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0 pointsthaumasiotes1y ago0 comments

Under "Risk Control":

> Avoiding risk for these farmers comes in two main forms: there are strategies to reduce the risk of failure within the annual cycle and then strategies to prepare for failure by ‘banking’ the gains of a good cycle against the losses of a bad cycle.

> If you only farm one crop (the ‘best’ one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others.

Under "Banqueting the Yields":

> The most immediate of these are the horizontal relationships: friends, family, marriage ties and neighbors. While some high-risk disasters are likely to strike an entire village at once (like a large raid or a general drought), most of the disasters that might befall one farming family (an essential worker being conscripted, harvest failure, robbery and so on) would just strike that one household. So farmers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me.

You might notice that this is exactly what I said above. What did you want me to see?

0 comments

ethbr11y ago

> Social ties are no more helpful in a famine than currency is. [...] Currency is fine in [a famine] scenario.

Social ties are more helpful than currency, even in a famine, because at that point resources are shared based on relationship rather than value. Triage, not optimizing future gain.

See also all the bits about why currency at that point was a terrible store of value.

thaumasiotesOP1y ago

Currency wasn't a terrible store of value. The essay says as much:

> Ok, so why not sell the grain and store something less perishable, like money? Sure, you can’t put it in a bank, but you can just keep it. And indeed, our ancients do this

The problems with currency are listed as:

1. Someone can come into your house and take it.

2. Ordinary farmers cannot afford enough currency to replace the value of a failed harvest. (An entire year's revenue.)

3. In the event of a famine, the price of food rises, making currency a poor hedge against famine.

Only #3 applies to how valuable currency is in a famine, and it remains superior to local social ties when the famine strikes.

But because of its unaffordability and undesirable correlation with famine, it is not the favored solution to famine. It's just a much better solution than local friendships.

You read the wrong essay; the standard defense against famine is discussed in the following one:

> So we’ve established what the big landlord gets out of working with the smaller subsistence farmers around them – they get labor to put more of their large holdings under cultivation and even a degree of labor flexibility with wage laborers and sharecroppers drawn from the existing rural population. In this sense – and I want to stress this – the large estates need the rural small farmers to survive. This is why, even in periods of rapid growth among large landholding estates (like the steady expansion of latifundia in the Roman late Republic and early Empire), there remained lots of these smaller farmers. But what do the small farmers get?

> Just like the smallholders could establish horizontal ties with fellow small farmers, they could also try to establish those ties with the big fellow in the big house. Of course the mechanisms for establishing the ties were different: few peasants could banquet an aristocrat and most aristocrats would be insulted by a suggestion of an alliance through marriage. Instead the ties were strictly vertical – that is they were unequal. They often began with the farmer working at least a bit as a tenant on the big farm, but also typically included political support, sometimes military support (that is, coming out to fight when the large landholder did, often as common troops in his retinue) and no small amount of social deference.

> In exchange, in theory, the large landholder could provide the ultimate backstop against catastrophe – even a catastrophe that might ruin an entire village or rural area all at once.

In the event of a famine, the farmer has two options:

1. Leave the stricken area, in which case he's dependent on his stock of currency.

2. Hope for relief to be delivered by his social superiors, which depends on their stock of currency.

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