RE: OWNERSHIP: The theoretical margin of production

["Ed Dodson" <ejdodson@comcast.net>]

Ed Dodson responding...
Bill Ryan wrote:


[Dodson] That happy situation eventually disappears;
and, at some point, the "freely accessible" land will
no longer yield even subsistence (given the knowledge
level of the day and existing capital goods.
----------------------------------------

BIILL RYAN:
This is nothing more than a hypothetical construct
based on unsound Georgist premises.  "Given the
knowledge of the day" infers a static condition; the
real world is not static.  Where is the empirical
evidence for the declining marginal productivity of
land, given continuously improving technology and
political organization?

Ed Dodson here:
Bill, you are, of course, correct; the real world is not static. Thus, the
"Georgist premise" as you label it, presents a "law of tendency." The
knowledge we gain thru experience and experiment tends to result in
increasing productivity of labor and capital; so, the "margin of production"
is ever-changing. However, there is some illustrative value in looking at
the dynamics as they occur at a given place and at a given moment in time.

In terms of evidence of declining margnal productivity of land, the best
"real world" example is the desertification of lands due to destruction of
the vegitation coverage. Then, there are the world's fisheries; overfishing
has brought some species of commercial fish to extinction or
near-extinction. We have become extremely adept at the technologies of
extraction but not, as yet, the science of stewardship.

****

BILL RYAN:
The fact is, the marginal productivity of land is
increasing, not decreasing, as it has done for
millennia.  How else do you explain that in America
there is less land under cultivation than a half
century ago, yet exported surpluses are bigger than
ever?

Ed Dodson here:
The productivity of farmers has, of course, been greatly enhanced by the use
of new techniques and technologies. This has not come without problems. For
example, the use of irrigation in the arid West of the United States often
results eventually in the destruction of fertility due to salination. In
many of the so-called "developing" parts of the world, the poor are forced
to grow crops on fragile hillsides and forest edges. Conventional
agriculture, with so many farmers engaged in monoculture production,
requires enormous inputs of fertilizers and herbicides, while destroying
animal and plant habitat. Runoff into streams, lakes and rivers has
destroyed fish stocks and created giant algae blooms that suck the oxygen
from the water. The list of contradictions is long, indeed.

Here's something to think about from the World Watch Institute's State of
the World 2002 report: "Perhaps the strongest evidence that our food system
is dysfunctional is the fact that farmers are the poorest people on the
planet."



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