This is ridiculous. Being a subsistence farmer with no medical care and no laws against your husband beating you obviously sucked. For a middle class American white guy to idealize it like it’s a fuckin pastoral is the most ridiculous thing imaginable.
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Replying to @yungneocon @Itmechr3 and
Do you think the median American today, with their $55k a year in household income (or say $30k, if you want a ridiculous super conservative estimate because you don’t believe in stats) is worse off than a peasant subsistence farmer dying of appendicitis at 35 if he’s lucky?
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Replying to @marthsshinedair @yungneocon and
That's a terrible comparison because there haven't been peasants in the classical sense in the US for AT LEAST century. The real comparison is between a peasant in Vietnam or a coolie sharecropper and the peasants are consistently able to survive droughts and poor harvests
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Replying to @Itmechr3 @marthsshinedair and
better than contracted, wave-laboring farm workers. When you read anthropologists who've actually done substantive work studying peasant economies like the ones
@yungneocon mentioned you realize that compared to their direct wage labor alternatives the peasants are far better off1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @Itmechr3 @marthsshinedair and
Let me randomly interject myself and suggest the book How Asia Works, whose first half is all about this. And also make a plug for the great Wolf Ladejinsky: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_Ladejinsky …
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Replying to @Noahpinion @Itmechr3 and
Thanks for chiming in, Noah! Just read Ladijinsky’s wiki article, completely fascinating. Sorry for clogging up your mentions!
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It's OK, it was an interesting debate.
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