rigidities in politics, law, and attitudes that are difficult to overcome.

This is a key, fundamental point. Do you have specific statistics or evidence of the magnitude of mobility? Has this point already been analyzed elsewhere? I would love to see this argument elaborated and suppored with empirical evidence.

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